Body Gothic

Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film

Xavier Aldana Reyes

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781783160945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012).

1

Splatterpunk

Splatterpunk, although retrospectively seen as a relatively cogent literary movement, did not suddenly come into existence. This horror fiction subgenre gradually gathered momentum after David J. Schow christened it at the Twelfth World Fantasy Convention in 1986.1 It roughly blossomed from 1985 to 1990 through the work of the self-professed Splat Pack, which included John Skipp and Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, Richard Christian Matheson, Ray Garton, Robert R. McCammon and Schow himself amongst others, and the aggressively violent and extremely visceral novels of cult horror writers Edward Lee or Jack Ketchum, especially the latter’s Off Season (1981) and The Girl Next Door (1989). Group pictures abound, even if some of its practitioners have afterwards distanced themselves from the movement, and splatterpunk could be said to have gradually disappeared after 1990, even if successful novels such as Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls (1992) could still be connected to it. In fact, it could be argued that the reason why ‘splatterpunk’ is no longer used as an adjective to define a specific type of fiction is because the extremity it once came to define has been more widely assimilated by the horror genre.2 Splatterpunk aimed to shock, generally through displays of corporeal transgression encompassing anything from extreme mutilation and transformation to mutation or severe body modification and graphic sex. Whilst I am not suggesting that splatterpunk was the first instance of gothic writing that sought to exploit corporeality for reading affect – as I have argued, I see this as an ineluctable aspect of gothic horror more broadly – it is a testament to the relevance that corporeality has gained in the construction of spaces or zones of affect for contemporary writers. Although splatterpunk’s settings (cemeteries, derelict abbeys, slums), characters (vampires, zombies, tyrannical villains), tropes (hauntings, invasions, incarcerations) mostly adhere to the canon, this chapter turns to the way in which its constituting fictions have actually developed, rather than followed, the gothic tradition.

Gothic fiction in the 1970s had obviously already entered graphic territory, but only sparingly and often with a degree of caution. James Herbert’s The Rats (1975), a splatterpunk novel avant la lettre, takes place in a London ridden with a mutated species of rodents. The novel’s episodic structure is mostly driven by short vignettes set in the gloomier quarters of the city that eventually reveal themselves as murder set pieces more typical of 1960s and 1970s exploitation films. Herbert’s novel received heavy criticism for its graphic depictions of violence, which included homeless people being eaten alive. The Rats had been preceded by literary works that had been very different in their nature and tone, and which pointed to a very different taste in gothic fiction. The most successful horror novel of the previous decade, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1966), used the subtle construction of atmosphere and the trappings of the suburban gothic to generate fear, and Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) had, only a few years earlier, depended largely on suspense and warped psychologies.3 Herbert’s visceral novel proposed a break with the work of previous writers by emphasising the affective potential of explicit descriptions of mutilation and death. As the author explained, although the decision to be graphic was not necessarily the result of a dissatisfaction with the current state of the genre, it still managed to perceptively anticipate changes in readerly expectations. Herbert saw his early novels as

the initial part in a growing explicitness of narrative, stories that rarely balked at expressing horror’s true physical reality. Judging by the genre’s swift return to public attention, through both the novel and the screen, that reality had been suppressed far too long … Readers or moviegoers no longer wanted to be merely frightened, they wanted to be shocked rigid too.4

The Rats and Herbert’s similarly visceral The Fog (1975) were published just after Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie (1974), had started gathering attention. The work of this most successful contemporary writer also showed an obvious urgency to portray corporeality in viscous and carnal detail. This preoccupation with ‘the effectiveness of … images’, in conjunction with the use of specific gothic tropes or stock characters, would be taken up and articulated by splatterpunk a decade later.5

Herbert’s remark about the state of horror in the mid-1970s perspicaciously encompasses both readers and moviegoers. A fond allegiance to a cinematic tradition is crucial to a full understanding of the ethos behind the splatterpunk movement, not the least because it is partly named after splatter films. The most obvious examples are Joe R. Lansdale’s The Drive-In: A ‘B’ Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas (1988) and The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels (1989), and the edited collection Silver Scream (1988), which purposely brought together writers and directors, and sought to explore the symbiotic relationship between horror and cinema. Clive Barker’s ‘Son of Celluloid’ (1984), a short story in the third volume of his Books of Blood, features a virus that transforms into Hollywood actors to attack the audience and thus anticipates the filmic meta-horrors of Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985). If the spatial boundaries between spectator and screen had already been pushed by director William Castle and his various theatrical gimmicks – a glowing skeleton descending on the audience in House on Haunted Hill (1959), vibrating seats in The Tingler (1959) – splatterpunk would cement these affective concerns.

Much like Herbert’s The Rats distinguished itself from previous gothic writing, splatter cinema has been constructed as a departure from the more restrained cinema of directors like Val Lewton.6 John McCarty defines splatter films as ‘off-shoots of the horror film genre, [which] aim not to scare their audiences, necessarily, nor to drive them to the edge of their seats in suspense, but to mortify them with scenes of explicit gore’.7 Finding its roots in the more overtly exploitational gore cinema of Herschell Gordon Lewis and gaining popular appeal through the reputed B-movie Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968), splatter cinema was distinctive because it featured increasing levels of explicit violence and because the camera refused to look away. The prevalence of serial killers in subgenres related to splatter such as, for example, the slasher cycle, has driven attention away from the potential gothic qualities of works like Friday the 13^th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980).8 As a result, there has been little engagement with these texts as staples of gothic cinema and they are notoriously absent from surveys of gothic horror film.9 It should not be forgotten that it was the gothic period pieces of Hammer Studios, spearheaded by the successful Technicolor adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula that first injected a dose of gore into the history of horror cinema.10 In fact, even the grand Guignol and the EC Comics traditions, usually cited as a direct influence on splatter cinema, often found inspiration in the gothic tales of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe.11 Splatter cinema makes the corporeality inherent to the gothic tradition its main spectacle, and it foregrounds pace, sometimes at the expense of narrative logic or continuity. The focus therefore shifts from the creation of suspense or a specific mood or atmosphere – still important – to the display of special effects.12 In short, splatter cinema illustrates the shift towards a gothic tradition that can recreate particular corporeal sensations through detailed stagecraft. Contrary to more modern gothic, splatterpunk, as a particularly virulent horror subgenre, often relishes the histrionics of corporeality and makes the most of the excesses that have come to define it.13

Such a shift towards an uncomfortable and transgressive form of the gothic translated almost directly into fiction. John Skipp and Craig Spector, who co-authored six splatterpunk novels, wrote a preface in their influential zombie anthology Book of the Dead that reflects on splatterpunk’s desire ‘to stretch the boundaries of modern horror fiction’ and to ‘go too far’.14 According to the authors, horror had thus far been constituted by the work of certain writers that are now firmly established within the gothic canon, namely, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson or Robert Bloch.15 Although splatterpunk should not be envisaged as an anti-gothic horror movement, but as an engagement and extension of that tradition, there is a clear sense in which its practitioners sought to bring fiction into a territory that was self-evidently, and packaged as, visceral. In a sense, the experience of excess that they were seeking to generate has much in common with some of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century gothic novels I mentioned in the introduction. It should not be surprising then that, like their filmic counterparts, the excesses of splatterpunk would suffer from censorship. Ray Garton’s Crucifax Abbey (1989), which included a very graphic birth scene, famously had to be excised and the novel published in an expurgated version. Similarly, detractors of splatterpunk soon made their voices heard in a manner that echoed the reception of canonical gothic novels such as The Monk.16 Writer William F. Nolan, for example, complained about what he perceived as ‘the Vomit Bag School of Horror, whether on screen or on the printed page – books and stories and films featuring gore for gore’s sake, designed strictly for the purpose of grossing out an audience’.17 As Skipp and Spector note, critiques of splatterpunk as an ‘overt mode’ were so preoccupied with reducing it to ‘cheap sensationalism’ that they remained blind to the subgenre’s preoccupation with making the unknown known.18 Actually, as Skipp and Spector explained, splatterpunk is multi-levelled:

The first level [is] the ground floor of being. It’s fear as a matter of simple biology: the flesh, surrendering to the laws of physics … The second level … takes place on the stripped-naked faces of the people to whom this horror is occurring … The third level [is] the level of gestalt, of fusion and reintegration. At this point, you can no longer detach; the unknown has become tangible and all too real, beyond cheapening on the one hand or denial on the other. You can see the wet hole and the charred stump, yes; but beyond that – and in vital, visceral conjunction – you can know how it feels to be part of it.19

This is the aim of splatterpunk and, more generally, of body gothic: to recreate and exploit a moment of ‘meat meeting mind, with the soul as screaming omniscient witness’.20 Whilst the spiritual side of this encounter between affect and corporeality is something that preoccupies my latter discussion of Clive Barker, it is important to note that splatterpunk understands itself as not merely an exercise in pushing boundaries, but as an illuminating materialist and empirical experience. Splatterpunk writers appeal to the affective part of the reader/spectator and thus foreground the role that their bodies play in the fictional transaction.

The second noun in the word ‘splatterpunk’, although also a wink to the then popular cyberpunk movement, very consciously refers to a rock music genre similarly linked to transgression and anti-establishment politics. Although the connections between punk and the extreme fiction considered in this chapter are not always overt (i.e. there are very few punks in these novels and stories), more general rock music permeates both the literary moods of the works and even their method of writing. As Sammon suggests in the introduction to his second anthology on splatterpunk, a general picture of this subgenre would be incomplete without ‘the screaming guitar licks of the world’s greatest heavy bands’.21 Not surprisingly, the last chapter in this anthology is dedicated to a long list of music that most definitely does not include ‘one single fucking Madonna record’.22 Splatterpunk fictions such as Michael Slade’s Ghoul (1987), David J. Schow’s The Kill Riff (1988) or Philip Nutman’s ‘Full Throttle’ (1990) feature doomed music starts or delve in the radical aspects of specific urban subcultures such as punk.23 In the case of Richard Christian Matheson or Skipp and Spector, splatterpunk writers may even be former or practising rock musicians themselves.24 These writers’ incorporation of successful or struggling musicians was not groundbreaking as such. Gothic novels such as Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat (1985) had already explored rock stardom. But whilst hers was an isolated instance, splatterpunk consistently exploited the transgressive and political aspects of rock and brought the term into the graphic territory of its fictions. Music in splatter-punk exceeds representation and filters through the writing method to grant it a sense of urgency.

If the role of musical subcultures to this type of gothic fiction will be further explored in chapter 3, it is important, at this stage, to recognise the disruptive and revolutionary aspect that these texts identify in alternative communities. The punk in splatterpunk is more than just ‘a mocking echo of cyberpunk’, as Ken Tucker proposes.25 Radical lifestyles abound in splatterpunk because, like its fiction, they defy the status quo with ‘courage’ and a ‘no-bullshit attitude’.26 This rebellious approach to life is what, according to writer Craig Spector, made rock so appealing to splatterpunk.27 In the same way that goth has often found inspiration in gothic literature and imagery, splatterpunk found in rock a language through which to articulate a countercultural message. Anya Martin notes that this is not coincidental:

Indeed, rock ‘n’ roll as a musical style that challenges cultural taboos shares a number of characteristics with horror as a literary style which at its best tests the limits of our sensibilities. A case can be...