“Another common feature of these great murders,” Foucault writes, “is that they take place in a domestic setting. They are family crimes, household crimes, and at most neighbourly crimes... Rather than crimes against society and its rules, they are crimes against nature, against those laws which are perceived to be inscribed directly on the human heart and which link families and generations... Criminal psychiatry first proclaimed itself a pathology of the monstrous.” (“The Dangerous Individual”, 1978.)
In late November 1993, two separate murder trials invoked the title of a horror film then widely available on video, Child’s Play 3. Mr Justice Morland, who tried the James Bulger murder case, said of the defendants “it is not for me to pass judgment on their upbringing, but I suspect exposure to violent video films may be an explanation”. A few days earlier, it had been alleged that one of the defendants in the Suzanne Capper murder trial had referred to herself as “Chucky”, the demonic doll from the same film. In the House of Commons, minutes after the Bulger jury reached their verdicts, a motion was tabled demanding an enquiry into the role of TV and video violence in the crime. BSkyB pulled the film from its schedules. The Sun’s campaign to destroy all copies of Child’s Play 3 has evidently enjoyed some success; my enquiry at a local video store was greeted by wry grins, and the statement that all copies had been removed from the shelves.
Links between crime and exposure to violence in films and on television are notoriously hard to establish, for obvious reasons. Yet those links are already forged in the popular imagination, the recent outcries from judges, politicians, editorials and saloon bars being far from unusual, and perhaps explaining why Mrs Mary Whitehouse was able to retire feeling vindicated. It was almost a decade ago that a concerted tabloid campaign led to The Video Recording Act (1984), in a clampdown on the so-called “video nasties”. There was also a general furore about the prevalence of snuff movies, despite the fact that no police force seems ever to have laid hands on one. Linda Williams, in Hardcore (University of California, 1989), has suggested that a realistic but entirely staged scene in a film with the name Snuff might have contributed to this apotheosis of uninformed outrage. More recently, an amendment has been made to the current Criminal Justice Bill, further tightening guidelines on certification and rental of videos; this will provide more succour to disputatious lawyers than disappointed libertarians.
The power of media representation of horror movies, often flying in the face of the actual content of the films, should not be underestimated, although, given their financial success, it is far from clear that the public entirely concurs. The fear expressed at such times has a distinctly religious or superstitious quality. What is interesting is the co-opting of such representations of atrocity as the explanation for real-life atrocities; it indicates the compelling need for explanation. Both the court cases mentioned above were unusually horrific crimes, involving torture and murder of an apparently senseless nature. It isn’t necessary to subscribe to Foucault’s thought to appreciate the difficulty with which society faces the reasonless crime. The judicial system, and the public rites surrounding it, demands motive, blame, remorse, punishment. In singular, grotesque, profitless crimes, there is no reason, no explanation. Only the terms “insanity” or “evil” can explain, or explain away, such phenomena; the indiscriminate lay use of the term “psychopath”, and its queasily indefinite status in both law and medicine, testify to its place on the border of understanding. The public fascination with serial killers, in real life as well as on screen, suggests that faced with the abysmal, we cannot bear either to look or to look away.
Beyond the psychological or sociological question of “effect” raised in the Commons, the generic question of what horror is, and the methodological question of how it might be interpreted, the overwhelming question is: why should anyone want to watch it?
The horror movie is generically defined by its intended effect; it promises to horrify. Poster slogans emphasize this contract with the punter; “Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid” (The Fly), “In Space No-one Can Hear You Scream” (Alien). Why cinema-goers sign up for these strange pleasures is, perhaps, no more rational than why holidaymakers visit white-knuckle rides at Blackpool or Brighton, or willingly view tragedy, social realism or weepies. The sadistic, cartoon violence of much light entertainment—the staggering brutality of Home Alone II, for instance—is supposedly different from the visceral gorefest of low-budget horror. But in what way?
In a line which could equally well be taken as a comment on generic status, the poster slogan to the 1987 remake of The Blob announced that “horror has no shape”. This parodic, almost comic film—all the standard tropes, one piece of cheeky self-referentiality when young kids visit a “normal” slice ’n’ dice movie—featured a polymorphous pink gunge, not unlike a blancmange, on the rampage. The film itself is far from frightening because, despite its disturbing alien shapelessness, the creature is deliberately visible, and presumably deliberately ridiculous. A lack of clarity, illumination and definition is the essence of both the horror film and the psychological thriller (the genres overlap in, say, The Silence of the Lambs). A crucial element is not-knowing, not-seeing, and catharsis comes in revelation; the killer is identified, the creature is physically revealed, the motive for the violence is explained in a cod-psychological coda. Few films—Picnic at Hanging Rock is one exception—deliberately leave questions unanswered. The control offered by comprehension deals with fear.
Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) covers much of this functionalist analysis of the horror movie, albeit avant la lettre. “To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.” Burke is quite clear that the inspiration of fear in art can be pleasurable, and proffers reasons for this which are still perfectly plausible; he then begins a patient taxonomy of the mechanics by which such fear is induced. Yet Burke’s focus is on areas in which reason and understanding are suspended, in which detail and difference are effaced, in which boundaries collapse. This is an essay attempting to categorize the uncategorizable, to control the uncontrollable; we are afraid because we are, in every sense, in the dark.
What horror offers, in common with the suspense genre, is prolonged periods of apprehension and anticipation, punctuated either by shock and surprise or, more rarely, disappointment or frustration. In many horror movies, the points of climax involve death; often unpleasant and sometimes graphic death. The combination of charged anticipation and visual excess is not peculiar to this genre; what is peculiar is its prevalence. The horror movie offers almost nothing other than this roller-coaster ride of fear and sensation. As Carol Clover observes in Men, Women and Chainsaws, “The ‘art’ of the horror film, like the ‘art’ of pornography, is to a large extent the art of rendition or performance, and is understood as such by the competent audience.” Perfunctory characterization, thin plots and ludicrous scripts are beside the point; they are necessary backdrops to the main attraction.
It is that sense of spectacle that accounts in part for horror’s low status as a genre, and which has led to accusations that the genre places spectators in a sadistic position in relation to events on-screen. Clover’s book is an attempt to suggest an alternative assessment of the pleasures offered by the genre, and she therefore immediately contests the thesis of Laura Mulvey’s highly influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, which argued that classical Hollywood narrative cinema was constructed around a sadistic or fetishizing male gaze, and therefore posited a male audience in complicity with that gaze. Despite its heavy reliance on ideas from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, which it did not seek to question, the essay became a hotly debated classic.
Clover, in essays full of striking insights, counters Mulvey, while still allowing a psychoanalytic approach to dominate. Focusing on a certain breed of low-budget “American cinematic horror (a category I define somewhat loosely) from the 1970s to mid-1980s”, she suggests that the male spectator’s position is not sadistic but masochistic; although the spectacle of beautiful young women being murdered is apparently a titillating one (the blurbs on videos are obviously convinced of this as a selling point), Clover picks out of the “slasher movie” the Proppian type of The Last Girl, who survives the slaughter of her friends and kills the monster or psychopath herself. On the basis of anecdotal evidence, Clover asserts that viewers identify with the struggles and triumph of The Last Girl, which leads her to conclude that part of the pleasure of watching is a masochistic one; a point with which Burke would agree, and, apparently, Robert Wareing MP, who used that very word to describe the horror movie in the wake of the Bulger case.
This is a simplification of Clover’s argument, which has some interesting things to say on the androgyny of the new heroines of the slasher genre (they are not sexually active, they have ambiguous names like Robin, Stevie or Joey), but it is not an oversimplification. After a long debate on gender, employing Freudian and Lacanian schema, Clover suggests that these films demonstrate a “loosening of the categories of gender”, by which she means that women take the heroic (male) role. This is surely, as other commentators suggest, a natural consequence of feminist gains in the 1970s and 80s, and culminates in the figure of Ripley in Aliens 3, whose credentials as a fighter to match men are emphasized by her shaven head and hardbody figure, while her sex is clearly marked by her presence in an entirely male community, arousing desire and attempted rape, and her maternal qualifications are evidenced by her affinity with the (female) alien, whose child she is, grotesquely, carrying unawares. Aliens 3 displays a high awareness of Ripley’s iconic significance, and an admirable intention to capitalize on it; a not unique example of theory and criticism feeding back into its subject.
It is not that Clover’s arguments are not interesting and informative (this is a book worth reading simply for its footnotes); it is more that although what they set out to establish comes as no surprise from a lay position—that watching a movie in order to be frightened might be seen as a masochistic activity—it is exceptionally difficult to establish this from Clover’s chosen theoretical position. Questions of audience identification are unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved by recourse to reductive, abstract generalizations about the gendering of the Symbolic, and Clover’s nod at genuine “audience response” consists of two quotations from male critics’ anecdotal discussions, the second of which suggests that audiences identify across class and age as well as gender. Once more it appears that it is the ritual of the horror film that matters more than the sex of the performers; that identification is with acts rather than agents. It could also be argued that if anyone really cared how audiences respond to films, they should be initiating psychological research with a more rigorous scientific basis, rather than relying on the results of Freudian speculation.
Clover's incisive point is that film critics, whether seeing through the eyes of Laura Mulvey or not, generally fail to see anything but sadism in the viewing of a narrative. Clover points out that the emphasis on sadism "has the virtue of rhyming with the aggressive sexuality attributed to conventional heterosexual masculinity – a virtue that has put feminist critics from Mulvey on (who deplore it) in an unholy alliance with most male critics (who say it is unavoidable)". Mulvey's critique centred on the gaze; it is asserted that a camera angle which represents the point of view of a protagonist encourages the audience to identify with that protagonist. This is debatable; identification at its deepest level is likely to be with the character whose ideals and desires in other respects match those of the viewer. Anyone with Irish Republican sympathies will find it hard to identify with Harrison Ford in Patriot Games; many adults would dearly love to see Macaulay Culkin come a cropper in Home Alone II.
Camera viewpoint, in any case, serves a more important function in the horror film. When we see with the eyes of the killer, we cannot actually see the killer; this invisibility, and our witness to the reactions of victims, adds to our sense of fear without illuminating us as to its cause. When we see with the victims’ eyes, there is a level of identification (we too are terrorized), but we are also often prevented from seeing, until it is too late, the horror that we know – from the music, from experience, our much-valued “competence”, as the critics would have it – is nearby. Omniscient camera shots, related to no character's point of view, are, obviously, voyeuristic in a sense; they also facilitate a form of irony from which many narratives, in literature as well as film, benefit.
Clover makes some worthwhile points about eyes and seeing in these films; there is also the de rigueur exegesis of Peeping Tom, Joseph Losey's film, admired by critics because of its treatment of voyeurism, as if by enacting their theories it somehow also vindicates them. In this tradition, and perhaps more shockingly, a more recent British horror film, Hardware, takes these routines still further in questioning male violence. In one set-piece, a drooling voyeur has his eyes poked out; furthermore, he is injected with lethal poison, gutted by a saw, and – in a gory evocation of overkill – has his head beaten against the ground. The final scene of a brutal ninety minutes of violence involving a man-made war-machine is the irradiated desert of a world poisoned by man's abuse of technology; but former Sex Pistol John Lydon's intonation on the soundtrack is ambiguous, aligning our desire to watch with our acceptance of catastrophe. He repeatedly chants, "This is what you want: this is what you get."
A telling rebuff to the cinema-goer. Or is it? In a thoroughly entertaining and iconoclastic essay in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, Jeffery Sconce compares the critical receptions accorded to Freddy's Dead (Nightmare on Elm Street VI) and Henry – Portrait of a Serial Killer. He draws attention to the absolute disjunction between the tastes of middle-aged film critics and teenage audiences. Referring, for instance, to an accepted convention of the genre in which teenagers having sex are inevitably murdered after or during their "transgression", and the argument that the killer is thus "the incarnation of adult authority come down to punish the guilty teens", Sconce comments acidly, "I would argue that critics employing this specious 'slasher as superego explanation' have never sat in a theatre with a bunch of teenagers to watch one of these films." This, after all, follows an illustrative quotation in which a teenage girl has referred to Freddy Krueger, the child-murderer of the Elm Street films, as "a funny guy" – meaning funny ha-ha, rather than funny peculiar.
Sconce calls attention to the enjoyment of horror as pure spectacle; certainly, in teenage slice 'n' dice movies, the teenager scarcely identifies with the hapless expendables, whose flat-headed determination to camp in woods where not one, but several, groups have already been horribly eliminated [OCR unclear here — the sentence appears to break off]. A New Zealand film, Braindead, parodies lovingly the interest of "competent" audiences who simply enjoy the stomach-turning gore of it all, for which characters and plot are mere chainsaw-fodder. Sconce's essay demonstrates the way in which films signal their understanding of their audiences; this incidentally explains how the Elm Street films, which began in archetypal slasher style and were both scary and imaginative, degenerated into crude caricature. As Freddy came to be the "hero" of the genre, less care went into other characters, rock music pervaded the soundtrack, and spurious "good" references (Nintendo GameBoy consoles, for instance) tricked out the previously splendid special effects.
Rather than fall back on symbols of castration and the phallus, it might be interesting to examine the forces behind the production of such films: censorship and certification, Hollywood's unwritten rules of conservatism, the market factor – and also the conflicting drives and demands of a "more of the same" ethos (if a formula is successful, why change what isn't broken?) and the need inherent in a genre to surprise, to put a fresh spin on the old formula.
Peter Hutchings's work on the Hammer horror movies, despite its fondness for psychoanalytic language in interpretations of individual films, is an impressive attempt in this vein. Hammer and Beyond takes as its subject the British horror film from 1945 to the early 1970s – so different a subject from Clover's. Analysing the social background of those involved in Hammer, and the specific postwar anxieties and social changes of Britain, and not afraid to discuss market forces, this is a worthy thesis. Clover herself, discussing the city-country clashes in films such as The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as rape-revenge narratives like I Spit on Your Grave (the last two were casualties in Britain of the video nasty uproar), compellingly argues that these films both retain traces of the Western and employ a feminist-type argument: Indians, who demonize into inbred, autophagous rapists, ally the audience's sympathies with the town-dwellers who "rape" the Indians' land. Frederic Jameson, in Signatures of the Visible, in an even more complex thesis, devotes a chapter to The Shining, arguing that the occult movie betrays a yearning for the simplicities of Cold War Manicheanism pre-Vietnam, "allowing us to reinterpret this still 'metaphysical' nostalgia for an absolute Evil in the far more materialistic terms of a yearning for certainties and satisfactions of a traditional class system".
The occult movie did not fare well in the 1980s. Horror in this period, aside from reiterations of established sequel-spawning staples, has undergone a shift, from the external into the home. The rape-revenge slasher gives way to The Accused or Extremities, becomes documentary, juridical, realist. The psychoanalyst, whose explanations are now provided by the narrative or the ordinary characters, is collapsed into the figure of the psychopath in the form of Hannibal Lecter – physician, explain yourself! Medical insanity makes a comeback, and, significantly for those who detected an anti-feminist backlash in Republican America, the monster is a demonic woman, possessed not by satanic forces but by clinical madness.
The disturbing, mainstream films of this subgenre carry familiar labels: "Mistress From Hell" (Fatal Attraction), "Nanny From Hell" (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), "Flatmate From Hell" (Single White Female) et al. That diabolic resonance places these films in the horror genre alongside Psycho, with their focus on the mind as the seat of the monstrous. They are films which affirm family values even as they threaten them: the marriage in Fatal Attraction, the place of the housewife in Hand..., as nanny usurps the maternal role (and whose psychosis stems partly from infertility); the heterosexual relationship in Single White Female. This film, as much as The Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct, marked out homosexuality as something dangerous, since it includes the compulsory trip into the twilight world of clubland and shows some titillating hints of lesbianism. This was gratuitous in that it advanced neither plot nor characterization, but merely serviced a public hypocrisy: that of fascinated disapproval.
As Foucault recognized, horror has always, to a greater or lesser degree, been happiest in the home; horror films attempt to transform our real anxieties into manageable battles. In Beowulf, Grendel's mother inhabits a form of anti-hall; in Sir Orfeo and Gawain and the Green Knight, the hero encounters the alien within recognizable societal structures. While science fiction used to represent Cold War paranoia, in the Alien films it is an assault on corporate greed; the enemy is within as well as without, an idea spectacularly enacted in Aliens 3 when an alien is nesting in Ripley's skull. The horror film's reliance on metaphors of invasion, possession, contamination and the unnatural, exchanged so freely in social, penal, political, moral and medical discourses, allows for fairly free interpretations; and those who tender political interpretations invariably appear to have a clear a priori political viewpoint which they then conveniently find reflected in the object of their study. A film is, for that reason, unlikely to tell us anything we did not know. Even so, the film-makers' choices of social situations for the drama are frequently quite revealing, and the new focus on the domestic arena, and the psychosis of women, is seen as an unwelcome development from the provocative films of the 1970s which Clover champions, whose gender-subverting stances, she had hoped, would "trickle up" into the mainstream.
Child's Play 3, ironically, is set in an institution for unruly youngsters, who are trained in military style under the auspices of the State. The Elm Street series focused increasingly on disturbed and abused teenagers as its protagonists. These films are marketed for young people whose "competence" to deal with issues of identification and enactment exceeds that of the critics who discuss them. Perhaps the horror movie has anyway become merely a naked display of marketing semiotics? Child's Play 3 begins with a discussion by the doll's makers about reissuing the toy: has the scandal died down, is there still a demand? And one can imagine the makers of the film having similar discussions in the future.
Real horror is fended off in horror fiction: urban paranoia, economic insecurity, abusive families, our fear of burglars, immigrants, or even the darkness within children themselves, are collapsed into grotesque yet containable threats to ideal homes, which we recognize yet do not live in. Just as the horror film can be read in any manner you choose – politically, psychoanalytically, aesthetically – we find what explanation we can for our fears, and any explanation will do. "We all see ourselves in it," screams the percipient heroine of The Abyss.