They’re Coming to Get You, Barbara

Summary

This article discusses the conception of an apocryphal narrative of horror cinema, one that centers the experience of spectatorship and what happens after spectators have left the cinema. How are films discussed, digested, and understood in popular culture and in niche fandom spaces? Furthermore, how do these discussions create legacies and contribute to a form of myth that is crafted around not the production or the history of the film itself but, instead, the consumption? I term this narrative the “cinematic apocrypha,” a type of narrative that stems principally from engagement with the film by individuals whose experiences of spectatorship then go on to acquire a sort of legendary status. I develop this notion of cinematic apocrypha through an engagement with Tom Gunning’s theories around the cinema of attraction as well as the cinema of astonishment, bringing together the history of the cinema as a physical (and communal) space that creates the conditions of possibility for extreme reactions. I then bring together specific examples of films (Paranormal Activity and The Exorcist) for discussions of materials around them as core examples of the notion and incarnation of the cinematic apocrypha on a large scale. Notably, I look at trailers for films as objects that endeavor to create a certain narrative for a film before its release, as the trailer is often the first engagement with the cinematic object itself. Finally, I engage with a discussion of film festivals, Cannes in particular, that offer a particular mode of engagement, through audiences whose reactions are often extreme, recorded, and become part of the film’s history itself entrenching further apocryphal narratives in contemporary horror cinema.