The “elevated horror” label that has surrounded debates about the genre in recent years has an even more irritating relative than this, and that is called “social horror.” By social terror, we mean propositions such as the saga The PurgeJordan Peele’s cinema or even Parasites. Even if the label translates into impossible liquidity, it could reveal its main characteristics as soon as Don’t say anything bad. Around this acclaimed Danish film, directed by Christian Tafdrup in 2022, it was easy to come across this label in the reviews. Social terror. And it seemed reasonable to sink into confusion, because if there are films defined as “social horror”, it means that there must be a terror that, necessarily, does not exist.
Stephen King wrote an essay on horror fiction in the 1980s that is always worth turning to when doubts arise about the genre’s constitution. This fragment of dance of death is revealing: “Terror is an invitation to symbolically indulge in deviant and antisocial behavior, to commit acts of gratuitous violence, to give in to our childish fantasies of power, to surrender to our most cowardly fears.” King thus argues that the terrifying experience is inseparable from individuals and that, in order to unfold organically, it needs other individuals to confront it. In other words, it requires a social fabric. If someone wants to sell us something like “social terror,” it is possible that terror is just an ingredient with little real impact on the work. Or a marketing gimmick.
What was it for? Don’t say anything bad? It is difficult to say, just as it is difficult to guarantee that the films of Michael Haneke or Lars von Trier belong to horror fiction, no matter how uncomfortable their films may be. What seems simple is to connect Tafdrup’s effort to the discursive coordinates of this cinema – which some call “cruelty” and which usually triumphs in European festivals – and, beyond the impact it leaves on the spectator, to deduce that what matters most to him is the spinning. a precise diagnosis. One that, rather than taking advantage of or investigating our human particularities, prefers to issue monolithic statements on the misery of the species to which we belong.
Let us then propose that social terror would be relevant, intellectual and undoubtedly cynical. And let us be surprised that a studio as festive as Blumhouse has made a remake of Don’t say anything bad. Its Spanish title, Don’t talk to strangersalready clearly states the essential stupidity that always hides beneath the label.
From Europe to Hollywood
Another irritating habit of horror fiction, codified by market conceptions, is the assiduity with which, faced with America’s reluctance to read subtitles, Hollywood dissolves into remakes. We suffered it in Spain when [•REC] became QuarantineSweden suffered it with let me inor France with Martyrs. The case of Don’t talk to strangers It is particularly interesting, however, for the described ambiguity of its approaches in contrast to the nature of Blumhouse. This horror factory, associated with Universal, is characterized by small budgets and conscious approaches, confident in the profitability of the genre and the desire to have fun of a loyal audience, which may not be very interested in serious messages about oppression on the part of the beginning of social conventions.
It was more or less about Don’t say anything bad. A Danish couple met another Dutch couple while on vacation, they hit it off and were later invited to spend a weekend at their home. The Danish couple quickly became very uncomfortable with the Dutchman’s treatment and customs, initially trying to hide it out of respect for their hosts. The tension grew and Tafdrup had fun exposing the (ultimately deadly) ridiculousness of the well-meaning protagonists, until he effectively concluded with a dark insight into a reflection on… well, society. The approach was juicy enough to try to bring it closer to American audiences, although Blumhouse also had the idea of entrusting the direction to another European director, like Tafdrup.
Perhaps Britain’s James Watkins also hinted at some comments about “social terror” when he signed his 2008 debut, Lake Eden. With a starting point that recalls the Who can kill a child? by our Chicho Ibáñez Serrador, this film with Michael Fassbender investigates the abyss of understanding between city dwellers and the inhabitants of the most depressed areas of the United Kingdom, represented by the children of these lower classes. Even having a conclusion just as lazy as that of Don’t say anything badThe inevitable diagnosis had more to do with frivolous spectacle and instinctive satisfaction than with the pretentious alibis that Cannes could attribute, something Watkins himself confirmed by following up Lake Eden with The woman in black, noisy exercise in gothic horror with Daniel Radcliffe.
Posts to lighten Don’t say anything bad and make it an industrial horror proposition closer to Blumhouse entertainment, Watkins seemed the ideal candidate. This could introduce Tafdrup’s ideas to digestible terrain for the fandom the most fundamentalist of the genre, while cosmetically preserving a certain solemnity, the slight feeling that these shocks were “important”. That’s just what it feels like Don’t talk to strangersbecoming in passing a version of Don’t say anything bad better and worse, simultaneously, than the original. If that’s possible.
From the United States to England
In Don’t talk to strangers James McAvoy plays the patriarch of the “strange” family, who within this remake shifts from Dutch to British. The Danish family, on the other hand, is of American origin and consists of Scoot McNairy and Mackenzie Davis, who are familiar with the McAvoy clan through their professional move to the UK. These differences are not as circumstantial as they may seem at first glance, as different aspects of Anglo-Saxon identity come into conflict, and it is particularly significant that McNairy and Davis are immigrants.
The visiting couple, for example, downplay the hosts’ early eccentricities as a condescension between city dwellers and Americans: not only are they British, but they are also country folk, something like “exotic” by today’s standards where the rural becomes a fetish. These are ingredients with which Tafdrup has barely played. Don’t say anything badby giving his fiction a more universalizing tone: he preferred to place his characters in a void, in order to extrapolate their disagreements onto a bed that would transcend the human condition above any identity or nationality.
Watkins’ interest in giving a more earthly anchoring to the characters – which mainly recalls Lake Eden— extends to the portrait of the visiting couple, much more psychologically charged. The scenario describes a marital crisis and places previous malaises that could explode or reach an unexpected catharsis in contact with the dangerous clan led by McAvoy. McNairy’s feeling of male inferiority, combined with a painful past where infidelity lurked, adds layers to their coexistence and the way the protagonists try to cope with it. Also, directly because of this, the black comedy intensifies.
As a screenwriter, Watkins expands several key scenes from Don’t say anything bad for humor to find its way where Tafdrup’s firm corsets wouldn’t allow it, in what is good news… with its negative angle. By cultivating a greater emotional openness in the relationships between the characters, Watkins ensures that his Danish counterpart’s concerns are made explicit in a pedestrian way, Don’t talk to strangers Little by little, it becomes a garish story, aware of the need to assert oneself and be honest. From the hieratic void of Don’t say anything bad we are heading towards a clear overexposure trainingwho falls into new ridiculous imaginaries by assuming the human being as someone capable of breaking with these so-called social impostures to find a previous stage, and something like honest.
Despite all the crudeness of his version, Tafdrup was intelligent enough not to regard the human being as an entity separate from his gregarious nature, but Don’t talk to strangers He operates in another league: in the ideological and self-devouring plain of Hollywood, capable of religiously following the structure of the original and, when the third act arrives, radically changing the outcome proposed by Tafdrup. Don’t talk to strangers It sinks completely into a few awkward final minutes where Hollywood domestication hurts more than ever, without the thing having managed to fully work before. Because the plot progression has been largely the same, but the characters are constructed differently, their decisions have seemed much more inconsistent and arbitrary than those of their Danish counterparts.
So for Don’t talk to strangers There is no choice but to fail as fiction. It does so, however, in very different terms than Don’t say anything bad: fiercely idiosyncratic terms, from which it is very interesting to compare the two versions. The dialogue they establish, what each version says about the cinematic tradition that gave birth to it, is far more stimulating than the misunderstandings between Danish and Dutch, or American and British, families. Of course, and as with the families themselves, what these traditions teach about themselves is not at all positive.
