Horror Movies (Carlos Clarens, 1967)

Carlos Clarens. Horror Movies: an illustrated survey. London: Panther, 1971. (pp.312)

"It would seem logical to suppose that troubled art is born out of troubled times. But it would be wrong to be that systematic about it, for what period of history has siled in, pre-ordained and self-acknowledged a golden age? Edgar Allan Poe existed in a momentary by-way of relative peace and security in a new country still full of hope, yet his work is limned by the same dark phantoms that haunt E.T.A Hoffmann's, a writer who lived when Europe was an open field trampled by the Napoleonic Wars. The landscape of the mind does not always correspond to external circumstance" (p.9).

"Satan is immutable, it would seem, whether ancestral dark angel or devil in the flesh. Those who imagine him today are not the doctors of demonology but the psychiatrist, the anthropologist, the sociologist. To them, horror movies might be seen as a historical imperative, if not an as aesthetic necessity" (p.10).

"Only the best horror movies sustain their power to frighten through the passage of time. Yet this does not necessarily entail a loss of interest or even popularity. They gain a new dimension in perspective by appearing encrusted with the meaning of their period. Didn't Prometheus come to represent the Myth of Electricity (in Frankenstein) after being the Myth of Scientific Power and, before then, the mythical alibi for man's defiance of divine will? Didn't Mr Hyde become more recognisably human as we learned to accept that our forefathers endeavoured to conceal and represses? Besides making us nostalgic of the things we once feared, they help us to gauge the escalation of our insensibility. It follows that a supremely violent age like ours calls for unprecedented violence in its aesthetics manifestations" (p.11)

"Whether horror films set out to scare us or to elevate what scares us to the status of myths, the movies follow popular taste or at least try to, inasmuch as they are products of an industry, and are bound to reflect something of the collective unconscious of their audience. It may commonly be that the artistic best does not always coincide with the mythological most tangible: a film may hit a very definite chord in the public mind and still not be distinguished on any other terms" (p.12)

"In France, most of the movies discussed in this book fall under the rather vague (for Anglo-Saxons) heading of le fantastique. Besides horror films, le fantastique includes such titles as Alice in the Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, while excluding the more earthbound thrillers that carry no supernatural implications. I am aware of the shortcomings of 'horror films' as a designation - the term unavoidably carries it connotations of repulsion and disgust- but it is the one sanctioned by usage and the best available in English. Yet, in writing about horror films, I have occasionally included for illustrative purposes a fantastic movies that contains little or no horror. I have not singled out, however, serials such as Feuillade's Les Vampires or Universal's Flash Gordon, although their mention crops up in the text several times. Despite the fact that it contains some delightful moments of near-fantasy, Les Vampires is unshakeably (an in spite of its masked hoods and hooded vamps) on the side of light: its essence is poetry and movement and one would look in vain for the dark undertow of, say, the Fritz Lang serials, which are included. As for Flash Gordon, it is pure prewar science fiction, utterly devoid of anxiety, a superior adventure romance. But my respect for the serial excludes its inclusion here as a mere appendage to the horror film" (p.13)

"Finally, my exclusion of Les Diaboliques, Psycho, Repulsion and the more blatant borrowings from Krafft-Ebing are not as arbitrary as it may seem if we are to consider the Horror Film as the Cinema of Obsession, the rendering unto film of the immanent fears of mankind: damnation, demonic possession, old age, death, in brief, the night side of life. In Jungian fashion, I fell more compelled to single out and explore the visionary than the psychological" (p.14). [Clarens suggests the paternity of Psycho lies in Fritz Lang's M, cross of police dossier and psychiatric case-history]

"Horror, like beauty, may reside in the eye of the beholder; or in the attitude of the director towards his material. Most film-makers have, at one stage or another of their careers, felt the challenge to instil that elusive feeling of terror in the audience. There are unforgettable horror moments in non-horror films" (p.14).

"As we tend to pigeonhole the enormous mass of films laid at our disposal through seventy years of industry, we apply to movies the strict rules and superficial restrictions of genre headings, when horror films (and Westerns) at best obey no rules and transcend the limitations we impose on them. Let me the first to realise that such staggering number of movies can wreak havoc on any serious attempt at theorising. Most movies have their own voice, and none of them was created to support a single aesthetic or theory" (p.15)

The Wizard on Montreuil Paris, 1815-1913: Chapter about George Méliès and who the fantastic film 'accidentally' came into being. Méliès did not think the new invention of the motion picture (Lumière Cinématographe and Thomas Edison Kinetoscope) should merely record reality in a journalistic way. He thought it excluded poetry, fantasy and unbridled imagination therefore he set up a studio in Montreuil where he created his films Battleship Maine (1896), The Haunted Cave (1898), The One Man Band (1900), Trip to the Moon (1902), The Conquest of the Pole (1912), among others. In order to create his illusions, Méliès resorted to double and multiple exposure of the film, the gradual disappearance of the image (fade) and the slow transition from one image to another (dissolve), plus trap doors and other resources used by magicians and well as a great deal of pantomime trickery and stage-based acts. Clarens chapter is an homage to Méliès and his dream factory.

Recreational Terror (Pinedo, 1997)

Isabel Cristina Pinedo. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State of New York Press, 1997.

"As a product of mass culture the horror film is not a utopian form; it is not a politically transformative experience in any grand sense of the term" (p.4-5).

Characteristics of the postmodern horror genre: 1) violent disruption of everyday world; 2) blurs the putative boundary between good and evil; 3) throws into question the validity of rationality; 4) narratives are apt to end apocalyptically; 5) simulation of danger that produces a bounded experience of fear, not unlike a roller coaster.

"Much as the horror film is an exercise in terror, it is simultaneously an exercise in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control. The proliferation of apocalyptic, graphically violent horror films which dot the post-sixties landscape attests to the need to express rage and terror in the midst of postmodern social upheaval" (p.5).

"I argue that the slasher film creates an opening for feminist discourse by restaging the relationship between women and violence as not only one of danger in which women are objects of violence but also a pleasure one in women retaliate to become agents of violence and turn the tables on their aggressors" (p.6) [e.g. The Stepfather].

"Not all postmodern horror films bring to fruition the feminist potential of the genre. But that is not to say that they are otherwise without a progressive aspect" (p.6).

"The irrepressibility and inevitability of violence represented in these films speak to the sense of helplessness that results when the normalcy of violence (be it illegal varieties of street violence or state-sanctioned forms like corporate downsizing) is wrenched from its social context and made to seem extraordinary, unfathomable and inescapable" (p.7)

"In contrast to the classical horror film, the postmodern film locates horror in the contemporary everyday world, where the efficacious male expert is supplanted by the ordinary victim who is subjected to high levels of explicit, sexualized violence, especially if female" (p.16)

"People are no longer terrified by his films [Boris Karloff]. Why should they be, when the headlines of everyday life are more horrific?" (p.16)

"Much as the horror film is an exercise in terror, it is simultaneously an exercise in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control [again!]. It allows us to give free reign to culturally repressed feelings such as terror and rage. It constructs situations where these taboo feelings are sanctioned. This bounded experience of terror is constructed by various means: the temporally and spatially finite nature of film, the semipublic setting of the film exhibition, the acquisition of insider knowledge, and the use of comedy" (p.41)

"Frederic Jameson refers to the cannibalization of past productions as pastiche, an ironic self-awareness that calls attention to its own constructedness. Pastiche, the art of plagiarism, is the postmodern code that supplants modernism's unique mark of style (In: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. pp.16). I am disturbed by the characterization, stated or implied, of pastiche as exclusively a postmodern phenomenon. when it comes to the horror film, pastiche is a long standing practice. The film cycles of the thirties and forties abound in countless remakes and sequels, although not enumerated as the are today. Pastiche is not a new theme; however, in the contemporary genre there has been an intensification"(p.47) [primary difference is the prominence of graphic violence to produce gory humour]

The Monster Show (David J. Skal, 1994)

David J. Skal. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. London: Plexus, 1994.

"A good deal of this book has dealt with the long shadow of war reflected and transformed in the shared anxiety rituals we call monster movies. Wars tend not to resolve themselves , culturally, until years after the combat stops. The same is true of economic depressions, fatal epidemics, political witch-hunts -- the traumas can linger for decades." (p.386)

"World War I found a persistent symbolic expression in horror entertainment, a tendency that never really ended, and was only replaced by the symbol-distillations of World War II. The American nineties are still haunted by the Vietnamese seventies; the belief in the survival of Vietnam-era MIAs remains a powerful fixation in many quarters, a tenet of faith that psychologically concretizes at least one truth: that the Vietnam War was never really resolved, not in the world not in our minds" (p.386)

"She [Diane Arbus, photographer] saw that 'monsters' were everywhere, that the whole of modern life could be viewed as a tawdry side-show, driven by dreams and terrors of alienation, mutilation, actual death and its everyday variations. Working-class families, through Arbus' unforgiving lens, emerged as denizens of an existential suburban sideshow. Society dowagers were close cousins to Times Square transvestites. Caught at the right moment, almost anyone could look retarded. america, it seemed, was nothing but a monstershow. It was a revelation, a cause and a creed" (p.18)

"There are four primary icons on this carousel, which turns to a calliope dirge: Dracula, the human vampire; the composite, walking-dead creation of Frankenstein; the werewolfish duality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and, perhaps most disturbing, the freak from a nightmare sideshow - armless, legless, twisted or truncated, now shrunken, now immense - it changes every time we look, a violation of our deepest sense of human shape and its natural boundaries. The carousel turns slowly, but steadily; if one looks long enough, one monster eventually blurs into another." (p.19)

"Caligari was derivative, no doubt, but it shared one honest source of inspiration with the new art movements, namely the Great War just past. The war had a tremenduous influence on the expressionist, dadaist, and emerging surrealist artists during the 1920s. In her recent book Anxious Visions, art historian Sidra Stich links the surrealist preocuppation with deformed and desfigured bodies to the sudden presence, following the war, of a sizeable population of the crippled and mutilated. Modern welfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body." (p.48)

"Horror has always had a certain affinity for modern art movements and has often quoted their manneirisms, possibly because, at root level, they are inspired by similar cultural anxieties." (p.55)

"Dracula is a story about a particulary destructive and compulsive form of drinking; in the ensuing decades vampire stories would be colored increasingly by the metaphors of addiction." (p.124)

"By the time the MMPDA had the chance to view the finished version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Universal's Frankenstein had just opened to astonishing business, leading the industry to realise the Dracula was not a fluke, and 'horror movies' (the term was not widely used previously, and was in many ways an invetion of 1931) formed an important and profitable new category." (p.144)

"With Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the psychic landscapes of castle, crypt and laboratory were definitively mapped." (p.145)

THE MONSTER SHOW uncovers links between horror entertainment and the great social crises of our time, as well as horror's function as a pop-cultural counterpart to surrealism, expressionism, and other twentieth-century artistic movements. Ultimately focusing on film, the predominant art form of the modern world, Skal examines the many ways in which this medium has played out the traumas of two world wars and the Depression; the nightmare visions of invasion and mind control engendered by the Cold War; the preoccupation with demon children and mutants that took hold as thalidomide, birth control, and abortion changed the reproductive landscape; the vogue in body-transforming special effects that paralleled the development of the plastic surgery industry; the link between the rise of the AIDS epidemic and a renewed fascination with vampires. The author looks at horror's popular renaissance in the last decade, a thought-provoking inquiry into America's continuing obsession with the macabre.

Skal also offers the reader some insights into the struggles that the rival studios faced during the horror film boom of the 1930's and the effects of the demarcation enforced by the Production Code. In addition the author explores Hitler's fascination with the symbol of the wolf, E.C's vastly popular and extremely graphic comic books and the works of Stephen King.Interestingly Skal reinforces the theory that the public appetite for horror movies seem to grow in proportion to actual horrors experienced at the time. The biggest booms in the horror product occured during the Depression of the late 20's, the advent of World War II, the Red Scare, the growing threat of nuclear war and finally to the AIDS epidemic of today.