ABSTRACT

The horror genre is especially familiar with manifesting a social anxiety through the emotional capital that audiences invest in children and their families. Perverse familial structures of endemic ugliness and dissatisfaction, fanatical fathers of disobedient sons and hideous mothers of wayward daughters have saturated the genre since the 1970s, when the institution of family underwent severe assault during The Vietnam War. Post-9/11 Heartland Horror similarly subverts, and deliberately repudiates, normal and idealised notions of family. The film's focus on the degradation of the institution of family is thus suggestive of the ways in which idealism and the nation-as-family itself might constitute a web of culprits and causalities. Ultimately, the Post-9/11 Heartland Horror film is representative of an altered state of American national cynicism, crusading for realism in place of idealism. Bill Paxton's degenerate patriarchal family does dramatically encapsulate the cultural deterioration of the post-9/11 United States and the subsiding of confidence in the authority.