THE APPEAL OF HORROR

And everything that once was
Infinitely far
And unsayable is now
Unsayable
And right here in the room
From “Progress” Franz Wright

Horror films edify, satisfy and entertain; they also obscure, repulse and distract. Both celebrated and denounced, they are often dismissed as exploitation, appealing to our basest tastes and compulsions. On the other hand, they are also held up as a mirror of our collective psyche, revealing inconvenient and unpleasant truths about the species.

I believe the difficulty we have with horror is that it’s ultimately personal. While these films play with our minds—creating bouts of anxiety and tension, which through their dark arts, become somehow, pleasurable—the real object it toys with is our idea of our bodies

The “body,” is the central metaphor of this genre; and horror is successful only to the degree that it reminds us of the profound vulnerability of flesh and bone. Which is to say, when horror equates vulnerability with death…and in particular, with one’s own death.

Various theories compete to explain the appeal of these films. Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” and his notion of the “return of the repressed” have informed much subsequent inquiry. Later psychoanalytic-inspired investigators have developed supplementary

Still other approaches further elaborate on the role of the unconscious and these include Kristeva’s Lacan-influenced account of “abjection” and Creeds’ and Mulvey’s Feminist Theory, which examine critical differences between male and female viewing/experiences of horror.
There are also critics of the genre who reject the various psychoanalytic-inspired explanations, in part or in whole, and instead find social, political, aesthetic or ideological explanations for the continuing appeal of horror. These include post-modern critics such as Budra, Jameson and Tutor. Another, Noel Carroll, has developed the concept of “art-horror,” that describes a “kind of emotional state that works of horror seek to engender. “[A state] … that involves fear, disgust and revulsion on the part of the spectator or reader, a response specifically related to the distinguishing features of horror monsters.”

However, it is not my purpose to either defend or dismiss these or any other attempts at a general or universal explanation of the popularity of the genre. For an excellent survey of these aforementioned, as well as other approaches, I recommend Andrew Tudor’s comprehensive “Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre.”

The explanation I offer here, like those listed above, is an attempt to make sense of something seemingly inexplicable, namely, the enduring and extraordinary appeal of a genre that makes the experience of pain pleasurable, and that for lack of a better word, places at its center the “triumph” of death.

Familiar Territory

Before introducing this work, I would like to remind the reader that horror, consumed as entertainment, as opposed to the actual experience of the horrific, is not a recent phenomenon. It predates the predations of industrialization, the slaughter of the First World War, the crimes of the Holocaust, as well as the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the end game of the Cold War era. Although each of these catastrophes would, in their turn, provide the genre with meat for its table.

What’s more, it’s important to note that the loss of certainty, the rejection of authority, the erasure of boundaries, or the ruptures of systems that characterize postmodern life have not significantly altered the genre; nor has the re-emergence of pandemics and plagues either noticeably enhanced or diminished its appeal. (Even while we acknowledge advances in special effects, especially in regard to the heightened “realism” brought to bear in moments of both spectacular and intimate scenes of violence).

I suggest this longevity is due to the fact that it continues to perform its original function: Horror, regardless of the time or place of its setting, or the particular nature of terror it exploits, seeks, above all else, to re-introduce the living to its estranged, but life-long companion, Death.
As we saw above, horror achieves this by reducing the whole of a life to merely the life of the body. And in doing so, it has created what is possibly the world’s most popular experience of eroticism. (Which returns the favor by making such films even more tempting, if not irresistible.)

However, I believe that the genre’s great innovation (Or perhaps its secret?) was to show that even a person torn to pieces and a spirit ravaged beyond recognition could be, through the alchemy of death, restored into a single whole. Restored in the sense of transformed from flesh into spirit. Transformed from the mortal into the immortal.

These films test, retest and confirm Bataille’s observation:
“The body is a thing, vile, slavish, servile, just like a stone or a piece of wood. Only the spirit with its intimate and subjective truth cannot be reduced to a thing. It is sacred, housed in a profane body, that only becomes sacred in its turn, as death reveals the incomparable worth of the spirit.”

Horror, of course, predates film, and elements of the genre—structures, styles and texts—have their origins in earliest narratives. Over millennia, horror has made the transition from oral traditions into literary ones, and from paper to the stage, stage to film to TV, and from there, into various graphic and digital representations. Yet, I would like to suggest that even as the genre re-invents itself in response to ever-effervescent cultural, social, aesthetic and political conditions, there is nothing significantly new in either the telling, or in horror’s stock elements.

Horror continues to serve up: the intervention of the supernatural, sudden and cruel death, the appearance of actual monsters and/or of human beings who embody the monstrous. Which leads one to ask, are the men/monsters of Hostel that different Procrustes and his ilk? In the end, despite considerable innovations in form and content, the action still seems to center on the fact that 1) some taboo has been transgressed; 2) that punishment is demanded (by both the logic of the film and by the audience’s expectation), 3) that death is let loose to kill and through its action, impart some important lesson. (Both to those characters left standing in the film and to the members of the audience.)

However, as always, it all remains open to interpretation—zombies may reflect deeply felt, but equally deeply repressed, horror at the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse, or they may simply offer another version of the “beast within” that Joseph Grixti wrote of in Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction. (See Tutor, p. 445))

That horror is intended to be as instructive as it is entertaining can be seen in the fact that it appears in both sacred texts—the story of Job can be read as a horror story—and in profane media, and that it is as welcome in high culture, Macbeth, as it is in low, Tales from the Crypt. That horror also provides something essential to our psychic well-being—either as an immortality strategy or a catharsis—can be assumed by the fact that these stories do not, themselves, ever die. Rather, they are continually re-made, re-imagined, and re-animated.
One of the earliest horror films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), had as its villain a madman with irresistible powers. (It also had an unexpected dénouement.) Almost a hundred years later, the film Saw has as its villain a madman with irresistible powers. (It also has an unexpected dénouement.)

Since the original vampire film, Nosferatu (1920), itself derived from Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel Dracula, first appeared, it is estimated that as of 2004, 160 movies have been produced with the character Dracula cast in a major role. (Reference to Dracula may reach as high as 649 movies according to the Internet Movie Database.)

That the monster was destroyed in the original, only to be brought back to life in a “sequel” (a practice that goes back to the 1930s and ‘40s) requires a little more than the customary suspension of disbelief. The more contemporary term “franchise” which describes films such as Halloween, Hellraiser, The Ring and countless others, introduce another appealing layer to the genre, namely postmodern monsters. Along these lines, Paul Budra, as quoted in Martin Harris’ article, “You Can’t Kill the Boogeyman: Halloween III and the Modern Horror Franchise” states:
“…Postmodern unease” generated by “the perception that the world is increasingly one in which borders have collapsed, in which preconceptions, hierarchies, absolutes, and perhaps reason itself are being abandoned, drawing an analogy of sorts between the content of these films and their form: The threat in postmodern horror … is not the lurker on the threshold, but the very absence of thresholds,” a threat “manifested in formal aspects of these films, not the least of which is the sequel.”

In both reflecting and mastering our uncertainties, these monsters offer consumers different kind of reassurance, and so in this way, we can see in these monsters something vaguely familiar. And it is this familiarity that perhaps makes them appealing. It is exactly this experience that harkens back to Freud’s original idea of the uncanny as “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed.”

I think it is this familiarity, this sense of the uncanny, that helps explain some of the difficulty Andrew Tudor refers to when writing about horror: “When we ask, ‘why horror? precisely what we are asking is far from clear. Even at its simplest the question has two distinct aspects, involving either or both of ‘what is it about people who like horror’ and ‘what is it about horror that people like?’”

For the purposes of this paper, I want to suggest that an answer to Tudor’s question can be found at the intersection of these two questions. It’s my belief that most people don’t like horror; rather, they like watching horror, hearing horror and sensing horror. They also like talking about horror and the sensations it allows them to re-experience. Which is to say, consumers of horror like what they experience when watching horror—feelings of dislocation, tension and anxiety, and any of a hundred other sensations. I think this disconnect can be somewhat explained by Bataille, “Our secret experience cannot enter directly the field of our conscious awareness, but at least our consciousness can know just when it shifts out of the way the thing it condemns. So, our deepest truths come up to consciousness as something accursed and condemned as sin.”-

2. TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

Yet, also inside the armor of the knight,
Inside those sinister rings,
Death squats, musing and brooding;
When will the sword, that strange
Liberating blade, spring
Over the iron hedge
To release me from this place
That has cramped me many a day
So that I can stretch myself
And Play
And Sing.
The Knight
Rilke: Das Buch der Dider
Trans. James B. Hall

I suspect what makes these sights; sounds and sensations of horror bearable are that they are experienced in the “sacred” precinct of the theater, far from where we actually live. (Or in one’s home behind the presumed safety of the bolted door.) Horror, for this duration, is contained within the screen. It is a presence in a narrative that in no way intersects with a spectator’s life. We hold on to this belief, even as this notion of separate worlds—real life versus the cinematic representation—is increasing tested; in fact, the dissolution of Budra’s threshold, has become a trope of recent horror, as seen in The Ring and its sequels, although it was anticipated by earlier films, such as David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983).

Here, I think Freud’s explanation of the uncanny becomes more helpful if we identify the word “terror” as the essential experience of horror. The experience of the uncanny, according to Freud, “derives its terror not from something externally alien or unknown but, on the contrary, from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it.”
I wonder if it isn’t our terror of death that is awakened by the horror film? Could these films awaken in the spectator an awareness of proximity to death and that it is this awareness that triggers that feeling of terror and related sensations?

A consistent aspect of horror films is that its portrayal of violence is often seductive. As I mentioned earlier, horror films tend to reduce the whole of a life to the life of the body. In fact, much of contemporary horror consists of showing more terrible ways to violate the body. The old saying, “It made my skin crawl,“ accurately places the threat on the body. It appears that horror in general, and recent horror in particular, makes one acutely aware of his or her body, and as such offer a promise of not inconsiderable erotic pleasure, in addition to the emotional affects such as catharsis.

Some critics explain the attraction of these films (the “Torture” subgenre) by implicating the audience in the violence, saying that people are paying not so much for the traditional horror experience, but to enjoy the sight (and sensation) of watching people being tortured and murdered. I wouldn’t argue that a minority of horror film consumers don’t find an expression of their sado-masochistic tendencies in these films, but I think this is an obvious and not a particularly interesting analysis of the appeal of these films.

There’s another explanation I’d like to develop which I call the Paradox of Proximity. At the movies, or even at home, consumers of horror are just close enough to observe death, to look directly into its face, to be within arm’s reach, and yet feel themselves safe as if watching from an infinite distance away.

The notion of serial death is a painful and so unacceptable truth. Painful because the death of another leads us to infer that if others can die, so can we. Our response to this irrefutable logic is to repress awareness of not simply death in our lives, but the frequency and variety of death in our life—our own personal horror franchise so to speak. If we did not suppress this awareness, I suspect we might all succumb to Freud’s notion of melancholia—an excessive state of mourning—and enter states of either complete dissipation a la de Sade, or into of mirthless apathy common to people caught in protracted war or poverty.

The Paradox of Proximity is a strategy that enables horror audience to deny the fact that death is a frequent visitor in their own life. So long as death operates within the parameters of the screen, we are safe by virtue of the fact that we are not in the film. We continue to believe in this “safe distance,” even as death snatches those nearest and dearest to us, and in ways not unlike those perfected by such popular monsters as: Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, or the anonymous crowds of zombies.

The Paradox of Proximity acknowledges death while encouraging a kind of amnesia, where one simply fails to recall the death of those one has known. But this is only a temporary amnesia. A passing memory or association may trigger the recall the dead the way a few strains of music may lead one to hum an entire song.

In the interest of full disclosure, I will now admit that I am not a fan of horror movies. I saw the first of the Friday the 13th movies, but none of the sequels. I never saw Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Evil Dead, etc. I was tempted to see, Hostel, but only because I had spent the summer months of 1976 hitchhiking through Western Europe. (Note: Horror films tempt, another aspect of their erotic powers.)

Nevertheless, as a feature of our culture, I believe horror films offer its consumers a ritualistic solution to the problem of death. This ritual has at its center human sacrifice, even though what is sacrificed are characters and not living persons. (But this is merely a technicality, since the characters are meant to stand in for us. Which is one reason why I am skeptical of some of the conclusions of those who are critical of the Torture films.)

Toward this end, I also think that these films possess a talisman-like power to keep the death both satisfied and distracted until we make our getaway. These films accomplish this by providing death and his agents with an inexhaustible supply of bodies. (Over the history of film, we move from individual death to collective death to extinction as a species, reflecting the audience’s current state mind.) Which leads one to wonder whether there’s a horror film where everyone dies? Or have we reached a point of diminishing return—a tipping point at which death really does need a holiday?

Through the Paradox of Proximity, horror films help us to avoid thinking about death as a real and present (and increasingly likely) possibility. The experience enables consumers to purchase not only 90-minutes or so of curious pleasures, but also a 90-minute reprieve from death itself. As I wrote above, so long as the action takes place on the screen, we may deny the reality death itself. After all, it’s only a movie.

3. MY PERSONAL HORROR FRANCHISE

I’ve lived now for more than 60 years far from war and insulated by time and distance from epidemics and pandemics. I’ve survived earthquakes and brush fires. My Guardian Angels, alert as they were loving. I feel I can compare my distance from hurt was comparable to that of Siddhartha Gautama.

Oddly enough, I say this despite the present of death in my life. There were deaths: my great grandmother, my grandfathers, grandmothers (both dead before I was born), great uncles and aunts, unexceptional uncles and aunts, the occasional news of an unfortunate cousin. Even my father had died—of excess, which is to say, an unexceptional death.

Death, I did not notice. Nor did I notice that until recently I had no pictures of family members in my house. Nor did I think it strange that I didn’t visit my mother when she was in the hospital or return home to say goodbye to either my dying grandfather or father. There was time, but I never found it.

However, the more I began to reflect on the appeal of horror films and the more I meditated on the nature of death, the more I saw of it. Suddenly the dead included not only ancient members of my family but classmates, friends, and friends of friends, colleagues, and neighbors. As soon as I remembered one death: David Hirschman, leukemia, I saw another, my dear friend Alan F.W. Roy who, although battered, battled AIDS. There were more than a few snatched by heroin and cocaine overdoses. Car Accidents. Swept to sea. The more dead/deaths I recalled, the more I remembered, until the lyrics of Jim Carroll song, “People Who Died” popped into my head.

Recently, it occurred to me that I lived in the center of my own horror franchise. Death tugged, while the methods or mechanisms I used to deny death continued to defy explanation. But as I grow older, it’s time to acknowledge its shadow. Its growing shadow. One by one they enter the room. The one who committed suicide. The other who took home the wrong man. Some died horribly, others suddenly, or, at the least, ironically. Of course, I should resent its presence, but I don’t. Yes, every death is monstrous, each an outrage. All regrettable if for no other reason than every death is a harbinger of one’s own.