Content area
Full Text
Abstract: This essay explores the troublesome relationship between horror cinema and American independent cinema, with particular emphasis on the reception of Nadja (Michael Almereyda, 1994) and The Addiction (Abel Ferrara, 1995), ultimately arguing that the continued opposition between "horror" and "art" that exists within a number of film critics' frameworks leads to US "indie-horror" cinema being articulated as a quasi-generic field within which horror tropes are largely absent.
Horror fi lms have been a frequent staple of independent fi lm production within the United States (Figure 1), yet since the 1980s they have been marginalized from discourses relating to American independent cinema. Stephen Thrower's Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (2007) investigates a large number of horror fi lms made during the 1980s, though most of these have barely registered within accounts of American independent cinema of the decade.1 Xavier Mendik and Steven Jay Schneider's Underground USA: Filmmaking beyond the Hollywood Canon is an attempt to encompass horror and exploitation within a broader focus on (largely) independent productions, though it still stands out as a rarity within studies of American independent cinema.2 For the most part a critical framework has developed in which "horror" cinema is seen as largely separate from "independent cinema." In books that mainly focus on American independent cinema since the 1980s, the genre is often overlooked.3 In some of the more historical overviews of American independent cinema from its beginnings, horror tends to feature slightly more prominently, but is still not a particularly significant presence within the overall focus.4 More general guides to the field typically only mention a few horror films each. There are, however, a few books-Geoff King's American Independent Cinema and editors Chris Holmund and Justin Wyatt's Contemporary American Independent Film, for example-which do actually include horror as a more substantial presence within overviews of American independent cinema.5 Such publications, in addition to Mendik and Schneider's Underground USA, may indicate an increasing willingness among some academics to incorporate horror production within the field of independent cinema, though at present the genre is still a rather marginal component of American independent cinema. Those horror films that do tend to feature in surveys of American independent cinema are often considered to be "seminal" productions, in the...