The Psycho Records

Laurence A. Rickels

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780231543491
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

?The Psycho Records follows the influence of the primal shower scene within subsequent slasher and splatter films. American soldiers returning from World War II were called "psychos" if they exhibited mental illness. Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock turned the term into a catch-all phrase for a range of psychotic and psychopathic symptoms or dispositions. They transferred a war disorder to the American heartland. Drawing on his experience with German film, Hitchcock packed inside his shower stall the essence of schauer, the German cognate meaning "horror." Later serial horror film production has post-traumatically flashed back to Hitchcock's shower scene. In the end, though, this book argues the effect is therapeutically finite. This extensive case study summons the genealogical readings of philosopher and psychoanalyst Laurence Rickels. The book opens not with another reading of Hitchcock's 1960 film but with an evaluation of various updates to vampirism over the years. It concludes with a close look at the rise of demonic and infernal tendencies in horror movies since the 1990s and the problem of the psycho as our most uncanny double in close quarters.

RECORD ONE

Playing Catch Up with the Vampire − But with True Blood

1

While touring in 1999 with The Vampire Lectures I noted that the fans of undeath had a real problem with John Carpenter’s 1998 film Vampires. Goth girls shivered with revulsion at that ugly depiction of vampirism as exercise in all-around psychopathic violence. The memory of this in-group resistance to the Carpenter film is all I had to build on when awakening from another bout of Rip van Winkle oblivion that befell me upon closing the book on vampirism in the early 1990s. In 2009 I was invited by Artforum International to address the changes that had gone into vampirism according to the TV show True Blood (2008–2014). In the process of fulfilling my assignment to catch up with the new vampire, another longstanding project was dragged up in its train, the figuration of psycho horror in slasher and splatter cinema. While vampirism was re-emerging in the place monopolised by zombie projections, the psycho violence specific to slasher and splatter films, which had been therapeutically terminated by 1990, was beginning to find a new delegation under the aegis of the Devil. These reflections on the Undad and the closing reflections on the Devil Dad frame the concise psycho history of the secularisation of occult horror that is this study’s content.

It’s true that in time for the new millennium the vampires were changing. Whereas bloodsucking was routinely interpreted in the era before as metaphor for genital sexuality (which I always felt missed the points of the encounter), the vampire fictions themselves began to flesh or flush out the pre-Oedipal blood bond with the fully sexual bodies of our undead neighbours (for example, in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003)and the film trilogy Blade (1998, 2002, 2004). This normativisation of the vampire was attended by narratives of race (and class). Previously werewolves walked in the fine print of undead defence policies issued to protect the vampire during the span of time he spent stuck in the coffin, as utterly unprotected as only the dead can be. To the extent that the werewolf figured at all in vampire fictions in the pre-Buffy days he was often a familiar; at times he was the metamorphic mask a vampire could assume to maintain mobility during daytime programming. That was then. In the meantime werewolves could be recognised as belonging to the service industry of the underworld. If you show me a vampire you have to show me the local disgruntled werewolf or shape-shifter, too. Indeed we were soon instructed (in Underworld (2003) and its sequels) that the lycanthrope was originally related to the vampire, whose ‘purity’ was but the guilty assumption whereby the snarliest vampires maintained a false sense of superiority. These new fables came to the point by overcoming the prohibition against intermarriage.

It’s true that the werewolf is the other melancholic, indeed emphatically so, since his original name, lycanthrope, issues the diagnosis of melancholic incorporation. But vampirism gets immersed in melancholia to sort out the contents of the crypt it transmits and by which it is transmitted. Only that which was good to go – in other words, the good object – qualifies for undeath. The melancholic werewolf wallows in the death wish. That’s why he invariably begs a true love to release him from his sorry state. But the crypt carrier holds the good in storage, not the bad and ugly. As vampire he perpetrates on his victims and their survivors the wounding of the loss of the good but also secures the chosen object’s inner-world-like preservation.

Though not conjugated with werewolves, the plot points of Blade and its sequels – deregulation of the bloodline (and even of the lust for blood) within vampirism (and, as always, in humankind’s relationship to undeath) – are symptomatically in sync with the development of genital sexuality against a backdrop of race relations. The African-American vampire hunter (who is himself half vampire, or ‘daywalker’) emerges in the late 1990s from a 1973 pocket of superhumanity inside Marvel Comics. He is caught between ‘pure-blood’ vampire interests and the fascist aspirations of those merely ‘turned’ (who, as in the case of Frost, would be blood gods). Subsequently Blade is realigned in another reshuffling of interests to meet the advance of ‘Reapers’, whose bottomless thirst even for vampire blood threatens humans and vampires alike with extinction.

That vampires can be ‘vegetarian’ in regard to their bloodlust, which is retained in True Blood only as hick, I mean hickey accessory of genital sex with mortals, is a hope as old as the era we remember as the 1980s, when the sexual revolution had really spread itself thin. At least in the movies from this era, at least those playing in New York or on the Coast, everyone spoke ‘Camp’, the idiolect of unprotected experimentation. But then there was AIDS, which changed everything, albeit in stages, like the stages of grief. Because of the changes in vampire sexual mores, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005) can fall back on abstinence to promote vegetarian vampirism as the medium of marriage, while True Blood scatter-shoots vampiric identification across the all-inclusive topography of survival.

When her vampire boyfriend gets to ask Bella (the protagonist of Twilight) 20 teen questions for the first date or love forever we enter the deep end with Bella’s release: ‘I sighed in relief, and continued with the psychoanalysis’ (2005: 230). What keeps Twilight cursory as vampire fantasy is, for example, the deeper commitment to something like Mormonism underlying good vampire values, which is as explicit in the management of non-reproductive sex as in Bella’s decision to fly in the face of all she values and induce sleep one night by taking what’s known on the Coast as the Mormon cocktail: ‘unnecessary cold medicine’ (2005: 251). If the Cullens, the vegetarian vampires, are Mormons, then do those still drinking human blood qualify as Catholics? The opening of the sequel to Twilight (appended inside my copy of Twilight) makes explicit the relationship to the dead in Bella’s involvement with vampirism: a fixation (which may indeed be age appropriate) preliminary to any consideration of mourning. Bella dreams she sees her deceased grandmother coming toward her for reunion. But then she recognises that she’s the old woman in the mirror, which is the affective moment of horror and yearning. Developmentally we might as well be inside a zombie projection.

In Grammophon, Film, Typewriter (1986) Friedrich Kittler aligned the historical changes in the itinerary of haunting with the advances in the media sensorium. For a long time ghosts were at home in books, and their range of spooking was analogised with the ins and outs of the volumes of the brain. Following haunting’s seat in photography, the range of analogy occupied, within a cascade of mere decades: radio, film, the telephone, the tape recorder and television. Increasingly, haunting was integrated within the media Sensurround as the form, literally, of keeping intact by keeping in touch. Telecommunication is always also communication with ghosts.

But there are also changes in the consumer population that turns to media contact with the departed and, by going to the movies, turning books into bestsellers, pays for the exchange service. The ongoing Chinese cult of offering paper representations to the departed in the meantime specialises in burning copies of commodities, which are continuously updated. By the items reproduced in paper for burnt offering the Chinese signal their new status as consumers. The US became a world power by the early 20th century largely through the number of citizens carrying disposable cash. With the Chinese middle class growing, and the prospect of hundreds of millions of consumers coming to the fore, those seeking profit within the US economy started fracking its layers of reserve.

Innovations in occult horror capitalised on early teen and pre-adolescent girls, who, in alliance with their parents, promoted the Twilight phenomenon. True Blood is the cable TV syndication of this renewal but made for adults – conceivably for the parents who had to attend with their daughters to the perils of Bella. As good girl, Bella enjoys a relationship to canon works, even in the school setting, but mediated by her favorite film adaptations.

Adaptations make the literary canon more accessible. Symptomatically in sync the trend developed in the book market to remake the canon in similar terms of adaptation but mixed up with B-horror, like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). The teen could now be caught where she reads (for the first time on her own, not as assigned, and thus as true consumer). The introduction of the young teen as target reader of ‘mediated’ books was the counterpart to the global impact upon all markets of the introduction of the Chinese consumer.

2

In Dead Until Dark (2001), the novel by Charlaine Harris on which the first season of True Blood was largely based, the narrative loses the momentum of first contact once mortal Sookie and her vampire boyfriend Bill start having regular sex. By the second novel, when Harris starts borrowing elements from the fantasy genre (maenads and dragons), she is already at the last resort of reader stimulation. Now that vampires are real, we are taught, all other fictional figures press for realisation.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle almost got lost in this diversion when he involved himself in the controversy around the evidential status of the fairies, sprites and elves represented in spirit photographs taken by two teen girls. Doyle didn’t see that they failed the proving or testing of the rule that otherwise reserved spirit photography for the ghostly emanations attending communication with the recently departed, which the advent of live media opened up right away as their Spiritualist syndication and advertisement. But he wasn’t blinded by the light, the other world of fantasy or Christianity; he was determined (even Hell-bent) to bend and blend the borders of materiality to promote, even if by proxy or displacement, the media link to one’s lost loved ones. Regarding the matter of the supernatural existence of the fairies recorded in the controversial photos, Doyle writes from Australia (where he was conducting his ‘down under’ occult research) to his colleague Gardner, who was giving the photographic phenomenon in question another close look:

The matter does not bear directly upon the more vital question of our own fate and that of those we have lost, which has brought me out here. But anything which extends man’s mental horizon, and proves to him that matter as we have known it is not really the limit of our universe, must have a good effect in breaking down materialism and leading human thought to a broader and more spiritual level…We have had continued messages at séances for some time that a visible sign was coming through – and perhaps this was what was meant. (2006: 98–9)

The occult and fantasy genres are as different as necromancy and Christianity. When the genres are brought together Christianity tends to guide necromancy into the light (the unbearable outcome of most ghost movies, from Poltergeist (1982) and Ghost (1990) all the way to The Sixth Sense (1999)). We found ourselves headed off at this impasse watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When, in season six, Buffy was in deep despair over her return to life from Heaven, even wearing shades couldn’t save the show from its own apocalypse.

The author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels is fundamentally a mystery writer. Indeed in the fictions True Blood adapts, every main character at some point is motivated, by coming under suspicion or by appointment or calling, to join as detective in yet another murder investigation. And yet the happy end of crime solution, as Christian as it is Oedipal, can still yield to an occult desire for reanimation (not redemption), as did Doyle when, responding to reader demand, he brought Sherlock Holmes back to life.

What the TV series added to Harris’s novels was a far greater development of the African-American contingent, beginning with Sookie’s BFF Tara. In her cousin Lafayette, black, gay and vampire identifications and rights met and crossed over. The mortals know that once you go with a vampire there’s no going back. For the vampires it’s ‘out of the coffin’ into the desire. ‘Fang banging’ is as addictive as ingestion of vampire blood (marketed as the drug V). However, vampires who don’t integrate or ‘mainstream’, but remain in ‘nests’ with their own, become as consumers of sex flamboyant, outrageous and apparently disposable. No one likes a Miami Bitch vampire.

The greatest contribution of the African-American figures is their resistance to the fictional world suspended between occult and fantasy genres, which, paradoxically perhaps, gives that world traction and reality effect. I remember listening to a hip hop station while driving around in LA the day another of the newer Star Wars films opened. The host, no doubt preaching to the laugh track, kept asking his phone-in listeners what their plans were for seeing the movie, and he each time drew a blank. Immunity to complete vampirism, which was the big idea behind Blade, is rephrased in True Blood as a fact of everyday life – reminding me that only the African-American vote was not ‘glamoured’ by Ronald Reagan. Our mass psychology registers or installs this resistance as dissociation, like that of Tara at the meeting of the Descendents of the Glorious Dead. She bears even in name the burden of dissociation American popular culture maintains by the prominent placement in its canon of Gone with the Wind (1939)

In the 1990s the Candyman trilogy (1992, 1995, 1999) showed us racism, by hook or by crook, in our mirror reflection, while the Leprechaun franchise (which commenced in 1993 but began internally, or so the story goes, in 1983, right around the time ‘therapy values’ came to dominate the slasher genre) sealed away its pot of gore at the end of a rainbow coalition that this figure of Irish superstition (or of Celtic belief, like the holy day of Halloween) kept on testing. Candyman was an African-American artist whose slave ancestry was variously underscored. In the beginning he is murdered by the racist mob for miscegenation (first they cut off his arm, then introduce the rest of him, rendered sweet, into a tight corner with countless bees). Liberal white kids, who find the study of urban legend ‘relevant’, come across the belief (specific to the film adaptation of the original story by Clive Barker) that if you call his name five times while looking into the mirror the Candyman (who, as played by Tony Todd, looked like O. J. Simpson) is summoned. He’s another bogeyman on call for those who dare doubt his existence. At the end of the trilogy his great-great-granddaughter, who tries to rehabilitate her ancestor as painter of works for sale in her gallery, falls victim to jealous murder but thereby accedes to the role of new incarnation of Candyman.

Though there were several short-lived entries in the past, it was with Blade that the African-American body was integrated in the mainstream of vampirism’s reception and fabulation. Before the racist phantasm of purity could be addressed or redressed within this reception, vampirism had to undergo the kind of development that admitted full frontal genital sexuality for the undead. Thanks in part to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood is more ‘integrated’ than that, at least in the psychodynamic sense. (The teen therapy that Buffy cheerled into our relationship to occult horror was largely borrowed from the momentum of the slasher genre’s turn to serial survival in groups.)

The rerouting of censorship on cable TV into compulsive nudity and sex forced the glamour of vampirism to show its hand in symptom formations of pathogenic identification and desublimation. Our affair with vampirism was indeed conditioned by our trauma survival. The sexual body in our faces during the first year of True Blood belonged to Sookie’s brother Jason, who, underneath or above it all, was the splitting, I mean spitting image of the young George W. Bush. Tara, who qualified in the terms of family systems therapy as the identified patient of the show’s first season, had a thing for him since childhood. But then she started exorcising the demons in her relationship to her mother (the relationship that determined, in her case, the pattern of falling for the wrong man). In the second year, Jason converted from wild 1980s-style hedonism to rigid Christianism – the Christian Right being dedicated in this fictional world to the killing of the dead (or undead).

In True Blood, vampires, now lodged in sexual bodies, could be openly integrated as minority members within a socius comprised of countless special interests, including those of every occult figuration imaginable across genres. Integration described neither a happy harmony nor did it admit inimical interests that were equal and opposing. The Christian Right was also admitted: but while dedicated in the show to the destruction of undead integration, its dialectical opposition had lost its footing in the ever expanding crowd of minority interests. The melting pot model was left behind, together with its paranoid variation – the melting plot. Instead there was integration or disintegration of parts held or brought together without opposition.

That vampiric existence would become integrated as sexually embodied in close association with the political integration of the African-American body condenses histories of the touch taboo and its mass psychological dissolution that are legend to the mapping of integration not only in the United States.

3

Whereas the vampire is allegorical in the intermediate way of interpretation, the zombie is allegorical in the topical sense of immediate application. The zombie is the violence in our midst, in our foreign policy, in our racism, in our consumerism – at which point the interchangeability with us begins. The first screen zombies were adapted from the 1954 novel I Am Legend, Richard Matheson’s conceit of a massification of vampires through an epidemic of undeath.

The vampire’s return displaced from the screen the dominance of zombie films we watched throughout the Bush Junior years. A generalised post-9/11 condition of post-traumatic stress disorder, continuing through the second Gulf War, went into these zombie years. In 2009 Zombieland was the diminishing return as farce of the tragedy that ‘Eight Years Later’ we had to recognise: we thrilled to our survival through killing ambulatory corpses. It was this niche market of guilt-free killing of the dead already opened up in 1968 that recommended zombie movies for makeover into video games. It’s hard to imagine how adding ‘interactive’ to the films would make any constitutive difference in the case or face of the living dead.

Once there was hope again with the change in office, we were prepared to project our vampires. The turn to vampirism demonstrates a renewed capacity for affirmation of life in undeath, a relational predicament. Identification with the dead or undead again became possible. (That one doesn’t identify with your average zombie is the flash point of our consumption of those films.)

In 2007 Thirty Days of Night supplied a transitional objective in the course of switching over from zombies to vampires. It peeled vampirism off the back of the zombie invasion, beginning with the title which smuggles quality time for vampires into the generic countdown to mass contagion (as in 28 Days Later (2002)). Though they resemble zombies, the vampires are linguistic creatures and thus, like the members of the mass phenomenon in I Am Legend, stand between zombies and vampires. They’re sloppy drinkers who tear apart body parts with their teeth to get to the blood flow. The title’s published schedule counts down to survival. With the first new dawn the vampire invasion is out of there. The transitional state of these vampires is underscored on the human side. The mortal leader of the group of survivors injects himself with vampire blood so he can combat the undead chieftain on a level dying field. After he triumphs he stays put for the sunrise. He turns to ashes while in the grieving embrace of the one he died for. What takes us out of the zombie equation between surviving and killing is this prospect of our dead dying for our survival. Thus the psycho violence that follows the new vampires emerging out of zombieism is countered by mourning.

During the years of vampirism’s makeover, new variations on psycho horror also slouched toward the screen to be borne. What remains in the background of the ascent of the vampire is the psycho killer, who fully returned to the screen during the zombie years. The psycho is the problem that even identifications with vampirism can’t avoid.

The story that Stoker’s Dracula (1987) records tak...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Late arrival of the ‘New Vampire Lectures’
• Psycho-Historical Introduction
• Record 1. Playing Catch Up with the Vampire – But with True Blood
• Record 2. Schauer Scenes
• Record 3. Alternate History – 1960
• Record 4. Epidemics of Mass Murder
• Record 5. Manuals
• Record 6. Still Working on It
• Record 7. Phantoms
• Record 8. The Turning
• Record 9. The Crowd and the Couple
• Record 10. Getting Into B-Pictures
• Record 11. The Emperor’s New Closure
• Record 12. By Rule of Tomb
• Record 13. The Renewal of Psycho Horror by Compact with the Devil
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index