ABSTRACT
American cinematic representations of the Vietnam War in the 1970s and ’80s were consistently steeped in a Gothic aesthetic, a consequence of not only the horror of the encounter with a confounding enemy and landscape, but of an ambivalence toward an unwinnable war conflated with widespread domestic cultural dis-ease. Cinematic depictions were few and lagged behind the conflict, as the nation and Hollywood remained equally unwilling to revisit or exhume the trauma. Julian Smith observes that while the war’s effect on Vietnam-era American cinema was pervasive, it had to go underground, “surfacing in strange places, taking off its mask only briefly,” particularly in probing American masculinist institutions in crisis (3). This “strange surfacing” of the so-recently repressed was particularly apparent in 70s horror films. Chief amongst these were slasher, Rural Gothic, and hillbilly horror films, like The Last House on the Left, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, films that diagnose the parlous state of the American family post-Vietnam and Watergate. Even war films traded heavily in horror elements to dissect the conflict’s bizarreness, ugliness, and monstrous fascination. Gothicized battlefields dominate the combat experience in war films, showcasing off-kilter, burning worlds, carnivalesque situations, madness and grotesque actions, in films like The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket and Hamburger Hill. However, numerous important films, like Deliverance and First Blood, brought the battlefield home, allegorizing the Vietnam experience via horror tropes and Gothicized landscapes – as the foreign disturbed and entered the domestic, thereby rendered unfamiliar, unsettling and threatening. However, Southern Comfort, which uniquely positions the combat film as American Rural Gothic horror, most completely domesticates America’s experience of the foreign battlefield to dissect Vietnam’s effects on the besieged American male, masculinist institutions and the nation.
