Sleep and the Reign of the Uncanny in Postrecession Horror Film

Horror films have seemed preoccupied with sleep and its disorders of late: Paranormal Activity (2007), Insidious (2010), Platinum Dunes’ remake of Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Sinister (2012), The Conjuring (2013), Dead Awake (2016), The Break‐In (2016), and Slumber (2017) to name just a few. Sleepwalkers, as well as those gripped by a terrifying nocturnal paralysis, are part of a larger trend in horror of the last decade: the overwhelming presence of human monsters. These are not purposefully malevolent characters (such as serial killers), however, but versions of ourselves wrenched free from reason and volition. Post-recession horror films have served as dark mirrors reflecting both what we do and do not recognize, manifesting uncanny doubles that reveal our supposedly singular, bounded, and volitional selves to be multiple, dispersed, and involuntary. There are many causes for this particular incarnation of the monstrous in horror—and for its happening now—and they all highlight humans’ growing powerlessness. Foremost among these causes is the Great Recession of 2008 and, in the United States, the mortgage and housing crisis with which it was bound up, but there is also the increasing penetration into our lives of social media and technologies of surveillance, the steady progression of robotics and automation, and the increasing visibility of neurocognitive research that speaks to humans’ own interior “automatic” systems. Together these factors impel the swell of post-recession uncanny horror.