Recreational Terror and the Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film

The universe of the contemporary horror film is an uncertain one in which good and evil, normality and abnormality, reality and illusion become virtually indistinguishable. This, together with the presentation of violence as a constituent feature of everyday life, the inefficacy of human action, and the refusal of narrative closure produces an unstable, paranoid universe in which familiar categories collapse. The iconography of the body figure as the site of this collapse. Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer unfolds in this postmodern universe. The film, which details the sanguinary activities of a psychotic serial killer, was ready for release early in 1986 but remained on the distributor's shelf until 1989, when Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line brought Henry to the Telluride Film Festival(Village Voice 1990, 59). Among the obstacles the film faced was the unwillingness of the Motion Picture Association of America(MPAA) to give it an R rating .The reason? Its "disturbing moral tone" (McDonough 1990, 59). Fearful because an X rating means death at the box office for nonpornographic films, distributors lost interest. Even the director John McNaughton expressed concern over whether the film would find an audience. As he told Variety, "[Henry] may be too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd" (quoted in Stein 1990, 59). McNaughton's concern and the MPAA's judgement rested on the film's tendency to play with and against the conventions of the contemporary horror genre. What makes it an innovative and daring film also makes it difficulr to classify. This holds true as well for the postmodern horror film, of which Henry os emblematic