INTRODUCTION—A DISCOMFORTING FEELING

I would like to start this chapter with a short personal memory. As someone who defined his cinephile identity in the first decade of the twenty-first century, I have a clear memory of the first time I saw Fred Vogel’s August Underground (2001). I was expecting an extreme horror experience, but I had no clue about the content of the movie or its style. The first sequence of the film hit me in a very shocking way. As the reader may know, the movie starts in media res, without mentioning any title or providing initial credits. The first thing we see is a generic suburban exterior; we are given the point of view of a handheld camera that produces shaky and extremely lo-fi images. It is therefore extremely difficult for the viewer to have a clear idea of what is happening, of what he is actually seeing. After a few moments, we see a man walking toward us; we don’t know who he is, while the man operating the camera seems to know him quite well.

The effect of the sequence is extremely perturbing: we can’t figure out what is going to happen, but we progressively start to think that what we are watching is something that was not meant for us, a kind of amateur video content designed to circulate within a small group of people. In this sense, the movie betrays the expectation of a horror fan, adopting visual solutions that seem to derive rather from reality television. The destabilizing aesthetic proposed by the movie is typical of an emerging subgenre, that Steve Jones rightly named “hardcore horror.” Its main feature, according to James Aston, has to do with its ability to produce a “multi-sensorial shock” with explicit bodily connotations. In our example, this comes true when we discover the captive body of a young woman, tortured and covered in organic fluids. Apart from the extreme content of the images, the shocking value of August Underground’s incipit derives also from the fact that the spectator is left doubting the fictional nature of what is seen. Watching a horror movie is a potentially comforting experience because the spectator knows that every death he/she sees on the screen, no matter how realistic, is ultimately fake.