The Horror Genre, from Beelzebub to Blair Witch (Paul Wells, 2000)

Paul Wells. The Horror Genre, from Beelzebub to Blair Witch. Wallflower, London, 2000.


Introduction

"Like many people interested in the horror film, or indeed comedy, its allied genre, I view its analysis as something which should not strain too far after meaning for fear it might undermine the sensation created" (p.1)

"Thankfully the effects of horror or humour initially by-pass the inhibitions and intrusions of the intellect so the thrill can precede the theory" (p.1)

In the first section, Configuring the Monster, Paul Wells explores the key themes of the genre, the main issues and debates raised, and engage with approaches and theories that have been applied to horrors texts. The theoretical background is presented via the modernist context within which early horror texts evolved. Review of fundamental preoccupations, especially through psychoanalytical and gendered readings. Also includes case study that reviews indicative patterns of readings of horror films across different age groups (audience and reception studies). In the second section, Consensus and Constrain 1919-1960, and in the final section, Chaos and Collapse 1960-2000, he addresses the chronological evolution of the horror film, looking at how it reflected and commented upon particular historical periods. His analysis considers myth and gothic literature in early cinematic representations of horror. Post-war developments are reviewed in terms of revisiting this formulae. Contemporary gore and pathological states are considered through a discussion of auteurs reworking the genre field's of operation and its constant recycle.

Configuring the Monster

"The history of the horror film is essentially the history of anxiety in the twentieth century." (p.3)

"As the nineteenth century passed into the twentieth, this prevailing moral and ethical tension between the individual and the socio-political order was profoundly affected by some of the most significant shifts in social and cultural life. This effectively reconfigured the notion of evil in the horror text -soon to be a cinematic as well as a literary form - in a way that moved beyond the issues of fantasy and ideology and into the realms of material existence and overt challenge to established cultural value systems." (p.3)

* 19th century transformative discourses = political and economical theories, Karl Marx and The Communist Manifesto (1848). "Arguably the horror film embraces the leftist critique of this process, consistently invoking the 'monster' of the alienated and disadvantaged as the key protagonist against the bourgeois middle-class orthodoxies" (p.4)

"the genre has been used to explore modes of social 'revolution' in which naturalised ideas about bourgeois orthodoxies are transgressed, exposing how the 'working class' in Weimar's Germany, Depression-era America, Franco's Spain and so on have been oppressed and socially manipulated to maintain those advantaged by the late capitalism status quo." (p.4)

* 'Natural selection' as transformative discourse= Darwin's On the Origins of the Species (1859). Mankind artificially imposes itself upon the conditions of material existence, while nature changes the world slowly. Jekyll and Hyde, Birds would be films that address the 'revenge of nature'. Nature pitted against humankind's will to power.

* Friedrich Nietzsche's = " will to power" , humanity subject to degeneracy and spiritual crisis. He insists that humankind id nihilistic and Christian piety is the worst evil of all (as it does not come into contact with the reality of the world). Collapse of spiritual values echo in horror films.

* Sigmund Freud = emergence of psychoanalysis, structures of consciousness revealed at primal level. In the horror film this is usually linked to madness, dysfunctionality and psychosis, the monsters of the mind.

"Horror films have been analysed within a range of theoretical paradigms and discourses. The genre has been addressed in the light of its theological and moral perspectives, its sociological and cultural dimensions, its politics of representation, and its configuration as a set of texts particularly conducive to psychoanalytical approaches. Problematically, the horror genre has no clearly defined boundaries, and overlaps with aspects of science fiction and fantasy genres. Also, in recent years, many of its generic elements have been absorbed into the mainstream thriller. Arguably, there is no great benefit in attempting to disentangle these generic perspectives. It may be more constructive to proceed on the basis of addressing the distinctive elements of any on text within a particular historical moment.

It may be noted that the horror genre is predominantly concerned with death and the impacts and effects of the past, while science fiction is future-oriented, engaging with how human social existence could develop and dealing with humankind's predilection for self-destruction. While science fiction is potentially utopian (although often critically grounded), the horror genre is almost entirely dystopic, and often nihilistic in outlook". (p.7)

Devils and Doubles (sub-chapter) "Psychoanalyst Otto Rank wrote 'Der Doppelgänger' in 1914, suggesting that the double was essentially the way in which the soul or ego sought to preserve itself, ensuring against destruction by replicating itself. Bound up with a narcissistic self-love which is self-protecting and strongly predicated to the denial of death, this act of 'doubling' can work in reverse. Once the double is cleaved or threatened, it heightens the degree by which mortality and the signs of death are enhanced. It is of no surprise, therefore, to see the prominence of the motive in the horror text". (p.9)

On Ann Radcliffe opinion about Horror vs Terror = "Radcliffe's definition is enabling in the sense that texts maybe viewed in the light of 'terror' and its potential radicalism, or 'horror' and its creation of a seemingly reactionary position". (p.11)

Horror Films in Content (sub-chapter) "Arguably, if the horror text is to be culturally and historically pertinent, film-makers have to engage with an aesthetic space free from the moral and ethical obligations of the social paradigm in which they live - only then they can comment upon, and critique the conditions of, the material world. If the social concern about violence in the horror film is to be properly addressed, for example, it is crucial that such issues be treated responsibly, looking at violence as a reality and not the tilitatory experiences of the adventure spectacles which passes uncensored into cinemas every week. The horror text does this in a variety of ways, and this is why, as a genre, it remains subversive and challenging because it foregrounds, through the comparative safety of fiction, the very agendas humankind needs to address in 'fact'. While it remains contentious, and subject to considerable opposition, the horror film makes us confront our complex 'darker' agendas, and in this it serves an important function as progressive and sometimes radical genre, in the face of reactionary stances". (p.24)

"Although seemingly nihilistic in outlook, the horror film can continually remind an audience of the things that about which it should neither be complacent nor accepting". (p.35)

Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962)

Playing drag and racing, a group of boys "accidentally" push another car off a bridge. The car, which had three girls in, quickly sinks and disappears into the river. Soon after the town people are at the spot in attempt to withdraw the car from the bottom of the river. As three hours have passed by since the accident everyone assumes the girls must be dead but a survivor unexpectedly creeps out the river.

Apparently a few days later but still not quite recovered from the shock, the survivor Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) decides to leave the town not to be seen again. She accepts a job as a professional organist in a church in Utah to start anew. As she is driving there alone, she begins seeing a ghostly apparition reflected in the side car window.

The figure seems to reside in an old run-down pavilion, a spooky abandoned amusement park to where she is strangely attracted. It is the abandoned Saltair Pavilion outside Salt Lake City. There is a shot of her in front of a promotional poster for the Pavilion and, on the poster there is a look-alike blonde with the same hairstyle. Saltair had been a family swimming, recreational facility and it looks like a cross between an Eastern Orthodox church and an Arabian Nights palace. The falling lake level doomed the swimming feature but the place operated as an amusement park until abandoned five years before the filming of "Carnival of Souls" (a story structure adapted to fit sets and locations to which Harvey had free access). Anyway, it is here that Mary must confront the personal demons of her spiritual insouciance. It is a quite scary movie but not the kind of scary that exploits blood and violence to make you jump. The plot is incredibly simple, all the haunting comes from the simple visual craft. The dead man seems to echo some German Expressionism, which I think is great, but the soundtrack and the sound itself lets down.

As much as a pervading sense of disquiet is enhanced by the efficient use of locations (a church, a vast ballroom, a decrepit and deserted amusement park at the end of a pier), the organ music is a bit irritating, however it brings in some disturbing religious images and undertones. There are, though, nice angular shots with the huge organ pipes in the foreground and the diminutive figure of Hilligoss far below. As a church organist, she is also "possessed" by her instrument, her playing alternates between the spiritual and the profane, and that deeply disturbs her wrapped-too-tight minister. There is the moment when she is alone on the highway and her radio will only pick up organ music.

Mary lodges in a boarding house and fends off the aggressive advances of her across-the-hall neighbor. The man is named John Linden, he is an alcoholic and very persistent in his attempts to seduce Mary. But those strange vision have not been left behind and she is still being haunted by the apparition of a ghastly-looking stranger. Mary is very indifferent to her job and to those around her. She is kind of "passive" and completely detached from the ordinary life situations. "I don't belong in the world….something separates me from other people" says Mary Henry. Quite lyrical! There is the isolation theme going on here, the drama of someone who feels they no longer belong.

I also liked the way Mary went from real life to "limbo", where people couldn't hear or see her.The two occasions where Mary Henry suddenly becomes invisible to everyone are much more vivid because Hilligoss is so beautiful. Unlike a person of average appearance, an especially beautiful woman walking down the street is used to drawing stares from virtually everyone. The director throws in some symbolism and the viewer has to fill in the gaps. Not much explanation is given, it seems just the supernatural at work. I thought it was excellent, very atmospheric but not truly spooky. The visions of the phantom man became more often, Mary goes to the abandoned carnival pavilion in the afternoon an experiences a surreal, dreamlike moments of sensual necro-beauty. All the phantoms come out of water to be reborn.

Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980 (David Punter, 1996)

David Punter, 1996. The Modern Gothic: Gothic in the Horror Film 1930-1980. In: David Punter. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present day. Longman, London, 1996 (p. 96-119).

The international history of the horror film to 1980 may be seen in three principal phases: the German masterpieces of the silent era; the developments in America between 1930 and the late 1950s; and the largely British-centered product of the 1960 and 1970s." (p.96)

"In this chapter, I want, as with the fiction, to restrict myself to American and British work, but it worth nothing from the outset that behind all subsequent horror films there lurks, in a curiously resonant parallel with eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, a German presence. It manifests itself in theme, in content, in a specific set of photographic styles, indeed in an entire mis-en-scene which runs from the range of Universal studios films of 1931 and 1932 to the Hammer cycle of the 1960s" (p.96)

"The horror film thus has a complexly twisted provenance: out, originally, of a body of legendary which owes much to real or fake German and central European sources and 'Transylvanian' settings, via English nineneenth-century fictional developments, but then mediated again through the directional styles of the great German directors, Wegener, Wiene, Murnau and Lang." (p.96)

"This is by no means to assume that all horrifying films are Gothic; but at the same time it is true that the fundamentally formulaic model which isconventionally known as 'the horror film' hs indeed many Gothic aspects." (p.96)

"... still the forgers of the most culturally prominent images of Frankenstein's monster and Dracula respectively." (p.96-97)

"In one sense at least the horror film is very similar to eighteenth-century Gothic fiction, in that, while being a popular form, it demonstrates on closer inspection both a surprisingly high level of erudition, actual on the part of its makers and also imputed to its audience, and also a very high level of technical virtuosity." (p.97)

"To connect the thematic and the technical, one might perhaps say that what the 1930s horror films essentially possessed were content to be unrushed, to allow space and time for their conceptions to emerge on the screen, and in doing so they managed to create a series of works which posessed a genuinely tragic quality, at least insofar as they realised a sense of powerful forces, forces of destiny, operative in human life." (p. 98)

"He is a splendid mixture of the diabolical and the gentlemanly..." (p.100)

"danger usually brings out not the best but the worst in people, and where it does bring out the best, that best is generally unrecognisable to the world outside. " (p.103)

"... Gothic act of divine defiance, and thus necessarily entailing its own defeat." (p.105) Promethean defiance

"... who is indeed a bourgeois character, trying to impose a schema of rationalism on the events with which he is confronted" (p. 106)

"... deliberate vulgarisation, which is presumably in itself a significant element of an attempt to deal with historical problems." (p. 107)

"Corman's films - and Price's acting - demand audience collusion, and it is this structural sense, and not merely because of the extent of their appeal, that they can most fairly be called 'cult' films. They permit their audience to asknowledge its own intelligent and reasonableness before deliberately abandoning. It has often been said that only a secure avant-garde can afford seriously to affront or abandon good taste, and certainly Corman's films afford intellectual relief - not scape - of a kind which cannot be far distant from the esxitement ladies in the late eighteenth century derived from observing the wickedness of an Ambrosio. Corman's cinema is neither realist nor psychological: it is, in a sense, a cinema of pure formalism, and only because it is so reliant on fixed form can it afford the gross excess of colour and dialogue which typify it." (p.107)

"When The Course of Frankstein first appeared, it was rapidly condemned on the grounds of explicit sadism, a criticism which seems to us now rather surprising, for the kinds of ritualised violence which occur in Hammer films seem very much bounded by assumptions of the form." (p.108-109)

"... Fisher shows him simultaneously capable of cruelty and disinterested kindness, and brings him into close proximity with the stereotype of the victimised pioneer." (p.109)

"That all the vampires, male and female, in Hammer's films are sexually attractive, sometimes to the point of caricature, recalls precisely scenes in Stocker like that of the three female vampires..." (p.110)

"For it is not enough to say that horror motifs have lost their bite because we no longer 'believe in' them: we have never believed in them as simply existent, but more as valuable and disturbing fictional images which gain their vitality, when they do, from the underlying truth which they represent." (p.118)

Horror (Mark Jancovich, 1992)

Mark Jancovich, 1992. Horror. In: Mark Jancovich. Horror. B.T. Batsford, London, p. (p.7-25).

Introduction

On censorship:"they claimed that 'video nasties' were a new category of media products, and that they had dangerous effects on viewers, especially young viewers. No clear definition of the video nasty existed but it was generally accepted that they were examples of pornography and horror" (p.7)

"the language which is frequently used to describe these genres is one of disease and contagion. They are referred to as as 'sick' and 'perverted', and their diffusion is described in terms of corruption and contamination" (p.7-8)

"the study of horror is important, if only because claims about it have had political effects - effects which extend far beyond the limits of the genre itself. However the social unacceptability as a genre has meant that there has been, as with the study of pornography, little real investigation of its forms and effects." (p.8)

Post-structural psychoanalytic criticism = shifts the focus of study from the individual artist or text to the system of signification itself. "they stress that all cultural activities have rules and codes, whether of language or visual imagery. Not the individual author who should be the source of meaning, but these rules and codes. They maintain that: our sense of ourselves as individuals (or our subjectivity) is not we who speak language but language which speaks us, the very way we think is determined by the structures of language" (p.9)

"In the case of horror it is claimed that the pleasure offered by the genre is based on the process of narrative closure, in which the horrifying or monstrous is destroyed or contained". Structure order- disorder- order re-established. The audience's pleasure is supposed to be based upon the expectation that the narrative will reach this particular type of conclusion, and the eventual fulfillment of this expectation."

This narrative structure is claimed to have specific ideological effects. Post-structuralism presents itself as a political project in offering an analysis of the se type of ideological effects.

Ideological effects: Post-structuralism presents itself as a political project in offering an analysis of these effects. "The narrative closure of horror texts is not only claimed to contain the elements which are disturbing dominant order, but to produce psychological effect in the audience" (p.9). It suppresses conflicts which might threaten their subjectivities (sense of self). This process is referred to as 'the positioning of the subject within ideology' and is considered undesirable regardless of the ideology within the subject is positioned" (p.10)

"the reasoning behind this argument is that while we appear to express our own thoughts through the use of language, the very way in which we think is determined by the structures of language. The subject, or the sense of identity is made to appear natural and inherent. It makes what is social, constructed and historical to be individual and natural" (p.10)

Therefore: the very way we think is determined by the structures of language. The subject is a product of ideology. In positioning the subject within ideology, this sense of identity is made to appear natural and inherent.

Modern gothic, a reader (Allan Lloyd Smith, 1996)

Allan Lloyd Smith, 1996. Postmodernism/Gothicism. In: Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith (ed). Modern gothic, A reader. Manchester University Press, Manchester, p. (p. 1-19).

Introduction

"This essay attempts to interpret the unmistakable presence, through structural or verbal allusion, or wholesale rewriting, of the Gothic in some of the fictions of the postwar period." ( p.1)

"The Old Gothic, however, as the backdating of Stevenson's own tale suggests, doesn't stand still as a point of reference: even in the eighteenth-century, it was itself anarchic, popular, an indeed 'camp' recycling the past, long before Sir Walter Scott sought to transform and rationalise it into an official literary genre, the so-called 'historical romance'." ( p.1)

"Evidently, the Gothic is not merely a literary convention or a set of motifs: it is a language, often an anti-historicising language, which provides writers with the critical means of transferring an idea of the otherness of the past into present." ( p.1)

"As these essays demonstrate, there is no point in thinking of the Gothic as 'pure'; it is an apparent genre-badge which, the moment it is worn by a text, becomes an imperceptible catalyst, a transforming agent for other codes: the uncanny, a form of Gothic fantastic effect quite central to modern fictions of screen and novel, is not one code but a kind of gap between codes, a point at which representation itself appears to fail, displace, or diffuse itself." ( p.2)

"But these Gothic black spots, lurking like the sites of past road accidents in so many contemporary contexts, are not simple deconstructive aporias transformed into spatial metaphors; they form in themselves textual negotiations with history, and the corollary of this critical preoccupation of the Gothic's latest history of itself is a description of a present whose very presentness is diminished and vitiated by disruptive images of the past." ( p.2) Interference of the past into the present.

"The anxiety of influence is not a pattern for the authors and critics represent in this book - the Gothic, it seems, is a language that, by definition, belongs to no one; with its air of pastiche - only made, never born - it forms a ready-made language for the aesthetic and cultural politics of our time. ( p.3-4)

"The Gothic is perfect anonymous language for the peculiar unwillingness of the past to go away" (p.4)

"Reiteration is the modern form of haunting; reiteration of narrative manouevres and motifs, unholy reanimation of the deadness of the past that has the power to make something new" ( p.4)

"But whereas early Gothic proposed a delightful excursion through the realms of imaginary horror, contemporary use of the Gothic register strikes a darker and more disturbing note. It is the horror now that is real, and the resolution that is fanciful. Hence the peculiar effect we sometimes find, akin to the dropping of a stone through a spiders's web, when the actuality or realisations of the horrors of the contemporary life strikes through the web of highlighted representation with an effect that may be comic, or grotesque, or uncannily chilling." ( p.5) Although the popular evocation of horror is itself significant, the mode does not simply 'reflect' a modern condition by a form of inverted mimesis.

Modern Gothic- be it the "barbarous vitality of the Past, the Alien or the Other to erupt, and threaten the familiar plot, an accepted environment, the repeated pattern allows us first to glimpse, and then to reflect critically upon, the changing processes at work in our imaginings, and even in our theories, of our own contemporaneity." ( p.5)

American Gothic (John Hough, 1988)

Six young and wealthy friends from Seattle decide to go on a camping trip but they get stranded on a remote American island after having trouble with their hydroplane's engine. They spend the night in the woods and next day they find a Victorian-like house occupied by a strange family. Initially they are hosted by Ma, Pa only but soon they get to know their three middle-aged children and it becomes clear that they are among very demented people. The family are self-righteous, God-fearing American Puritans who lead their lives as if their still were in the 1920s'. (The dvd frontispiece is a parody)

They are skeptical of science and averse to mundane vices, such as smoking or having sex outside marriage. One by one the visitors start to get viciously murdered by the psychotic family members eventually only Cynthia (Sarah Torgov) alive. The fragile girl has a past trauma (she feels guilty of letting her own baby drown) and her experiences on the island are enough to snap her already fragile hold on reality. As she he is then incorporated by the family a reverse of fortune takes place and the victim becomes a monster.

The film addresses themes like: madness, incest, secrets from the past, rape, basically those features established by 18th century Gothic literature. A warning for the blood-thirst seekers: there is actually very little blood and gore. If I was to drawn on a general theme for this film it would have to be the fear of arbitrary forces from the past, the play of modern values against old brutal ones.

Although the production is fairly good (opening sequence with the plane, the woods scenes on the island) the film is really campy. The title was what attracted me the most but the film is a bit disappointing. As much as "everything has been done before" some horror films are actually capable of innovating those well-known aspects of terror. Enormously overacted the horror flick becomes increasingly risible towards the end. The presence Rod Steiger and Yvonne DeCarlo, as Pa and Ma, is enough to make this a good film. Though I think Fanny (Janet Wright) delivers a creepy performance which kind of saves the show.