HOLDING COURT: Chvrches, Horror Tropes, and the 90s
Welcome to a new blog series here at The Fear of God. HOLDING COURT, a series by FoG Legal Counsel, Dave Courtney (get it?), where he plays both defense and prosecution, making airtight cases for the media he’s consuming; be it horrific, holy, or somewhere in the middle. Friends and FoGgers, all rise, because HOLDING COURT is now in session…
Smells Like Teen Spirit
If you are unfamiliar with the eclectic pop rock, synth driven, Glasgow based trio Chvrches, I highly recommend checking them out. They have a way with music, as well as with words, consistently creating art that is both captivating and insightful.
After taking a familiar 3 year hiatus following the 2018 release of Love is Dead, and in the wake of a much publicized dispute between the band and Chris Brown over the issue of domestic abuse, along with front person Lauren Mayberry’s decision to create some intentional space between her and the band for the sake of her personal health and interests (she was the recipient of abusive direct messages), 2021 saw the welcome return of this popular indie trio with a project birthed from the Covid era and made, somewhat ironically, from a distance. As Mayberry has expressed during subsequent interviews, their most recent release, titled Screen Violence, reflects the natural progression from the positivity of Love is Dead towards confronting some of the darker edges of our present time, both in her life, within the band, and in society at large. In a lengthy interview with NME, Mayberry speaks about what it means to be the only girl in the band and often in venues and meetings, confessing that in the past she tended to cave to the pressure of simply trying to be “one of the guys”. Recent years have seen something of a transformation in this regard, or perhaps a welcome liberation from the social pressures that have haunted her career as an artist and musician (the article cites the song Good Girls as an example), helping to give a visible narrative to this natural progression, an album that uses horror as a way to reflect on culture at large, and within that personal themes like loneliness and isolation, oppression, fear and yes, hope.
Fun fact- Screen Violence was in the running as the original band name. Speaking of how and why this name resurfaced as the natural title for this new, decidedly darker album:
“My association with screens had become very negative,” (Mayberry) says, referring to the sheer amount of abuse and death threats she’s faced online throughout her career. “It was horrible to have to only see people on screens – I’ve not seen my mum in 3D since Christmas 2019. But I think, if anything, it made me more grateful because if this didn’t exist I couldn’t talk to you; we couldn’t have made this record and we couldn’t have spoken to any of our friends and family. It makes you think – are the machines evil, or are we?”
Elaborating on this, bandmate Lain Cook explains,
“Horror don David Cronenberg’s 1983 sci-fi body horror Videodrome was a big influence on not just this album, but the band’s career as a whole. We’ve always been really influenced by the idea of the ghost in the machine, the evil behind the screen and the way it saturates our minds.”
In the article, Mayberry describes herself as “morbidly fascinated with horror movies” even if she isn’t always able to “handle them”. She refers to the genre as “therapeutic”, offering this as a means of contextualizing it into her own experience. “As a woman, the sensation of being watched and hunted and controlled is quite profound a lot of the time. But then the final girl – when [Halloween protagonist] Laurie Strode survives? There’s hope in that.”
The name “Screen Violence” was always intended to evoke a mix of nostalgia and reality, harkening back to the 80’s slashers and the symbolic emergence of the “final girl” as both a liberating and hopeful prospect (giving the woman agency and strength), along with holding the potential for becoming an oppressive and defining horror-filled trope (defining the woman according to the male gaze). Indeed, the new album seems to revolve around the track “Final Girl” that occupies its center, with the rest of the songs all speaking with equal degrees hope and fear to its anthemic declaration of this forming tension. Here Mayberry offers something of a window into her own experience:
And it feels like the weight is too much to carry
I should quit, maybe go get married
Only time will tell
And I wonder if I should've changed my accent
Tried to make myself more attractive
Only time will tell
In the final cut
In the final scene
There's a final girl
And you know that she should be screaming
As it says in the interview with NME, “Final Girl’ suggests, in its horror movie trope-referencing title, a battle to survive, to outlive the demons and monsters that surround us.”
Alexandra West: The 1990’s Teen Horror Cycle- Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula
I love when things seem to intersect in terms of what I’m watching, reading and listening to. This might sound trite, but I often think of these moments as divinely inspired. Such is the case with my recent introduction to Alexandra West, a Toronto based Canadian writer (Films of the new French Extremity) and podcast host (Faculty of Horror Podcast). I came across her name through a recent forum at my local arthouse where she spoke as part of a larger series on the New French Extremity films. This led me to her most recent book titled “The 1990’s Teen Horror Cycle: Final Girls and a New Hollywood Formula”. Reading this book with Chvrches “Screen Violence” playing in the background helped give the themes present in Mayberry’s personal story and the album itself a greater awareness and sense of meaning, especially when it comes to seeing this trope within its larger cultural expression.
Narrowing in on the 90’s, West’s essential thesis sees in this era what she calls a “Teen Horror Cycle”, defined as a narrow and brief “cultural moment” that informs the success of a specific genre, trope, or style, which then gets replicated, commodified and framed into what is often a short lived cultural cycle. The 90’s holds particular interest for West because an often overlooked era can help us understand how it is that we move from the creation of the “Final Girl” in the eighties to the reimagining of this concept within the horror films of the new millennia. Further, understanding this trajectory sheds light both on the development of a specific feminist concern (and more specifically it’s Third Wave expression, which increased conversation around sexual assault and violence against women) and the development of the teenage spirit. If the 1990’s Teen Horror cycle has been “dismissed by most major publications, film journals, spectators and critics as a Hollywoodized iteration of the now beloved slasher subgenre of the 1970’s and 1980’s horror”, West also then contends that “these films, film criticism and film fandom are ignoring a cultural moment that integrated multiple social and political forces within the film industry to create a cycle…” (p3). As someone born in the 70’s, who grew up in the 80’s, and who came of age in the 90’s, it didn’t take long for this book to tap into my own sense of this cultural awareness- the 90’s were my time. It also tapped into my own ignorance of the social issues the culture of my day was speaking to. Reshaping my understanding of this era against the “Final Girl” trope, and attaching this to a new era of feminist concern and a now burgeoning teenage spirit, awakened me to a narrative that, as a white cis gendered male, I otherwise would and could not be aware of.
The Final Girl and The Emergence of the Teenager
For West, something changed when we moved from the 80’s to the 90’s, a time of unprecedented prosperity in North America (economic and population growth) and fear (technological changes and the rise of generational angst). As West asserts, “In the 1990’s, films were no longer just films; they were soundtracks, fashions, slang, award shows and identities.” (P10) This I get. My formative years reflect the age of the indie, the rise of multiplexes and Blockbusters, and the infamous cultural moment that was VHS, all of which she touches on in her book. Culture was now a thing, and this culture was ours to own in a way that it had never been before in history. What’s important to note here is just how recent the notion of the teenager was within the rise of 90s culture. West suggests, “Teenagers” is a relatively new construct to the modern world. This began to shift when we moved from farming to industry. Families no longer knew what to do with their children- put them to work or send them to school. Thus “The notion of a teenager was ostensibly designed to prevent labor competition within families.” (p25).
Fast forward and we find that the concept of “Teenagers” did not fully emerge in the social consciousness until the 1940’s, and even later with the emergence of technology, and it began with “teenage girls” (Life Magazine article in 1944). They owned the culture, having the power to make or break those trying to capitalize on this growing industry. This led to a youth culture where content was being created just for them. Teens, and more specifically “teenage girls”, wanted/needed the rebellion this culture enabled. In a world dominated by men and in an age where hidden abuses of women were now beginning to surface, the emergence of a true cultural ethos built around the idea of the teenager as a powerful, independent entity, an idea further fueled by the growing feminist concern for liberating woman from the shadows of the Patriarchy, was quickly being embraced by the youth of the day. As West writes, “The 1990s emerges from the slashers of the 80s where the final girl confronts and kills the killer or get rescued. In the 90s male run studios were willing to recognize the powerful intersection between women, horror, youth and films. The heyday of the 1980s slasher film had died at various stages with killers at the forefront, and now it was time to focus on the Final Girls.” (p33)
Here in lies one of the main tensions within the trope itself. As West suggests, “The 1990s was a time when concern over narratives was at a high and the ability to control ones narrative was at a premium.” With the notion of the teenager emerging as a narrative of necessary “rebellion”, “the characters in these films questioned the world around them and refused to let the killers control their hard fought narratives.” (P 171) And this often meant distinguishing themselves from their parents in specific ways, moving from an era of accepted moral certainty to an embrace of moral ambiguity. The Teen Horror Cycle exists “between the generation coming of age and the choices of their parents”, showing the older generations “fallibility and idealistic rejection of their moral system.” As West suggests, “The youths in these films are confronted with the ambiguous notions of good and evil that were prevalent in the 1990s through various sectors all claiming ownership over perceived goodness,” (p171) with the horror cycle of the 90s capturing the larger socio-political reality and the potential and uncertainty that we can see running through the thread of the 90s horror slate, something West does a great job of weaving into a cohesive narrative.
Where Mayberry Meets West
In the song He Said She Said, Chvrches imagines this same sense of uncertainty in the world Mayberry has had to navigate largely on her own, singing,
He said "you need to be fed"
"But keep an eye on your waistline" and
"Look good but don't be obsessed"
Keep thinking over, over I try
But it's hard to know what's right
When I feel like I'm borrowing all of my time
And it's hard to hit rewind
When I feel like I'm losing my mind
This gets expressed further as a kind of lament in the song California, where she sings “God bless this mess that we made ourselves. Pull me into the screen at the end”, demonstrating a similar sentiment in Lullabies:
Paralysed and spinning backwards
Lullabies don't comfort me
Televise the great disaster
We're better off inside of the screen
I'm terrified of falling faster
Lullabies don't comfort me
So televise the great disaster
We're better off inside of the screen sometimes
One of the albums most startling lines comes from the song You Still Matter, where she confesses, “And the mess we made on Fridays gave me Sundays on my knees”, which echos with the words of Nightmares as feeling stuck in a cycle between islolation and the hope of liberation:
I've been singing that song again
Another ballad that won't make amends
It's been giving me nightmares again
And they don't end
I've been singing along again
Another poem designed for revenge
Now I'm living the nightmare again
And it won't end
All of this gets accentuated with the haunting and lingering line, “I get the last word only because I write on the walls in my head.”
This line I find lingers for me because, as a 90s child I knew the trope of the Final Girl, but I didn’t “know” the trope, to put it bluntly. What haunts me are the years I failed to hear precisely what this cultural word was saying about a social problem that desperately needed advocates and attention. I guess this is in a sense what it looks like to be a teenager, caught in this space where everything, big or small, is life or death, caught between a culture that controls us and a culture that we simultaneously shape. As we grow into our adult years, we grow with the natural evolution of these tropes. We grow a greater awareness for our reality, learning to make greater sense of what is important and what is not. But, hopefully and with God’s good grace, we also grow in our awareness of the greater reality that surrounds us, in an increasing concern for the other. This is where agency gets transformed into action. Thankfully, over the years I have had voices speaking loud enough in my life to allow me to hear the growing and still present feminist concern for the struggles of our present time. What Chvrches new album and West’s work have done is give this a fresh narrative that I hadn’t previously seen, one that makes sense within my own formative years and within a genre that I, and I know all of us in the FoG community, genuinely love. In the Final Girl there is both potential for liberation and for further oppression. And with the natural evolution of the trope into new cultural expressions, every generation needs to learn to see and hear this anew. The question for me and for all of us then is, are we listening well enough to hear the screams, and are we acting well enough to reimagine the trope.
