Horror, The Film Reader

Mark Jancovich, Mark Jancovich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134563746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Horror, The Film Reader brings together key articles to provide a comprehensive resource for students of horror cinema. Mark Jancovich's introduction traces the development of horror film from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to The Blair Witch Project, and outlines the main critical debates. Combining classic and recent articles, each section explores a central issue of horror film, and features an editor's introduction outlining the context of debates.

PART ONE
THEORIZING HORROR

Introduction

As we saw in the general introduction, much work on the horror film has tried to identify the defining features of the genre. Part I looks at this particular aspect of the analysis of horror, and it contains three extracts. The first is Robin Wood’s now classic essay on the horror film which was referred to in the general introduction, and, as we have seen, it develops out of both auteur theory and genre criticism. On the one hand, Wood tries to identify the central oppositions that define the genre, while on the other hand he is also concerned to establish the auteur status of a series of directors who have worked within it.

In his attempt to define the genre, like many other critics, he turns to psychoanalysis. For Wood, the clearly fantastical nature of many horror plots presents a problem: fantasy is often seen as mere escapism, a refusal to deal with ‘reality’, and hence as inherently unserious. The turn to psychoanalysis is therefore one way in which writers such as Wood are able to reinvest horror with seriousness. Through psychoanalysis, the fantastical nature of many horror plots can be read not as escapism, but as an attempt to deal with repressed materials. As a result, Wood draws an analogy between the horror film and dreams, in which he argues:

Dreams—the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions, fears that our conscious mind rejects—become possible when the censor that guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep, though even then the desires can only emerge in disguise, as fantasies that are innocent or apparently meaningless.

(p. 30)

Here the fantasy is therefore a symptom of something else. It is a coded expression of the tension between social norms and unconscious desires.

In other words, rather than escapism, fantasy tries to deal with the very materials that rational ‘realist’ discourse exists to repress, and it therefore offers a potentially subversive critique of the social world. The unconscious desires that erupt in dreams and horror films are the product of social repression, and in giving expression to these desires, horror therefore implies a critique of the social world that represses them. As Wood puts it, ‘the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses’ (see page).

As a result, he not only outlines the different ways in which horror monsters speak of repression and oppression, but also argues that it is due to their nature as embodiments of repressed desire that audiences have such ambivalent relationships with horror monsters. On the one hand, they are obviously monstrous – that which audiences cannot socially acknowledge and accept – but on the other they also represent our desire to flout social norms: ‘Central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their fulfillment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere’ (see page). Audiences experience ambivalence about the monster precisely because of the contradictions between the conscious and the unconscious.

The next passage is by Noël Carroll, and while Carroll rejects psychoanalytic accounts in favour of cognitive psychology, he also presents ambivalence as being central to the horror film. The turn to cognitive psychology has become very popular within recent forms of film studies as a way of understanding how audiences make sense of films, and it is largely associated with historical poetics (see, for example, Bordwell, 1985).

In Carroll’s account of horror, audiences’ ambivalent responses to the figure of the monster are not primarily about the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious mind but about the way in which monsters ‘violate our classifactory scheme’ (see page). In other words, their fantastical nature is precisely about the way in which they flout our ‘conceptual categories’ and so produce both fascination and disgust (Carroll, 1990:185).

One of the strengths of Carroll’s account is that he is therefore able to analyse how this relationship with the monster produces particular and distinctive narrative forms. For example, while he argues that horror narratives are concerned with the processes of revealing and disclosing the monster, he is also able to claim that these processes are handled differently from detective stories and disaster films.

However, there are a number of problems with Carroll’s account. On the one hand, it has been argued that the preoccupation with knowledge and problem solving that is so central to cognitive psychology is ill equipped to deal with a genre so centred upon emotional affect. In other words, despite Carroll’s discussion of the viewer’s ambivalent responses to the monster, his analysis of the narrative concentrates on ‘cognitive pleasures’ associated with rational ‘problem solving’. It provides little room for an understanding of the emotional processes and responses of horror audiences.

Even more problematic is Carroll’s conception of the horror audience. As Wood acknowledges, it not only is the case that many people positively dislike horror films but also that the genre’s ‘popularity itself has a peculiar characteristic that sets it apart from other genres: it is restricted to aficionados and complemented by total rejection, people tending to go to horror films either obsessively or not at all’ (Chapter 1, pp. below). Furthermore, it is for this reason that, as Carroll observes, ‘a theoretical question about horror’ frequently arises that does not arise in the same way ‘with respect to other popular genres’ (Chapter 2, p. below). According to Carroll, this question is: ‘how can we explain its very existence, for why would anyone want to be horrified, or even art-horrified?’ (see page). While people may not actually like specific genres, many consider the appeal of horror films a problem in itself. A taste for westerns may be strange, but a taste for horror films is often seen as somehow ‘sick’.

However, if people have different responses to horror film, some deriving pleasure from the genre and others not, Wood and Carroll’s discussions of it has particular problems. Their accounts purport to describe the pleasures of the genre to viewers, but it is quite clear that certain viewers do not gain pleasure from the genre, and as a result, not all viewers consume horror films in the same way.

In Chapter 3, Andrew Tudor pays particular attention to this problem and argues that the very attempt to understand how audiences gain pleasure from horror films is misconstrued. As he argues, not only do different audiences make sense of horror in different ways, but ‘horror’ is not a coherent entity in which all horror films work in the same way. He therefore takes issue with universal accounts of the genre that try to define it in particular ways, and he calls instead for particularistic accounts that study the consumption of specific types of horror by specific audiences within specific social settings.

1 The American nightmare

Horror in the 70s

ROBIN WOOD

[. . .]

In the previous chapter I briefly introduced the distinction between basic and surplus repression, developed out of Freud by Marcuse, and given definitive expression in a book that should be far better known than it is: Repression, by Gad Horowitz. The book’s subtitle is “Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud, Reich, Marcuse”; it is dense, often difficult, very closely and cogently argued, and the account offered here is necessarily bald and simplified.

Basic repression is universal, necessary, and inescapable. It is what makes possible our development from an uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and convulsions into a human being; it is bound up with the ability to accept the postponement of gratification, with the development of our thought and memory processes, of our capacity for self-control, and of our recognition of and consideration for other people. Surplus repression, on the other hand, is specific to a particular culture and is the process whereby people are conditioned from earliest infancy to take on predetermined roles within that culture. In terms of our own culture, then: basic repression makes us distinctively human, capable of directing our own lives and co-existing with others; surplus represssion makes us into monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists (“bourgeois” even if we are born into the proletariat, for we are talking here of ideological norms rather than material status)—that is, if it works. If it doesn’t, the result is either a neurotic or a revolutionary (or both), and if revolutionaries account for a very small proportion of the population, neurotics account for a very large one. Hardly surprising. All known existing societies are to some degree surplus-repressive, but the degree varies enormously, from the trivial to the overwhelming. Freud saw long ago that our own civilization had reached a point where the burden of repression was becoming all but insupportable, an insight Horowitz (following Marcuse) brilliantly relates to Marx’s theory of alienated labor. The most immediately obvious characteristics of life in our culture are frustration, dissatisfaction, anxiety, greed, possessiveness, jealousy, neuroticism: no more than what psychoanalytic theory shows to be the logical product of patriarchal capitalism. What needs to be stressed is that the challenges now being made to the system—and the perceptions and recognitions that structure those challenges and give them impetus—become possible (become in the literal sense thinkable) only in the circumstances of the system’s imminent disintegration. While the system retained sufficient conviction, credibility and show of coherence to suppress them, it did so. The struggle for liberation is not utopian, but a practical necessity.

Given that our culture offers an extreme example of surplus repressiveness, one can ask what, exactly, in the interests of alienated labor and the patriarchal family, is repressed. One needs here both to distinguish between the concepts of repression and oppression and to suggest the continuity between them. In psychoanalytic terms, what is repressed is not accessible to the conscious mind (except through analysis or, if one can penetrate their disguises, in dreams). We may also not be conscious of ways in which we are oppressed, but it is much easier to become so: we are oppressed by something “out there.” One might perhaps define repression as fully internalized oppression (while reminding ourselves that all the groundwork of repression is laid in infancy), thereby suggesting both the difference and the connection. A specific example may make this clearer: our social structure demands the repression of the bisexuality that psychoanalysis shows to be the natural heritage of every human individual and the oppression of homosexuals: obviously the two phenomena are not identical, but equally obviously they are closely connected. What escapes repression has to be dealt with by oppression.

What, then, is repressed in our culture? First, sexual energy itself, together with its possible successful sublimation into non-sexual creativity—sexuality being the source of creative energy in general. The “ideal” inhabitant of our culture is the individual whose sexuality is sufficiently fulfilled by the monogamous heterosexual union necessary for the reproduction of future ideal inhabitants, and whose sublimated sexuality (creativity) is sufficiently fulfilled in the totally non-creative and non-fulfilling labor (whether in factory or office) to which our society dooms the overwhelming majority of its members. The ideal, in other words, is as close as possible to an automaton in whom both sexual and intellectual energy has been reduced to a minimum. Otherwise, the ideal is a contradiction in terms and a logical impossibility— hence the necessary frustration, anxiety and neuroticism of our culture.

Second, bisexuality—which should be understood both literally (in terms of possible sexual orientation and practice) and in a more general sense. Bisexuality represents the most obvious and direct affront to the principle of monogamy and its supportive romantic myth of “the one right person”; the homosexual impulse in both men and women represents the most obvious threat to the norm of sexuality as reproductive and restricted by the ideal of family. But more generally we confront here the whole edifice of clear-cut sexual differentiation that bourgeois-capitalist ideology erects on the flimsy and dubious foundations of biological difference: the social norms of masculinity and femininity, the social definitions of manliness and womanliness, the whole vast apparatus of oppressive male/female myths, and the systematic repression from infancy (“blue for a boy”) of the man’s femininity and the woman’s masculinity, in the interests of forming human beings for specific predetermined social roles.

Third, the particularly severe repression of female sexuality/creativity, the attribution to the female of passivity, and her preparation for her subordinate, dependent role in our culture. Clearly, a crucial aspect of the repression of bisexuality is the denial to women of drives culturally associated with masculinity: activeness, aggression, self-assertion, organizational power, creativity itself.

Fourth, and fundamentally, the repression of the sexuality of children, taking different forms from infancy, through “latency” and puberty, and into adolescence—the process moving, indeed, from repression to oppression, from the denial of the infant’s nature as sexual being to the veto on the expression of sexuality before marriage.

None of these forms of repression is necessary for the existence of civilization in some form (i.e., none is “basic”)—for the development of our human-ness. Indeed, they impose limitations and restrictions on that development, stunting human potential. All are the outcome of the requirements of the particular surplus-repressive civilization in which we live.

Closely linked to the concept of repression—indeed, truly inseparable from it—is another concept necessary to an understanding of ideology on which psychoanalysis throws much light, the concept of “the Other.” Otherness represents that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with (as Barthes suggests in Mythologies) in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself. The concept of Otherness can be theorized in many ways and on many levels. Its psychoanalytic significance resides in the fact that it functions not simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what is repressed (though never destroyed) in the self and projected outward in order to be hated and disowned. A particularly vivid example—and one that throws light on a great many classical Westerns—is the relationship of the Puritan settlers to the Indians in the early days of America. The Puritans rejected any perception that the Indians had a culture, a civilization, of their own; they perceived them not merely as savage but, literally, as devils or the spawn of the Devil; and, since the Devil and sexuality were inextricably linked in the Puritan consciousness, they perceived them as sexually promiscuous, creatures of unbridled libido. The connection between this view of the Indian and Puritan repression is obvious: a classic and extreme case of the projection on to the Other of what is repressed within the Self in order that it can be discredited, disowned, and if possible annihilated. It is repression, in other words, that makes impossible the healthy alternative—the full recognition and acceptance of the Other’s autonomy and right to exist.

Some versions follow of the figure of the Other as it operates within our culture, of its relation to repression and oppression, and of how it is characteristically dealt with:

1. Quite simply, other people. It is logical and probable that under capitalism all human relations will be characterized by power, dominance, possessiveness, manipulation: the extension into relationships of the property principle. Given the subordinate and dependent position of women, this is especially true of the culture’s central relationship, the male/female, and explains why marriage as we have it is characteristically a kind of mutual imperialism/ colonization, on exchange of different forms of possession and dependence, both economic and emotional. In theory, relations between people of the same sex stand more chance of evading this contamination, but in practice most gay and lesbian relationships tend to rely on heterosexual models. The otherness and the autonomy of the partner as well as her/his right to freedom and independence of being are perceived as a threat to the possession/ dependence principle and are denied.

2. Woman. In a male-dominated culture, where power, money, law, and social institutions are controlled by past, present, and future patriarchs, woman as the Other assumes particular significance. The dominant images of women in our culture are entirely male created and male controlled. Woman’s autonomy and independence are denied; on to women men project their own innate, repressed femininity in order to disown it as inferior (to be called “unmanly”—i.e., like a woman—is the supreme insult).

3. The proletariat—insofar as it still has any autonomous existence and has escaped its colonization by bourgeois ideology. It remains, at least, a conveniently available object for projection: the bourgeois obsession with cleanliness, which psychoanalysis shows to be an outward symptom closely associated with sexual repression, and bourgeois sexual repression itself, find their inverse reflections in the myths of working-class squalor and sexuality.

4. Other cultures. If they are sufficiently remote, no problem arises: they can be simultaneously deprived of their true character and exoticized (e.g., Polynesian cultures as embodied by Dorothy Lamour). If they are inconveniently close, another approach predominates, of which what happened to the American Indian is a prime example. The procedure is very precisely represented in Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk, with its double vision of the Indians as “sons of Belial” fit only for extermination and as the Christianized, domesticated, servile, and (hopefully) comic Blueback.

5. Ethnic groups within the culture. Again, they function as easily available projection objects (myths of black sexuality, animality, etc.). Or they become acceptable in two ways: either they keep to their ghettos and don’t trouble us with their otherness, or they behave as we do and become replicas of the good bourgeois, their Otherness reduced to the one unfortunate difference of color. We are more likely to invite a Pakistani to dinner if he dresses in a business suit.

6. Alternative ideologies or political systems. The exemplary case is of course Marxism, the strategy that of parody. Still almost totally repressed within our pre-university education system (despite the key importance of Marx—whatever way you look at it—in the development of twentieth-century thought), Marxism exists generally in our culture only in the form of bourgeois myth that renders it indistinguishable from Stalinism.

7. Deviations from ideological sexual norms—notably bisexuality and homosexuality. One of the clearest instances of the operation of the repression/projection mechanism, homophobia (the irrational hatred and fear of homosexuals) is only explicable as the product of the unsuccessful repression of bisexual tendencies: what is hated in others is what is rejected (but nonetheless continues to exist) within the self.

8. Children. When we have worked our way through all the other liberation movements, we may discover that children are the most oppressed section of the population (unfortunately, we cannot expect to liberate our children until we have successfully liberated ourselves). Most clearly of all, the otherness of children (see Freudian theories of infantile sexuality) is that which is repressed within ourselves, its expression therefore hated in others. What the previous generation repressed in us, we, in turn, repress in our children, seeking to mold them into replicas of ourselves, ...