Opinion: recent horror films like these are unsettling reminders of one of the most chilling prospects a person can contemplate: an awkward moment
By Gráinne O'Hare, University of Newcastle
With society still adjusting to life after the solitary banana bread-making, TikTok-dancing and mental liquefaction of lockdown, it is hardly surprising that the makers of recent horror films have chosen to deploy social anxiety as a tool with which to terrorise their audiences.
For many of us pre-pandemic, the everyday disquiet of parties, reunions, social faux pas and simmering tensions between friends were already a source of deep unease. However, following the separations and altered communications of lockdown life, interpersonal conflict and the nervous navigation of social mores are arguably even more fertile ground for modern fear-fests.
2022's comedy-horror films Bodies Bodies Bodies and All My Friends Hate Me use group reunions in large, isolated houses as a stage for their theatre of social awkwardness. In All My Friends Hate Me, protagonist Pete (Tom Stourton) is reunited with his university friends to celebrate his birthday. A self-satisfied charity worker now living in the north of England, Pete sees himself as distanced from the cut-glass accents and carelessness of his old well-to-do friends, yet still finds himself seeking their approval.
While the landscape of the creepy aristocratic manor, looming forests, and vaguely sinister villagers contributes to the atmosphere of unease, the true grimness of All My Friends Hate Me is in watching Pete perceive himself superior to his former wolfpack of Lost Boys (and girls), while also desperate to reconnect with them on the plane of their shared memories—an increasingly unstable plane, he discovers.
One memorable moment features local interloper Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns) ambushing Pete in the bath and standing intimidatingly over him, stark naked. 'So it's true, then,' he says when Pete recoils. 'You are the shy one.’ Any physical menace in Harry’s stance is at once eclipsed by Pete’s horror that among his friends, unbeknownst to him, he was viewed at university as gauche and introverted, and not the sesh-captain he considers his past self.
The same seeping uncertainty is present in Bodies Bodies Bodies, where a group of rich twenty-somethings are confined to a mansion during a hurricane. A power-cut and a party game gone wrong provide the setting for multiple violent altercations and deaths; but again, it is the social interactions that are perhaps most brutally compelling. Undertones of tension about who has or has not responded to the group chat escalate to confrontations that destabilise the cornerstones of each person’s identity.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's The Business, 2022 has been a really strong year commercially for chilling flicks and the Irish film industry is having something of a horror moment
‘You ran away to write your memoirs—’ accuses Jordan (Myha'la Herrold), to which recovering addict Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) protests, ‘It’s creative non-fiction, which is a valid response to life in an attention economy!’ Sophie counters that Jordan ‘hate-listens’ to Alice (Rachel Sennott)’s podcast, causing Alice to tearfully inform them of the amount of organisation that goes into creating a podcast.
Alice subsequently turns on Jordan: ‘Nobody likes you. You know when you’re drunk and you cry to me "oh, I’m afraid nobody likes me because I’m mean and a bitch and I suck"; well, you do, okay? You fucking suck. And I only hang out with you out of pity and the suffocating weight of our shared history, and that is all.’ Three members of the ensemble are, by this scene, lying bloodied and dead around the mansion, yet this absurd exchange of attacks on artistry and identity sits perfectly amidst the bodily carnage.
This aspect of Bodies Bodies Bodies seems particularly significant in a post-lockdown world when, alongside the worldwide chaos and grief exacted by the Covid pandemic, more intimate localised anxieties about how we are perceived by others still permeate the fabric of everyday life: are we interesting enough / likeable enough / did anyone actually listen to that deeply self-indulgent podcast we made during the spring of 2020?
Nor are the social anxieties on display in contemporary horror limited to concerns about friends' perceptions and opinions; the 2022 psychological horror Speak No Evil serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of making concessions to strangers out of a fear of making social faux pas. In Speak No Evil, Danish couple Bjørn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch) and their young daughter meet a Dutch family while on holiday, after which Patrick (Fedja van Huêt) and Karin (Karina Smulders) invite Bjørn and Louise to visit them at home for a weekend.
Bjørn and Louise predict perhaps an amicable mini-break with their ostensibly pleasant new friends; however, this swiftly becomes a sequence of painfully subtle antagonisms that Bjørn in particular struggles to challenge. Patrick serves meat-heavy cooked meals to Louise and passive-aggressively picks holes in her vegetarianism. He and his wife invite them out to dinner, ordering on their behalf and pressuring Bjørn to cover the hefty bill for the night, an imposition to which he is too uncomfortable to object.
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From RTÉ Brainstorm, what makes a great horror film?
These and many more unsettling moments are stacked end-to-end in such a way that even seasoned consumers of gore- and carnage-heavy horror surely cannot help but feel squeamish at the Dutch couple’s cavalier disregard for personal boundaries. As the oozing discomfort slowly escalates, Bjørn is not imprisoned by rope or at knifepoint, but rather a hostage to politeness and the avoidance of confrontation. It is (without disclosing major spoilers) this consistent reluctance to risk committing a social transgression that leads to disaster in the film’s third act; when Bjørn asks for justification, Patrick responds only, ‘Because you let me.’
Having swapped jump-scares for death-stares and tubular bells for uncomfortable lulls in conversation, films like these are unsettling reminders of one of the most chilling prospects a person can contemplate: the ever-lurking possibility of an awkward moment.
Gráinne O'Hare is a PhD researcher of the 18th century at the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at University of Newcastle.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
