One of my biggest pet peeves as a reader of film criticism is when a self-described critic treats spectatorship as a passive experience: one where the movie takes you hostage and force-feeds itself to you, which is just not how it works. When bell hooks wrote of “the oppositional gaze,” it was to describe the act of looking against power; of refusing its incorporation even in the act of forced consumption. Only under extreme circumstances is spectatorship ever actually a position without agency.
To be in the world and experience the world is to consume it, incorporate it, be nurtured or poisoned by it. Existence is an infinite and infinitely interconnected feedback loop, and what are movies, if not simulations of life? Dreamscapes imagined and pulled out of the abstract into the material in a process so painstaking that the act of moviemaking becomes its own consumptive experience.
It’s the nature of genre to be referential, and this is perhaps especially true of horror. Because “the monster always escapes” is not merely a trope of the genre but a fact of life, and being that the tropes, motifs, and themes of horror precede the invention of film by, oh, all of human history, there are a couple of ways one might be eaten alive by the movies, though there are very rarely clean lines of distinction.
The postmodern metanarration and intertextuality of projects like the Scream franchise, Cabin In The Woods and The Blackening are one way, where the architecture of the story is built of direct references and commentary on other works. If we think of these references (source material) as body parts, this method looks a lot like Dr. Frankenstein’s method of grave-robbing and body-snatching: sniffing out the most delectable, desirable bits from different locations and stitching them together into something altogether new. Genre cannibalism is another way to think about it. It’s no wonder then, that genre fans find this type of work- its consumption and digestion- deeply satisfying. It gives us a lot to chew on.
Other projects like A Clockwork Orange, Videodrome, Demons, Anguish, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, The Ring, Josie And The Pussycats (fight me, I dare you), Scream 2, and Nope all render horrific the feedback loop between the projection of images, their consumption by spectators, how they’re interpreted (digested), and what horror is conjured into the world by the act of spectacle and its witness—a subject Wes Craven knows plenty about.
The most terrifying monsters are the ones that don’t necessarily seem like monsters. They’re the most inconvenient truths, and in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, that inconvenience takes the shape of The Nightmare On Elm Street franchise itself, the success of which haunts its creators who can’t seem to leave Freddy behind. The gathering anxiety experienced by Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, and future generations of spectators embodied in Dylan (Miko Hughes), Heather’s fictional son, coalesces and nourishes Freddy, drawing him out of the imagination into an increasingly materialized presence. When Heather must follow Dylan into his nightmare, she enters a temple through the doorway of Freddy’s mouth.
The metanarration in New Nightmare doesn’t stop at its fictional realness but sees Craven actively writing the script as the movie’s events unfold. Even though Heather is the center and it’s her perspective that drives the film, just off center is Craven writing himself as Dr. Frankenstein and Freddy as his Creature, where the Author is Architect is God.
The project ultimately asks what it means for the people who make the horror films- who imagine and engineer and perform them- to live with their creations? To be eaten alive by their own monsters, careers, and successes. In many ways, New Nightmare feels like Craven’s process of coming to terms with the creator’s destiny: to be destroyed by their own creation, and reborn anew.
Alternatively, A Clockwork Orange raises moral questions about the implications of violence, witness, intervention, free will, and public/social health while questioning the concept of morality itself. Videodrome considers a world where satanic panic and conspiratorial sentiments about media consumption aren’t altogether wrong: where human acts of monstrosity are viral in nature, and the alternate realities onscreen are consuming material reality to ask the same question as Larry Cohen’s The Stuff: “are you eating it, or is it eating you?” Demons answers said question by having the film within the film transgress the boundaries between fiction and reality when the monsters literally burst through the movie screen and start ripping chunks out of unsuspecting moviegoers. We’re eating it and it’s eating us.
When you watch a horror movie about people watching and responding to horror movies where the film within the film is part of the text, you are also always part of the text. In many ways, the consumer-spectator’s response is always the final, unwritable act. It’s why The Ring ends with the haunted video’s final image, the film suggesting you, the viewer, have now been incorporated into the story. You have been by the act of consuming it. Spectatorship is never purely passive.
The horror in Popcorn is grounded in this very idea.
The title refers to the genre category, “popcorn horror,” as in horror that’s fun, casual, and can have audiences nervously devouring bags of popcorn while maybe losing some to a jump scare or two. Much of the film takes place during a horror movie marathon featuring three fictional films, all of which pay loving homage to ’50s horror B-movies and the gimmicks concocted to market their releases. Such events were a real blending of cinema and theater, a demonstration of horror spectatorship’s long-standing relationship with the carnivalesque, which Popcorn celebrates in the way any horror lover would: by imagining these gimmicks as instruments of terror.
As for the frame story, Popcorn opens with a nightmare. A child chased through a haze of shimmering smoke and light that compresses into a type of portal. An unnamed, unseen someone beckons to her- “Sarah! Sarah!”- and she comes upon a bloodied skull, its mouth an open doorway. Here, Maggie (Jill Schoelen) wakes up and, in the true nature of an obsessive, immediately records what we learn is a recurring dream she’s using as inspiration for a screenplay.
Maggie is a dedicated film student in a floundering department. During a class period held on gym bleachers, her classmate Toby (Tom Villard) comes up with the idea to raise money by hosting a horror movie marathon. By fact of the metanarrative, the scene drives the plot and also comments on the mirrored economics of universities and moviemaking which both expect that low institutional and industrial investment should nevertheless yield high profits. Horror has always been thought of by its most cynical investors as a cash cow because fear and titillation are pleasurable, and audiences have always been willing to pay good money to delight in the spectacle. Who would better understand this than a bunch of film students?
While setting up at the Dreamland theater (due to be demolished), the group discovers a mysterious film titled Possessor, the fourth movie within the movie, images from which are the same as those in Maggie’s dreams: a mouth says, “Come into my head,” a head wound gapes like an open mouth, and the same bloodied skull appears.
Professor Davis (Tony Roberts) tells them about the director, Lanyard Gates. Haunted by the failure and criticism of his first movie, Gates projected that haunting back to his audience in the form of Possessor. The beckoning offered by the film, “come into my head” and its associated imagery essentializes the request made by a filmmaker of their audience. Please, come inside, come consume the spectacle of my dreams. It may be scary, but it’s safe because it’s not real. Then, as the last act, he violates that contract when he murders his family and sets the theater on fire with the audience barricaded inside. As a result, the community and theater are haunted by the specter of Gates’ memory.
Popcorn continuously makes that violation its subject. Maggie becomes increasingly obsessed with Gates and his film, and meanwhile, the marathon commences with deadly results for her class. Professor Davis is impaled by the giant mosquito that soars over the audience during the first film, Mosquito, a riff on the ’50s Big Bug Movies like Them! and Tarantula. Bud, a wheelchair-user, is electrified during The Attack of the Amazing Electrified Man (The Amazing Colossal Man, 1957), a mirror of the “Shock-O-Scope” gimmick that puts buzzers under seats to zap moviegoers at key moments.
Each scene is in active dialogue with the events on the screen within the screen. Bud’s electrocution syncs with the one happening in the movie within the movie, so when the audience chants, “Fry him!” during the electrocution scene, they are also chanting for Bud. This movement is a dissolution between fiction and the fiction-presented-as-reality, as well as the language of murder and food preparation. This choice acts as a neon blinking sign signaling the connection between spectatorship and consumption. “They’re eating it up in there!” Leon exclaims about the crowd.
One of the more surprising moments in the film comes when a power surge shorts out the electricity and a reggae band is introduced as entertainment, a decision that makes more sense with the knowledge that Popcorn was actually filmed entirely in Kingston, Jamaica. The band plays “Pocomania Day,” and the crowd goes wild. For those unfamiliar, pocomania is a syncretic spiritual practice of seeking communion with ancestors and spirits. There’s a willingness in pocomania to offer oneself over in a way that mirrors the spectator’s willingness to enter the head of a filmmaker by the very act of viewing their work: a willingness to be spiritually moved by another’s dream—or nightmare.
It’s eventually revealed that Gates is Maggie’s father, her dreams are memories of the night of the fire, that she’s Sarah, saved by her aunt after her mother was murdered. Believing she’s been seeing her father lurking around the theater and that he’s the one behind the murders, she responds to Toby’s question about why he’d come back with the hypothesis, “To finish the film. And to kill me.” But the killer, as it turns out, wasn’t her father at all.
The relationship between horror and catharsis as a coping mechanism for processing trauma is well-documented, and Popcorn presents a monstrous version of that mode of engagement: what happens when a spectator loses themselves in the movies, when they’ve crossed from consumer to the one being consumed.
