I have never seen Rubber (2010) and truthfully do not know that I ever will, but, regardless, the premise is interesting in its playfulness towards both film and fear. For Carroll, monsters must be both fearsome and disgusting (150). The bloodthirsty tire at the center of the film is staunchly neither. It seems like the writers saw No Country for Old Men (2007) and said what if Javier Bardem but tire. Naming a monster in a sense can domesticate it, especially when that name is Robert. It is not just banal, but for a tire also a punny parallel to the phonetics of “rubber.”
Robert does, however, resist categorical rigidity and is to that extent disconcerting in a monstrous sense. The disruption of our sense of what is alive or sentient and what is not could unearth anxiety, but the audience instead feels it to be silly and unthreatening. Other than its anthropomorphic ability to move on its own, the tire is just a tire. It is not distorted in any way—it is literally just a piece of rubber. The film ascribes a fearsomeness to the tire that exists only diegetically; the characters take it (literally) deathly seriously, but the audience, external to and aware of the genre conventions, laugh at the overall ridiculousness and the characters’ disproportionate fear. As Carroll describes with the kidney beans, something has to be believed to be harmful to be feared, and the characters must believe in the tire’s capacity to harm so as not to betray the genre conventions with which audiences are so affectionately or exhaustedly familiar (151). The fact that the film treats the tire as seriously harmful is key to its absurd amusement.
The ridiculousness of Robert is mapped onto cinema itself. The opening scene with the binoculars and smashed chairs details the supposed lack of reason in film that mirrors life itself. This absurd, postmodern stance is further articulated by the film’s subsequent spoof of genre conventions. By calling attention to film’s construction, we are brought to recognize its manufactured nature and, more importantly, the manufactured nature of our own emotions. Fear is produced by circumstances, so by making those circumstances silly we come to understand the sort of fragility of our reactions. Horror-comedy does not just make the fearsome laughable but fear itself, and it is in that joy that I think the genre-fusion’s outlandish fun lies.
I’ve never seen this film, but it reminds me of the movie “Killer Sofa”, in which a recliner chair is possessed and goes on a bloodthirsty killing spree. Similar to the tire, it is just a sofa with sentient abilities and a thirst for murder. However, in both movies the characters take it so seriously and we see a lot of gore and blood with it. At the end of the day though, it’s just a tire and a sofa. These movies blend a perfect combination of tense and anxiety-producing scenes – normally present in regular horror-tropes – and a monster that cannot be taken seriously by the audience. The blend of absurd monsters with terrifying tropes leads to the best horror comedies.