RICH AND STRANGE: THE YUPPIE HORROR FILM
Author(s): BARRY KEITH GRANT
Source: Journal of Film and Video , Spring-Summer 1996, Vol. 48, No. 1/2 (SpringSummer
1996), pp. 4-16
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video
Association
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RICH AND STRANGE: THE YUPPIE HORROR FILM
BARRY KEITH GRANT
Most critics who are concerned with
genre theory or interested in the range
of formal film categories deny that the
genres of horror and science fiction are
particularly flexible and adaptable. For
example, at the beginning of his Holly
wood Genres, Thomas Schatz asserts that
science fiction is rather inflexible because
of the specifics, the topicality, of its con
ventional narrative conflicts (31). After
thus dismissing science fiction, Schatz
never returns to it?and horror isn't even
listed in the index. Similarly, Andrew
Tudor, a sociologically oriented film theo
rist, claims that horror is a particularly
"limited" film category because "its con
ventions are unidimensional and straight
forward" (208). Such an assessment relies
in large part on how one defines the
genre?the problem of definition always
being a thorny one in genre theory and
criticism.
I shall discuss a group of recent American
films that presents a distinct variation
of the horror film. This group includes,
among others, After Hours (1985), Des
perately Seeking Susan (1985), Something
Wild (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987),
Bad Influence (1991), Pacific Heights
(1990), The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle (1992), Poison Ivy (1992), Single
White Female (1992), and The Temp
(1993).
Barry Keith Grant is director of the film studies
program at Brock University in Ontario, Can
ada. He is the author of Voyages of Discovery:
The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman, and his
latest anthology, The Dread of Difference: Gen
der and the Horror Film, is forthcoming from
the University of Texas P.
Copyright ? 1996 by B. K. Grant
Some of these films, to be sure, reveal
affinities to other genres: both Something
Wild and Desperately Seeking Susan, for
example, possess elements of screwball
comedy (a classification that shares with
horror the irruption of the irrational into
the workaday world). Yet, to a significant
extent, all these films retain much of the
style and syntax of the horror genre?
while substituting a new set of semantic
elements, or what Rick Altman calls
"building blocks" (30). And although it
may be argued that some of these movies
exhibit only minimal relation to the horror
film, together they form a distinct generic
cycle that, instead of expressing the re
pression and contradictions of bourgeois
society generally, as many critics agree
is central to the ideology of the genre,1
specifically addresses the anxieties of an
affluent culture in an era of prolonged
recession.
The fears and anxieties of the yuppie
subculture, which has been estimated to
include anywhere from 4 to 20 million
people (Savells 234), encourage the trans
formation of "evil" in these movies from
the classic horror film's otherworldly su
pernatural to the material and economic
pressures of this world that are too much
with us. This change strikes me as mark
ing a generic shift as profound as that of
the evolving antinomies of the contempo
rary western?the very example that
Schatz invokes as a comparison in order
to dismiss science fiction.
Defining Yuppie Horror
The term "yuppie" was coined in 1983
(Adler et al. 14; Hammond 496) to de
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seribe an emergent and seemingly distinct
class of young urban professionals, tran
scending categories of both race and gen
der, that embraced values of conspicuous
consumption and technology as unambig
uously positive. Yuppiedom thus com
bined the "me-generation" philosophy of
the Carter era with Reaganomics, becom
ing a convenient icon of the era's Zeitgeist.
More precisely, according to Mariss?
Piesman and Marilee Hartley's The Yup
pie Handbook, the term
would include a person of either gen
der who meets the following criteria:
(1) resides in or near one of the major
cities; (2) claims to be between the
ages of 25 and 45; and (3) lives on
aspirations of glory, prestige, recog
nition, fame, social status, power,
money or any and all combinations of
the above (12).
These values coalesced into a lifestyle, a
veritable Weltanschauung, that embraced
what one observer has called a "religion
of Transcendental Acquisitions" (Adler
et al. 19). This is nicely expressed in Bad
Influence when the yuppie Michael, asked
whether he needs his elaborate new video
system, says, "That's not the point."
With his hair slicked back and braces on
his trousers, Michael Douglas's Gordon
Gekko in Wall Street (1987) became the
perfect icon of the high-powered business
man?and the patron saint for yuppies, for
whom "greed is good" because "money
means choices" (Savells 235).
The term caught hold of the popular imag
ination, generating much media hype and
spawning a gaggle of other demographic
acronyms. In short order, there were,
among others, DINKS (Double Income
No Kids), WOOFS (Well Off Older
Folks), and SWELLS (Single Women
Earning Lots and Lots) (Kastner A4). The
trend is nicely satirized in the instant
group identified in the Jane Austen-like
comedy of manners Metropolitan (1990):
the indelicate and cumbersome UHBs, or
Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, a term that by
the end of the film shows signs of catching
on despite its apparent awkwardness.
Commercial cinema, with its antennae
sharply attuned to popular taste, mobi
lized the tested appeal and contemporary
popularity of the horror film to address
this new cultural force?and has contin
ued the cycle into the decade of the '90s.
Yuppie horror is a subgenre that em
ploys?but modifies? the codes and con
ventions of the classic horror film. "A
good horror film," notes Bruce Kawin,
"takes you down into the depths and
shows you something about the land
scape; it might be compared to Charon,
and the horror experience to a visit to the
land of the dead" ("Children of the Light"
237). In After Hours, Paul's taxi ride to the
different, bohemian world of Soho in
lower Manhattan is shot in fast motion?a
joke about New York cab drivers, to be
sure, but also a suggestion of crossing
over into another place, like Jonathan
Harker's coach ride through the Borgo
Pass in Murnau's classic Nosferatu (1922).
Other instances of the use of this narrative
convention include Michael's descent into
the underground bar in Bad Influence, site
of alternative sexual practices (the pass
words include "gay white male" and
"fun-loving couple"), and the movement
in Desperately Seeking Susan from the
rational materialism of Fort Lee, New
Jersey, to the dark and magical world of
Manhattan, as if New York were across
the river Styx rather than the more mun
dane (but perhaps equally dead) Hudson.
In an economy characterized by increas
ing economic polarization and spreading
poverty, these scenes of crossing into the
nether world of urban decay "exude the
Manichaean, middle-class paranoia . . .
that once you leave bourgeois life, you're
immediately prey to crime, madness,
squalor, poverty" (Powers 51). Hence in
Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) wannabe
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Gekko Sherman McCoy, a self-described
"master of the universe" with a "$6 mil
lion apartment," quickly plummets from
his usual haunts into the dark underpass
of a highway ramp in the Fort Apache
wilderness of the South Bronx. So, too, in
Pacific Heights, the reddish bulbs of a
"Loan" sign flash behind Patty Parker as
if in warning to abandon all hope ye who
enter here.
This fear informs the premise of the de
scent by middle-class characters into the
hell of the inner city, as in Trespass and
Judgment Night (both 1993)?the latter
employing the metaphor of the mobile
home to signify a lack of bourgeois stabil
ity, an idea used earlier in the supernatural
horror film Race with the Devil (1975).
Like the return of the oppressed, this
nightmarish world threatens always to
erupt, as in Grand Canyon (1992) when
the yuppie entrepreneur (Steve Martin) is
hospitalized after a mugger takes his
Rolex. To use the terms of another of
these movies, one must always be on
guard against the temp who aspires to
become permanent.
Within this dark underworld of bank
ruptcy and property divestiture, several of
the films oflfer upscale variations on the
horror film's old dark house, what Robin
Wood calls the terrible house (90) and
Carol J. Clover the terrible place (30),
making them into gothic, horrifying
"workspaces" or "living spaces." In
deed, the eponymous upscale high-rise in
Sliver (1993) is explicitly referred to sev
eral times by some of its inhabitants as a
"haunted house." The New York apart
ment building in which the two women
live in Single White Female is visually
reminiscent of the spooky Dakota in Rose
mary's Baby (1968)?a deliberately reso
nant reference, as Roman Polanski's film
may be seen as an early instance of yuppie
horror in which Satan's manifestation
functions as the unrepressed return of
Guy's real desire to further his career over
commitment to raising a family.2 In Un
lawful Entry (1992), the installation of the
warning system and the periodic spotlight
from the police car put the white family in
the position of South Central L.A. blacks,
making their home seem more like a
prison, a horrifying representation of the
couple's anxiety about whether they can
afford their house. Michael's place in Bad
Influence becomes frightening mostly af
ter Alex has stripped it clean of all the
yuppie toys?an ironic inversion of the
conventionally cluttered Gothic mansion.
This seeming oxymoron of the terrible
luxury home is explicitly the subject of
Pacific Heights. The plot concerns a cou
ple's efforts to gentrify an old Victorian
house, a popular yuppie pasttime (Ward
97). Initially, the yuppie couple, Patty
Parker and Drake Goodman, conceive of
their home as little more than a profitable
investment, as a financial arrangement not
unlike their cohabitational agreement. But
the home soaks up renovation money like
an insatiable sponge, a money pit?a sce
nario presented not with the blithe spirit
of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
(1948) but with the ominous foreboding of
Amity ville Horror (1979), perhaps the first
real estate horror film. (Stephen King per
ceptively described it as the generic "hor
ror movie as economic nightmare" [138].)
Drake and Patty inexorably fall from the
beatific heights of potential profit to the
lower depths of looming insolvency.
An essential visual difference between
horror and science fiction films is one of
vision. In science fiction, the outlook is
characteristically bright and directed up
ward and out; in horror films, vision?that
of the characters, the text, and the spec
tator?tends to be directed down and in
ward and to be darkened and obscured
(Grant 185-87).
A similar visual design tends to inform
yuppie horror films. In Poison Ivy, for
example, both the mother and the deadly
outsider contemplate sinking downward
into the big sleep of reason, creating a
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^H^^^l^ ^l^r ^ ^^^^
In the tradition of The Bad Seed, Peyton (Rebecca de Mornay), the nanny in The Hand That
Rocks the Cradle, presents an angelic facade that only handyman Solomon (Ernie Hudson)
suspects may hide a heart of evil.
vertiginous gloom that pervades the entire
film from the opening giddy bird's-eye
shots of Drew Barrymore swinging out
over a steep cliff. The sleek black car
driven by Carter Hayes in Pacific Heights
appears ominously over the crests of hilly
San Francisco streets as if surfacing from
the underworld. Carter, Peyton in The
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and the
deadly roommate Ellen in Single White
Female are all associated with the base
ment and darkness. Pacific Heights uses a
swirling 360-degree camera movement at
crucial moments to comment on Patty and
Drake's crumbling finances, both to visu
alize their sinking deeper and deeper into
debt and to lend their descent into the
maelstrom metaphysical weight, as if their
very world view had been pulled out from
under them, ? la Vertigo (1958). Not coin
cidentally, this Hitchcock film is one
among several referred to diegetically on
the television in the smartly intertextual
Single White Female.
Monstrous Others and Material Fears
An essential element of the horror film is
the presence of a monster. In yuppie hor
ror films, the villains are commonly coded
as such. Alex's face in Bad Influence is
frequently streaked by the noirish shad
ows of trendy Levelor blinds, and the
killer's face in Desperately Seeking Susan
is often bathed in a hellish red light. When
Carter Hayes successfully installs himself
in the apartment of the yuppie couple's
home, he is said by their lawyer to have
"taken possession"; in the climax, Carter
is impaled, a fitting demise for a blood
sucking vampire, financially speaking. In
the climaxes of Fatal Attraction and
Something Wild, both Alex and Ray seem
implausibly unstoppable, like their super
natural counterparts Jason, Michael Mey
ers, and Freddie Krueger. And in The
Hand That Rocks the Cradle, the tension
established between the seeming girlish
innocence of nanny Peyton (Rebecca de
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Mornay) and her fiendish malevolence is
firmly rooted in the tradition of such "pos
sessed child" horror films as The Exorcist
(1973) and The Omen (1976), and, further
back, The Bad Seed (1956).
Furthermore, much like the traditional
monsters, the evil characters in yuppie
horror movies function as the Other, as an
external, disavowed projection of some
thing repressed or denied within the indi
vidual psyche or collective culture. These
films tend to depict the monstrous Other
as the protagonist's Doppelganger, or
double, a convention Wood calls "the
privileged form" of the horror film (79).
Roland Barthes writes that "the petit
bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the
Other" and so makes him over into the
image of himself (151), a point that would
seem especially true for yuppies, who,
according to sociologist Jerry Savells,
"assume control of their lives and their
fate, without question" (235).
Pam Cook has suggested that Max Cady
in Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear (1992)
offers a "distorted picture" of the Bowden
family's "rage and pain, and of their de
sire for revenge," called forth from within
the family by the daughter, Danielle (15).
Cook argues that the film has to be under
stood as Danielle's subjective vision, what
Kawin would call her mindscreen (Mind
screen), because it is marked by her voice
over in the form of recollection.
Cook's reading may be applied equally to
several other of these films, among them
Pacific Heights, Bad Influence, and Poi
son Ivy. In the latter, for example, the bad
girl who seduces the father is clearly the
incarnation of the rebellious daughter who
considers herself to be unfeminine and
unloved and, as in Cape Fear, the film's
narrative is framed by the daughter's
voice-over remembrances.
In Michael Cimino's remake of The Des
perate Hours (1991), the fleeing criminal
Michael Bosworth, threatening the up
scale family he has taken hostage in their
home, suggests that he represents a "re
proach" to what he refers to as the "men
dacity" of the family patriarch, who is
having an extramarital affair, as if Bos
worth were the return of the man's re
pressed self?the father confronted by Big
Daddy, as it were?a relation wholly ab
sent from the original drama.
Similarly, in Something Wild, Charlie be
gins as what Lulu calls a "closet rebel,"
but the "something wild" within him is
brought out by his passion for Lulu/
Audrey and his struggle against Ray Sin
clair. During the climax, Charlie and Ray
seem to embrace even as they fight, like
twin Stanley Kowalskis in their T-shirts.
Lulu says to Charlie in the end, "What are
you going to do now that you've seen how
the other half lives ... the other half of
you?" A similar reading is invited by
Desperately Seeking Susan, in which the
bland Roberta learns to be more assured
sexually, like the extroverted Susan she
encounters, significantly, through the per
sonal want ads.
In Single White Female, in a way the
inverse of Poison Ivy, Ellen is the plain
Other of Allie, the wwattractive woman
whose career would proceed unimpeded
by sexual entanglements. The shots of the
two women in mirrors, posed in positions
reminiscent of the famous mirror shot in
Bergman's Persona (1966), makes their
psychological interdependence clear.
In Pacific Heights, Drake Goodman
grows increasingly violent in response to
the "bad influence" of Carter Hayes. At
first glibly willing to commit white-collar
crime by, as he says, "fudging the num
bers a bit," Drake later viciously beats
Carter and is about to strike him a mur
derous blow with a tire iron when he is
finally restrained by Patty's screaming
plea. But like Nathaniel Hawthorne's
Goodman before him, Drake has glimpsed
the underlying moral ambiguity of human
nature.
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In Bad Influence, Alex is the incarnation
of what Michael calls the "voice that tells
you what to do some time," a therapeutic
materialization of Michael's much-needed
assertiveness training. Like Bruno Antony
to Guy Haines in Hitchcock's Strangers
on a Train (1951), Alex is Michael's unre
strained id, the embodiment of Michelob's
yuppie admonition that "you can have it
all." As Alex shows Michael how to be
more competitive and assertive, Michael's
hair, like his personality, becomes in
creasingly Gekko-like. In the end, before
going over the edge himself, Michael
shoots Alex, who falls heavily from a pier,
the water closing over him as he sinks
back into the murky depths from which he
had emerged, the creature from the black
lagoon of Michael's mind now vanquished.
Even Fatal Attraction, which has almost
uniformly been condemned for its scape
goating of the professional female, may be
read in this way. It is possible to view the
narrative as Dan Gallagher's horrifying
mindscreen or psychodrama, wherein the
result of his affair with Alex Forrest is, on
one level, the return of his repressed dis
satisfaction with his marriage.3 Dan feels
trapped by domesticity, his discontent im
aged forth in the family's cramped apart
ment. He is clearly disappointed about the
evening's prospects when he returns from
walking the dog to find their daughter
sleeping in his bed with his wife, Beth. So
he fantasizes a relationship with no dis
tracting responsibilities in the form of
Alex. But then, like a networking party
turned nightmare, to assuage his guilt,
Dan projects the blame onto her?at one
point he calls her "sick"?making her a
monstrous Other because she does not
recognize what he calls "the rules" for
such affairs. Alex will not be "reason
able," will not be treated like the sides of
beef that hang outside her apartment
building. She refuses to allow the removal
of her voice, an ideological operation of
the text that feminist critics such as Kaja
Silverman and Mary Ann Doane have
argued happens so often in Hollywood
film. Alex telephones Dan insistently and
leaves an audio cassette in his car that
questions his masculinity?both instances
of an assertive female voice that seems
beyond his masculine control. Indeed, it is
not Alex but Dan who is silenced, as her
adamant refusal to have an abortion leaves
him, as he admits, "no say."
Many commentators on yuppiedom have
noted that yuppies are always threatened
by the looming spectre of "burnout" be
cause they are "workaholicfs] whose main
identity and sense of self-worth is often
supplied by [professional] success" (Ward
106). Burnout is thus a fearful possibility
that, like the portrait of Dorian Gray,
haunts the yuppie's prized public image.
It is no coincidence that Michael in Bad
Influence, Drake Goodman in Pacific
Heights, and Allie in Single White Female
all show clear evidence of work-related
stress. As an article in Newsweek put it,
"You can, after all, stay on the fast track
only so long, even in a $125 pair of running
shoes" (Adler et al 24). The important
distinction is that the visage of Dorian
Gray in yuppie horror films is handsome
rather than grotesque. Here the craggy
ugliness of a Rondo Hatton is replaced by
the smooth charm of a Rob Lowe, for the
ethical horrors of cupidity supersede the
physical revulsion of the classic horror
film. The fact that so many of these char
acters are at once ethically monstrous
and physically attractive befits an age in
which, as someone observes in The Temp,
"They still stab you in the back as much
as in the '80s, only now they smile when
they do it."
Indeed, it is exactly this view that ani
mates the worldly narrative of Ghost
(1990), a film that, while marginal as hor
ror, is nevertheless strongly informed by
yuppie angst, and Brett Easton Ellis's
remarkable 1991 novel American Psycho,
a book that perhaps stands in relation to
yuppie horror as Psycho (1960)?to which
its title obviously refers?does to the mod
ern horror film genre.
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If yuppie consciousness and values fetish
ize appearances?"Surface surface sur
face was all anyone found meaning in"
(Ellis 375), observes Patrick Bateman, El
lis's handsome Wall Street mass murder
er?then yuppie horror films show how
frightening such surfaces can really be. "I
have a knife with a serrated blade in the
pocket of my Valentino jacket," Bateman
matter-of-factly observes at one point, like
that sage observer in The Temp. It is
perhaps no accident that Ellis's narrator
often describes his perceptions in terms of
movie techniques such as pans (5), dis
solves (8), and slow motion (114). Nar
rated with the same kind of dark humor as
pervades Psycho, it is as if Norman has
grown up and moved from a remote place
off the main highway to life in the fast lane
in the big city. Master Bates has become
BateMAN, but, ironically, the onanism
only suggested in the Hitchcock film is
chillingly literal in the novel.
Because of the valorization of conspicu
ous wealth in the yuppie world view (and
one of the great jokes of Ellis's style in
American Psycho), the monsters in yuppie
horror films tend to threaten materiality
more than mortality. For yuppies, in the
words of the portrait in Newsweek, "The
perfection of their possessions enables
them to rise above the messy turmoil of
their emotional lives" (Adler et al. 19).
Thus, yuppie horror films exploit the sub
culture's aspiration for material comfort,
and the material success the characters
so covet becomes frighteningly vulnerable
and fragile, like the close-up of the splin
tering scale model of Patty and Drake's
home in Pacific Heights.
The vindictive Cady sums it up well in
Cape Fear when he says, "That house,
that car, that wife and kid, they mean
nothing to you now." The Puritan-like
material emblems of election come to
seem suddenly damned, the appurte
nances of an expensive lifestyle often
turned deadly, like Claire's greenhouse in
The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, which
becomes an elaborate weapon hailing le
thal shards on her best friend, Marlene.
The husband in Unlawful Entry, fetching a
golf club to ward off a possible intruder in
their home, jokes to his wife that if it turns
out to be dangerous, he'll come back for
his driver. This yuppie joke is realized in
Something Wild when Audrey uses one
of Charlie's clubs to whack the attacking
Ray, and in Bad Influence, in which one of
Michael's clubs (he owns a set although he
doesn't play) serves as the murder weapon
for Alex. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
devotes much of its time to chronicling
objects that become "unruly." In an up
scale yuppie home fitted with, as Elayne
Rapping notes, tasteful "houseware
'touches' out of L. L. Bean and Bloom
ingdale's" (65), Peyton is like a yuppie
gremlin, relocating icons of status (such as
a gold cigarette lighter) and thus encour
aging a "misreading" of their subcultural
signification.
Perhaps, then, the quintessential moment
of fright in the yuppie horror film is the
image in After Hours?emphasized by
Scorsese in slow motion?of aspiring yup
pie Paul's lone $20 bill flying out of the cab
window. In yuppie horror films, it would
seem that to be broke is more frightening
than being undead or mutilated. So Char
lie desperately clutches at his wallet in
Something Wild, although he allows him
self to be handcuffed to the bed by Lulu,
whom he has just met, with barely a
protest. Because yuppies are already
"possessed," these films suggest, they are
more frightened by the sight of acid eating
into the smooth finish of Dan's Volvo in
Fatal Attraction than by, say, Uncle Ira
no longer quite being Uncle Ira in Invasion
of the Body Snatchers (1956).
Ideology of Yuppie Horror
While this yuppie cycle tends to rely pri
marily on the visual and narrative con
ventions of the classic horror film, on
occasion their very discursive structure is
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Is Peter (Timothy Hutton) suffering from paranoid delusions, or is The Temp (Lara Flynn
Boyle) truly evil?
also similar, employing what Tzvetan
Todorov has called "the Fantastic,"
which critics have found to inform tradi
tional horror films (Gunning). According
to Todorov, the fantastic is characterized
by a "hesitation" that eludes either a
realist explanation (the "uncanny") or a
supernatural one (the "marvellous").
Such hesitation is found in those yuppie
horror films that can be read as mind
screens, as already discussed, but perhaps
the most interesting in this regard is The
Temp. Narrated from the viewpoint of the
male protagonist, the film begins with his
finishing a therapy session, and we soon
learn that he has suffered from paranoid
delusions in the past. Since we never see
the secretary actually do anything omi
nous until the end, we can't be sure
whether the narrator's interpretation of
events is correct or if the woman is merely
a terrific secretary and the protagonist is
experiencing a series of unhappy coinci
dences. This intriguing ambiguity is
clearly resolved in the climax, where the
patriarchal power of the narrator/male
boss is forcefully reinstated with the de
feat of the infernal secretary who has
refused to stay in her allotted place in the
corporate hierarchy. But until the film
reaches for such predictable generic and
ideological closure, it insistently questions
patriarchal assumptions.
Fredric Jameson's observation that Some
thing Wild is about patriarchy (291) ap
plies to many of these movies, which on
another level, as my reading of Fatal
Attraction suggests, are about masculinity
in crisis. This is hardly surprising, given
that yuppie horror films necessarily ques
tion (by expressing an unease about) cap
italist ideology. Indeed, to the very
substantial extent to which yuppie horror
films are about masculine panic, they are
simply the most overt articulation of a
theme that dominates contemporary Hol
lywood cinema, most obviously in the
recent trend toward hyperbolic SF action
movies, with their excessive display of
masculine "hardbodies."
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This is not to suggest, however, that all
yuppie horror endorses the ideological sta
tus quo. For if we were to examine this
subgenre according to Wood's "basic for
mula for the horror film" (78)?the way
the texts define normality, the monster,
and the relation between these two
terms?we would find they range from the
reactionary to the progressive, as with any
genre. In Pacific Heights, for example,
all's well that ends well: Patty reconciles
with Drake, sells the house for a tidy
profit, and defeats Carter Hayes while
adding further to her income, tax-free yet.
The film thus endorses yuppie capitalist
values and neutralizes any potential threat
in the fact that Patty, as Carter says, has
"crossed the line" of acceptable behavior.
Pacific Heights is no Hitchcockian text.
By contrast, the ending of Fatal Attrac
tion may be seen as more subversive. It is
Beth who kills Alex, after which she and
Dan embrace, reunited because she has
submitted to the patriarchal imaginary;
only then can marriage be "happy." The
final shot is thus heavy with Sirkian irony,
worthy of the famous ending of Magni
ficent Obsession (1953): the camera pans
to the fireplace mantle, the hearth of the
family home, showing a photograph of the
married couple?a still image?and a pair
of bronzed baby shoes. Both objects un
dercut the notion that anything has
changed in Dan and Beth's marriage;
rather, the objects connote immobility and
stasis and are a comment on their embrace
of traditional values.
Similar is the ending of After Hours, when
Paul returns from his descent to the nether
world and arrives at the entrance to his
midtown office. No longer what poet An
drew Marvell would call the iron gates of
strife, they open of their own accord and,
transformed by the golden light of dawn,
seem to beckon Paul into the comfy
heaven of his low-level executive job.
In their articulation of lurking dread, even
the most conservative of these films are
more interesting than bland yuppie movies
like Rain Man (1988), wherein the yuppie
is humanized and learns that there are
more important things in life than im
ported sports cars, or Grand Canyon, in
which the economic gap is dwarfed by the
geographical one.4 Jameson is right to call
Something Wild and other such movies
modern gothic tales (289-90), although he
incorrectly, I think, chooses to emphasize
their reliance on nostalgia. For these mov
ies are emphatically about now.
Certainly the fact that mainstream cinema
has turned more to horror and the thriller
than to, say, comedy and the musical (as it
did in the past), to address fears about
America's affluent but now struggling
economy?as well as the very nature of
contemporary relationships?tells us how
very deeply these anxieties are rooted.
Indeed, these films tend to locate these
larger cultural concerns at a more basic,
personal level, within the dynamic of inti
mate personal relationships?the perfect
adaptation of the horror genre to the trou
bled narcissism of the post-me generation.
In yuppie horror films, monsters do not
roam the countryside, killing indiscrimi
nately; instead, we find ourselves sleeping
with the enemy, often literally.
One can discern a decided evolution
within the cycle. In the early yuppie hor
ror films, the nightmarish situations were
as often as not the result of recklessness
rather than fiendishness. But as the reces
sion deepened, the monsters tended to
become increasingly malevolent: the Big
Chill has become a wind from hell. (One
might view the recent cycle of films based
on old TV series?The Addams Family
[1992], The Beverly Hillbillies [1993], The
Flintstones [1994], and Car 54, Where Are
You? [1994]?as the flip side of yuppie
anxiety. Truly based on nostalgic appeal,
they recall both the historical "better
time" of the affluent 1960s, when the
shows were first broadcast, and the ahis
torical once-upon-a-time fantasy world of
TV-land.)
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Certainly, as I've already suggested, there
are examples of earlier horror films, like
Rosemary's Baby and Race with the
Devil, that anticipated the yuppie cycle.
The Exorcist is similar to Polanski's film in
that it suggests that the demonic posses
sion of the daughter is the result of the
mother's putting her career before family.
But of the several examples one might cite
as precursors of the modern horror cycle,
only Strangers on a Train, in typical
Hitchcock fashion, steadfastly refuses to
locate or "explain" the monstrous as su
pernatural. And although there are earlier
films that we might identify as examples of
Stephen King's notion of economic hor
ror, the yuppie horror cycle truly begins to
appear around the time of the publication
in 1985 of an article entitled "Second
Thoughts on Having It All" in New York
magazine, described by one observer as
an "epochal event" (Will 78).
Whether the yuppie protagonists are con
tained within their space in the movies
of besiegement (Fatal Attraction, Pacific
Heights, The Hand That Rocks the Cra
dle) or removed from it in the "road
movies" (Something Wild, After Hours),
they share a frightening sense of alienation
from a comfortable, privileged routine.
Films that combine elements of both
subclassifications (Trespass, Judgment
Night) emphatically demonstrate that you
can't take it with you, even if you have
yuppie buying power.
Significantly, yuppie horror films exhibit
minimal interest in gore and splatter eflfects.
They avoid the kind of body horror charac
teristic of, say, George Romero or David
Cronenberg, even though, as one writer
puts it, "The body is the yuppie's most
prized possession" (Adler et al. 14). In
these movies, it is less life than "lifestyle"
that is threatened. Disclosure (1994) is filled
with trendy dialogue about the dilemmas of
contemporary sexual politics, and it sug
gests throughout a wish to avoid rather than
a fear of the body that culminates, in the
climactic scene in which Michael Douglas is
pursued by a virtual reality Demi Moore, in
its rejection altogether.
The greater concern with lifestyle in yup
pie horror films is perhaps nowhere more
clear than in such movies as The Firm and
The Fugitive (both 1993): the former is an
upscale variation on such demonic cult
horror films as Val Lewton's The Seventh
Victim (1943); the latter little more than
the hoary mechanics of the chase, situated
within a yuppie context. Graphic body
horror, by contrast, has become increas
ingly characteristic of the more main
stream horror film and of cyberpunk
science fiction?the novels of William
Gibson, or movies in which the body
literally becomes a thing, as in Robocop
(1987), The Terminator (1984), and such
less distinguished clones as Universal Sol
dier (1992).
For similar reasons, fear of racial differ
ence is not particularly important in yup
pie horror movies. As in yuppie ideology,
race is subsumed by economic difference.
Hence, Judgment Night is careful to in
clude a black among the group of four
suburban men who carelessly venture, in a
state-of-the-art mobile home, into the
monstrous violence of inner-city Detroit.
By contrast, race, an issue in such earlier
horror films as White Zombie (1932) and /
Walked with a Zombie (1943), has re
turned more recently in such mainstream
horror movies as The People under the
Stairs (1991), Candyman (1992), and Can
dyman II (1995). But whether the mon
strous Other in yuppie horror films
is seemingly aristocratic (as in Bad Influ
ence) or strictly blue collar (as in Poison
Ivy), the fear exploited may be understood
as the nightmarish result of the yuppie's
typical narcissistic self-absorption.
Conclusion
If, as some would argue, yuppies are noth
ing more than a "media mirage" (Ham
mond 496), an imaginative creation of the
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Denis Leary (right) and his gang of suburbanites present a real life-threatening menace when
they drive into inner-city Detroit in Judgment Night.
culture industry, they nevertheless have
had a powerful effect on advertising and
marketing. Moreover, since yuppies come
from the "baby-boomer" generation that
constituted the teenagers to whom horror
films were directed in the 1950s and '60s,
they share an already established bond
with the genre. Thus, it is not surprising
that Hollywood would seek to incorporate
into its rhetoric these viewers who, in the
words of one advertising executive, are
themselves "like a Hollywood movie, not
real life" (Kastner A4).
Curiously, Rick Altman does not include
horror in his examples of durable genres
that have established a particularly coher
ent syntax (37-38), although the genre
has been around since almost the begin
ning of cinema and, of course, before that
in literature and folklore. Surely, the yup
pie horror film is a particularly vivid con
temporary instance of a genre's semantic
modification within its existing syntax to
accommodate a newly defined potential
audience. Horror, it would seem, is a
more flexible genre than such critics as
Schatz, Tudor, and Altman have claimed.
Rather, I would agree with Stephen King's
assertion in Danse Macabre that the
horror genre is "extremely limber, ex
tremely adaptable, extremely useful"
(138). In fact, the yuppie horror film
would seem a vivid demonstration of
Altaian's thesis that the "relationship be
tween the semantic and syntactic consti
tutes the very site of negotiation between
Hollywood and its audience" (35). And if
this cycle of the horror film demonstrates
the protean adaptability of genre, it also
reveals the inevitable anxiety generated
by the biggest monster of all, late capital
ism. To paraphrase William Carlos
Wilhams, yuppie horror films depict the
pure products of America gone crazy. And,
to quote the last line of Ellis's American
Psycho, "This is not an exit" (399).
Notes
1 See, for example, Wood, chapters 5 and 6;
Clover; and several of the essays in Grant,
Planks of Reason.
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2 The importance to yuppie horror of Ira
Levin's fiction, including Rosemary's Baby,
The Stepford Wives, and Sliver, is significant
and certainly a subject for further research.
3 It is worth noting that the action in Adrian
Lyne's next film, Jacob's Ladder (1990), is
revealed explicitly at the end to have occurred
entirely in the mind of the protagonist at the
moment of his death. The only other similar
reading of the film of which I am aware is
Morris's.
4 In the context of romantic comedy, Steve
Neale argues that the end of Something Wild
"manoeuvres its couple . . . into an 'old
fashioned,' 'traditional' and ideologically con
ventional position" (297).
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