The Horror Device: Artifact & Artifice
by J †Johnson
Take Slumber Party Massacre, swap driller-killer castration anxiety for therapy speak, privilege and paranoia, and you get the wicked game BODIES BODIES BODIES. This is a theory of the embedded device in horror movies—let’s call it the horror device—with a focus on a particular film, as a self-contained example of how this trope works. The horror device is a thematic element that is also a piece of mise en scène: a set piece within a set piece, with a more or less subtle structural and narrative function. The device is an object on screen (often but not always a piece of technology) as well as a literary effect—artifact & artifice.
Three game pieces function as horror devices in BODIES BODIES BODIES, one device for each of those BODIES: machines within the machine of the film that have a narrative and thematic function distinct from their ostensible mechanical function. Often the horror device fails in its common function (related to its artifactuality and field of reference). That failure allows it to better function as a plot device (part of its artifice), and extends its thematic resonance (more artifice).
In BODIES BODIES BODIES, the horror devices include an SUV, a scimitar, and the cell phone.
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In film, the car often functions to transport characters from one scene or location to another—obvious, perhaps, though we should note the filmic distinction of moving scene to scene versus place to place as in our common experience. The vehicle (and now we’re shifting toward the language of metaphor) also groups particular characters while presenting power dynamics between driver and passengers, and parsing characters by front and back seats. It can be a site of distinct activity, a location in and of itself (think of all the drama in the van from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, particularly after the group picks up one of the Sawyer clan).
In BODIES BODIES BODIES, the SUV delivers the dual protagonists, Sophie and Bee, to the main site of the film’s action. It then ceases to function as usual, after Bee uses it as a private powder room and leaves down the sunshade. The camera clocks the mirror light, so alert viewers recognize this as a significant moment indicating that the car battery will die and the SUV will no longer function as an escape vehicle. (This might seem subtle, but experienced horror viewers know when we are being stranded at a significant location: our eyes dilate, our heart rates go up, and our popcorn levels get dangerously low.) Later, after fleeing characters discover the dead battery, the SUV takes on a third function related to the second. Bee returns to the SUV powder room in an escalated moment of distress and discovers a pair of underwear that indicate a prior fuckpad function of the vehicle. This reveal motivates tension between the two protagonists for the rest of the film.
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The scimitar is a model esoteric weapon, embedding characteristics that make a horror device stand out and fail to seamlessly integrate into the action, even as that distinctiveness contributes to the specific tone and plot of the film. In this case the display function of the scimitar is transformed into the threat of a murder weapon, while feeding into motifs of opulence and smug cultural recognition that functions ironically as disregard. Characters tend to overtly display their cultural sensitivity as a means to cover their lack of interpersonal empathy, and waving around a fancy sword is a pretty good parody of that particular mode of craven, vapid virtue signaling. When the eponymous whodoneit parlor game predictably gets real and produces an actual murder, the victim (David) displays a sword wound, realizing the game’s execution of the killer (based on accusation rather than guilt). Not only has the embedded device changed (predictably) from display item—signifier of empty, anachronistic heroism and wealth—to weapon (restoring its actual historical function); it also transforms (less predictably) from murder weapon to plot device. As we will ultimately learn, in a payoff from the first appearance of the scimitar (which the second character to die, Greg, first uses to open a prohibited bottle of champagne), the first death was in fact the result of a sword wound, but did not result from an act of homicide.
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We learn of the first victim’s accidental auto-execution via the film’s third significant horror device, the cell phone. As with the vehicle, this device fails in its primary function, turning a telephone into a flashlight both in the game and the actual murder mystery to follow. During the game, lights are turned off intentionally, and during the murder mystery sequence, a hurricane causes power failure that not only cuts the lights, but disrupts cell service. In both conditions, cell phones operate as flashlights (and ostensible filmic lighting), but the stakes for illumination (and illuminated conditions) change. Here the function of the horror device shifts its resonance as the film’s tension and stakes are ratcheted up.
The cell phone also maintains and extends two other common functions—taking video and displaying a record of text messages—both of which are crucial to plot reveals related to the other two devices. Cell phone video capture provides the ultimate reveal that the first victim cut his own neck with the scimitar (in solo documented parody of the second victim’s performance of opening champagne, which also extends the parody of virtue signaling from fancy sword waving to selfie sword waving—Pete Davidson is well cast as a fragile white jackass whose character’s name is embedded in his own). Meanwhile, text message history promises to substantiate Bee’s suspicion (via SUV powder room underwear discovery) that her girlfriend Sophie hooked up with another character, Jordan, earlier that day.
These three horror devices effectively arrange the bodies bodies bodies in the film. Critics who complain that we don’t care what happens because the characters are annoying have overlooked the film’s comic effects, all laid out for us via the horror device.
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The horror device isn’t new—every weapon, magic wand, and gizmo in the history of horror cinema can be read this way. However, contemporary filmmakers—let’s say, post-smartphone—are finding new ways to use the horror device to tell stories in the present tense. For a while after we started carrying phones and the internet in our pockets and handbags (where we used to just have guns, gum, and rubbers), filmmakers weren’t sure what to do with cell phones. We did alright figuring out how to draft the telephone into horror—that ring! But the cell phone is a challenge because we always have a lifeline, which makes it more difficult to strand people in elementally dangerous situations. Another inconvenience of representing modern urban life is that most people are super fucking boring and annoying to watch, what with all the staring into and touching of cell phones. An added complication is that for all this cellular ubiquity, most people who grew up with smartphones avoid actually talking on them, so filmmakers are left to represent less cinematic functions like texting and selfies selfies selfies. Well, at least there’s horror potential there: Agh, someone is calling me—what horrible thing horrible enough for someone to call me on my phone is happening! Anyway, so we start seeing contemporary filmmakers find expedient ways to ditch cell phones so they don’t have to wind the plot around them the way our lives are all tangled up around these cursed objects. Dead batteries. Angry chucking out windows, tossing into woods or water. Losing the fucking thing. Flashbacks! The whole retro-’80s horror thing owes something to the simple absence of cell phones in the good old days.
Eventually, inevitably, we figured out how to use the cell phone as a horror device, just like we figured out what might be scary about a telephone, a TV, or a car. (You can follow the development of telecommunications devices and their thematic application through the Scream franchise.) The beauty of a horror device is that it can be right up front in the story action, or it can fade back into the scenery. In either case, it can function just as we need it to, even if it doesn’t work.
J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018), and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021). Their writing has appeared in PEN America, Jacket2, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. A chapbook, trunc & frag, is at Our Teeth. Most recently, they completed a performative critical investigation of analog-digital interface, language-oriented poetry, digital language art, and experimental electronic music called Janky Materiality. They live in Philadelphia.