No Signal (And Other Cellular Drama)
5 Comments | Posted: September 24th, 2009 | Filed under: Thinking About Movies | Tags: cellular phones, cinema, clicheThis video’s being passed around the last couple of days with people discussing the cliché that is the dead cellular phone in horror and suspense movies. What I’ve not seen is anyone stating why this motif is so persistent.
Horror is derived from the feeling of isolation, from the fact that there is no easy out for a protagonist. In an era where 82% of Americans now have a cellular phone of some type, any screenplay (or comics script) that wants to keep the audience from suspecting the protagonists are as dumb as posts for not calling the police/national guard/Justice League in at the end of the first act needs to address the issue of the ubiquitous communications device that allows us to send pictures, emails, text messages, and make phone calls. Yes it’s a cliché, and usually clumsily handled, but it’s a necessary one to keep that needed suspension of disbelief aloft for the 90+ minutes of entertainment that the viewer has paid for.
(On a slightly-related note, that’s something I’ve noticed a lot about Japanese horror: it’s definitely about being isolated. In a very social, very crowded culture like theirs, the idea of being utterly alone already hits a tone. A prime example of this is the last third of Audition, where Takeshi Miike plays this to the hilt.)
It’s not just that the cell phone needs to be taken off the table as a matter of establishing suspension of disbelief (though that’s part of it, for sure). In modern horror, there’s this consistent trope of betrayal by technology that the cell phone that doesn’t work or that rings when the killer is looking for you plays into perfectly.
It’s an updated version of the car that breaks down for no apparent reason in the worst possible location.
What’s really interesting, IMO, is a story that is the opposite: functioning technology enables the monster, crime, mystery, or what-have-you.
“Veronica Mars” used to do that. The plots often involved incidents that could only happen in a world with cell phones, webcams, the internet.
Reep: That’s why I liked DISTURBIA a surprising amount. Technology exists in full force (everything you’d find in a modern teenager’s room), and yet technology is also isolating and can often betray you. It allows the heroes to be resourceful, but not to be impervious.
Wouldn’t it be the equivalent of the phone lines being down (or cut)? In any horror movie, or even in mysteries, it seems like 9 out of 10 times the landline phones wouldn’t work.
Of course, some young people actually are so socialized to texting and social networking rather than calling that they do things like posting on facebook that they are are stuck in a water tunnel and waiting seven hours until someone finds them instead of calling for help on the same phone they changed their status.(http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/07/2678945.htm)