Trope Talk is my way of dishing out and breaking down the timeless and the tiresome of cinema’s most recognizable tropes, archetypes and formulas. This month, I’ll be considering what a Wes Anderson horror movie would really look like, and if the combination of tropes could ever really work at all.
This past Halloween, Saturday Night Live had host Edward Norton play Owen Wilson in a fake trailer for a Wes Anderson home invasion thriller, aptly and humorously titled “The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders” (which can be found on Hulu here or via the embed below). Admittedly and unfortunately, the only Wes Anderson movie I’ve ever seen in full so far has been Moonrise Kingdom (2012), which I absolutely adored; it is beautiful and strange, relatable and charming, smart and simple all at once.
However, the joke of this spoof trailer still came across because Anderson is simply one of those directors whose trailers alone are so recognizably and uniformly him (again, feeling at liberty here to say this director functions not just as a noun but as an adjective). I’m not saying that I don’t want or need to see more of his movies in their entireties, but let’s face it—if you’ve seen a few Wes Anderson movie trailers or at least one of his films from beginning to end, you already have a pretty good idea of what his style is like across the board.
Since my understanding of his style is at this somewhat more surface level, though, I thought it might be more interesting, and certainly more fair, for me to take this SNL sketch a little more seriously, and write a post about something I do know quite a bit more about: horror movies, and home invasion tropes specifically. How would the tropes of Wes Anderson, as I understand them anyway, alter the generic tropes at work if The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders really came to be?
The fake trailer begins much like any other horror trailer would, with shots of a mansion in the fog and someone walking through leaves, eventually revealing a large knife. But the moment that we hear narrator Alec Baldwin say “…the twisted mind of Wes Anderson,” Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” starts playing and our killer is waving to us in his baby blue suit and smiling mask.
With that in mind, let me first address that particular trope which we have come to know so well in recent horror film: creepy killers with even creepier masks. The masks in this trailer are parodies in themselves, quirky and oddly cute plays on the more sinister, obviously more serious counterparts we’ve seen in The Strangers (2008), You’re Next (2013), and to less successful ends I’d argue, The Purge (2013)—a scary set of masks does not a scary movie make! That being said, masks are perhaps the most integral part of any home invasion thriller. In this trailer, our Owen Wilson character (imitated so perfectly by Norton) is looking through binoculars (one of many references to Moonrise Kingdom) and naming what he sees: one killer who happens to have an old record player in addition to a meat cleaver, one with a falcon, and a pair of twins wearing the same matching red tracksuits as those in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) who here, of course, are also holding knives. Because what is a home invasion thriller without weapons, and what is a Wes Anderson film without random items-turned-motifs?
Stylistically, everything is quirky and colorful in that dulled, vintage way and most of our shots are perfectly centered. So the horror movie tone is obviously missing here in place of Anderson’s offbeat sense of humor and timing, and the horror tropes being much more muddled or rather transformed to fit that tone instead. A paper airplane glides through the window set to classical music, only to be unfolded and read through a magnifying glass: the Murderers ask the Homeowners if they may kill them. The formality here and the voiceover of that formality is undoubtedly the way Anderson would see a home invasion story. Why shouldn’t the killers be polite and get permission first before attacking?
So, there are no violent entries through windows in this would-be horror film— just “one determined father” whose suggestion to head to the “panic room” is nothing more than his own enthusiastic entry into the yellow tent from Moonrise Kingdom. His two precocious kids, meanwhile, are dressed as woodland animals (of course) and rattling off what weapons they have (some of which are so characteristically silly and random but treated still with uniform reverence, like a picture of Edith Piaf and a ship in a bottle) in monotone fashion.
I feel like what makes this trailer so humorous and so impossible is that even the killers, as I mentioned, are so perfectly Wes Anderson. Even when they kill, they do it without much brutality or urgency, instead embodying a casual blankness that most of Anderson’s characters I’m familiar with seem to exhibit. That is evident also by the way we are introduced to the rest of the supposed cast, which consists of more actors we know to be Anderson veterans and favorites, such as Jason Schwartzman who is bleeding out of his mouth and Adrien Brody missing one of his arms. The trailer even acknowledges Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) by including a stop-motion mouse, holding a bloody weapon himself. The end of the trailer finds everyone chasing each other but the chase is so orderly and cutesy, for lack of a better word.
I think Wes Anderson’s style is so perfectly parodied here by positioning that sometimes cutesy style with its complete opposite, and making even the more horrific signifiers into trademark Anderson objects of unpretentious retro chic and unapologetic thrift store kitsch meant to be intellectually funny somehow. I think his style is so all consuming in that way, that to dabble in a genre with its own set of narrative and stylistic conventions would be a concoction far too ill-matched to ever work. Then again, I’m specifically judging the hypothetical film on whether it would work in horror movie terms, and surmising that Anderson’s own brand of weirdness is too light and singular to maintain any semblance of scariness in a horror film of his own creation; Fangoria Magazine is even “quoted” in the trailer as being very, very confused, as I think I might be too if it were a real movie.
But, maybe it would work better as an Anderson film than it would as a horror film, even if he did inevitably have to alter the very tropes that make it a horror film in the first place in service of his own strong tropes (as they clearly were meshed and combined for this trailer alone). Anderson’s films may feel very similar to one another, but that distinct feeling his films offer might be a really interesting case for extreme genre-bending (and blending), if for no other reason than to test what this faux trailer has offered us: can that Wes Anderson feeling transcend genres, or is a director like him bound to genres that unquestioningly support his very particular tropes? Well, unless The Midnight Coterie of Sinister Intruders becomes a reality, we’re left only with this fake trailer to give us at least some idea of what a Wes Anderson horror movie may look like.
