Don’t Go In There!: Creepy and Generic Compulsion
/This contribution is part of a series of posts on genre and the ‘global shuffle’.
In a 2014 car insurance ad, a group of terrified young people flee some horrific threat, parodying a stereotypical schlocky horror film.1 They deliberate what they should do next alternatively suggesting to hide in the attic of a dilapidated house, the basement, and the reasonable idea that - as one sobbing youth asks - why can’t they simply leave via the running car? That idea is quickly shot down as farcical, and instead chose to hide behind a bunch of rusty chainsaws in a foul looking garage. The parodic killer is in the exact spot they chose, rolling his eyes as a voiceover narrates: “If you’re in a horror movie, you make poor decisions. It’s what you do.” The ad contrasts it with the rational choice of purchasing their car insurance over a shot of the hapless gaggle running towards the cemetery. The ad, in a breezy one-minute runtime, neatly outlines a commonly perceived facet of the horror genre: characters compulsively act against the grain of sound decision making, submitting themselves to the terror that we, the sagacious viewer, would surely avoid if we were in their stead. Leaving car insurance for another day, I want to focus on how this generic feature is elaborated.
Irrationality, or stupidity in many cases, can come in various forms over the course of a given horror film. Frequently, this unfolds as a character fails to maintain a relationship to space that would keep them from the grasp of the particular bogeyman threatening them. The more caring individuals among us may try to warn them, crying out, “DON’T GO IN THERE”, ignoring the diegetic world’s indifference to the protestations of the audience as a character crosses a threshold that would have been better left uncrossed. I see this as a compulsive attitude wherein characters, in part because of the demands of narrative (we wouldn’t have a movie if horror characters avoided such circumstances) depart from “typical” psychological attitudes as a means of articulating genre. It is none too interesting to say that different genres employ different psychological relations that fall outside of day-to-day activity. What I hope to suggest by broaching these moments of spatial indiscretion is the interface between the text and the audience and the location of genre somewhere between the two. I propose the term generic compulsion to address how both film text and audience are drawn to generic classification. I argue something is lost when theorizing genre completely abandons either the text or external sites of meaning making, such as advertisement or public perception. On the one hand, a strictly textual approach overlooks the discursivity of genre and how it is deployed. On the other hand, discursive strategies that completely elides an important fact of that discourse: despite various moves in genre studies to unmoor genre from the text, a common-sense conception will point back to the text. Compulsion mediates between the two by pointing to how film texts locate themselves within generic tradition and how the audience is able to make such a claim that this film is that genre.
To get to the dual aspects of generic compulsion, I will discuss Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy (2016), which features several moments of a character passing into the maw of horror against better judgement. The film follows an ex-detective turned criminology professor, Takakura who, after relocating to a new home in the suburbs with his wife, Yasuko, is drawn to a mysterious case by one of his new colleagues. Years prior, a family mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind their teenage daughter who only has a fragmented account of the events. While Takakura chases this unsolved mystery, Yasuko has an increasingly strange series of encounters with their Neighbor, Nishino. Nishino lives up to the title of the film, emulating the physicality of a Looney Tunes caricature of Peter Lorre channeled through an awkward suburban avatar. The couple directly address his ominous bearing as early on, after a mangled attempt to give Nishino a neighborly gift, Takakura assuages Yasuko of unease as he explains it's not the ones you’d expect to commit crimes. Unfortunately, Nishino’s external appearance proves to be a pretty reliable indicator of his internal character, a book best judged by its cover.
Despite how off-putting Nishino is, Yasuko valiantly attempts to maintain a cordial relationship with him, at one point bringing him leftover food. Nishino asks Yasuko further into his abode, but, upon a look from his daughter, Yasuko hastily makes an excuse to leave the premises. Her initial hesitancy gives way later on as she crosses the threshold, joining Nishino’s pretend daughter and until this point unseen wife as captives. Nishino fashions his prisoners into a quasi-nuclear family, with himself at the head, wielding complete patriarchal authority. Moreover, this is a cyclical ritual for him. Taskakura’s investigation slowly reveals the connection between the cold case and his domestic situation. The film concludes after several deaths and moments where characters “should not have gone in there,” with Nishino taking his makeshift family on the road, ready to reincarnate his next cycle until Takakura breaks his grip, shooting the ghastly neighbor dead.
This is a cursory overview of the film and smooths over a lot of its intricacies and convolutions, which I hope will come out in further analysis, but should highlight a few elements. First, the role of hypnosis in the narrative. While we know there is a chemical basis for the victim’s reactions, with Nishino injecting Yasuko, we don’t really know what it is, how it works, or the extent to which it determines behaviors or merely suggests them. What we do know is that it is effective. Effective enough that Nishino has been doing this for years. Second, his house, and more specifically the hallway leading to the heavy metallic door which holds his captives, acts as a kind of binding agent for his hypnosis wherein characters are seemingly completely subjected to his will. Even though not strictly hypnosis, I argue that the threshold of horror-space acts as a hypnotic agent both diegetically and for the audience in how they relate generically to the film, which is doubled in Creepy through the hypnotic effects of Nishino’s injection.
This is a prime example of generic compulsion. Compulsion is meant to highlight that, while it still connotes a lack of autonomy in decision making, does not include the same level of unconsciousness suggested by hypnosis. Often it is the force of the narrative that drives this compulsion. For example, a slasher film needs a requisite amount of death and thus requires a level of compulsion from the characters to enable that, but should also be read for its deeper signification of the cultural valence of the horror genre. The compulsion to enter horror-space can be viewed as what Rick Altman has called “generic crossroad,” points in a narrative where decision opens up the possibility of generic pleasure for the audience. Altman introduces the term, writing,
To the extent that they are indebted to specific genre, Hollywood films incorporate a series of paradigmatically designed and often repeated ‘crossroads’. Each one of these moments depends on a crucial opposition between two paths open to the text, each representing a different type of pleasure for the spectator. Strategically simplifying, we may say that one fork offers a culturally sanctioned activity or value, while the other path diverges in favour of generic pleasure…Though they may remain unaware of the process, those who delight in a particular genre are always affected by the crossroad experiences involving that genre, simply because their continued pleasure depends on the ‘proper’ negotiation of those crossroads. (1999, 145).
In Creepy, we come to the crossroads in the aforementioned scene where Yasuko is first invited into Nishino’s lair. Everything screams that this is not the place to be, reinforced by the scared and meaningful look of Nishino’s fake daughter. What Kurosawa does that perhaps diverges in the usual offering of generic pleasure is forestall the revelation of what’s behind the door. We come to the door and not pass it several times before getting let in on the magnitude of Nishino’s depravity, which amplifies the moment when we are finally let into the room.
While Altman’s thesis here is helpful in delineating how these particular moments enable generic pleasure, I would like to muddy the water a bit. The bifurcation of pleasures, between the culturally sanctioned and its opposite, is not so clear, especially when that pleasure is derived from a sense of fear. In Creepy, disgust and affection are comingled, never intractable from one another. The generic crossroads offered by the film aren’t permanent divergences between the sanctioned and the unsanctioned, but rather a continual process of re-connecting. In fact, the distinction between the sanctioned and its opposite is blurred as Nishino assembles his makeshift family, which for a little bit appears to be more cohesive, even if that cohesion is coerced, than the marital until of Takakura and Yasuko. While generic crossroads may refer broadly between choices that don’t necessarily involve a spatial element, compulsive decision making in horror films is best realized through spatialization. These areas are examples of a Bakhtinian “chronotope”, spatio-temporal knots whose expression engenders specific generic relations, “[Defining] genre and genre distinctions” and “determines…the image of man” (1981, 85). In other words, spatio-temporal arrangement of narrative elements compels characters to act generically. This should not only be thought of as structuring the narrative and character relations, but orienting the audience to the specificity of these relations, or, in other words, its worthiness as a generic indicator.
In Creepy, and other Kurosawa films, space-time undergoes a strange series of dilations and contractions. In the several instances where a character inadvisably enters Nishino’s house, the space to the bunker door seems to yawn into an abyss, the seconds inching by. Horror is enacted through these permutations, with the narrative continually receding back to the house. It is only when Nishino’s newly assembled family are removed from these environs that Takakura is able to break from the compulsion at the end of the film. The recursivity of these moments, doubled by the fact that Nishino appears to be carrying out his plots on nearly identical geographical and social formations, acting first as neighbor to the victims, underscores that these elements are fundamentally generic. The deployment of sameness in the film conjures the image of a genre coming into definition through the repetition of recognizable elements. The most disturbing element of this recursivity is in how it centers domestic space as horror-space, and death (at least for Yasuko and Takakura) is not the immediate source of terror, but rather the mimetic recapitulation of the domesticity that is the supposed good object to pursue. In this blurring, domestic life itself is seen as a grim kind of compulsion towards stereotypic behavior. Yasuko plays a dutiful wife, cooking elaborate meals, greeting Takakura at the door, pouring him beer, etc, but she isn’t happy. The horror-space of Nishino’s house is a reflection of the unrealized horror of her own space. But I shouldn’t overstate my case; being a bad husband is not the same as vacuum sealing dead bodies. A difference of degree, if not of kind.
To close, I want to extrapolate how the compulsion of characters to enter horror-space relates to spectators' relationship with genre itself. If hypnosis/compulsion has been thematized in countless films, it has been doubly posited by theory. Eisenstein's “montage of attractions”,2 apparatus theory’s infantalization of the audience,3 Linda Williams’ “body genres,”4 and more all point to an idea that the spectator is at the whim of the film, each theory outlining its own method of compulsion. I use generic compulsion to indicate how genre orients us in a specific direction towards itself.
For Peter Rabinowitz, “genres can be viewed as strategies that readers use to process texts” and, changing the scenario for the moving pictures, audiences choose which textual elements signal generic leanings (1985, 419). I concur with him, but slightly modify it through the lens of compulsion. Rather than choosing, although one can always choose after the fact, I argue that an audience is compelled towards generic features, which then enable the type of reading Rabinowitz describes. Like the characters who cannot but help to enter horror space, we are compelled towards generic elements as anchor points for our understanding of the text. This is especially relevant to “genre film.” Take Umberto Eco’s classic treatment of the cult film, that “one must be able to unhinge it, to break it up and take it apart so that one may remember only parts of it, regardless of their original relationship to the whole” (1985, 4). Cult film and genre film are not synonymous, but I’m leveling the difference here to make a point: there are elements, and they don’t necessarily have to be textual, that have a strong pull over us and shape our relationship to the text. Generic compulsion isolates those elements that hold unnatural sway over us, and it is these moments that shape our understanding of a given film as generic.
What I hope to achieve in this tentative formulation of generic compulsion is to point to the sympathies between how narratives appear to belong to a given genre and how those judgements are made. While I typically privilege an approach to genre that hinges on the discursive construction of genres, we should not abandon the text and the sway it holds. Compulsion figures as a model for both the structure of generic texts and how they are deemed to belong to this or that genre. Horror is fertile ground for this examination because of its overemphasis on non-rational choice making, but compulsion can and should be thought across a range of genres and audience’s relationships to them.
Notes
Car Insurance, Geico. “Good Choices: Geico Horror Movie Commercial”. Advertisement. 2014.
“An attraction (in relation to the theatre) is any aggressive aspect of the theatre; that is,any element of the theatre that subjects the spectator to a sensual or psychological impact, experimentally regulated and mathematically calculated to produce in him certain emotional shocks which, when placed in their proper sequence within the totality of the production, become the only means that enable the spectator to perceive the ideological side of what is being demonstrated-the ultimate ideological conclusion.” (1974, 78).
For example, Dayan, in “The Tutor-code of Classical Cinema”, uses the Lacanian imaginary to describe how it “sutures” the audience into the ideology of the film. (1974)
For Williams, horror evokes a mimetic reaction in the audience. (1991)
Bibliography
Altman, Rick, and British Film Institute. 1999. Film/Genre. London: BFI Pub.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Dayan, Daniel. 1974 “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema.” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1: 22–31.
Eco, Umberto. 1985. “‘Casablanca’: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage.” SubStance 14, no. 2
Eisenstein, Sergei, and Daniel Gerould. 1974. “Montage of Attractions: For ‘Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman.’” The Drama Review: TDR 18, no. 1: 77–85.
Rabinowitz, Peter J. 1985. "The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy." Critical Inquiry, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 418–431.
Williams, Linda. 1991. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4.
Biography
Graham Paull is a PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. His main research interest is in the representation of animal life across media, science, culture, and philosophy. This work has been presented at the Domitor Conference graduate workshop (2024) and inaugural Hollywood Conference (2025), with particular attention to the transformation in human-animal relations reflected in the rise of CGI technologies. Outside of work, you can find him at the movies or watching baseball.