Horror and the “Murder Machine” subgenre

Thirteen Ghosts — excuse us, Thir13een Ghosts — has shown up a few times recently (and again on Sunday at 7:00 pm on SyFy). It’s a big fave of Hollis and some of the other AmityvilleNowvians… and it’s emblematic of a strange little subgenre that’s shown an odd persistence: the murder machine genre.

Over the last few years, a whole new subgenre of horror – especially graphic horror – has slowly populated the zeitgeist, a kind of stylistic virus that’s reached critical mass (shut up, we know it’s a mixed metaphor). We choose to call it “the murder machine” subgenre, in which a mad mechanical genius goes a little bit funny in the head, just a little bit funny, and builds a ridiculously complex machine or series of machines housed in an abandoned warehouse or sewer or hotel or mansion, and proceeds to kill a succession of either innocent or secretly guilty people until he gets tired and stops. Until the sequel.

We’re talking the Saw franchise or The Collector or the remake of Texas Chainsaw or House of Wax. We’d include the Final Destination franchise and its increasingly complex and bizarre Rube Goldberg approach to slaughter. And the list goes and on and on.

It’s a strangely remote way to view death — or more precisely, murder. In the early days of the Halloween/Jason/Freddie murder-spreed subgenre, the victims may have been set pieces, but they usually ‘deserved’ what they got: they were having sex, they were mean to each other, they were shallow or stupid. But in the murder machine, characters don’t matter even to that minor degree. In fact, they rarely have personalities on display at all. Often, as in The Collector, they don’t even have names. It’s all about the “optics” — all about the clever or bizarre or unexpected mechanism by which they are skewered, crushed, or decapitated. It’s about the means, not the end — because the end is always the same.

Which brings us back to Thirteen Ghosts — or Thir13en Ghosts, if you prefer. Even with major-league players like Tony Shalhoub, Matthew Lillard, and F. Murray Abraham, the movie is clearly about the gear-driven House of Horror that has entrapped them — about the nearly endless series of graphic, even gaudy deaths.

Ever since the invention of the wheel, we human have been fascinated with the implications of the machines we make. With the event of every gear, spring, or switch, we concoct new and more elaborate ways to do harm to ourselves or each other. But it is odd to have reached the point where the machines themselves more important — and more interesteing — than the humans they destroy.

See if you agree. Thriteen Ghosts shrieks, spins, and splatters into view at 7:00 pm Sunday on SyFy. And Ghost Ship, director Steve Beck’s other movie, another “murder machine” movie, shows up on AMC at 4:30 pm on Friday, November 7.

Do you buy the “murder machine” subgenre? Disagree, agree, or add some Murder Machine Movies to the list in a comment below…