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Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps
This episode aired right after another amazing episode, 'Remedial Chaos Theory', which is regarded by many (myself included) as a representation of the very best Community as a show was capable of. Understandably, 'Horror Fiction In Seven Spooky Steps' often gets overshadowed. However, it is my belief that this episode is just as worthy of our attention and praise. It uses a really cool framing device to help us to get to know all of our bestest friends; the study group. I will be going over all of the seven sequences in turn. Some of the sequences are just ripe for the over analysing and a couple are pretty overt with their meanings but fun to look at anyway. Also, I think it’s interesting to note that this episode utilises a different type of horror for almost every story (slasher - Britta & Abed, supernatural/psychological - Annie, body horror - Troy, religious parable - Shirley, just pure unadulterated racism [not saying this one is Lovecraftian horror but...I'm not not saying that] - Pierce). I’ll be focusing mostly on Troy’s and Annie’s stories since they just have more content to think about.
So, a quick summary of the episode for the uninitiated. The episode opens with Britta (who has recently declared herself a psychology major) being very concerned over the results of a personality quiz she and her friends took for one of her classes. She concludes that one of the seven has the potential to become a homicidal maniac from the answer sheets that everyone filled out. She decides to try to figure out which friend it is by telling a scary story (which is so bare-bones and rushed that it elicits no emotional response from anyone even though they both die at the end). The episode continues with each of the friends telling their own story and wraps up with the revelation that Britta has marked the test sheets incorrectly. The final shot is of all seven sheets on the table in the study room, six of them having been determined to belong to “crazy people”. The group leaves the room having agreed not to try to find out which sheet belongs to whom. Also, just wanted to note some general observations before getting into the individual story analyses. All of the stories’ dialogue is written in each character’s specific voice. What I mean by that is each story sounds like it could have been written by the narrator character. Troy’s story sounds like what Troy trying to say smart science words would be like; especially when you listen to how the crazy, old, racist doctor speaks. Shirley’s fundamental misunderstanding of recreational drugs and how they work is pervasive in her story, as well as the actual speech patterns and word choices of her characters. Annie’s sounds like a period romance film because that’s where she drew some of her inspiration for the character archetypes she’s chosen to use. And so on and so forth, I’m sure you get the point.
And now I’ll get into the individual stories. For the sake of simplicity, let’s do this in chronological order. Britta time, baby.
Britta’s Story
Britta is just trying to come up with a way to smoke out the deranged lunatic who is imminently going to kill her and her friends so her story is really fast and not much time is spent on it. The general gist is that a man and a woman (played by Jeff and Britta) are making out in a car and then a killer with a hook for hand escapes from a nearby asylum and kills the man after he gets out of the car to check for danger. I don’t think this necessarily says much about Britta as she really is just trying to get a reaction out of everyone else. She probably just chooses the most quintessential horror tropes for a quick n’ easy scare. It must be said that Britts kinda dates herself with her use of the “make out in a car in random forest” trope. I believe the last time that trope was popular was like the 80’s to early 90’s? Even Abed makes fun of her later saying that “...it’s not the 50’s so we don't have to park a car and neck at Inspiration Point” when narrating his own story which is really just an improved version of Britta’s.
Abed’s Story
Next up is Abed. Abed is super well-versed on the tropes associated with pretty much every genre of fictional media, horror included. It seems that he has a disdain for the popular tropes that Britta employs in her story as he subverts them in his and he all but says that her characters deserved to die, narratively, because they made bad decisions. Britta’s characters make stupid, impulsive decisions which end up getting them killed. Abed’s characters are well-prepared and smart. They rent a cabin, have fully-charged cell phones, effective weapons and a battery-powered radio but they die anyway once it has been “earned”. Abed dislikes any story component he deems too “convenient” such as a pertinent news broadcast coming on the radio as soon as it’s turned. He tries to tell a much more fleshed-out and slowly paced story but he is limited by his medium. I know that his story would have been the best one, hands-down, had he been allowed to tell it.
Annie’s Story
Ok, let’s talk about the absolute goldmine of characterisation that Annie’s story is. Annie’s story starts off like a classic kind of supernatural horror. Jeff, Annie and Britta are the only people involved. These three are like the closest that Community gets to a traditional love triangle so that tracks. Jeff is a predatory vampire (:eyes emoji:), Britta is a pushover who allows him to drink from her whenever he wants and Annie is positioned as the morally upright and respectable saviour, up until the end when it’s revealed that she’s a werewolf who eats selfish vampires. We know that being the best and most correct at all times is very important to her and so it makes sense that she would frame herself in this way. In the story, Jeff asks Annie to teach him to read which, in this context, is basically equivalent to being “fixed” or “saved” for the purposes of the story. We see in many episodes, such as in 06x12 ‘Wedding Videography’, that Annie has an unhealthy habit of helping others, sometimes to her own detriment, because she needs to be needed and to feel useful. This could help explain why she feels such an attachment to Jeff (and to the other members of the study group, to a lesser degree); she recognises the pain and damage he carries and wants nothing more than to fix it herself or to be the reason he changes. It is for this reason that I don’t think she’s actually attracted to Jeff. I think she feels an obligation to him, to try to make him better than he was when she met him. I think what her story reveals is that she views him as something of a project instead of an actual romantic or sexual prospect. She even says in 03x16 ‘Virtual Systems Analysis’ a few episodes later that she doesn’t actually love Jeff and that she’s just “in love with the idea of being in love”. When Jeff is unattainable, that is when her ‘attraction’ to him reaches its peak and as soon as he seems like an actual realistic option, she’s no longer interested. At the end of season 6, she kisses him because while she acknowledges a deep connection between them, she doesn’t quite realise that the connection she feels isn’t a romantic one. She’s still dealing with compulsory heterosexuality. Even her short and ill-fated infatuation with Troy follows the same pattern. She had a crush on him in high school when she knew that their respective places in the hierarchy made him unattainable for her. As soon as they started becoming friends in college, she was no longer interested, even when Troy expressed that he was interested (I love a couple of comphet besties). In conclusion, Annie’s a lesbian suffering from comphet and good ol’ people-pleasing disease who’s convinced herself that she is in love with a man 20 years her senior who she has no business being anywhere near. I might do a bigger character meta about Annie at some point because she’s so fascinating and complex and I love her.
Troy’s Story
Troy’s story begins explosively AND awesomely with his and Abed’s F-15 going down in the woods. Quick side note, I find it important to mention that Abed’s story didn’t have Troy in it but Troy’s story did have Abed in it. Look, I hate that Troy left as much as the next guy but the more I rewatch this show, the more I realise that that was a natural progression of his story arc. He is sort of unable to be a person without Abed. The closest he got to being independent was during the AC Repair plot and after that, he went straight back from being Troy to being TroyandAbed. This point comes up over and over and over again, for example in 05x01 ‘Repilot’ he remarks that he needs to figure out who he is and Abed says that he’ll help him. Abed kind of knows how to exist without Troy. He’s known who he is for a really long time and has accepted himself as well as having “self-esteem coming out of his butt”. But Troy is just figuring himself out when we meet him. He spent all of high school behind this uber macho jock persona and he doesn’t know who he is outside of that. We see Troy slowly but surely become more comfortable with his actual personality throughout the series but he had to leave Abed for his journey of self-discovery to begin in earnest. All that means is that their relationship will be so much healthier for them both when Troy returns from his voyage. Ok, tangent over, back to Troy’s story. Troy carries Abed over the threshold into this crazy, old, racist doctor’s house (Pierce obvi). The doctor then drugs them (with first aids, and what have you) and sews them together. This veers into body horror territory but ultimately it ends up being mostly comic relief because Troy and Abed suddenly have ESP and take their revenge on the old doctor. They drink whisky together and have a gay old time torturing the old crazy racist doctor.
Instead of a horror story, I think Troy’s story acts more like some sort of power fantasy. Maybe his story is all about control. Control over his life, control over his and Abed’s relationship. His story is him being permanently attached to his best bro so they can be awesome together forever. Pierce could represent his parents/family by his age, toxic masculinity by his...everything about him, etc. Pierce is a good symbol for all of these systems of oppression because in a lot of ways, he is a large source of these bigotries in Troy’s life. It’s unsurprising that he would correlate Pierce with these struggles. Back to this story being a power fantasy, it more or less ends with the “power of friendship” trope. He wants to believe that simply being with Abed is enough to make everything ok. He wants to believe that simply being the version of himself who plays in the Dreamatorium and eats popcorn with his best friend is all he needs to be happy. But he’s afraid that this isn’t the case as we see later on with the AC Repair arc.
Pierce’s Story
I don’t really want to do this but for the sake of completion, let’s talk about Pierce’s story. His story doesn’t even fit the criteria for horror, it’s really just an old white man’s power fantasy (which honestly could be considered a horror story in a certain context, even though it isn't in this one, but I digress). He’s sexually desirable and adept, he’s able to protect his house and women from the threat of brown people and he drinks lots of post-coital brandy. Also he’s like 30 years old. He, and many of his generation, believe that they’re just exempt from the rules everyone else has to follow. He doesn’t have to follow the theme everyone else has been adhering to thus far because he’s better than them. Though, I’m not going to pretend that watching adorable Troy and Abed try to rob him isn’t funny.
Shirley’s Story
Once again, Shirley’s story is mostly comic relief and it also doesn’t reveal anything new about her character. We know that she’s a Christian who believes that all her friends are going to hell for being heathens. It seems important to point out that the person she chooses to represent the devil in her story is Dean Pelton. We know that she thinks of him as some sort of cross-dressing pervert (02x20 ‘Paradigms of Human Memory’) but it’s a big leap from that to him being the literal embodiment of the devil for being pansexual and gender non-conforming. Yeah, not a big fan of this one, Shirley. Also, her fundamental misunderstanding of how drugs work is hilarious (such as making Jeff snort “weed” off of Britta and exclaiming “Alright, alright! That’s my kind of pot bong!”) and one of the comedic highlights of a very strong and funny episode.
Jeff’s Story
Finally, Jeff’s story. Jeff’s story is similar to Britta’s in that it’s a means to an end; he’s trying to stop the fight that has broken out as a result of the reveal that Britta is trying to psychoanalyse them covertly using their stories. His story is one of understanding and unity but it’s also one that blames and vilifies the Other, blaming It for anything that could and has gone wrong rather than any one member of the group. His conclusion was basically that it was unconscionable that one of the people in the group didn’t belong in the group. After Jeff tells his story, Annie actually looks at the answer sheets the group filled out and notices that Britta ran them through the machine wrong so they don’t actually know their scores. All Jeff’s story really says to me is that he likes when his friends are getting along, which is pretty relatable. Sometimes, surface level is good.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
This is one of my favourite episodes of the whole series because it just packs so much content into 22 minutes. There’s so much to really sink your teeth into and think about and that’s one of the things I love most about this show as a whole. Being able to pick apart a show like this is one of the hallmarks of tight, expert writing, in my opinion. The fantastic writing is one of the reasons I can just rewatch basically any episode over and over and never get bored because there’s always something I missed or something new to think about. Sometimes certain lines or even entire episodes gain a new context/meaning after watching the whole series or even just after having new life experiences. I love a good character study and this episode is a masterclass .