The False Problem of Genre
On Longlegs, Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy
Can you hate the genre you work in and still do great work? That is the question posed by creators over and over again when they assert they are different than the rest. That they are the exception. Recently the director of Longlegs, Osgood Perkins, said he doesn’t watch (or enjoy) modern horror movies. In the process, he seemed to diss directors like Ti West. Perkins said he (only) likes horror because it allows for poetry. The problem inherent with this approach is that ignoring genre work and attempting to carve out an “artistic” niche inside of an already-established world often simply results in creators re-creating the wheel. Ignoring your contemporaries results in a failure to understand cinematic history. This approach also presupposes that genre is static. That it doesn’t contain a wide array of high-brow and low-brow work. Some of it very good and some of it very bad.
Ultimately, I didn’t hate Longlegs as much as everyone else did. I enjoyed it. The first two-thirds were genuinely moody and terrifying. A riff on serial killers, Satanic Panic, and Silence of the Lambs. The problem came with the clunky ending. Things fall apart after one of the characters explains her motivations in a baggy exposition drop. By then, the scariest monster has died and we’ve barely seen him. It feels like a letdown. The lore of the movie never quite coheres. There are dolls and deals and demons but none of it makes a whole lot of sense. Perhaps if the film was about either serial killers or demons it would’ve sorted out the deus ex machina better.
This could’ve been avoided if instead of thinking he was creating something entirely new without any cinematic context, Perkins watched the work of his peers. He claims to have seen plenty of older horror movies—Psycho and Lambs—but so many of those older films work because they never drop a clunky explainer of our villain’s motivations. They simply haunt. (See also In a Violent Nature.) Some lore is always needed in a horror movie, sure, but so is a human fear to drive the movie. Perkins acknowledges as much in the Hollywood Reporter interview. He claims that Longlegs is about the lies we tell children to protect them. I certainly didn’t read that into the film, at least not as the main fear Perkins was exploring. It has only a tangential relation to the established main villain, who, yes, seems to rely on some generalized trans panic fear. But the movie doesn’t settle into any one particular story it wants to tell, so I can’t even claim to think through its alleged transphobia with any intellectual rigor. What starts as a film about the fear of evil turns into a film about childhood without any specificity. Like holding water in your hand, the fear evaporates like a bad dream. I didn’t leave the movie theater afraid to walk home at night because I was thinking about things my parents did or did not do. I left thinking about genre.
Film isn’t the only medium this applies to. Patricia Highsmith’s crime novels are rarely afforded the literary acclaim they deserve while her male peers often float to the top of the best literary lists. Some writers are let into the gates of high-brow success even if their work is fantastical or flirts with the conventions of science fiction. Literature and genre are considered anathema. Vladimir Sorokin is one of the best living sci-fi writers who’s been masterfully translated by Max Lawton. I recently read Notice by Heather Lewis, an incredible crime novel that certainly delves into existentialism. (Isn’t The Stranger a crime novel at heart?) Kelly Link’s work tends to blur the borders of genre and she’s accepted on both sides of the fence. Her latest opus, The Book of Love, was a fantastical romance. Carmen Maria Machado’s work has recently been honored by The Times’ wild list of the best books of the 21st century. But generally, the two are separated. There’s literary fiction and genre fiction and never the two shall meet.
Ursula K Le Guin advised against this false dichotomy her whole career. She often ribbed Margaret Atwood for refusing to call her work “science-fiction.” In 2015, she received a fair amount of press for panning Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. She takes offense at things he says in an interview about the nature of fantasy. “Are they going to call this fantasy?” he worries. Well, yes, Le Guin ribs. The surface elements are there, but “A fantastic setting requires vivid and specific description; while characters may lose touch with their reality, the storyteller can’t. A toneless, inexact language is incapable of creating landscape, meaningful relationship, or credible event.”
This texture, Le Guin says, is what Ishiguro fails to accomplish. He fails to create depth when merely using fantasy for his own ends. Ishiguro wants to be high-brow. “I am sure reviewers who share his prejudice will never suggest that he has polluted his authorial gravitas with the childish whims of fantasy.” She knows what he means to say is that he isn’t trying to write fantasy, he is trying to write something serious. Le Guin, even at her most playful, is always serious. Her work takes on anarchism, love, misogyny, patriarchy, racism, child-rearing, and the essence of myth, but she is not always given her due. Only after her death did people begin to differentiate what she did from those less serious authors who wrote about dragons and planet-hopping. But every “genre” has pulp. Every genre has the potential for merit. A lot of you would do well to realize autofiction can be good or bad just like every other genre. The same goes for the broad realm of “literary fiction.” We already differentiate it by how commercial it is. Why not by its ability to make us think? Le Guin’s novels and short stories (The Earthsea Series, The Hainish Saga, The Telling, “Betrayals,” Tehanu, Searoad and so on) taught me how to think. How to write with both grace and gravitas. To take genre seriously. Her essays on craft are no less formative. She knew what she was talking about.
The problem with genre is that there isn’t one. People create their own stumbling blocks and make life too difficult for themselves. If Ishiguro or Perkins had respect for their craft, they would see genre as a vast ocean, not a tiny brook. You can go places with genre. Sail away and tell tales of love and power just like Odysseus or Beowulf. To not take genre seriously is like failing to use all the colors in your watercolor set. Some choose to paint monochromatically on purpose. But don’t use a color without knowing its historical complements. Some artists only ever have a Blue Period. And that’s perfectly fine.
Hunter Schafer Profile for Vogue.
My Bookforum piece on Lindsay Lohan, Kim K, and Philippa Snow is online now.
Look, i didn't need my opinions about both Longlegs and In A Violent Nature validated (I watched them back to back - well, one night to the next) but appreciate it all the same - agree with most everything you've said here. Quickly learned to love those incredibly long 'walking to the next target' scenes in '..Violent Nature'. Haunting, as you say.