Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Tremors, John Carpenter, and Bigot Audiences
by Travis Hedge Coke
When John Carpenter describes basic right wing and left wing horror stories, or conservative and liberal horror, he cannot stop himself, even, from framing right horror in racist terms from the ground up. It is “tribal.” It comes from a “witch doctor.”
Carpenter, who has always tread both right and left politics, though I think, certainly more left than right, suggests that the two basic scary stories are “the evil is inside, or the evil is outside.” The evil is foreign, your distant neighbors or foreign policies. The evil is internal, it comes from your neighborhood, your home, your own body or mind.
One of the most-seen breakdowns online of Carpenter’s theory, posits that a hardworking mother and her abusive layabout boyfriend, as seen in the 2007 Rob Zombie remake of Halloween, make a household that “couldn’t exist anywhere.”
The gay conversion stuff as mundane horror, in Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, often goes unrecognized by cishet audiences, while white audiences may miss how much of the cast is nonwhite and what a rarity that is, while it is observed by some that the leaden performance by the ostensible strong-jawed white hero is a miscasting or a mistake by actor, Jameson Parker (AJ Simon of televisions’ Simon & Simon) and not that his plodding performance is pitch perfect in this socially-aware satire of lovecraftian confrontation with the evil other.
Prince of Darkness and Vampires look like right wing scary stories, and right wing success stories, if you either are not paying enough attention or just want them to be so bad they are. Same, also, with American Psycho, Fight Club, and people who believe They Live is antisemitic.
What happens, I think, is that what is foreign or domestic, external or internal, differs person to person, based on culture, on economic and social status, based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, on access, on privilege. When a movie like Sleeping With the Enemy or Lurkers fails to make domesticity of a male/female coupled household frightening to male audiences, the failure may not be the movie’s, but one of culture and status.
“My wife controls my happy home, a lover I cannot find.
The only thing I can call my own, is a worried and a troubled mind,
as the Mississippi John Hurt song, Let the Mermaids Flirt With Me says.
An American man might feel his home is or should be his kingdom, in the sense that his home is an extension of himself, which has affected so-called “stand your ground” laws and defense of domain as self-defense. It follows, then, that when we see these laws not defend or support women and femme-read nonbinary individuals, it can be because women are not seen as king of the castle, nor the castle as an extension of their body or soul.
Loads of people know they do not have to feel the person in the bed next to them is possessed by something external to be terrified of them. Or, just cautious about them.
When the online Tremors fandom blew up with homophobia, transphobia, queer phobia, and a side of racism and misogyny, I was surprised, but I was not so surprised that I was not expecting it. I had one eye open the whole time.
Heather and Burt Gummer (Reba McEntire and Michael Gross), in the first Tremors movie, have, “Food for five years, a thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, Geiger counter. Bomb shelter!” so they were prepared, too, but there is prepared and then there is finding yourself being charged by, “Underground god damn monsters.”
The recent panic some horror heads faced when even confronted with the notion of “cozy horror” was at least equally absurd as what some cozy fans would place in the cozy bin, and by my count, more.
Which, I think, might be a better metric that inside or outside, or even left or right. Lower case “c” conservative, instead of cap-C Conservative.
Even some right-leaning filmgoers can surely watch John Carpenter’s Vampires or Tremors 3: Back to Perfection, and see that the tough-talking, hard-walking, well-armed hard men who seem to constantly worry their masculinity is being threatened by the existence of existence are, at least to degrees, satirical. But, then, there are audiences, and in some cases, contributors, who will never see the satire, who will not allow the idea that there is any parody or commentary beyond the character being a hard-talking, hard-walking hard man with an armament. These are sometimes known as that guy who tries to talk like Ash from Evil Dead all the time and thinks he’s beloved.
There is an entire horror movie (called both The Wisher and Spliced) based around the anxiety we face as horror fans, dealing with pretentious bullying from other horror fans. In The Wisher, the lead character is suicidally depressed and barely gets out, even to school or her front yard. Her friends, compassionate, declare her not a real horror fan, despite living, breathing, being dyed in horror wool, because she did not see a new franchise sequel (to The Wisher) on opening night, but days later.
If you look up reviews of The Wisher, you will find no lack of those critics complaining that the favorite horror movies of that main character prove she is no true horror fan. They are movies no one likes. Movies no one has heard of.
They are, in fact, the movies of the director of The Wisher.
Even if, as audience, we do not appreciate that the director has chosen his body of work as a fictional person’s favorite movies, in the movie, she is a fan, already, of the director and of the Wisher franchise, of which he is clearly the only director we can name. It is the kind of detail which needs reinforcing, but also needs to be there to make this kind of plot work.
It is the type of mechanics which can be easily missed by someone spending all their effort not watching the movie but judging an imaginary, fictional person’s personal horror tastes.
It is the kind of plot mechanics which can be missed by someone who thinks it is all about them.
And, that is how we have fans of the Tremors franchise who are so homophobic, so transphobic, queerphobic, so paranoid scared, that they cannot handle acknowledgment of a homoerotic domesticity between Val and Earl (Kevin Bacon; Fred Ward), or that actors from the franchise have performed in other movies where they were explicitly homosexual (Helen Shaver; Charlotte Stewart) or eroticized for a male homosexual gaze (Ward). That Michael Gross wanted to play a woman in the fourth movie, the prequel, and be his original character’s grandmother. That J.E. Freeman, Old Fred of the same Tremors prequel which could have had Gross in drag, was gay in real life. That in Body Beautiful, Marcelo Tubert (Carlos Ortega of Tremors 2: Aftershocks) is a gay therapist treating queer patients and moving back in with his ex-wife. That Fred Ward also played roles which were queer. Bibi Besch did Tremors between cross-dressing comedy He’s My Girl and gay melodrama, Doing Time on Maple Drive.
Even if one believes that Tremors and its followups are not deliberately or canonically queer, they sure are loaded up on queer dynamics, queer actors, actors who would portray queer onscreen or stage.
You think Kevin Bacon is afraid of being homoeroticized? Val and Earl are an old married couple even if they are not having sex. Like a lot of old married couples.
Courtesy Alex Dumitru.
Recently, some circles have been enraged and felt betrayed that drag-fan, queer-audience-courting Reba McEntire is not the bigot they wanted her to be.
All audiences put in more of any movie, any song, and entertainment ouvre than anyone is comfortable with. We all make movies after and before they have actually, physically, been made. There can be a teller of a scary story, but there is also, always, the audience for the story and audiences who are getting the story whether they are the intended audience or not. And, we all take and make versions of that tale.
Ain’t them that’s uptight – to make this folksy – if you are uptight, it’s you.