Non-fiction
You wouldn’t go in the basement.
If you were being targeted by a home invader – maybe a masked slasher or an overly-sentient (and overly large) creature – you wouldn’t run from them by going into the basement, a room with no other exit. The basement is a trap. Even as the viewer takes pleasure in watching the characters on the screen make choices that leave them effectively trapped, vulnerable to the horrors of the cinematic world, part of the pleasure is in knowing that’s the wrong choice and also the only effective narrative choice. A character’s choices to trap themselves – in the basement or elsewhere – makes the plot of the film move forward.
In this book, part cultural analysis, part legal systems analysis, we look at the structure of horror films – and the characters or archetypes who inhabit those films – to show the parallel systemic entrapment of the legal system. We argue that the legal system enacts a set of constraining choices that forces people into less-than-ideal circumstances (like going into the basement) when drawing upon the system that is meant to serve them. We show how horror tropes and archetypes help us understand how people get trapped in the legal system, including:
- The final girl as the ideal plaintiff or victim and how the fact of survival is not inherently empowering
- How the first person to die – in the film or in real life – sets the tone for the narrative and defines how the law will proceed
- How racist and sexist caricatures in films and the law exist to raise the stakes for more “deserving” victims
- And more