Let’s face it, what would a travelog, either from the 16th century or last year, be worth, if one could foresee this journey’s beginning and end, as well as anything that happened in between would it be an amiable and beautiful experience, a safe travel to a secure area which read like the perfect holiday handout?
Probably not much, and be rather a very boring affair. As audiences want to be surprised, bewildered and entertained by any kind of report, story and naturally, a movie.
That sort of expectation includes anxiety, fear and the advent of terrible things that may be very close.
Hence, the horror film genre exists, is alive and well and it holds “… an unspoken message that there are geographies of terror, places that, either by their very nature of their role in the history of the genre, just aren’t safe – making travel a perilous thing.”
As tension in movies not only develops during car chases, bank heists and following a detective unveiling motive and killers; the expectation, fright, excitement and concentration on the unknown, may be the most horrible and shocking thing or event that waits just next to that cellar door, abandoned mine shaft or ancient ruin in the plains is just as good a source of tension and entertainment. Literature has long made use of those expectations, as even before the literary horror genre, there was the Gothic novel.
Especially as some travels, journeys, explorations to foreign territories, or even familiar regions nearby (but a mile underneath your feet) did not end well. That is, we only learn about their respective endings if one of the journeymen or crew members employed made it back alive to tell about it (to be looked at in disbelief, usually). This strange fascination is at the center of Journeys into Terror, as it deals with the endless number of explorations that ended badly. With the advent of film, those plots could now be visualized and the weird and horrible experiences started a new genre.
The editors and the sixteen contributors assembled here, among them several authors who have contributed to literature on the subject like Lindsey Michael Banco, Barbara Plotz, and James J. Ward, cite and allude to a great number of movies that combine the threats of journeys into unknown regions and their cinematic contemplation.
Furthermore, the urge to reveal the secrets of a place, a region, some old cult or family secret naturally belongs to the quest genre, so audiences are familiar with tailing the usually average Joe’s journey to uncover a secret or two, even if lives could end most brutally while entering certain regions even deeper.
Such accounts are at the bottom of a large body of literature dating back centuries, telling of weird, remote and exotic lands, and even further to ancient folktales and myth. Which explains why several themes keep repeating themselves and are picked up by contemporary media, such as TV shows and cinema blockbusters. Nevertheless, the unpredictable, the tragic or terrifying is not simply a thing of the past or associated with ancient ways of travel. “Even today, when travel by car, rail, ship or plane is a commonplace thing, those who journey often leave behind the safety and certainty of the familiar, placing themselves in the company of strangers – or in solitude – and rendering themselves vulnerable in order to experience the new and unexpected. … [Y]et, sometimes, those journeys go horribly wrong and the traveler stumbles into a nightmare world filled with unexpected dangers that they barely understand and have few resources to combat. This is the stuff that horror is made of.”
The eighteen essays here all refer to that heritage of journeys into the unknown in their own way and pick either a group of movies with a similar theme, setting or region. All kinds of obstacles and dangers make bringing those journeys to a good end, or finding the way home most difficult, as such harassment presented to the journeymen ranges from problems associated with class, gender, social conflict, mindset, race, and naturally power, i.e. the power to keep travelers or entire social classes suppressed.
Such texts in the first section of the title include Michael C. Reiff’s musings on Us, Thomas Prasch’s encounter with Embrace of the Serpent, and further text on Bacurau, The Nightingale and Wake in Fright.
The next set of essays shares experiences of satanic powers and the supernatural being part of the real world; at least to the protagonists of the movies Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, The Midnight Meat Train and Dead End.
Section three deals with “Uncanny Landscapes,” regions that are known to be unsafe and infernal, places where evil lives, even before the protagonists tie their shoelaces to go there. There is a special section on films that relate to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, and that picks up on regional variations of cursed topographies, places and their respective folklore as used in the plots. The movies cited, among others, are Chernobyl Diaries, Devil’s Pass, The Abandoned, The Shrine, The Nun, They’re Watching, Nightworld, Severance, Spectral, Outpost, The Tomb, as well as the American classics Horror Island, Isle of the Dead, and Island of Lost Souls.
Section four is focused on a variation of the journey, namely the time off or holiday turned nightmare in movies such as Midsommar and The Cabin in the Woods. And a film about the individual being lost at the fringe of wilderness and civilization as experienced by an army platoon in Louisiana’s swamps in Southern Comfort. Karen Horsley’s excellent text on a very special sort of Southern hospitality is recommended.
The last three texts revisit Disney’s Pinocchio, but beware; this is the darkest version of the story, the British Blockbuster The Decent (brilliantly interpreted by Phil Hobbes-White) and The Langoliers.
Both editors have published on similar topics before, some of Cynthia J. Miller’s recent titles – she is a cultural anthropologist specializing in popular culture and visual media – are reviewed here. She has collaborated with co-editor A. Bowdoin Van Riper in the past.
Journeys into Terror: Essays from the Cinematic Intersection of Travel and Horror is carefully compiled, and the texts cover the majority of locations and settings where journeys turn bad. Maybe an extra section on space exploration would have looked good, but so far, the texts here will satisfy any nosy traveler who thought he had seen it all.
Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2024
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds.) Journeys into Terror: Essays from the Cinematic Intersection of Travel and Horror. McFarland, 2023, 255 p.