What's your genre?

Thursday 4/23/26

From a piece on Bob Clark's 1974 film, Deathdream, completed this morning.

Bob Clark, the director who gave us unforgettable accounts of both sides of the Yuletide coin from mine to mint with Black Christmas and A Christmas Story, was pledged to range. The best artists are. If you can describe what someone does in a stock phrase or slap on a one-size-fits-all genre label, their work won’t last, and nor should it.

Cast your mind to something like Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s as gothic horror as gothic horror gets, right? But the novel is also a work of proto-modernism, a welter of sociological metaphors, a fin-de-siècle fictive travelogue, a cloudburst of excess, a study in Victorian restraint, a blend of homoeroticism, religiosity, urbanity, folk legend, cod philosophy, food prep, superstition, science, faith, empiricism, telepathy, gushy buddy road trip romp, and Manichaean saga. Only the multifaceted endures, and multifaceted artists who shift from work to work.

Take note, you who deal in the blandest, least-individualized catch-all-isms like “What’s your genre?” and claim to write upmarket romantasy, whatever the hell that means, which is to say, it means nothing. The thing being only and wholly itself is inseparable from any claim to art. In this regard, Bob Clark’s finest films are efforts and extolments of indivisibility.

Among them is 1974’s Deathdream, which itself is vampiric and likely to remain deathless in terms of its political relevance, unless dictator-types stop warring. People watch horror films in part because real life is so horrifying. Life will get you at some point or other. We’re never truly safe from that monster. Sometimes when we believe we’re most in the clear is exactly when we feel the monster’s breath on the back of our neck. And then there are those among us who only, or mostly, know the monster. Live with it. Which isn’t exactly Ernie rooming with Bert.