Home and the Horrific: Generational Trauma and Film

The family sits at the center of much of human society as one of its most fundamental social institutions. The form and shape of families varies from culture to culture and over time – from the traditional large, multigenerational family, to the “nuclear family” which bonds much of the modern social fabric, to our current plethora of vaguely defined and diverse types of families that can include distant relatives, partners, or others that live and care for each other. All of these family types come with a shared experience, a shared life, and, more often than not, shared trauma, trauma that runs down the family tree. Alcoholics beget alcoholics. Abusers beget abusers. Each person carries the weight of decades and centuries of damage from people they may never have known. Horror and the fantastic reflect this trauma in different ways. Things horrifying, fantastical, or abject can either be the product of, or an escape from, families that are oppressive. As we see in movies like Raw, The Babadook, and to a lesser extent in Get Out, we have no say in the trauma that engulfs us. The person experiencing a trauma was never asked to consent, ending up face to face with the horrific. However, in other films like Let The Right One In and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, it is the characters’ interactions with the fantastic and the horrific that allows them to escape this cycle. One does not choose one’s family. It is something one is thrust into, for better and worse. Escaping can take many years, often after the damage has already been done. The trope in horror movies is that the family is a breeding ground for the horrific, often stretching over generations – carrying a trauma that, as shown in these movies, grows with repression and only heals when accepted and confronted.

Horror, a genre rooted in the fearful, the incomprehensible, the indescribable, and the abject, is a perfect medium for analyzing family-based trauma. It forces the viewer to look at those things they would usually turn away from, locking us in to one particular narrative, which we do not have the power to change. It hides things in the unseen, in the dark, in the supposedly empty spaces of an old hotel, or a house heavy with grief, or a veterinary school. The filmmaker’s power to choose what the viewer experiences reflects the power the parents have over their children, and maybe even their children and so on. Robin Wood, in his piece titled “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” further echoes the idea of the family as a repressive and oppressive entity. Wood argues that the family’s role in horror has developed over the years, beginning with familial comedies in the 1930s and progressing to horror stories centered on the family unit and the evils of society at large, which took off in the 1960s and 1970s, with Psycho as a turning point. Wood takes this central thesis further when analyzing The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where he refers to the “terrible house” as a “[signification of] the dead weight of the past crushing the life of the younger generation, the future.” (13) Wood also discusses the nature of the monstrous in Massacre, where the closed family perspective forces us to identify with the monstrous, or at the very least prevents us from completely separating ourselves from it. In my view, Wood sees these films and the logic behind them as an expression of the capitalist system, specifically Massacre. The premise of Massacre is in his view a logical extension of how society functions, where we are taught “that people have the right to live off other people.” (14) This may be so, but I think he is missing a piece of something larger. 

Massacre, in my view, shares a core similarity with Get Out. While neither deals directly with abusive families or trauma, both address generational trauma broadly, and how a family can pass these along. The horror of Massacre’s family is linked to the changing times, and economic trauma – very much in line with Wood’s own analysis. Where I think Wood falls short is in assuming that the family of Massacre are acting as good capitalists. Sure, it is a wry criticism of capitalism, but Leatherface’s family are not capitalist villains, but rather its victims. They are the pieces left behind. They were promised that their work and their family unit would be enough to provide them a good life, so it is no surprise that they put their trust in the same system when their livelihood is lost. But they now return to something twisted and horrific; an existence perverted by the trauma of a society that no longer needs their services. The family that was once a source of mutual support and understanding becomes a shell of its former self, propagating itself far beyond its natural death (in the case of Leatherface’s grandfather) and through unnatural means (cannibalism). It is also worth noting the Sawyer family is a dead family in more than just their trade – there is, as far as the viewer knows, no reproductive capability left in the family, which is now made up of exclusively cis men. The Sawyers are, essentially, a lingering memory. They are a family held together by pain, the trauma of development and the progression of time made manifest. They survive through sheer force of will, setting their own purpose, taking pride in their craft. Even the camera admires this, abandoning its usually straight-on and steady view when honing in on the couch made of human remains. It takes on an almost divine aesthetic with the light filtering in through the window behind it and the camera pointing up at the sight, rather than on level with it like the rest of the shots in the film. While Massacre’s cinematography often highlights the gritty, the obscene, the dirty, and the disgusting, it occasionally treats these as something to be respected, looked up at, and acknowledged, through its camera angles and the literal steadiness of its gaze. This system that we regard as so sacred, that Wood views as an expression of the capitalist system, is responsible for the horror of existing beyond your time, the horror of something that goes on just a little bit too long. Much like Freud’s uncanny, it is mostly us, but it is just slightly wrong.

Get Out flows in the same vein as Massacre. While these two movies could not be more different on the surface – one about the state of racism in today’s America and the dangers of white liberalism, the other about the effect of capitalism on the structure of society – both deal with families as a corrupt and horrific space. The generational trauma in Get Out is far broader, delving into the black experience in America. The central family here is not made up of those who have suffered from that generational trauma, but rather those who have propagated and upheld it throughout time. They are a continuation of a system of white supremacy that is not inherent but is passed on from generation to generation, where a family can say with no irony that they would have voted for Obama a third time but simultaneously finds no issue with fetishizing and, in the case of Get Out, literally taking over black bodies in order to maintain their own white selves. The horror in this family comes not so much from intrafamily abuse or trauma, but rather a shared history of subjugation, control, and systematic oppression. Here, the family is part of a white racist tradition. As Zadie Smith puts it in her Harper’s essay Getting In and Out: “Get Out flips the script, offering a compendium of black fears about white folk.” I agree with what Smith says about the fetishization of the black experience, where “in place of the old disgust comes a new kind of cannibalism… the white people in Get Out want to get inside the black experience: they want to wear it like a skin and walk around in it.” The family we meet in Get Out is horrifying because of this desire to “become” the other, to adopt this new structure for themselves. They are attempting to step beyond the history of violence against people of color – and specifically black Americans – by rejecting their inherent culpability in a supremacist system. Rather than accepting this past trauma, they act much like the Sawyers in Massacre. Both families consumed the bodies of the Other. One merely did so in the form of food, and the other in the form of their minds, souls, and experiences. And as several symbols in the film suggest – its main character Chris as a photographer, the sunken place as a deep void with a movie screen-like view of your own life – the trauma that Chris is faced with is one that can be captured, but seldom stopped. Names of black Americans who have been killed due to the system that white families like the Armitages prop up flash over our TV screens each day. Even the discordant soundtrack to this film pokes at something that doesn’t feel quite right, something familiar but messed up, twisted, confused.

Throughout the previous films we have discussed, one thread that has shown up either literally or through film theory surrounding it, is cannibalism, or consumption of humans in general. This is a natural comparison or metaphor to the horrors surrounding the family, as cannibalism in modern societies carries a particularly heavy weight amongst the crimes humans can commit toward one another. A craving for human flesh not only requires, in many cases, the death of a human, but it also requires a certain hunger for something forbidden and wrong. In that sense, it is a form of breaking through repression. A movie that used this metaphor explicitly was Raw, which follows a young girl as she enters veterinary school, like her parents and her sister before her. She is following in the path her family has laid out for her. When we start watching this movie, we find that Justine, our protagonist, comes from a family who seem to be quite serious about their vegetarianism. It isn’t until later that we find out that the reason for this is, that once the women of this family taste meat, they develop an all-encompassing craving for it and turn into cannibals. Not until the final, shocking scene, where Justine’s father pulls back his shirt to reveal scars resulting from years of what we can only assume was Justine’s mother’s hunger, do we realize the danger of this inheritance. Justine’s own desire for human flesh is not purely of her own making, not a strange disease that she and her sister share. It is a symbol of family trauma. Raw is as much a story about coming of age, as it is about what cannot be escaped. Growing up can be a difficult and sometimes a horrible experience. Your body goes through changes you have no control over. You develop new desires, thoughts, needs, and you do your best to balance these. I would argue that Raw is an allegory for the two types of repression Wood mentions: basic repression and surplus repression. 

Justine’s family initially attempts to deny and suppress any history they have with cannibalism, which is why they force their kids – and themselves – to completely abstain from eating meat. This “surplus repression” attempts to go on with life by ignoring the pain and pushing it aside. The film makes this repression almost physical through the depiction of tight, enclosed spaces. There is for example the scene with Justine under the sheets as she is being attacked by some unseen assailant. Her sheets act like a prison while the light shines through them, giving the scene its airy quality. There is also the animalistic run toward the party near the beginning, as new recruits run toward the light after crawling through the darkness on all four. These are moments of darkness that are followed by a sudden, jarring light, or noise, or event. This is perhaps most memorably expressed in the so-called “finger scene,” where we see the slow acceptance by Justine of her sister’s finger as food; the slow lift to her mouth, and then that first, desperate bite, followed by a sudden change of camera angle and a musical hit that accompanies Justine’s own realization of what she’s done. The family unit in Raw is not so much horrifying for what they have done, as much as they are bound by a horrible fate. Each suffers from something unknowable, something that may have passed through the ages, a pain with no name that can only be mitigated, not erased. In addition, it is likely no coincidence that the cannibalistic urges are passed down through the women in the family – perhaps an implication that as a result of toxic masculinity, women are the ones who wind up carrying the burden of emotional labor and trauma. Despite all of this, however, the family in Raw is in a sense more hopeful than the others. The film implies that while we cannot always erase trauma altogether, we can deal with it by sharing the burden. It views the family as a unit that shares trauma, but also a unit that shares the healing, albeit in a gruesome way. It is when people attempt to deal with their pain in extreme ways – say, Alexia forcing people into car crashes or commit murder to satisfy her addiction to human flesh – that they become totally consumed by it.

Consuming your own kind and being consumed by your own pain is a theme found in most of these horror films, but perhaps most explicitly in The Babadook. On its surface, The Babadook is a movie about a monster haunting a family grappling with grief. It takes place in the aftermath of the death of Amelia’s husband in a car crash on the way to the hospital to birth her son, Sam. On a deeper level, the movie is a story about the role of trauma in abuse, and in keeping with our previously discussed films, an analysis of how a family can be a safe space as well as a horrific one. One of the first scenes shows Sam giving his mother a hug, which she reacts to by pushing him away, yelling “don’t do that!” The familiarity of his presence, its “uncanniness,’ as Freud would put it, seems to remind her of her dead husband; the loss of which she blames Sam for. However, the family as a social institution asks of her to care for him as his mother; that she represses her grief, and her de facto hatred for her son. This is exacerbated by her son’s inability to “just be normal” or communicate like everyone else due to what appears to be his place somewhere on the autism spectrum, making him unable to repress these thoughts, but also unable to communicate them clearly to his mother. Amelia’s repression eventually becomes so strong it takes on physical form, in the shape of the Babadook. As the book in The Babadook says, “the more you deny, the stronger I get.” Internalizing grief, pain, and trauma does not help eradicate it. In Raw we saw how the mother dealt with her own monster and unnatural urges through sharing the burden with her husband and thus, with her family. In The Babadook, however, we see this pain let loose despite every attempt to keep it buried and ignored; but the pain is passed on anyway through Amelia’s physical and emotional abuse of her son. 
The black-and-white aesthetic of the movie makes each space feel cold, dead, and prison-like, devoid of color. We may be inhabiting a home with the rest of the family, but something feels wrong. The place is supposed to provide safety and warmth, but trauma and pain have drained it of all that. The Babadook even appears in the form of Amelia’s husband later in the film, before she is fully consumed by it. At that point, all repressed hatred bursts out at once as she shouts about bashing Sam’s head against a wall, killing her family dog, and even attempts to choke him. Her family enters the horrific through a traumatic event, but Amelia “lets it in” by keeping it all inside, rather than reaching out and seeking support. By doing so, she transforms her family into a source of horror, revealing that the intimacy of the family unit can as easily lend itself to violence and hate as love and kindness. Much like there was no way to rid anyone of the cannibalistic drive in Raw, one can never completely overcome grief, or of the Babadook. The only way Amelia truly gets the Babadook to back off, to stop his assault, is when she embraces her son fully, faces up to her fear (literally), and finally allows herself to feel something. This plays right in to Noel Carroll’s own definition of horror in “The Nature of Horror.” For Carroll, horror is found in the inconceivable, the unclean, the indescribable. More relevant to this film is Carroll’s notion of “the monster [as] a being in violation of the natural order.” (40) In The Babadook, the monster is surely an otherworldly, odd, hardly seen specter, but what it symbolizes also falls directly into Carroll’s latter definition. A mother who hates her son, who blames her son, is as much in violation of the “natural order” as a beast who lurks in the shadows. 

To round up this analysis of monstrosity and its role in propagating pain across generations in a family setting, it is worth looking at two films that, in their own way, break this mold. In Let The Right One In and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, the monsters do not serve as antagonists to our main characters, but rather an escape from their own family-based traumas. Both movies feature father figures who are addicts – Oskar’s father is an alcoholic, whereas Arash’s father is addicted to what we can assume is heroin. Both characters encounter different types of vampires, and both develop some sort of romantic connections with the vampires. We see the gruesome, bloody actions of these monsters, as do both Arash and Oskar, and yet it does not change their ultimate fates. Here, the monsters come not from inside the house, but instead represent the frightfulness of the unknown, despite the true domestic horror these characters faced. We are taught to be afraid of things like vampires, that they will suck our blood, hurt us, or kill us. But when the pain in your life is coming from your household, your circumstances, a history of abuse, addiction, or simply lack of care, then the fantastic – defined by Todorov as the uncertainty of whether something appearing to be outside the laws of the universe is a delusion or a total restructuring of what we know (15) – offers an escape. When the family itself is monstrous, the fantastic monsters outside it can become appealing. There is much shouting and screaming in Oskar’s household – no wonder then that he breaks out of this cycle of abuse and trauma by seeking out a new future with a vampire that transcends our generally accepted notions of life, propriety, etc. When the family is the source of our pain and terror, then the things known as horrific could turn out to be the opposite. In both of these films, the characters end up in a transitory state – Oskar and Eli on a train bound for who knows where, and The Girl and Arash driving down a dark highway. 

These two films play with the aesthetic of light and dark – Let the Right One In is covered in the dark shadows and snowfall of a Swedish winter, whereas A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is entirely presented in black and white, where crushed blacks on a drug dealers face morph into two voids, making his face look like a skeleton – portending his fate. And yet, in both these films, the source of lightness – society, community, family – all fail our protagonists. Most saliently, the city where The Girl Walks Home Alone at Night takes place is even called Bad City. The only escape is through the horrific unknown; an unknown that winds up being less horrific than the shackles of the family.

Horror is a genre that is uniquely adept for analyzing all sorts of trauma, trauma that is often found lurking in places where we least would expect it. Trauma can be found in the family, feeding on ancient pains, abuse, or violence. It can even be seen as written into the very structure of our modern society, emerging on the backs of generations of suffering by any number of people who fell outside of what society’s powerful deemed proper, be they people of color, those in the LGBTQ community, non-men, and so on. Repression, as we can see in these movies as well as in debates about the virtues of “color-blindness,” does not actually resolve the trauma, but may exacerbate it, extend the pain, keep the vicious cycle moving and prevent any chance of healing. We should not expect the horror to remain calmly in the background so that we can turn away from it. To that end, film is a medium that communicates great empathy. It is a form of expression that allows you to, for a little while, step into a host of different characters, or into a different world. Most crucially, it allows you to enter into the mind of its creator. Going off of this, the family, as a symbol of our society at its most fundamental level, is crucial to film theory, as it is often a hidden, closed space where fear, pain, and grief can flourish. If there is any central concept to take away from horror films, it is that we must face the horror unflinchingly to understand it, and by doing that overcome its power over us. We cannot address trauma by ignoring it. We cannot fix a broken family by pretending everything is fine. We cannot address violence against people of color by fetishizing them and aiming to consume them in new ways. Horror is a genre of the revelatory, the unseen made visible, the unknown becoming known. It would behoove us, personally and as a society, to address our own pains straightforwardly, lest the generational damage continue to grow.