Welcome back to another episode of Less People. I’m your hostess Jenny Russell. We are back talking about the Rule Remix version of the Rule Horror Picture Show and the third episode, the start of it has a hilarious part about what would be your downfall if you were in a horror movie and the hosts of that show talk about what they think that would happen if they were in a horror movie.
Before we get started though with whatever mysterious thing we’re going to talk about today, I have a question for you, Susanna, which is that in the last episode we talked about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is one of the most famous horror and slasher movies out there. Yeah. And you know, we talk a lot about tropes and the different roles that characters seem to play in horror movies.
And so my question for you is if you were in that movie, if you were in that situation, who are you? What are you doing? Since she used to run cross-country, she might have a chance to run away. So what would you, how would you fare in a horror movie? I’m gonna ask that question here from our audience. I think that I’m pretty good at hide-and-seek.
I might be able to find a hiding space and just hide away until the danger is gone. But a lot of those movies, they come find you. So who knows if I’d survive? Probably not.
I would probably be one of those that would be a goner. But I’d like to hear from you in the comments, what would be your downfall in a horror movie? Yeah. So today I want to talk about a couple of different things that we see a lot in horror movies, and those are both the concepts of isolation, and then we’re gonna get into a conversation about grief being a really prevalent emotion in horror movies.
So I think to start out, it would be helpful to kind of think about setting a little more, which is, you know, something we’ve talked a lot about in these episodes. It’s a big theme of this podcast, given that we are the Rural Horror Picture Show, but just throughout kind of all horror movies, the idea of being alone, being isolated, is so common. You know, the haunted lone cabin on the hill, friends camping alone in the woods, a family alone in an unfamiliar hotel, like the Shining, but you know, you can’t, no one’s there to hear your screams, you can’t call for help.
It’s this just really common thing, which is like preying on the fear of being alone, being isolated. And we see that in a lot of these movies where the landscape really just becomes an active character in the drama, in the horror, by becoming the thing that is isolating our main characters. I’m reading a lot about like, what makes this so scary, right? Like, it’s something that feels pretty obvious, right? We’re basically all humans are kind of afraid of being alone, in different capacities, but every capacity.
Yeah. And one thing I read that I think sort of sums up this feeling very well is that empty space, right? Like that isolating landscape, it helps do what horror movies do best, which allows the audience to kind of anticipate the arrival of something scary. This part talks about people being leery of those quiet, wide open spaces.
I know that we had a musical artist come when I lived in another rural, small Kansas town. And she was, she said her daughter was creeped out by how quiet it was. There wasn’t a lot of traffic sounds or anything, anything like that to keep them company all night long.
And this artist was just blown away that we were so far from a Walmart. But the only time that I’ve been extremely, I don’t know, creeped out, I guess, by the quiet and the ruralness of where we live, and there are no people around. I was out walking after dark in last year, and I was listening to a podcast as I walked and they were actually talking about conspiracy theories.
And they said, Oh, the chupacabra, this one was found. All these cattle were found drained of their blood north of Concordia, Kansas. I was really lived that far from this.
I was like, Okay, it’s time to go inside. When a national show references your town in reference to a creepy animal, they don’t know how, how it’s existing or where it’s existing. I was like, Okay, yeah, the wide open spaces I’m creeped out by right now.
But my dad always used to say those animals and things out there in where we live in rural areas, they are more scared of you, then you should be of them, because most of them are going to stay far, far away from you, even if it’s after dark in a rural area, and nobody else is around. One more example in a similar situation, I was out by myself exercising and I came up on another farm that we own, that nobody lives at that farm. And there was some really beat up cars in the driveway, and nobody ever lives there.
If anybody is there, it’s something to do with the farm and a tractor, or one of the family members that we farm with vehicle, but these were two vehicles had definitely seen better days. And they were parked at that farm. This is one of the reasons people feel like rural people maybe stare and things but this is another I think self preservation type of thing where we do notice things that are out of the ordinary because we can, there are a lot less people of us out here.
And so if something or someone new comes to town, or something is located, like a car shows up that nobody knows, we notice. And I guess that’s a way to keep ourselves safe. But yes, I saw those cars in the world is this so I called my husband and I’m like, Oh, there are cars and they are not ours.
I’ve never seen them before. They look like they have been run through the ringer. Who is this? Well, he had worked for a bank at that time.
And he they had to go repossess some of these cars and they had driven them over to this particular farm until they could dispose of them at the auction. So those cars that come from but boy did he not tell me and boy was I on the alert for whoever that was out in a rural area. So I guess they’re right about this.
You fear the silence, you fear not being able to get help because there’s nowhere to go get help with it. But it’s like I said, self preservation that we notice these things in rural areas because you can, because it’s out of the ordinary and because we don’t have a lot of extra fluff around us to distract us. In horror movies, you’re waiting for the monster, whatever it is, you know, whether a literal scary creature or another person or just kind of a haunting in general.
And horror movies are really interesting ones because they kind of work in a very meta way, right? You know, you’re watching and it’s a horror movie, it’s going to be scary. So you’re waiting for something scary to happen. And an empty space allows that anticipation because you feel like something should be filling it, right? And that is probably a monster of some sort, whether literal or just a spooky vibe.
Yeah, it literally makes you shiver with anticipation. Oh, wow. As Frankfurter would say, good call it to the name of the pun.
Thank you. Something that’s interesting for us, something that we think about a lot as an organization, we’re a rural media organization, we do reporting in rural areas and also think and talk about media representation and things like that. Something that my editor says sometimes, right, is that the surface of the moon is not rural, right? Just an empty landscape filled with nothing is not rural.
This part, there will always be people in rural, there’s not going to be, it may not look exactly the same as it does now, but your cities don’t look the same as it does now. Each place is always changing. And really, you know, some places may disappear, but the places that have any sort of synergy around services, those places are more than likely going to exist years from now in some capacity because they serve a purpose.
I know that not always is that the case, but more than likely that is going to be true. There is one story I’ve noted from back in the day, White Rock, Kansas, which used to be actually is pretty close to our house. Back, you know, when it was first settled, it was around 800 people and they kind of thought, well, we don’t need the railroad, I think we’re big enough.
They were in Indian territory, there was a really nasty showdown between some settlers leaving their home and some Indians that came up on their house. But that town used to be fairly large, almost a thousand people. And now White Rock is not even a town anymore.
It is a group of houses. I guess you can kind of see that something used to be there, but it did go away. So there are always going to be people in rule.
It just depends on how, if you’re in a place with synergy, if you’re in a place that is open for change and open for good change and progressive change, then you’re probably going to be there in a better capacity than other places. And so there are lots of horror movies where they’re truly in the middle, like they’re, they’re the only people there. And that to me doesn’t read exactly like a rural, that becomes like sort of a man versus nature situation as opposed to being really a movie that’s in or about a rural place.
Because if you’re just in the middle of a national park, like nobody lives there, right? That’s not a community. Yeah, that’s a super good point. And it’s important for us to remember that when talking about these movies, and I think brings up kind of a different version of this isolation I’m talking about, which is not necessarily being out in the wilderness alone, but being isolated sort of socially or maybe culturally, for instance, like being a stranger in a community or being a stranger among strange folk, new people to you, which goes back to our favorite concept of urban Noya, which we’ve been talking about in all these episodes, being a newcomer to a group of people where you feel different, this kind of like othering that happens.
Yeah, that isolation is something that’s going to come up in a lot of the movies we talk about today, along with the landscape isolation that’s so common throughout horror movies. So Anya, what are some of the emotions that come to mind when you think about these isolated situations? Yeah, I mean, I think that the first one is probably helplessness in the most literal sense of the word, which is that there is no one to help. Yeah, you know, we’ve talked about before, that something really common in horror movies is that they sort of depend on the institutions that we rely on failing.
So police or paramilitary, those like institutional authorities of government, sheriffs, right, have to be ineffectual in order for horror movies to really work and for it to really happen. So all of those institutions of society and civilization have to be absent. Horror depends on systems failing.
That’s, I thought this is an interesting reference. I really think that this is why rural people are gun owners. This is why rural people are more self reliant, because we are further away from We might be 15 minutes out from the ambulance coming.
We may be 15, 20 minutes out from the sheriff getting here. So there’s a lot of things where you have to take care of yourself. And I really think that there’s a point in that.
One story I have about this is we were living with my parents in law when we were building our house because we had sold our house before our other one was done. And so we were living at their house. While I support people’s right to bear arms, I do not necessarily, I don’t think you want me holding the gun.
I’m one of those people that is klutzy enough, I’m probably going to shoot myself in the foot rather than do anything productive with the weapon. But we were living out there and I just brought in like a cooler full of food that I had sitting outside the door. And I was gonna go back out and get it and I went back out the door and there was a skunk right outside of their front door.
And so I thought, well, wait a little bit. I’ll go back inside. That skunk, I don’t know if he had rabies or what was going on with that skunk, but it kept circling their house.
And you can see him at their basement windows, you go to the basement, you can see him, he just moved one window to the next window to the next window for hours. And there was no way of going back out without getting sprayed. Of course, nobody was home that also could, you know, take care of this issue.
And I never before had wished so much for someone that liked to hunt to be at their house and take care of this problem for me. So again, self reliance is really important for a reason now in these rural areas. And so horror depends depends on your systems feeling not exactly a wrong thing.
In these movies, it’s really striking when people are removed from their support systems or removed from their social resources that they have that might offer them help. And you’re sort of left very much on your own. It’s fun for yourself.
And that is where a lot of the terror comes from is that, yeah, you’re, you’ve not been training for this. So most scared, I’m most actually most scared of this. Not being able to rely on family.
I was in Kansas City when one of my friends lived there and she didn’t have any family living around her and really didn’t know a lot of people there. And I’ve always lived in a very support network type of a place. I grew up in a street around the side of the road, somebody would ride by and they would probably help me.
There’s been many times I was walking outside of my parents house like walking for exercise and people would stop and be like, Are you okay? Did your car break down? Do you need a ride? No, I’m just walking for fun. I know foreign concept, walking for fun. But you know, I’ve always lived in that environment where people are hopeful people are mostly trustworthy.
I same thing where I live now. I live around my husband’s extended family. So when I moved to a city, it was one of those things where I couldn’t just trust the car dealership anymore.
Your local car dealer, you know, the place that changed your oil in town, they weren’t going to pull a fast one on you. They knew you were Rodney’s daughter and they weren’t going to treat you badly because they know you and they know your family and they know your dad. And that word will get back to him.
So they treat you well because they’re good people and they treat you well because they’re gonna have to see you again. So I knew that if they told me I needed, you know, my tires was going low or my tires were getting bald. I knew that that was true and I probably needed a budget for that.
Then I got to the city and it was much different. You know, hey girl, you need wiper, you know, you need to, you need blinker fluid, that kind of stuff. And it’s like, I know I don’t need blinker fluid.
That’s not even a thing. But, uh, there was lots of things where they were trying to upsell me because they didn’t think I need better. Um, so that’s actually scarier to me than any, than most of the other things around horror movies is breaking down in the city of not having anybody to come help.
So, um, not being able to trust those who are giving you services and trust that they’re not going to pull a fast one on you. So that’s kind of an interesting take as well. You’re just stuck as you are in a situation, uh, that you now have to get yourself out of because nobody’s coming to help you.
Totally. So, yeah, I mean, as you were talking, I feel like some of the words I was hearing, like helpless, unprepared, I feel like you were describing a lot of feelings of anxiety. And I think those emotions that you brought up are really connected to feelings of grief, which can be a really isolating emotion.
It’s, you know, an intense feeling of sorrow that can make you feel helpless. You feel unprepared for it. You feel an anxiety.
And I think that that connection between grief being such an isolating emotion and isolation being so common in horror movies becomes a really interesting thing for us to analyze. And I found grief to be a really common thread in a lot of the movies that we watched. Yeah.
I brought up this idea of sort of a monster and other and I think whatever that is in the different movies, the thing that’s supposed to be scary is very effective at representing the emotion of grief and what it can do to someone and how it can kind of disrupt one’s way of being and like their way of interacting with the world. So what are the movies that you’re thinking of when we’re, you know, talking about grief and isolation? Yeah. So I want to start with a movie that when I watched it, I felt it to be all just an elaborate metaphor, I guess, for coping with grief, along with also just being, you know, a wildly entertaining and very disturbing horror movie.
And that is Midsommar. Oh, yeah. And I thought this Swedish example of a horror movie was interesting.It was actually Lindsborg, Kansas, Midsommar’s Day Festival, honoring this middle of summer where the sun is always out in Sweden. And so those Swedish ties have come back. Yeah.
So Midsommar is a 2019 horror movie. And I’m going to give a super brief plot summary, but also really recommend everyone watching it. This is one of my favorites that we watched.
So our main character, her name is Dani. And the movie begins with a very traumatic event, which is that her sister kills herself along with her parents. Following this, Dani, while dealing with this tragedy and this grief, goes on a trip with her boyfriend, Christian.
Bad boyfriend alert. We hate him. He is an insufferable character.
But she goes with him and his friends on a trip to rural Sweden to see a Midsommar celebration that is happening there. Very long story short, they end up sort of being trapped in this Swedish cult. Really, really difficult.
And seeing her coping with all of this isolation of this unsupportive group in this isolated landscape really heightens the emotions of the whole film. Everything in this movie feels a little off, a little wrong. I mean, they have a psychedelic trip, and it kind of feels like the whole situation is a bad trip.
And I think the director is just really disorienting the audience in the way that grief can be a really disorienting emotion and kind of warp your world. And I think it’s really effective filmmaking, just sort of my film bro moment. But it sort of seems that the situation is mimicking her grief back to us in a really visual way.
But there’s also isolation that Dani is going through in that she is grieving when she arrives. She’s grieving the loss of her family, and she’s dealing with this trauma. And there was just a couple of things I wanted to point out that felt really important in understanding Dani’s grief and how it adds to the horror of the situation.
One is that the friend group that she’s with, which is her boyfriend and his friends, she’s isolated in gender, in this group of male friends with her very unsupportive boyfriend, and these friends who have literally been like, why are you dating her? Break up with her. I hope you’ve enjoyed this third episode, evaluating the rural horror picture show from Rural Remix. We will see you again on the next episode of Less People.