Dr Linnie Blake
Manchester Metropolitan University
New Labour, New Horror: The Postmodernization of British Horror Cinema and Tony Blair’s Third Way
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This paper will explore how in recent years the conceptual confusions of the re-branded Labour Party’s Third Way (that pastiche of right-wing American-style individualism and left-wing European-style social democracy) are echoed in the thematic preoccupations and narrative machinery of an increasingly postmodern British horror cinema. Thus, whilst films such as Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Cradle of Fear (2000), The Bunker (2000), Dog Soldiers (2002), 28 Days Later (2002), Sean of the Dead (2004) and Creep (2004) undertake their own re-visionings of earlier zombie, werewolf, vampire and monster movies in ways that vary from homage to pastiche to unabashed parody, so too can New Labour be seen to enter into its own hybrid re-formulation of Old Labour and Neo Conservative positions on public ownership, economic strategy, taxation, industry, welfare, education and foreign policy. Hence the polyphonic and multi-stylistic celebration of the generic signifiers of horror cinema, undertaken by these films, ironically and self-referentially foregrounding the fictive nature of horror text and its inter-connectedness with all other texts can be seen to give voice to a number of cultural anxieties engendered by New Labour’s hybridisation of Old Labour caring and Neo Conservative militarism in recent years. The problematic status of the individual, the nature and responsibilities of society, the role of government and the alterations wrought to national self-image by international events such as the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the rise of the Islamic other, are knowingly explored in many of these films, whilst a loss of faith in the democratic nature of parliamentary democracy is foregrounded through an insistent depiction of the military machine as simultaneous agent of and rescuer from the horrors of new-millennial life. In recent British horror cinema, I argue, we can see a loss of faith in the political metanarratives of old, and one that is echoed in the self-conscious conflation of the real and the fictive that characterises the simulational culture of New Labour.
