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ProQuest Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 USA. 800-521-0600 ® UMI‘The Horror Affect: Hollywood Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Cosimo Urbano A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Cinema Studies New York University ‘September 2002 William G.SimonUMI Number: 3062851 Copyright 2002 by Urbano, Cosimo All rights reserved. UMI LUMI Microform 3062851 ‘Copyright 2002 by ProQuest information and Learning Company. Al rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 ‘Ann Arbor, Mi 48106-1348© Cosimo Urbano All Rights Reserved, 2002ACKNOWLEDGMENTS |" would not have been able to write this dissertation without the continuous ‘Support of Dr. William G. Simon. His constant encouragement and the time he so Generously devoted to helping me complete the writing process simply cannot be ‘measured. Although | doubt | will ever be able to thank him enough, | hope that he knows how deeply and truly grateful | am. ‘As Chair of the Cinema Studies department, and together with Elena Pinto Simon, then Associate Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts, Dr. Simon allowed me to pursue my doctoral studies while | was living and working in Italy for part of the year. Without their Understanding and actual help, | probably could not have fulfiled the degree requirements, let alone successfully defend the dissertation. My deepest thanks also go to Dr. Art Simon who was involved in the project from the very beginning contributing most valuable observations and challenging questions throughout. Dr. Anna McCarthy graciously accepted to join the committee at a much later stage and | am most thankful to her for her useful comments and suggestions. For as long ‘as he was directly involved in the project, Dr. Richard Allen was a source of challenges and ideas. He has helped me more than he perhaps realizes. My two extemal readers, Herbert Stein, MD, and Dr. Adrienne Harris both provided ‘@ much needed clinical perspective to balance my essentially theoretical application of Psychoanalysis. Both also surprised me by engaging with my work more than | had anticipated and dared to hope for, offering comments, questions and challenges that | hope have helped me strengthen my arguments.Finally, Alexander Stein and Stephanie Carrow read and commented upon an earlier version of chapter two. Their input as well must not be left unacknowledged.TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1 The Monster and Its Critics CHAPTER 2 ‘Anxiety in the Modem Horror Film CHAPTER 3 Masochism and the Modern Horror Fim CHAPTER 4 Narrative, Repetition, Genre: The Medern Horror Film in Hollywood ADDENDUM A The Future of a Theory? BIBLIOGRAPHY 190 318 419 426INTRODUCTION This dissertation attempts to investigate what is known as the paradox of horror. Why do we, under certain circumstances, enjoy experiencing feelings that at any other time we Could only define as unpleasurable? Why do we feel attraction for, and even revel in, frightening and/or disgusting images, unsettling sounds, disturbing narratives? What is, in ‘other words, the appeal of the horror affect? Here, however, my starting point and main focus will not be the horror affect elicited by cultural texts in general-i.e. not what, for example, Noel Carroll calls “art horror," ‘an emotional effect presumed to remain essentially immutable throughout the years and the various forms of artistic expressions (literature, theatre, flm) which elicit it'but a well- delimited body of texts, namely what is referred to in the literature as the modern horror fiim.2 Moreover, and again unlike Carroll, | am interested in this specific genre precisely by virtue of its belonging to (and perhaps influencing) the Hollywood model and tradition.? ‘See his The Philosphy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart New York and London: Routledge, 1990. 2See. to cite just two examples, Gregory A. Waller, American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film, Urbana and Chicago: University of llinois Press, 1987, and Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Moder Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. 3By “Hollywood mode! and tradition” | mean a paradigm of commercial fimmaking describing in primis the films produced and distributed by the North American film industry for mainstream audiences. inevitably, however, the term Hollywood seems to me to come to identify also something slightly different, namely a model and a tradition of commercial filmmaking which is recognized (and often imitated) as such worldwide: e.g. Lawrence of Arabia (D. Lean, 1962), Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (S. Elliott, 1994) or Billy Eliott (S. Daldry, 2000). Although the notion of an essential continuity of this model and tradition—from D.W. Griffith to James Cameron, via Alfred Hitchcock (all directors ‘whose films are often referred to in this dissertation)~is far from being universally accepted, it’ seems to me that such a continuity can indeed be easily recognized if and when one looks for it in the ways in which the fms attempt to engage their audiences. The appeal of' see the modem horror fim, in other words, as a specific cultural and historical product, whose essential features and intended effects cannot be fully theorized unless they are assumed to be intrinsically related to the state of mainstream cinema in the late 20th century. Of course, it would stil be impossible not to acknoweldge what (and how much) the modem horror film derives from horror literature (dating from the end of the 18th century), from horrific representations of Westem figurative art, and even from other cinematic traditions (e.g. German expressionism). Nonetheless, what | intend to highlight in the following pages is what (and how much) the modem horror film shares with mainstream cinema. In fact, | shall argue that part of the interest a study of the modem horror film has for fim scholars lies precisely in what the genre can reveal about certain tendencies within mainstream cinema itself. Through its very specificity, in other words, | believe that the modem horror fim might iluminate certain features instrinsic to at least one kind of “typical” Hollywood productions, features which, although crucial for the films’ effects (and, presumably, for their success), are often overlooked or undervalued. 't thus ought to be clear that this will not be a genre study proper. | am not going to offer a comprehensive overview of the modem horror film. | am not interested in defining its parameters, tracing its evolution, dealing with the issue of sub-genres or cycles, or ‘Hollywood’, in other words, seem to me to have been, and to sill be, related to a complex set of narrative and visual techniques that during its history have certainly been modified, ‘but not, | would argue, radically changed. By this | mean that although such techniques are constantly being re-developed and fine-tuned on the basis of technological evolutions (sound, color, wide-screen photography, etc.) and cultural changes (e.g. the Production. Code),'so far they have never been truly abandoned or substituted by alternative ones (granting, of course, the few, proverbial exceptions: e.g. Pulp Fiction with its untraditional farrative structure, some of Woody Allen's films, or David Lynch's oeuvre). Despite the theoretical vagueness of the term ‘Hollywood’, therefore, | think that we are justified in assuming that audiences “know” the difference between, say, Mullholland Drive (D. Lynch, 2001) and in the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000) on the one hand, and La vita 6 bella (R. Benigni, 1997) or Titanic (J. Cameron, 1997) on the other. 2‘examining directors’ careers or the influence of specific screenwriters. | will use examples freely, choosing them with what might be considered a disregard to historical factors in a genre study, and generic intertextuality will not be given the attention it would deserve if this was a history of the modem horror film. Conversely, | will be particularly attentive to, and interested in, films such as Toumeur's Cat People (1942) or Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), films that although lying beyond what are considered to be the chronological confines of the genre (1968 onwards), nonetheless share with the modem horror film many of its essential features. ‘And | will also look at certain particular cases where | see similar basic mechanisms at work in films that have apparently nothing in common with the genre (e.g. Titanic }~a move which | suspect might appear even more peculiar if seen in the context of a traditional genre study. Taking our clues from the dissertation's title, we could therefore say that its main object is the affect elicited by the modem horror film, and that the main issue it tries to illuminate relates to the “paradoxical” nature of the spectator's relationship to the films (paradoxical insofar as Hollywood usually gets to be referred to as the “dream factory." 8 an industry founded upon and dominated by the exploitation of the pleasure principle, ‘ot its denial). The modem horror film, then, becomes the starting point and main focus of the dissertation by virtue of being the clearest and most revealing example of such a “paradoxical” attempt by Hollywood to horrify its viewers, to (apparently) deny them pleasure, to, in fact, (and stil perhaps only apparently) “traumatize” them. My work will follow what | would call an explicit trajectory which | will soon outline. But, parallel to this trajectory and, at crucial times, intersecting it, Iso run a couple of further arguments which, far from being “secondary,” seem to me instead to constitute thetrue and ultimate payoff of a study of the horror affect and the paradoxical nature of horror spectatorship. Let us begin by taking a look at the main, “explicit” trajectory which runs as follows. {In chapter one, | will offer an overview of both journalistic reviews/comments and scholarly analyses of two major (and extremely influential) medem horror films: The Exorcist and Jaws. Through such an overview, | will try to set up my argument against what 1 consider the mistaken primacy accorded to the figure of the monster by many films ‘Scholars (including psychoanalytically informed ones such as Robin Wood and Barbara Creed), Countering such an almost obsessively “interpretative” criticism of the genre, in Chapter two | will argue that modem horror films are better analysed if we recognize how they consistently employ four representational strategies to elicit a specific emotional effect in its spectators. Since the representation of the monster is but one of the four strategies, ‘my argument immediately “demotes” the figure of the monster, making it lose the crucial Centrality for an understanding of the modem horror film that it has for many film scholars, Carroll in primis. My detailed analysis of the four representational strategies will then lead us to a discussion of the affect of anxiety, for | shall point out a series of remarkable incidentally, the identification of the four strategies seem to me to support the contention of those horror film scholars who see the modem horror film as a genre distinct from other examples of filmic horror such as the Universal movies of the 1930s, the Hammer Studios Productions of the 1960s in England and the AIP efforts of the same decade in the United States. We shall encounter a number of arguments advanced in favor of such a position to which, | would claim, can easily and usefully be added the idea that the modem horror film can be theorized as a distinct genre precisely by virtue of its consistent use of the four strategies. To the traditional arguments of film scholars aimed at distinguishing the modem horror film from its predecessors mainly on the basis of socio-historical considerations (such as the advent of the MPAA rating system in 1968; the effect of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal on the public mind: and the mainstream success of The Exorcist and Jaws), we could, in other words, add a specifically stylistic criterion: the general and consistent deployment of the four representational strategies. 4correspondences between the four strategies and the four stages of anxiety examined by Freud in his second theory of anxiety. | will thus argue that we can see the four strategies ‘as sharing the same objective, namely that of eliciting anxiety in the modem horror fim ‘audience. Among the advantages to be gained from such a unified theory of anxiety in the moder horror film, we will find the possibilty of cogently integrating within it a number of crucial issues usually discussed separately in the literature such as the role and function of uncanny images, the feeling of disgust, and the phenomenon of projection. Having examined and identified what the modem horror film elicits (anxiety) and ‘how (through the four representational strategies), we then move on to ask why audiences Pay to be made to feel anxious. Chapter three is thus devoted to the issue of the Paradoxical nature of modem horror film spectatorship proper. Through an analysis of a ‘number of sequences taken from modem horror films, | will argue in favor of a suggestion which has already been made in the literature (e.g. by Carol Clover), nameiy that modem horror film spectatorship seems to be best described as essentially masochistic. This ‘argument is based, in part, on the striking similarities (which will be revealed by my chosen examples) that can be observed between reported masochistic fantasies and some of the modem horror film's more typical scenarios. But it will also come to be soundly based, having recognized the centraiity of anxiety in the modem horror film, on the crucial importance (much discussed in the psychoanalytic literature) of anxiety within masochistic fantasies and practices. This chapter will be in great part devoted to detailed analyses of theoretical Positions on masochism both the psychoanalytic community and within film studies. It seems to me in fact that, having invoked a concept as “loaded* as masochism, it is ecessary to try to acknowledge and avoid (to acknowledge in order to avoid) at least‘some of the more egregious contradictions, inconsistencies, blind spots and confusing assumptions which have become intrinsic to the concept throughout its by-now quite long history. It seems to me, in other words, that in order to usefully tun to the concept of ‘masochism, one needs to dwell upon the various theories of masochism that have been offered, even to the point of what might at times feel like exegetic obsession. Otherwise, | submit, one runs the very real risk of altogether losing one's bearing amidst the various theories, for, as | hope my analysis will show clearly enough, there are indeed many theories of masochism, often sharing very little with each other, and just as often not even acknowledging their profound differences. ‘A “tumn* to the concept of masochism and an “application* of it to the study of film without this necessary prior work of clarification is precisely what | find most problematic in the work of those film scholars that | will examine in this chapter. My detailed examination of the major theories of masochism within the psychoanalytic community is meant therefore to avoid making the same mistake myself. On the basis of such work of clarification, | will then offer my criticism of many of the arguments “in favor" of masochism advanced by film ‘Scholars, turing instead to the writings on masochism by Leo Bersani and Jean Laplanche which, | will suggest, offer apter bases upon which to attempt to theorize the spectator’s position in psychoanalytic terms. My goal here could thus be said to be two-fold. On the one hand, | will criticize what | see as the failings of a number of theories of masochism (and its assumed “value” that have been proposed in film studies. On the other hand, however, | shall suggest that the psychoanalytic concept of masochism (as elaborated specifically in the work of Bersani and Laplanche) can stil offer a viable, challenging and useful way to account for the paradox of horror (or, is | would rather put it, for the appeal of the horror affect) in the‘Specific context of an analysis of modem horror film's spectatorship. My analysis of Bersani's and, above all, Laplanche’s theories will focus on the essential and intrinsic relationship between affect and the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy. This issue will be explored in greater detail in chapter four where, in a discussion of the modem horror film in relation to the Hollywood model and tradition, | will focus on the notions of narrative and repetition (all too often overlooked by horror scholarship) in an attempt to illuminate precisely their complex relationship to emotional responses. Here | shall try to develop a theory which would allow us to account for the films’ ideological ‘meanings (perhaps the crucial interest of horror scholarship from Robin Wood onwards) precisely through an attentive reading of the way(s) in which emotional reactions are elicited, contextualized, transformed, and. ultimately, put to specific uses, within, and by, the texts, In this chapter, therefore, | will continue my examination of the relationship between affect(s) and fantasy (both in its private and public forms). My goal, however, will ot be that of arguing that “emotions are meaningful." Rather. | will suggest that cultural meanings reside (to a degree not easily acknowledged) in emotionally charged mise-en- ‘scénes, of which modem horror films are perhaps one of the clearest examples. Instead of seeing public fantasies as “supporting” ideological positions, we should, | will argue, investigate how such positions in fact come into being through (i.e. are literally produced by) the narrativization of affects in fantasy. ‘A few final words in chapter four will highlight what my study of the modem horror film as a public form of fantasy aimed at eliciting anxiety in its spectators can contribute to recent developments in genre studies (e.g. to Linda Williams’ argument about the importance of affective responses, and to Steve Neale's stress on the notion of the“dominant’). Alongside this “explicit” trajectory. as | have already indicated, run two somewhat. distinct, and yet often intersecting, projects. The first one has to do with my attempt to revisit (and often criticize) a number of applications of psychoanalytic theories/concepts to film studies. Such an attempt can be said to derive from a general conviction on my part that a useful application of psychoanalysis to cultural products ought to be focused not so ‘Much, and certainly not only, on symptoms (e.g. the figure of the monster), but on affects. Hence, to use a somewhat simplistic analogy, my focus on the spectator’s emotional relationship to the modem horror flm can be compared to an analytic interpretation of a transferential exchange within the clinical situation, whereas Carroll's or Creed’s often acute analyses of the monsters correspond to more classical dream interpretations (i.e. to interpretations aimed at revealing hidden meanings behind symbolic fagades). ‘Among the psychoanalytic concepts applied to the study of film (and of the moder horror film in particular) that my work will attempt to refine we find, as | have already suggested, the notions of the uncanny, of disgust, and of the mechanisms of Projection. But | will also try to demonstrate how, for example, the psychoanalytic notion of identification has by and large been misunderstood by film scholars and hence applied to ‘mainstream cinema in erroneous ways, leading cognitivist critics (rather justifiably perhaps) to vehemently attack it. Finally, a significant part of this project is, of course, my excursus through the various theories of masochism, an excursus motivated by the avowed conviction that a ‘study of the modem horror film can illuminate the psychoanalytic concept of masochism at least as much as the concept of masochism can be used to “explain” the modem horror file‘The second implicit, or underlying, project of my work can be referred to as the ‘attempt to substantiate a claim which hopefully in the course of the argument will become, slowly but clearly, far less controversial than the way it might sound at first. As we move, in fact, from an analysis of the four strategies to anxiety, and from masochism to narrative and repetition, we shail see how the modern horror film will tend to lose its presumed ‘exceptional status within Hollywood to acquire, on the contrary, an almost exemplary quality. So much so that (in a truly "paradoxical" twist) we shall come to see the modem horror film as being able, in its very marginality and perhaps precisely because of it, to ittumi te certain crucial features of a larger tendency within the Hollywood tradition of fimmaking The very feeling of anxiety, for example, as central as it is to the modem horror film, cannot but be recognized as crucially operative in a great number of “typical” Hollywood products such as the “suspense films" or “thrillers but also, most significantly, in its greatest worldwide success to date, James Cameron's Titanic. Similarly, as Titanic itself suggests, often crucial for Hollywood's success has apparently been its ability to exploit what we might call its audiences' propensity to enjoy its own suffering, @ propensity that from Griffith's Way Down East to Minghella's The English Patient has tumed a number of melodramatic love stories (e.9. Casablanca) into blockbusters and veritable embodiments of what has been referred to as a “masochistic aesthetic.” however, my analysis of the way in which affects in the modem horror film are imbued with ideological meanings~or rather my contention that ideological mes ings can ‘only come into being through emotional experiences—that most clearly suggest the “exemplary” quality of the genre. For here we will see how the modem horror film, far frombeing "unique" or exceptional, appears instead as the clearest instance of a process that is just as founding and operative in melodramas, westerns, and war movies as it is in films that most spectacularly wear their emotional quality on their sleeves (such as The Exorcist, Jaws, Alien and the like). In relation to these two undertying projects, itis thus also clear that among my goals lies a desire to engage with psychoanalytic theory itself. Far from being satisfied to “apply” psychoanalysis to the study of mainstream cineam, in other words, | (still) submit to Metz’s somewhat immodest hope that to a certain extent “the theory of the cinema may ‘some day contribute something to psychoanalysis...."5 ‘My efforts to illuminate the complex relationship between affects and ideological ‘meanings in the field of (private and public) fantasy tell of my desire to work toward such a contribution. But | should also like to add how, in my mind, the crucial centrality of masochism in psychic life argued for by Bersani and Laplanche and, consequently, the relevance of their theories within psychoanalysis and the humanities, appear to me to be profitably illuminated and supported by a study of the modem horror film such as the on attempt here. ‘This dissertation tries therefore to be as much a study of a specific, particular, and “marginal” genre as an examination of the essentially emotional nature of mainstream cinema spectatorship (of which horror spectatorship is argued to be an exemplary revealing instance). And, similarty, it aims to be as much a cogent and useful application of certain psychoanalytic concepts and theories to the study of mainstream cinema, as an attempt to enrich our psychoanalytic view of the human subject through a study of its relations to cultural products such as the modem horror film and the Hollywood model and SChristian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982, p. 57. 10tradition from which the genre so violently springs. fon the basis of some of the claims | have made above it is quite clear that | am convinced that certain forms of psychoanalyic thinking can be very helpful (and perhaps even necessary) to investigate a number of issues related to the modem horror film's (and Hollywood's) emotional effects, a large, over-reaching question still needs to be addressed. At the present moment, in fact, coesn't the very validity and usefulness of psychoanalysis as an interpretative discipline appear in need of being defended, at the very least in film studies? The story is well known. After a period of almost total domination of the field of film theory (approximately from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s), psychoanalysis has fallen in disrepute under the convergent attacks of cognitivism, cultural studies, and certain branches of gay/lesbian studies. Since it seems to me that so far the most comprehensive critique of psychoanalysis qua interpretative disciplit has been articulated by cognitive theorists, | shall try in the following pages to answer the two main objections raised by them. The first relate to what, according to the cogni ists, psychoanalysis ought to concem itsetf with. Noel Carroll writes: “Psychoanalysis is a theory whose object is the irrational. Or, to put the matter differently, the realm of psychoanalysis is the irrational, SCognitive theorists’ detailed critiques of psychoanalytic film theory can be found in Noe! Carroll, Mystifying Movies, New York: Columtia University Press, 1988; and David Bordwell & Noel Carroll eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, 1996. For a comprehensive overview of the history of psychoanalytic film theory see Richard Allen, "Psychoanalytic Film Theory.” A Companion To Film Theory, Toby Miller and Robert Stam eds., Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, pp. 123-145. 11which domain has as its criterion of identification that it be phenomena that cannot be adequately accounted for in terms of rational, cognitive, or organic explanations."? ‘The second objection sees psychoanalysis as a "unified," all-encompassing theory and, as such, judges it less useful to film scholars than the middle-evel research approach favored by the cognitivists. Here it is David Bordwell who puts it most succinctly: "Most important, the middleevel research programs have shown that you do not need a Big Theory of Everything to do enlightening work in a field of study. Contrary to what many believe, a study of United Artists’ business practices or the standardization of continuity editing or the activities of women in ily film audiences need carry no determining Philosophical assumptions about subjectivity or culture, no univocal metaphisical or ‘epistemological or political presumptions—in short, no commitment to a Grand Theory."® (italics in the original) AS for the first objection, that “psychoanalysis is a theory whose object is the irrational,” | would argue that to make such a statement is to miss both the ‘scope of the Freudian approach and, more importantly, the profound challenges his theories put forward. As it ought to be all too clear to anyone who leafs through books such as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, or Civilization and Its Discontents, one of Freud's most basic tenets (perhaps the most basic one) is precisely that in fact there is no absolute dividing line between what Carroll calls the “rational” and the “irrations "Freud argues for an understanding of psychic life as taking place along a 7 Noel Carroll, “Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in D. Carroll eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, 1996), p. 64. ®David Bordwell, “Contemporary Film Studies and the Vicissitudes of Grand Theory.” in D. Bordwell & N. Carroll eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, 1996), p. 29. 2)Spectrum, so that dreaming, for example, is to be understood as a temporary regression to 2 more primary mode of psychic functioning, a mode very similar to that which a psychotic Patient cannot break out from. It is in fact Freud's most radical suggestion that the difference between rational and irrational is not an ontological one, but one of degree. Far from being a theory of mental disfunction(s), Freudian psychoanalysis is a theory of mental functioning, that is to say, a theory of the human psyche. Now the cognitivists might argue that as such itis a ‘unified theory, a very “Big” ‘one indeed, and that therefore they are all the more sceptical of it. But what ! would argue 's that they too, notwithstanding all their claims, subscribe to a similarly Big Theory which underlines and predetermines their middievevel research programs. The difference is that, Unlike the psychoanalytic theorist, they are determined to disavow the existence of such a theory behind their piecemeal approaches. Here we have already moved into the field of the second objection. When Bordwell ‘efers to “business practices,” can we really believe that it is possible to look at them, let alone study them, from a "neutral" standpoint? It seems to me that the very definition of business practice is bound to be determined by, to use his words, some “philosophical ‘assumption about culture,” if not by “political presumptions." And, by the same token, to look at the activities of women in early fim audiences surely must carry some “assumptions” about subjectivity, that is to say not only about what it means to be a woman in a specific historical moment in a specific society, but also about the very way that society defines *woman.* Unless, of course, one believes that a woman is the female ‘member of the human species, and that such a definition is all we need to begin a middle- level research program... {tis therefore easy to show that, despite their claims to the contrary, the 13cognitivists as well subscribe to a number of “metaphisical or epistemological or political presumptions,” one of which is, as we have seen, that there is an ontological difference between what we call rational and irrational mentation processes. | have argued that Freudian psychoanalysis argues against such a position (perhaps we can begin to call it “a belief). But what | am trying to stress here is the fact that whereas Freudian Psychoanalysis self-consciously brings its “presumptions” out in the open (although it would perhaps be more exact to say that it “arrives” at them through a self-conscious process of doubting), the cognitivists are reluctant to recognize and acknowledge the extent to which their own arguments also depend on a number of underlining presumptions. To argue that it is possible to talk about perceptual processes, cognitive Processes, emotions, reason, irrational phenomena, and so on, as distinct from each other and from culture or ideology is a legitimate position to take. However, the fact that this idea might be reasonable for many does not imply that itis not in fact a belief. Freud's ‘work can after all be seen precisely as an attempt to reveal such an idea as a belief and to prove it wrong, so that one could argue that in this case it is the cognitivists' own Position which needs defending, having been put under the scrutinizing lens of an alternative theoretical model and criticized for falling short of offering a truly convincing ‘hypothesis. |, for one, am far from finding it “self-evident” that the irrational and the ‘ational are two ontologically distinct domains, rather than positions at the opposite ends of the same spectrum. Furthermore, the idea that a woman is a woman Is a woman (no ‘matter when and where she lives) seems to me not only not "reasonable," but in fact counterintuitive. 14“Thought is. . . nothing but a substitute for a hallucinatory wish.”® This is perhaps ‘one of Freud's most radical and provocative assertions (and, | am ready to admit, not an intuitive one). It comes toward the end of his long and dense book on dreams, and far from being an assumption it is a conclusion, something arrived at through a long and ‘complex process of observation, doubting, and incremental hypothesis making. This is not the place to examine what the presumptions Freud was working with were when he started to develop his theories, although it should be clear by now that | believe there must have been some (it is usually suggested he was working within the framework of late 19th- Century science). What ! want to stress here instead is the following. By taking us step by step to the conclusions he has reached, Frued is trying to convince us not only that thought developed out of the infant's hallucinatory wishes, but that because of this we should not "believe" that the two are radically distinct. By coming into being as a "substitute" for hallucinatory wish-fulfilment, thought cannot but have at least some points of contact with such primary mental processes, and, by the same token, hallucinations (both in infants and in psychotics, not to mention in the case of the temporary psychotic: the dreamer) are themselves a form of thinking. ‘As | said, such conclusions are not intuitive ones. Yet this does not mean that they are de facto unreasonable. He or she who wants to read Freud and follow his reasoning (for, after all, in his texts he certainly isn't free associating) might or might not become convinced by it. fhe or she is convinced, then it is likely that he or she will accept his conclusions and, on this basis, also accept his theorizations. Such theorizations, arrived at following the examination of a number of phenomena both pathological and not, will then become presumptions to which the psychoanalytic theorist will be committed until further Ssigmund Freud, The interpretation of Dreams, (New York: Avon Books, 1965). p 606. 15‘observations either prove them wrong or refine them. *.. . [Flor we must always be Prepared to drop our conceptual scaffolding if we feel that we are in a position to replace it by something that approximates more closely to the unknown reality." We begin to understand why the divide between the cognitivist stance and the Psychoanalytic one is felt by the cognitivists as impossible to bridge. Given the profound differences in their presuppositions, it is not so much that the conclusions reached by the {two are bound to be irreconcilable, but that the very objects under study are rarely the ‘same. What we have in fact are two sets of "beliefs" which cannot but predetermine what the critics choose to focus on. The cognitivists, believing that perception and cognitive Processes are distinct and crucial aspects of human behavior, set out to examine how they are inscribed in fim viewing and how they determine the filmic texts. The Psychoanalytic theorist, on the other hand, having been convinced that “nothing but a wish can set our mental apparatus at work,"!! necessarily (‘naturally” one is tempted to ‘Say) turns his or her attention to the where and how desire and pleasure appear in and shape the texts. The question at this point is: how does someone uncommitted to either theory decide which one is more "convincing"? Or, to put it differently, is it possible to adjudicate “objectively” (that is to say, from a standpoint extemal to either one) the merits and flaws ‘of one theory compared to the other? 1 am going to suggest that this is in fact possible, ‘and that it will be done by such a hypothetical, uncommitted reader not simply on the basis of the coherence and comprehensiveness of the answers provided, but above all on the basis of what are perceived to be the pertinence and appropriateness of the ‘questions posed by each theory. 10tbid, p. 648. ‘bid, p. 606. 16Let us take an actual example. Noel Carroll writes: For example, if we are studying horror films, it strikes me as incontrovertible that filmmakers often play upon what psychologists call the “startle response,” an innate human tendency to “jump” at loud noises and to recoil at fast movements. This tendency is, as they say, impenetrable to belief; that is, our beliefs won't change the response. It is hardwired and involuntary. Awareness of this response enables theorists like me to explain the presence of certain audiovisual patterns and effects in horror films, without reference to politics and ideology. Indeed, insofar as the startle response is impenetrable to belief, it could be said to be, in certain respects, beyond politics and ideology. Moreover, such examples indicate that there is a stratum of theoretical investigation at the level of cognitive architecture that can proceed while bracketing questions of ideology. ‘2 Now it strikes me as incontrovertible that what Carroll has explained here, by his ‘own admission, is the “presence” of certain audiovisual pattems and effects in such films, Given his awareness of the “innate, hardwired, and involuntary” startle response, he is able to argue that we do not need ideology, or for that matter anything else, to understand that filmmakers “play upon* such response through their usage of audiovisual patterns. It also strikes me as incontrovertible that such an argument does in fact “expiain® very little, if not nothing at all. Carrol's claim is that he is explaining the presence of certain audiovisual patterns, but what he is doing is describing a certain characteristic of modem horror films, namely their tendency to play upon the startle response. This in itself does not explain the presence of the audiovisual patterns, it only suggests that the spectators jump in their seats because of the startle response. But is this suggestion significant, useful, interesting? Now that we know the cause of the spectator's jump (the innate, hardwired, involuntary startle response), are we satisfied that we have offered a convincing explanation? And, more importantly, an explanation of what? | will make my point bluntly. It seems to me that Carroll is satisfied in pointing out ‘2Noel Carroll, "Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment, in D. Bordwell & N. Carroll eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, 1996), p. 50. 17the cause of the spectator's jump, but he is not in the least interested in asking why the spectator knowingly (that to say. voluntarily) goes into the theatre in the first place. Here we see how the true issue has to do with which questions get asked. Instead of claiming that the cause of the spectator’s jump is the involuntary startle reaction, a psychoanalytic Critic would look for the reason the spectator voluntarily decides to put him or herself in a situation in which he or she will be startled. And this is because the psychoanalytic critic is convinced that to explain tne presence of specific audiovisual patterns in a man-made Cultural product without taking into consideration their function is ultimately impossit Hence the psychoanalytic critic would conclude that the filmmakers’ “playing upon" the startle response might perhaps describe how the audiovisual pattems frighten the horror film spectators, but certainly not why the spectators want to be frightened. {am going to offer the reader a hypothetical, shamelessly banal, extra-cinematic example. Let us imagine a woman in her early thirties, Dorothy, who lives in New York City. Dorothy has a problem. She is emotionally involved with two men: William who lives in London, and Jack who lives in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, Dorothy hates flying, 's0 that to see her lovers she must everytime take a long trip, either by ship or by train. Tired of being tom in such a way, after much reflection and emotional turmoil, Dorothy decides that the life of a single career woman in New York is not for her and that her future is with Jack. She buys her Amtrak ticket and boards the train to Los Angeles. This is ‘when the cognitivist and the psychoanalytic critic run into her. ‘The cognitivist says: | can explain Dorothy's presence on this train! She was living in New York when she made up her mind to join her boyfriend, Jack, in Los Angeles. Since she does not like to fly, she examined her options and decided that the train was the quickest and most confortable way to go from New York to California. And here she is! 18‘The psychoanalytic critic listens to and says: Well, yeah, | agree with you, what you're saying makes sense. But what / would like to know is how Dorothy came to this, particular decision. What were the reasons that led her first to decide to get married, and then to choose Jack instead of good old Wiliam? And, by the way, what's with her fear of flying? You see, the psychoanalytic critic concludes, to me this is what would really ‘explain her presence on our train today. . Let us go back to the uncommitted reader of the two theories trying to decide which is the one he or she is more drawn to. Let us assume this reader is looking at Carrols eritique of the psychoanalytic concept of suture and at his altemative theory of point of view editing." | claim that the reader will not be swayed one way or another ‘simply on the basis of the intemal coherence and appropriateness of the theories. After all, | can find the theory of suture flawed and problema {as 1 do) and even admit that ‘many (but by no means all) of Carroll's points seem instead quite “reasonable.” But this does not change the fact that, unlike Carroll's, the theory of suture tries to address a ‘fumber of questions that | deem to be crucially important. That the theory's answers to these questions are not entirely satisfactory (and, at times, just plain wrong) does not therefore lead me to conclude that the questions were not the right ones to begin with. On the other hand, if the questions Carroll attempts to answer do not strike me as relevant, | ‘am not going to find his conclusions, as reasonable as they might be, very useful. ‘The theory of suture is based upon the “presumption” that there is often a great investment in looking, which mainstream cinema both exploits and manipulates by relaying the spectator's own look onto the character's. Of course we would expect psychoanalytic '3See his Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 183-198; and "Toward a Theory of Point-of-View Editing: Communication, Emotion, and the Movies," Poetics Today 14.1 (Spring 1992): 123-141. 7criticism to focus on the notion of this investment in part because psychoanalysis can itself be defined as a theory of psychic investments. But the point here is to see if the "objective" reader can agree, from the basis of his or her own personal experience of film viewing, with the psychoanalytic presumption lying behind the theory of suture. If, in other words, the reader agrees that the act of looking acquires a heightened relevance in ‘mainstream cinema thanks in part to specific audiovisual pattems, then a theory which attempts to explain these particular phenomena is likely to be judged by him or her as ‘more interesting and potentially useful than other theories which do not try to illuminate the same phenomena because they do not find them significant to begin with. (‘What is there to ‘explain’ about a point of view shot?" the cognitvist asks, ‘We understand that we are seeing what the character is supposed to see at that moment. That is all we know at the cinema, and all we need to know."'4) Jonathan Culler is dealing with these issues when he writes: “If readers do not accept the facts one sets out to explain as bearing any relation to their knowledge and experience of [cinema}, then one’s theory will be of litle interest; and therefore the analyst ‘must convince his readers that meanings or effects which he is attempting to account for are indeed appropriate ones."15 What follows is my own attempt to convince the reader of the appropriateness of my choice regarding which effects and meanings are worth investigating within the modem horror film. But itis also, and consequently, an attempt to suggest the viability, and ultimate usefulness, of certain forms of psychoanalytic theorizing for a study of such 14See Carroll, 1993. Also note the following remarks: “{It is . . . the case that the theory of some standard filmic device, like point-of-view editing, may remark upon some phenomena so mundane that it tums out to be never germane to interpretation." (Carroll, 1996, p. 43) ‘8Jonathan Culler, “Literary Competence," Reader Response Criticism Jane P. Tompkins ‘ed. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1980) p. 111. 20effects and meanings, both within the modem horror film in particular and within ‘mainstream cinema in general. aaCHAPTER 1 ‘The Monster and Its Critics Writing about both horror cinema and horror literature, Noel Carroll has argued that “what ‘seems to have happened in the first half of the seventies is that horror . . . entered the mainstream."! Indeed most commentators agree that, as far as cinematographic horror is concemed, no previous box-office success could be even distantly compared to The Exorcist phenomenon of 1973 or to the blockbuster explosion of Jaws two years later. The extraordinary economic retums of these two films and their ability to capture, in different ways, the popular imagination virtually guaranteed that the genre as whole established itself as the most profitable of the decade. In this chapter, | shall look at a number of reviews, commentaries and scholarly works on The Exorcist and Jaws with a twofold goal. First, | will try to raise, through my discussion of these various critical texts, a number of questions that are crucial for my work. | will use the writings on these two films, that is to say, to put into focus a few issues that will reveal themselves to be central to the arguments put forth in the dissertation. in this respect, this chapter is not to be taken as a review of the literature on the modem ‘American horror film. My choice of critical texts on The Exorcist and Jaws attempts to be neither comprehensive nor exemplary of, say, various trends within such literature. Yet | hope it will not be judged to be purely idiosyncratic. Each piece has been chosen because it introduces or deals with an idea, a belief, a feeling or a suggestion about the modem ‘Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart, New York: Routledge, 1990: 2. Cf, also the section on the 1970s horror film ("Horror and the Mainstreaming of in David A. Cook Lost iilusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000: 220-238. 22horror film that we shall re-encounter (often more than once) at various points in the dissertation. My second goal here consists in suggesting the existence of a trajectory along which critical thinking about these two films (and about the modem horror film in general) ‘appears to have moved. Whereas contemporary reviewers seemed to stress mainly the films' emotional effects on their audiences, later scholarly writings (with few notable exceptions) have tended to focus on the figure of the monster and to privilege its interpretation. | shall try to prove that, despite their inherent “superficiality” (above all when ‘compared to some of the best examples of horror scholarship), contemporary reviews did nonetheless capture certain fundamental characteristics of the flms that have instead become increasingly overlooked or undervalued by scholars. Let us begin with Gregory Waller's suggestion that the year 1968 was the ‘watershed point in the history of the American horror film. As we have already seen, Waller reminds us that 1968 was “perhaps not coincidentally, the year of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence and the election of ichard M. Nixon as president."2 Moreover, he continues, “[if 1968 could be id to inaugurate the ‘modem era of horror, it is not simply because this year saw the release of Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary's Baby. More important, in 1968 the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) instituted its ‘Industry Code of Self-Regulation' as a response to (and ‘an attempt to sidestep) public concern over the role of censorship in the media."? The new guidelines, David Cook writes, “allowed for the representation of graphic violence in its R ‘and X categories; and, almost without exception, the modem horror film went on to 2Gregory A. Waller, American Horrors: Essays on the Modem American Horror Film, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987: 2. ibid.: 5. re)become an R-rated genre.“* ‘Thus Waller quite clearly argues for a connection between the advent and the {following commercial success of the modem horror film and the political and cultural ‘moment in which they occurred. But he also reminds us of what is, according to most commentators, one of the essential differences between the modem horror film and its immediate predecessors. Whereas the 1960s horror films produced by Hammer Studios in England and by American International Pictures in the United States (the last examples of horror as a minor genre) shared a fundamental trait, namely that “they transformed the horror film into @ colorful period piece (usually set in the nineteenth century),"5 both Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, Waller's 1968 milestones, instead “and situate horror in the everyday world of contemporary America." Quite clearly this “bringing the horror home" is indeed a key element of the modem horror film. And yet it is worth noting that it is also a key element of two films from the early ‘sixties which, for reasons that will hopefully become clear in the course of my dissertation, | consider to be true antecedents of the modem horror film: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). As we know, these films didn't herald a whole genre, didn't ‘Spawn a long list of more or less successful imitations as Polanski's and Romero's films did, ‘and yet | believe they are just as significant and crucial for an understanding of the modern horror film as the 1968 films are.” Moreover they already shared with the later films ‘not only the “bringing the horror home," but also, and perhaps not unrelatedly, the ‘attempt to emotionally involve the spectator to a degree quite unlike that aimed at by “Cook (2000): 224. For a concise summary of the advent of the MPAA Rating System, see ook (2000) 70-1 2 3. Sibid.: 4. 78-movie director Wiliam Castle's Homicidal (1963) is, to my knowledge, the only movie directly influenced by Psycho. 24either mainstream cinema (lo which after all they belonged) or any Hammer or AIP ‘production from those years.® Here, however, rather than focusing on Polanski's and Romero's 1968 films (on the films that, according to Waller, literally ushered in the modem era of horror), | think it might be more useful to focus instead on the other two texts that seem to me to be absolutely ‘exemplary of the modem horror film and crucial to its development: The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975). They are crucial because it is with the Phenomenal success of both Friedkin's and Spielberg's works that horror did indeed enter the mainstream. And they are exemplary because in both of them we find, most spectacularly deployed, what in chapter two | will identify and define as the “representational strategies" of the modem horror film. Both films were not only extraordinarily successful (The Exorcist quickly surpassed The Godfather as the biggest box-office success of all time, and Jaws was of course the first film to break the $10,000,000 mark), but also became national (and intemational) phenomena. The inevitable cover stories in Newsweek (The Exorcist) and Time (Jaws) followed, while dozens, if not hundreds, of commentators began discussing and/or ‘explaining their success in print and on television. As a recent New York Times article reminds us Jaws must also be credited for having “created the Summer Movie as we know it the action-heavy ‘thrill ride’ sort of picture aimed at sensation-hungry younger audiences, which moves into theatres around Memorial Day." One could argue that they were, as the saying goes, ahead of their time and thus, although successful, remained isolated predecessors of what was to come half a dozen years later. “Terence Rafferty, “The Movie That Created the ‘Summer Movie" New York Times ‘Sunday, April 30, 2000. For a scholarly analysis of how Jaws changed the face of distribution and advertising practices, see Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and ‘Marketing in Hollywood, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994: 110-117. aa| am of course far from suggesting that box-office success in itself makes a movie worth studying, but | am pointing out that when two genre films released within 18 months of each other both quickly become the biggest money-grossing film of all time, clearly the genre they belong to has entered not only mainstream cinema but mainstream culture as well. fin the winter of 1974 the United States was in the grip of “the exorcism frenzy” as Newsweek prociaimed"®, and if in the fall of 1975 the Michael character (the "Meathead* son-in-law of Archie Bunker) could say in an episade of one of the top-rated sit-coms on ‘American television that *Gloria and | are the only couple in our street that hasn't seen Jaws," obviously cinematic horror cannot be considered the interest of a group of aficionados any longer. 'n the hilariously titled "Why the Devil Do They Dig ‘The Exorcist” Vincent Canby of the Ney York Times wrote: “The film . .. is the biggest thing to hit the industry since Mary Pickford, popcom, pomography and The Godfather.""" Exactly eleven days later in the same newspaper Lawrence van Gelder wrote: “Like The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris before it, The Exorcist is drawing long lines at the box offices from coast to coast and is a topic of conversation at cocktail party and hearthside alike."!2 The Godfather had of course been the previous year's blockbuster, and we are by Now very used to movies outgrossing each other every few months. But what these articles also remind us of is that the early seventies were the years that saw the relatively widespread distribution of radical and daring European art films and hardcore Pomography, a point to which we shall soon return. 10The title of a story in the February 11, 1974 issue. qXingent Canby, “Why the Devil Oo They Dig ‘The Exorcist" The Ney York Times, Januay 13, 1974. Lawrence van Gelder, "Exorcist Casts Spell in Full House," The Ney York Times, January 24, 1974, 26Almost immediately a fierce debate erupted between The Exorcist detractors and its supporters. Most often it was framed in the terms of high artlow art dichotomy and, not surprisingly, re-emerged with the Jaws craze. For Pauline Kael The Exorcist was “in the worst imaginable taste.""> Alexander Stuart lamented: “As always, the public craves yet ‘one more chance to proudly display its appalling lack of taste. And so they flock in their millions to see Tho Exorcist...“ An editorial in the Wall Street Journal prociaimed: “Lasting art is rarely designed to appeal to baser instincis. ..the word for that which makes Such an appeal is not art, but trash." Jay Cocks in Time wrote that “the movie is vile and brutalizing.* |i his unrelenting attack on Jaws (both the movie and the phenomenon) Stephen Farber elaborates upon the difference between art and trash: “Jaws. . .belong[s] to the Paviov dog school of filmmaking; [it treats] the audience like laboratory animals wired to twitch whenever the electricity is turned on. . . .The audience that has been pummelled by Universal's aggressive media blitz is then primed to respond to a scare show that works with the ruthless insistence of a cattle prod. Both the advertising and the film show the same manipulative contempt for the public."'5 Stanley Kauffmann showed the same contempt for the way the film worked: “The ads show a gaping shark’s mouth. If sharks can yawn, that's presumably what this one is doing. It's certainly what | was doing all through this picture, even in those few moments when | was frightened. There's no great trick to frightening a person: anyone can do it by jumping out of a closet at you~which would te both tedious and irritating at the same "See her review of the film in The New Yorker January 7, 1974: 59-62. ‘4Review in Films and Filming April 1974: 38. ‘Stephen Farber, “Jaws and Bug ~The Only Difference Is the Hype,” New York Times August 24, 1975. pgs‘moment that your heart skipped.~'6 | think it is worthwhile to pause for a moment and reflect upon what Farber and Kauffmann are doing. They are claiming that Jaws had an effect upon them, but this was either 1) bad, because obtained through a manipulative strategy; or 2) something worth belittiing ("there's no great trick..." “I was yawning"), insignificant at best, “tedious and irritating” at worst. Farber's images—"laboratory animals," “the ruthless insistence of a cattle brod”-suggest however something even worse than manipulation. They almost invoke a torture chamber scenario. In fact, one has the sense that Farber is accusing the film of attacking its spectator with a sadistic glee that goes beyond the desire to tum a huge Profit. Interestingly Molly Haskell describes her own experience of watching Jaws with very ‘similar images: "You feel like a rat, being given shock treatment, who has not yet figured ‘out what to do to call off the buzzers. He knows another electric jolt is coming, and lives in terror without fathoming the pattem." Kauffmann on the other hand gives away his disingenuousness by pushing his dismissive remarks a tad too much. Can anyone really be able to yawn while frightened? Perhaps Kauffmann wants to say something like: "Although | can't deny that the movie frightened me, | nonetheless still judge it a piece of crap (that is, it didn't interest me, in fact it bored me)."18 Yet | think that the way in which he tries to suggest that having been frightened didn't really mean that much to him tells us more about his attitudes towards emotional states than towards this particular film. *8See his review of the film in The New Republic July 26, 1975. ‘Molly Haskell, “The Claptrap of Pearly Whites in the Briny Deep," The Village Voice, dune 23, 1975. ‘As for his comments about being frightened by someone “jumping out of a closet at you." | wonder why, among all the possible examples he could have chosen from, he chose this particular one which, to my mind, does not seem to describe one of the most common ways in which people playfully startie one another. But perhaps in the mid- Seventies jumping “out of the closet” was occurring more often? 28Kauffmann's position was of course far from unique, as is clear from another excerpt from Molly Haskell's review of Jaws: “[You] might have seen me squirm and start and squeal during ‘Jaws,’ but that doesn't mean that it's a great film, or that | am compelled to give it a rave because | jumped out of my seat. | do the same thing in a dentist's chair."'® Again, we encounter the same defensive posture, the same “So what if | was scared? That doesn't mean the film was good!” attitude. And also, let us note, the ‘same basic sadomasochistic scenario suggested by Farber, whereby the spectator is Portrayed as the passive victim of the film's attacks, although the dentist's chair is indeed a rather unusual metaphor for the theatre seat. {tis perhaps worthwhile to remind the reader that what | am interested in here is ‘not the films’ value, whether they are “good” or “bad” films, but the way in which different critics justified their negative or positive takes on them, what elements they chose to stress, so to speak, in the texts and in their relationships to them. So it is all the more intriguing when opposite views end up suggesting the same basic experience. Take for ‘example Pauline Kae''s review of Jaws, a movie she seemed to have enjoyed much more. than The Exorcist. ws,’ which may be the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made, the disasters don't come on schedule the way they do in most disaster pictures, and your guts never ‘settle down to a timetable. Even while you're convulsed with laughter, you're still apprehensive, because the editing rhythms are very tricky, and the shock images loom up huge. right on top of you. There are parts of ‘Jaws’ that suggest what Eisenstein might have done if he hadn't intellecttualized himself out of reach~if he'd given in to the bourgecise child in himself. Leaving aside the notion of Steven Spielberg as the bourgeoise Eisenstein, it is clear that Kael is reporting a set of responses to the film very similar to those mentioned by Kauffmann, Haskell, et al. The difference is that Kael seemed, on the one hand, to have ‘Molly Haskell, “The Claptrap of Pearly Whites in the Briny Deep.* The Village Voice, dune 23, 1975. Review of the film in The New Yorker, undated. ei)enjoyed being subjected to the film's manipulative attempts, and, on the other, to have Fecognized that laughter, for example, is not simply a by-product of the film's strategy but ‘an integral part of it. She recognizes in other words both the power the film seems to have (on its audience and its multitayered quality. Jaws might be the “most cheerfully perverse ‘scare movie ever made" but itis also, for Kael, something much more complicated than a cattle prod. Hf the basic criticism coming out of the high brow camp was that The Exorcist and Jaws were "manipulative" and therefore low art, the films’ champions would praise what they saw as the unrelenting and skilful way in which their authors managed to tap into “primal fears." Many commentators noted the fact that both films had trimmed down the novels from which they were adapted, virtually eliminating all sub-plots and non-dramatic Passages. The result was a concentrated focus on the basic conflict and the actions required to solve it. For these critics too "Spielberg closely resembles those oldtime directors who disregarded the cerebrum and went right for the viscera,2" but this time this was meant as a compliment. They also predicted that the film was “destined to become a classic,” mainly because of its formal construction. “Bill Butler's cinematography, John Williams's music and most of all Vera Field's suspensful editing are classic examples of how these fundamental elements can sneak up on you and scare you to death against your better judgment.*22 Praises for The Exorcist could be just as passionat . "A picture of extraordinarily Powerful impact, both in word and deed, and can add the visuals. . . Friedkin has followed the gut-grabbing excitement of The French Connection with this even more impressive ZAstur Cooper's review in Newsweek, June 23, 1975: 54, bid. 30assemblage of demonic possession.“ “The Exorcist was cheated. it ought to have won the Oscar that went to The Sting. . . The director's grip on the audience is merciless... His Pacing is excellent. . . Audiences haven't responded so animatedly to a movie since. Psycho." 'twould be wrong however to suggest that critics were only divided between those who saw the movies’ “extraordinarily powerful impact" as something to be praised and those who considered the same “impact” as the worst example of mainstream cinema's tendency to manipulate its spectators. There were also critics, and very vocal ones at that, ‘who attacked the movies on other grounds. Psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson was perhaps the most straightforward one. The Exorcist is a menace, the most shocking major movie | have ever seen. Never before have | witnessed such a flagrant combination of perverse sex, brutal violence, and abused feligion. In addition, the film degrades the medical profession and psychiatry. At the showing | went to, the unruly audience giggled, talked, and yelled throughout. As well they might: Although the picture is not X-rated, it is so pomographic that it makes Last Tango in Paris seem like a Strauss waltz. ‘Seven long paragraphs later Grenson makes the following expert's claim: “In all, it is safe to say that the picture may well prove harmful to anyone whose emotional and ‘mental baiance is precarious." Greenson's statements well illustrate the theory ‘according to which the most vehement attacks against Friedkin's flm have come precisely from psychiatry and non-Catholic churches, that is to say from those very institutions. “revealed” by the film to be unable to fight off the demon and save Regan. Fortunately however, many opposing views, even from within Greenson's own field, soon rose to Review by Archer Winsten in The New York Post, undated. 2Foster Hirsch, free-tance critic in The New York Times, undated. Ralph R. Greenson, “A Psychoanalyst's Indictment of ‘The Exorcist," Saturday Review Mond, eisir4: 41 bid.: 42. 31counter his conclusions.27 Greenson's, however, wasn't an isolated voice. The following is taken from “Exorcist Fever,” an article in the Behavior section of Time: Manhattan Child Psychiatrist Hilde Mosse wams that the film provides a “deadly mixture of ‘sex, violence and evil. The idea that we can solve our problems by magic instead of by rational solutions is destructive. | lived through this before Hitler came to power. He said, ‘Listen to the language of your pure Germanic blood, your unconscious.’ The Jews in Germany then became the devil to be exorcised. The only thing The Exorcist can do," Dr. Mosse concludes emphatically, “is to pull young people down to a primitive level.® ‘Again the very same article provided the reader with an opposing view: “It is dangerous with people with weak ego control,’ explains Or. Vladimir Piskacek, @ Manhattan sociologist and psychiatrist, ‘but it would not cause psychosis.’ Small children may suffer from hallucinations after seeing The Exorcist, but Dr. Piskacek doubts that the fim would permanently impair even an immature mind."2 At which, one presumes, the mid-seventies housewife sighed with relief. Perhaps after ten years of hippy counterculture, hallucinations and temporary mental impairment weren't considered such grave dangers for small children after all. {1 dwell upon these quotes, however, it is not to make fun of them, although the temptation is hard to resist. By reproducing them here | am trying to suggest that if these movies made such an impact, stirred up such fierce debates, caused this kind of controversy, it wasn't because of what they were about, of their "message" or meaning, ‘but because whatever message or meaning they had, it was widely understood to be assimilated through emotional involvment. The flms were successful because they ‘emotionally engaged their spectators to such a degree that those who weren't convinced 7'See for example Hollis Alpert's “In Answer to Dr. Greenspan” in the same Saturday Review World issue. 2%in Time, February 11, 1974: 53. pid. 32that the experience could be safely dismissed as a rollercoaster ride began to be worried (eg. “the picture may well prove harmful” and the reference to Hitler). Finally, even among contemporary reviewers and commentators, we find some who criticized the movies on the basis of their relationship to mid-seventies' North American ‘society. With an annoyed disgust that | find quite amusing, Melvin Maddocks wrote: This stupid shark exists for us, then, as Archie Bunker exists for people who don’t even ‘own a TV set. . . . “Jaws” has become one of those obsessions, half put-on, that ‘Americans seem to invite into their lives, perhaps to drive out their real obsessions. . .. Over the years we have put up with other American crazes, from hula hoops to James Bond. But this shaggy shark, this plastic monster, this very poor man’s Moby Dick ‘Seems to trivialize the whole country just at the wrong time. Does anybody need to be told what we are looking away from-what we are diverting ourselves from—when we look at "Jaws"? History '75 has real sharks with real teeth. ‘As “this very poor man’s Moby Dick" suggests, here we are again in the field of hhigh brow criticism. Popular art is condemned as nothing but cheap escapism, and the biggest blockbuster of all times is accused of serving the purpose of distracting the masses from the “real sharks with real teeth” of the summer of 1975 (presumably unemployment and recession). Needless to say the film's advocates took a very different stance. Commenting tupon the same Greenson’s article we have already cited, David Bartholomew made a Point which we will re-encounter, basically identical, in Robin Wood and Andrew Britton's work: _.- Or. Ralph Grenson of UCLA calls the film “a menace to the mental heaith of our community. . . . It pours acid on our already corroded values and ideals. In the days when we all had more trust in our government, our friends, and ourselves, The Exorcist would have been a bad joke. Today, it is a danger.” Dr. Judd Marmor from Los Angeles concurs, “We have many disturbed people in our society and a film like The Exorcist will spread like aan infection.” It is interesting to note that many seemed to blame the film for simply Melvin Maddocks, “The shark has pearly false teeth, dear,” Christian Science Monitor, August 18, 1975. 33reftecting the corruption of society, skewering the film as disease, not symptom.3! ‘As both critics (Grenson) and champions (Bartholomew) make clear, The Exorcist was released at a time in North American society when values and ideals were “already corroded.” It is therefore not altogether surprising that more perceptive critics than Melvin Maddocks would be able to detect, even in a thoroughly “escapist” flm such as Maddocks’ detested Jaws . very contemporary cultural meanings. “It's not only the visual technique of Jaws that’s different,” Pauline Kael wrote, “The other big disaster movies are essentially the same as the pre-Vietnam films, but Jaws isn't. It belongs to the pulpiest sci-fi monster- ‘movie tradition, yet it stands some of the old conventions on their head. . . . The director, identifying with the Dreyfuss character, sets up bare-chested heroism as a joke, and ‘scores off it all through the movie. . . . [These anti-macho jokes expand into a satire of movie heroism." ‘AS we tum to more scholarly writings on these films we will find more and more ‘examples of such interpretations. They will be mainly focused on the figure of the monster ‘and will become increasingly sophisticated. Unfortunately the more sophisticated the interpretations become and the more the critical focus is on the texis' meaning, the less. attention will be devoted to the spectator’s emotional investment in the images. That is to say, the farther away we move from contemporary reviewers the less discussion we find of the “visceral reactions” audiences had to the films. | believe this to be a problem, and Perhaps nothing can better suggest why than the following comments by one of The Exorcists original spectators: Uf the message doesn't pull people together, the experience of it does. |, for one, spoke 'David Bartholomew, “The Exorcist: The Book, The Movie, The Phenomenon” Cinefantastique (undated clipping from the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Public Library in New York City). Pauline Kael's review of the film in The New Yorker undated. 34to more Puerto Ricans during my two hour wait in front of a New York theatre than | did the entire two years | lived in New York. And the vomit spattered bathroom after the show (you couldn't even get near the sink) may well be the closest the Melting Pot ever comes to blending titerally.°3 Being from Cinefantastique this quote ought perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt. We suspect today that many reports of people fainting or vomiting during The Exorcist were exaggerated, if not actually fabricated by distributors and exhibitors. But knowing for ‘Sure whether the incidents actually happened (or happened in those alleged numbers) isn't really that important after all. What is important is that a public discourse could develop about these incidents (or about the rumors about them), and that such incidents (or the possibility they might occur) became an important part of the “experience” of going to The Exorcist. What the above quote also suggests-and again whether the quote is reporting the “truth or contributing to spread a “myth” does not change the fact that this truth/myth was “out there"-is that there was something in the “experience” of The Exorcist which ‘Seemed to appeal to a very broad spectrum of the population. Endless reports about attendance stressed the diversity of audiences: old ladies, teenagers, Puerto Ricans and blacks, white young executives with their brief cases, and so on. The implied suggestion is that the movie cut across social and racial distinctions due to its ability to engage “primal fears.” Being in general very suspicious of the idea that anything human can be related to some primal, universal, innate and unchangeable trait, | would offer slightly different suggestion. The Exorcist, and mavies like it, attempted, often with success, to engage ‘SSHary Ringel “The Exorcist" Cinefantastique, (undatd). ‘Of course, the purported abilty to appeal to as large an audience as possible (above in ‘a multi-ethnic society such as the United States) is seen by many as one the characteristics of Hollywood genres themselves. Cf. Rick Altman: “Genres are regulatory ‘Schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single unified social fabric. As ‘Such, genres share many functions with nations and other complex communities.” Film/Genre, London: BF Publishing, 1999: 205. a7their spectators primarily on an emotional level. They did so openly and unashamedly and they did it at a particular socio-historical moment which allowed, and in a sense guaranteed, their success. | am going to try to illustrate this point by looking at yet another contemporary ‘account of the film's phenomenon. A month after its opening, the lines had become one of the movie's staples. A New York Times reporter tried to find out why people are “standing in those longlonglonglongiong lines when the reviews weren't all that great." Approximately one third of the people she interviewed said they wanted to see the movie because they had read the novel (a best-seller before the movie opened). A man and his girlfriend said they came because they couldn't imagine how a director could capture on film those arts of the book dealing with the exorcism. “I wanted to see the bedroom scene, like when the furniture is flying around and everything,” Robert said. Added Deborah: “And | wanted to see the part where the gir’s bed is shaking up and down, and where the priest actually performs the exorcism." Otto. . . said: “I wanted to see how the git's face becomes contorted and how she emits a foul odor from her mouth. And | want to see how they show her masturbating with a crucifix. | can't believe they could really show that." ‘What these quotes suggest is that at least a significant number of spectators had already read the novel. if we are willing to assume that by the time the movie had become. a cultural phenomenon most potential spectators who had not read the novel had nonetheless leamt not only what the movie was about but also what “horrors” to expect, ‘and probably how the story was going to tum out as well, then we must also assume that great part of the audience went to The Exorcist precisely to see how the movie depicted its horrific events. What we are dealing with here therefore is an issue of cinematographic realism, that is to say, of belief. Friedkin himself was very straightforward about this: “| SSJudy Kiemesrud, "They Wait Hours—to Be Shocked" The New York Times, January 27, 1974, Sid. 36attempted to make The Exorcist as realistic as possible." Was the movie really able to deliver on its promises? Judging from their success both The Exorcist and Jaws did indeed deliver. And it is obviously not coincidental that a great deal of publicity, commentary and discussion focused on their special effects, for ‘after all what must be realistic, “believable,” in horror films is precisely that which does not exist, and that must therefore be constructed, “made up" by those who were to become Hollywood's newest stars in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the special effects wizards. | shall examine the special effects’ importance to the experience of modem horror films in greater detail in chapter two. For the moment, let us undertine the fact that just as important, although perhaps not as immediately obvious, are other aspects of film technique. In his review of Jaws Arthur Cooper wrot - a8 with The Exorcist, the technical contributions are crucial to the film's manipulations of your nervous system."32 Almost all commentators, both favorable and unfavorable, remarked upon the importance of editing and sound in Friedkin's and Spielberg's films. in the latter case, even references to his "prodigious" talent stressed how self-effacing it was. In other words, Spielberg's technique was praised precisely because it managed to remain subordinated to the needs of the narration. The two examples often cited in this context are the shot in which the pages of the book on sharks that Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is reading are reflected in the lenses of his glasses, and the track-in/zoom-out shot on the same character patrolling the beach as he realizes the shark has attacked a swimmer. in both instances, Spielberg's command over the medium, his champions argue, far from becoming a self-indulgent display of technique, is used either to economically advance the ’David Bartholomew, “The Exorcist: The Book, The Movie, The Phenomenon" Cinefantastique (undated clipping from the Lincoln Center Performing Arts Library in New York City): 16. ‘arthur Cooper, “The Naked Tooth” Newsweek, June 23, 1975: 54. ea |story or to better represent the characters’ emotional or mental state. The demands of traditional narrative realism remain in other words the over-determining factor. |lam going to suggest that this interest in seeing and believing (believing both in what one sees on the screen, hence the importance of special effects, and in the story Itself, which therefore must be plausible and "well told") is crucial to an understanding of the degree to which The Exorcist and Jaws, and the genre they spawned, are texts of the 1970s. In order to illustrate this point, we should look at what else was on North American ‘Screens in those years, focusing, more precisely, on two other kinds of movies. First, ‘we have seen from a number of reviews of The Exorcist, by the early 1970s, European art films were quite regularly seen in big cities and college towns following their earty critical successes in the 1960s. Last Tango in Paris (released in the U.S. in 1973) had been a particularly relevant case, stirring, as it had done in Europe, debate and controversy for its subject matter and its graphic representation of sexual acts. What is even more significant is that the European art cinema had begun to influence Hollywood productions as well. An incomplete list of movies released by major studios in the three years which saw the release of The Exorcist and Jaws (1973-75) would include The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View, ‘Nashville and Night Moves. These in other words were the years when directors like Martin ‘Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Roman Polanski, Arthur Penn and Alan Pakula were creating movies which revealed how their authors had absorbed and assimilated not only the techniques but often also the attitudes and worldviews of their European counterparts. Both techniques and attitudes were perceived to be, to put it very bluntly, more complex and multi-layered than those traditionally associated with Hollywood, and, precisely because of this, deemed better suited to express the seif-doubts, 38disillusionment, and ever growing nihilism of larger and larger segments of the North ‘American population in those years. Therefore the use of formal elements such as zoom lenses or frozen frames, or an increased attention to off-screen space and sound, or the development of narrative constructions in which ellipses and abrupt cuts fragmented the lot exposition to the point where spectators were literally disoriented, are some of the examples of the techniques available in those years to those North American filmmakers that were inclined to “experiment” with the medium. The result were texts that looked and felt much different from what classical Hollywood cinema had produced thus far. There was, in other words, a quite strong and highly noticeable tendency to move away from what could be called classical realism, or at the very least a self-conscious desire to reformulate its definition by broadening its scope and challenging some of its old tenets at the same time. ‘Therefore it is no wonder that some critics would see the success of the early horror blockbusters as an unwelcome sign of a desire to tum back the clock in more than ‘one sense. The recurrent accusation was that of "shallowness." This is how Pauline Kael ‘opened her review of The Exorcist: “Shallowness that asks to be taken seriously. . . is an embarassment.” And later she added “Friedkin. . . is not a director given to depth or mystery.“ Once again Stephen Farber is the most unrelenting among the critics {although his wrath is aimed at Jaws, a movie that as we've seen Pauline Kael actually ‘Seemed to have enjoyed). Lamenting the “shallowness of (the film's] characterizations," For our context it is also worth mentioning how in the same years violence, both physical and psychological, becomes a central preoccupation for many filmmakers (including, of course, the ones mentioned above). Moreover, and perhaps even more important, the representation of violence in mainstream cinema changes dramatically, becoming not only ‘more graphic but highly foregrounded as well (the two classic examples cited as the films which ushered in these changes are Arthur Penn's 1967 Bonnie and Clyde and Sam Peckinpah's 1969 The Wild Bunch). “Kael (1974): 59. 39Farber reminds his readers of how the “true master of suspense," Alfred Hitchcock, “taught that suspense depends upon believable characters.” "In a truly classic suspense film ike ‘Notorious, Hitchcock took the time to develop Ingrid Bergman's character and establish her vulnerability . . .. Unfortunately, most of the younger filmmakers lack the talent to ‘make artful thrillers; they substitute shock for suspense, gore for psychological menace. Jaws illustrates the deciine in movie story-telling.“*" Interestingly, Molly Haskell too found it necessary to unfavorably compare Spielberg with Hitchcock: Compare the disdainful distance at which Spielberg keeps the citizenry-and discourages ur identification with them—with Hitchcock's treatment of the vulnerable island community in “The Birds." Not that Hitchcock idealized them, far from it; he simply particularized them, brought us swifly and vividly into their lives, in al their cranky and varied humanity, so that they became the surrogates not only for the audience, but for a civilization that precisely in its diversity is always vulnerable to the mindless and the monolithic, to pure evil or pure id. | dor't intend to enter into this aesthetic debate because one of the recurring points of my dissertation is precisely that interpretations such these apply to individual texts, whereas | am interested in identifying and accounting for a number of characteristics that horror movies share with one another and that, | would argue, probably are what ‘audience look for in them in the first place. ‘What is very interesting in these critics’ desire to refer back to Hitchcock's “mastery,” however, is that they conveniently fail to remind their readers that Hitchcock was most proud of films like Psycho, that is of flms where he was at his most manipulative. ‘As he told Francois Truffaut, "Psycho has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. ! was directing the viewers. You might say | was playing them, ike an organ.“ “Farber (1975). ‘2Haskell (1975). “Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock, New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1984: 269. 40Perhaps The Exorcist and Jaws deserve to be unfavorably compared to Hitchcock's masterpieces, but nonetheless it is as if the true reasons for which the ‘comparison can be made in the first place-the fact that the films are "manipulative," that they “play” their audiences like an organ-is disavowed, allowing the critics to focus instead on issues of “depth of characterizations" and the like. Interestingly, Hitchcock himself was. well aware of such critical attitudes: ‘That's why | take pride in the fact that Psycho, more than any of my other pictures, is a film that belongs to film-makers. . . | can't get a real appreciation of the picture. . . People will say, “It was a terrible film to make. The subject was horrible, the eople were small, there were no characters in it." | know all of this, but | also know that the construction of the story and the way in which it was told caused audiences all over the world to react and become emotional. . . . ls the kind of picture in which the camera takes over. Of course, since critics ‘are more concerned with the scenario, it won't necessarily get you the best notices, but you have to design you film just as Shakespeare did his plays-for an audience.“ Ifflms such as The Exorcist and Jaws could then be seen as having little to share with the European art films and the Hollywood products clearly influenced by them, | would argue they had instead something in common with another kind of movies that North ‘American audiences were being offered in the first part of the seventies, namely hardcore Pomography. Since today the home video market and the Internet have literally taken Pornography out of the streets and into middle-class homes, it might be all too easy to forget that the quite sudden and relatively widespread advent of X-rated pictures ‘graphically depicting sexual intercourse coincided with the advent of mainstream horror. We have already found direct references to pomography in both Canby’s and Greenson’s pieces on The Exorcist, and the reader who was to research reviews and articles from the Newspapers in which they originally appeared would have an even clearer first-hand experience of the adult movies’ co-existence with mainstream products in those years. Leafing through the newspapers’ sections in which films were advertised, he or she would “ibid.: 283. 41in fact notice the ads for both kinds of pictures lying literally side by side, mirroring each ‘other down to the use of critics’ quotes (in New York Al Goldstein seemed to have been considered the Pauline Kael of the XXX world).*S By pointing this out | am not arguing that the audiences for mainstream cinema (including horror) and pomography were the ‘same, far from it. am only drawing attention to the fact that any reader of a major-city ‘Newspaper was bound to be all too aware of the existence (and relative accessibility) of explicit, hardcore pornography. Keeping this in mind, itis quite interesting to realize that the R-rating given to The Exorcist by the MPAA had to be defended by Jack Valenti on the basis that there was “no nudity and no overt sexuality in the film.” Needless to say the rating created both surprise and debate. The Christian Century called it "hard-core pomography" that “uses the human fear of evil to create an emotional response and then provides~by Protestant standards—a completely impossible solution.““® Pauline Kael, among others, suggested that “[if The Exorcist had cost under a million, of had been made abroad, it would almost certainly be an X film, but when a movie is as expensive as this one, the M.P.A.A. rating board doesn't dare to give it an X.“7 Perhaps nothing helps us understand better the degree to which the film was “Not unsurprisingly a mere three weeks after The Exorcist had opened in New York Variety reported that Sol Fried's Capital Productions was planning the March release of The Sexorcist. (Variety, January 16, 1974) “The catholics were, not unexepectedly, not of the same opinion. After all, theirs was the ‘only institution that the film showed to be still in good standing and valuable. The Division of Film and Broadcasting of the United States Catholic Conference rated the film A-8 which means: “while moral itself it could confuse or offend some adult viewers.” The same year the Clint Eastwood vehicle Magnum Force was given a C (Condemned), proving that vil is indeed in the eye of the beholder. interestingly, Pope Paul VI had announced in June 1972 that for the Catholic church Satan really existed, legitimizing therefore brojection as the true catholic's main defense. No wonder protestants, relying instead on fepression which, as we know, is much harder to maintain, were so outraged by the film. Unlike the Pope's followers, they were indeed threatened by the film on all fronts. "Kael: 60. 42indeed a product of its time than this very debate. Could an expensive mainstream movie depicting an upper-class twelve-year-old white gir violently masturbating with a crucifix, screaming to her mother “Lick Me!" while pulling the mother’s head between her blood- covered legs, grabbing and squeezing a psychiatrist's crotch until he collapses in pain, vomiting green bile on a priest's face, and inviting another priest to “stick your crucifix up your ass?*—-could such a movie have been made a couple of years before?4® Interestingly, commentators drew parallels between the film and pamography not ‘only on the basis of content but of the audience's behavior as well. According to Canby, the many young people “in an orchestra aisle near my seat. . . smoked and talked about ‘baseball during those sections of the film in which the tormented child on the screen was ‘not {engaged in the behavior described above). . . [But] at those moments the kids were spellbound, almost it seems in spite of themselves.” A little later, referring to the audience in general Canby writes: "They are getting their kicks out of seeing a small girt being tortured and torn, quite literally. The audience watches as if attending a pomo film, moving around in their seats, talking, smoking, staring at the ceiling, during the conventional exposition, and then paying attention only to the violence that has been sanctified.“ We have no way of knowing how representative Canby's audience really was. Perhaps the show he attended was mainly filed with repeat viewers (although his ‘observations would still be meaningful, those viewers obviously going back for certain ‘Specific moments and not the overall narrative, for example). Farber however reports a very similar experience about the screening of Jaws he attended: “Audiences don't even ‘indeed the argument could perhaps be made that, were the movie to be produced today for the first time (and not as the re-release of a world-famous “old” movie), contemporary sensibilities might be much harder to overcome than was the case almost thirty years ago. “’canby (1974). 43ay attention during the quiet intervals; they are just waiting to see if the director can top the last spectacular death or dismemberment." What these reports suggest, once again, is a desire to see, a fascination (*speliound” is how Canby puts it) with what's on the screen that resembled, as the same critics recognized, the porno film's audience desire to “see it all," to have displayed in front Of their eyes “real” genitals engaging in intercourse (cf. the spectator waiting in line for The Exorcist who told Judy Klemesrud “I can't believe they coud really show that") It is therefore quite interesting that although both horror and pomography had had their cinematographic antecedents, it was only in the early seventies that both entered the mainstream and went “all the way.” exploiting a changed cultural climate and, in the case of horror, the advent of new technologies. IL were a historian and this were a history of the modem horror fim | would therefore try to conceptualize precisely this intersection of socio-cultural changes (the post- 1968 loosening of sexual mores, the post-Vietnam and post-Walergate malaise), cinema's history (the European art film, the New Hollywood “auteurs"), and technological innovations (the special-effects boom which would soon resurrect the science fiction genre ‘a8 well) in the attempt to trace and understand how all these factors might have combined to bring about a new attitude toward seeing in the movie-going audiences~an attitude which might have originated in the “reat” world and which the movies might have simply “mirrored,” or, as | would be more inclined to speculate, an attitude that commercial cinema in those years did in fact help produce. But | am not a historian and therefore my focus is rather different. | am interested in examining the experience the modem horror film tries to offer to its audience. What hi ‘Farber (1975). 44been said above should hopefully suggest that although ! will not, by and large, return to historical observations during the rest of the dissertation | am far from claiming that such an experience is not historically determined. That is to say, | might attempt to theorize ‘Such experience in terms of anxiety, an emotional state whose basic mechanisms might be taken to be unrelated to historical vicissitudes in the sense that, being part of our basic human make-up, we might assume that the feeling of anxiety remains the same throughout history. Yet | would stil argue that the different ways in which anxiety manifests itself, its different causes, and the very fact that at certain points in time popular culture's Products appear that are designed to arouse it are historical variables. Hopefully, should ‘my analysis of the experience offered by the modem horror film be judged to be convincing, it might then be used as the foundation upon which to build more historically focused studies. In June 1975 Murray Spector, “the happily surprised manager of the Fox Theatre in Hackensack,” was quoted as having said: "They like gruesome things. We're in a different world now.” He was, of course, referring to Jaws. What is crucial here is the recognition that the audiences like gruesome things. We have encountered Farber's and Haskell's comments about the analogy between the horror film spectators and laboratory animals (rats being given electric shocks was Haskell's example). As accurate as they might at first appear, such comments nonetheless overlook a most fundamental difference between the two groups. Unlike laboratory rats, or the cows 45being stunned by cattle prods that Farber refers to, the horror spectators are not only well aware of what's coming to them, but they also willingly pay for it. In fact they literally go in Search of it. It is here that the analogy inevitably collapses and loses most of its interest. For what such an analogy disawovs is precisely this complicity between the filmmakers and the audience, a complicity which obviously does not exist in the case of researchers and laboratory rats, or cowboys and cattle. Unless the critics acknowledge this complicity, and take it in fact as the starting Point of their studies, they won't be able to throw any light on the genre (although they ‘might stil offer convincing interpretations of individual texts' meanings). Film-makers on the other hand are well aware of it. William Friedkin: The cinema takes advantage of this factor. Alfred Hitchcock takes advantage of the fact that an audience comes into the theatre expecting to be scared. When they are standing in line they are afraid. So he takes them for about an hour and dangles them and lets them do it for themselves until he hits them with something. . . . The same is true for The Exorcist. People are afraid while they're standing in line. And for the first hour of the film. . people are working themselves into an emotional state that is inducive to becoming terrified.5" We shall soon retum to this active willingness on the spectators’ part to "become terrified," but for the time being the following words from Alfred Hitchcock should also be kept in mind as we move on to review the first major film scholar, Robin Wood. ‘My main satisfaction is that [Psycho] had an effect on the audiences, and | consider that very important. | don’t care about the subject matter, | don't care about the acting; but | do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the sound track and all of the technical ingredients that make the audience scream. | feel it's tremendously satisfying for Us to be able to use the cinematic art to achieve something of a mass emotion. And with Psycho we most definitely achieved this. it wasn't a message that stirred the audiences, nor was ita great performance or their enjoyment of the novel. They were aroused by pure fim: S!Quoted in Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modem Horror Film, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992: 205, note 83. S2Truffaut (1984): 282-83. 46Unfortunately, as | have already suggested, the further away we move from contemporary reviews and commentaries on the films, the less likely we are to find mention of “all of the technical ingredients that make the audience scream." Unlike the reviewers, ‘many, if not most, horror film scholars do not seem to be interested in the visceral effects the films try to produce and in the techniques the films use to achieve this goal.53 instead the subject matter and the “message” take center stage. Robin Wood's case is no exception. With the publication in 1979 of American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film and ‘above all with Wood's main contribution in that collection, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film," the horror genre began to be considered worthy of serious critical attention. Robin Wood, together with the other members of the collectives of the joumals Movie and CineAction, deserve credit for this. | believe a whole generation of scholars owes them a great debt for having opened the path at a time when, as we've seen, high brow ‘commentators would either vehemently attack the genre or disdainfully dismiss it. Robin Wood, Andrew Britton, and the other members of the journals’ collectives have been ‘highly influential (and to a certain degree they stil are) not only for having legitimized the study of the genre, but also and above all for having argued for the genre's potentially radical value. In the following pages. however, | am going to try, somewhat unwillingly given what | have just said, to illustrate what | see as the major shortcomings of their ‘analysis of the modem horror film genre. Wood's basic formula for the genre is well known: ‘Normality is threatened by the Notable exceptions are Clover (1992) and Wiliam Paul in Laughing Screaming: Modem Hollywood Horror and Comedy, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Noel Carrol, instead, although claiming to be interested in the emotional response to horror, ultimately derives it from and subordinates it to cognitive processes (e.g. we are disgusted by the monster because it undermines rational categories). We shall retum to these authors (and issues) later on. 47Monster.” According to Wood, “the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for all that our civilization represses or oppresses: its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror {the monster], a matter for terror, the ‘happy ending’ (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression.*S* Clearly, Wood is working within a Freudian perspective, although his insistence on the difference between repression and oppression reveals his belief in the necessity of joining Freud with Marx. ‘And it is indeed quite telling that, in order to introduce his work on a popular fim genre, Wood feels the need to offer as comprehensive as possible of all that our civilization (by which he means Westem ideology founded upon the pattiarchal nuclear family) attempts to repress and/or oppress. 'f what is repressed is, according to Wood, understood in typical Freudian fashion to be mainly sexuality in all its possible manifestations not subordinated to procreation within the patriarchal family, what Westem civilization attempts to oppress are the many embodiments of that which it calls the Other: women, the proletariat, other cultures, other ethnic groups, altemative ideologies, homosexuals, and children. The Monster in horror films often is, for Wood, precisely what has been unsuccessfully repressed/oppressed which now retums to haunt its censors. What attracts Wood to many horror films of the early 1970s is the peculiarly uncharacteristic way in which they represent the three variables of his basic formula: the ‘monster, normality, and their relationship. Above all, | would argue, he finds the depiction ‘of normality of particular interest in that many of these texts depict it in a clearly negative way. Wood, in other words, finds a lot to praise in popular culture's products that ‘Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film." American Nightmare: Essays ‘on the Horror Film, Robin Wood and Richard Lippe eds., Torcnto: Festival of Festivals, 1979: 10. 48Lunremittingly show the society which produced them as either inherently corrupt or on the verge of self-destruction. (On the other hand, one of the reasons for which he condemns a number of films that forms what he calls “the reactionary wing" of the horror genre is the confusion (in terms of what the film wishes to regard as ‘monstrous') of repressed sexuallity with sexuality itself. ... A very common generic pattem plays on the ambiguity of the monster as the ‘retum of the repressed’ and the monster as punishment for sexual promiscuity. 5 ‘This seems to me to indicate that Wood recognizes a whole spectrum along which ‘the representation and characterization of the monster can be chosen from, thereby implicitly admitting that the distinction between "progressive" and "reactionary" can and ‘Cught to be applied to individual texts and not the genre as a whole (a point to which we shall soon retum when dealing with Franco Morett's analysis of the genre). ‘Two related observations can be made here. First, Wood's points apply not only to the modem horror fim, but to horror narratives in general. His basic formula in other words describes equally well Bram Stoker's Dracula, Tod Browning's 1931 film version (Dracula), and Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film version (Bram Stoker's Dracula). | am not suggesting that this consitutes an inherent flaw per se. Yet if one’s focus is, as it is in my case, on the ‘emotional effects that the last one of the texts mentioned above attempts to produce in its viewers, then Wood's approach might tum out to be, in its comprehensiveness, not very Useful. And this is because Wood's quasi-structuralist analysis of horror narrative patterns does not help us identify and isolate those very characteristics of a contemporary film like Coppola's Dracula that are responsible for its audience's reaction (such as, for example, visual special effects, or historically specific styles of cinematography and editing). ‘Second, it is easy to see how in the early and mid-seventies horror films were far SSibid.: 23-24. 49from being the only examples of mainstream cinema's newfound freedom to depict contemporary North American society in a moderately or altogether negative way. Horror films might have pushed things a litle farther a little more often, but they were certainly not the only ones doing the pushing as, to cite just three examples again, Pakula's The Parallax View, Coppola's The Conversation and Penn's Night Moves show. Wood moves closer to offering us a somewhat more specific characteristic of the ‘modem horror film genre with his use of the concept of ambivalence, although it is clear that he does not introduce it for this purpose. Yet, even if Wood limits his focus on the way Such ambivalence relates to the films’ political meaning, | would argue that the mere act of recognizing and stressing the presence of a fundamental ambivalence in the texts ‘Suggests how this could be one of their most basic qualities. ‘An appropriate point to start is with analysis of Richard Donner’s The Omen (another very successful big-budget production that however did not reach blockbuster status). Wood reflects that ‘in obvious ways [the film] is old-fashioned, traditional, reactionary," mainly because the "goodness" of the status quo (the family, its values, ‘and so on! ‘not questioned, while, on the other hand, the monster is presented as totally evil (itis no less than the Devil himself, incamated in a litle child). ‘Yet the film is also very interesting, Wood claims, since it is about the end of the world. And this world is precisely the bourgeois capitalist patriarchal Establishment. “Here ‘normality’ is not merely threatened by the monster,” Wood writes, “but totally annhilated: the state, the church, the family. The principle of ambivalence must once again be invoked: with a film so shrewdly calculated for box-office response, it is legitimate to ask what general satisfaction it offers its audience."*? Spid.: 19. Mid. 50‘The next paragraph is worth quoting in ful: ‘Superficialy, the satisfaction of finding traditional values reaffirmed (even if "our" world is. ending, it was stil the good, right, true one): more deeply, and far more powerfully, under Cover of this, the satisfaction of the ruthless logic with which the premise is carried through- -the supreme satisfaction (masquerading as the final horror) being the revelation .. . that the Devil has been adopted by the President and First Lady of the United States. The translation of the film into Blakean terms is not in fact that difficult: the devil-child is its implicit hero, whose systematic destruction of the bourgeois Establishment the audience follows with a secret relish. The Omen would make no sense in a sociely that was not Prepared to enjoy and surreptitiously condone the working out of its own destruction.5® Now this is what | call interpretation (“the translation of the film into Blakean terms"), and a very good example of it as well. Yet the question is: how much do these thoughts help us understand the modem horror film rather than The Omen, i.e. a specific ‘example of the genre? Or, to put it in another way, are Wood's arguments relevant to an understanding of the genre as being predicated upon specific emotional responses, or do they relate to the genre's individual texts as producers of meaning? | believe that Wood is trying to offer, beyond brilliant textual analyses, a theory of genre. But this theory, by focusing mainly on the genre's structural pattems rather than on the strategies through which it tries to emotionally engage its spectators, ends up being not nearly as convincing as his interpretations of individual texts. What does the paragraph quoted above tell us about Wood's understanding of the genre? First, that he considers narrative construction to be the most important factor both for the meaning of the texts and for the pleasure they offer their audience. in his interpretation of The Omen, Wood is arguing that the spectator’s enjoyment of the film is the result of a particular closure (normality is totally annhilated) whose meaning is experienced ambivalently as something both bad and good. This implies that itis only at the very end that the spectator “reaches" the point where he or she can thoroughly relate to the text. It is only at the end that the "meaning" can be obtained, and it is only because SSibid.: 19-20. 51the film ends in this particular way that ambivalent pleasure is experienced. Clearly this is a conception of spectatorial activity drawn from the high art end of the spectrum. It requires a spectator who holds judgement until he or she can “revisit” the ‘narrative from the vantage point of the end. But what about the spectator's experiences of pleasure or unpleasure during the film, before the meaning-revealing ending? The feference to Blake is also suggestive here. Do the spectators who lack access to "Blakean terms" experience the film in the same way Wood does? And if they don’, can Wood's interpretation be convincing for them? | am far from wanting to suggest that Wood “makes too much out of a film like The Omen. But | do want to suggest that the importance he assigns to narrative and its closure derives from a particular tradition of literary criticism which might not be the most appropriate one to use here. ‘The risk that Wood runs is that of ending up subordinating everything (including therefore even extremely important, and specific, horrific elements) to the demands of traditional narrative. We see an example of this in the following remarks on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “Woman becomes the ultimate object of the characters’ animus (and, | think, the film's, since the sadistic torments visited on Sally go far beyond what is necessary to the narrative)."® (italics mine) Indeed it is worth quoting Wood's final remarks on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (@ film he expressely compares and contrasts to The Omen) in detail, for through them we can see both the strength and interest of his argument and its shortcomings: As a “collective nightmare” it brings into focus a spirit of negativity, an undifferentiated lust for destruction, that seems to lie not far below the surface of the modem collective consciuosness. Watching it recently with a large, half-stoned youth audience who cheered and applauded every one of Leatherface’s outrages against their representatives on the screen, was a terrifying experience. It must not be seen as an isolated phenomenon: it expresses, with unique force and intensity, at least one important aspect of what the horror film'has come to signify, the sense of a civilization condemning itself, through its Spid.: 21. 52popular culture, to ultimate disintegration, and ambivalently (with the simultaneous horror/wish-fulfilment of nightmare) celebrating the fact. Clearly here Wood is trying to account for the youth audience's reaction to the film, @ reaction (cheering and applauding) that is both participatory and, we are to assume, highly pleasurable. But where, according to Wood, does the pleasure lie exactly? On the ‘one hand, he identifies a “spirit of negativity,” an “undifferentiated lust for destruction* that he sees as lying “not far below the surface of the modem collective consciousness,” and to which, we are to assume, the film appeals by bringing it into focus. But in so far as ‘Wood puts it “not far below” modem consciousness, in so far, that is, as it can be quite easily embraced by the audience, are we to assume that such spirit is pre-conscious? In fact, given the ease with which it can be revealed by a film such as The Texas Chainsaw ‘Massacre, we cannot assume it to be unconscious, in the sense of permanently repressed ‘and unavailable to the conscious mind. In this part of the argument, Wood thus seems to ‘me to theorize a relatively conscious engagement of the audience with the material Presented on the screen. But when he is theorizing that the horror film monster embodies the return of the Fepressed Wood is in deep Freudian territory, for here the unconscious does acquire an ‘overriding importance. Let us take the case of the nightmare, which is in fact the paradigm for Wood's return of the repressed. In that case, what we have is one, or a series of, unconscious wishes~.e. forbidden wishes that have been repressed—striving to find expression during sleep when the censoring activity of the superego is weakend. Under these circumstances, such wishes might indeed find expression, but often only in a highly distorted form. The remaining strength of the superego’s control (which is never totally ‘overcome) is in fact stil sufficient to produce a peculiar result: the wishes find expression 53but such expression produces unpleasure rather than satisfaction. This is the basic ‘mechanism of the nightmare, and like that of the symptom, it is one based on compromise. The wishes “reappear” above the surface, but only in the guise of the frightening monster or, more generally, in the form of a diffused anxiety.®1 The more forbidden the wishes, the theory goes, the more frightening the monster and the greater the anxiely. Indeed often, ‘no matter how thorough the disguise is, the dreamer must still be awakened by the nightmare, for the risk that the forbidden wishes may be recognized as the dreamer's own simply cannot be run. What is crucial here is that, although the wishes demand to be satisfied, the feeling that accompanies their distorted expression is an unpleasurable one. Once again this is because the psyche has reached a compromise: the forbidden wishes will be allowed, so to speak, representation (albeit in a distorted form), but the effect shail not be pleasurable. in a sense, one could say that the dreamer's experience of the frightening ‘monster, or of an engulfing anxiety, is the price the dreamer pays for the partial revelation of his or her forbidden wishes. Obviously this is not what happens during the viewing of a modem horror film. The horror spectator, unlike someone who is having a nightmare, enjoys his or her experience. This might not be the case for all people-and indeed there are people who do not enjoy the nightmarish experience of a “well made" horror film~but when it is the case (i.e. when the spectator enjoys the experience), we are in the presence of precisely the “paradox that this dissertation tries to investigate. ‘Once again, therefore, just as in the case of Farber’s analogy between the experience of watching Jaws and the fate of laboratory animals, Wood's argument is S'The fact that anxiety can arise even without the presence of a monster will be a crucial Point of this dissertation. 54founded upon an analogy that, at closer look, reveals itself to be far less appropriate and illuminating than it had at first appeared. Modern horror films cannot actually be characterized as ‘our collective nightmares” since, unlike actual nightmares, they are consciuosly looked for, and (a point of no small importance) paid for. The confusion this analogy produces is best exemplified in the following quote: Central to the effect and fascination of horror films is their fullment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere. The overwhelming commercial success of The Omen cannot possibly be explained in terms of a simple, unequivocal horror at the devils progress. have tried to suggest that, in so far as the viewing of a horror film can be a pleasurable experience for the satisfied fan, we cannot postulate an analogy with the nightmare experience. Wood's use of the term “nightmare wish,” indeed, overlooks the crucial fact that in a nightmare such a wish is represented in a highly distorted form, so distorted that in fact its true nature can only be glimpsed at through an interpretation of the dreamers free associations. The wishes to smash society's oppressive norms that Wood rightly detects at work in some modem horror films are instead quite easy to see represented in the texts and embraced by the audiences. After all, as Wood himself puts it, in The Omen the bourgecis capitalist patriarchal Establishment és annhilated, that is, this is precisely what the film shows to happen. Similarly, the youth audience cheering and applauding Leatherface are consciously enjoying the experience of seeing normality (their representatives on the screen) being butchered. Moreover, by suggesting that an enjoyment of the devil's progress is behind the commercial success of The Omen, Wood seems to put a much greater emphasis on the film's ending (the devil is adopted by the President and the First Lady of the United States), and therefore on the trajectory of its narrative, than on the power of its image and. ‘pid.: 15. 55‘Sound track up until that point. But nightmares, like dreams in general, do not present themselves in such well-developed narrative forms, and this is therefore one more point where the analogy falls short. Wood's stress on the ending, and thus on the narrative itself, is also problematic when we pause to consider the overwhelming commercial success of films with very different, more consolatory, endings such 2s The Exorcist and Jaws, not to mention all the films belonging to Wood's “reactionary wing” which after all dominated the box office in the 1980s. The fundamental problem running undemeath Wood's entire argument is, therefore, that he constantly assigns a greater importance to the trajectory of the film's narrative rather than to the emotional response(s) to the film. Or rather, that he seems to understand the emotional response(s) as purely a function of the trajectory of the narrative. We have already seen that he distinguishes a “reactionary wing," contrasting it to those eartier texts (the 1970s" ones he liked) whose “negativity is not recuperable into the dominant ideology.” His dislike for the films of David Cronenberg is also well known, and it would be interesting in this case to speculate whether it is in fact the very viscerality of Cronenberg's films that disturbs Wood. One of his favorite directors, George Romero, seems indeed to occupy the opposite end of the spectrum from Cronenberg in terms of the way they choose to represent the monstrous. By choosing to focus on the films’ ‘meaning rather than on what Hitchcock called “all of the technical ingredients that make SAbid.: 23. Wood's most comprehensive articulation of his negative criticism of Cronenberg's work can be found in his “Cronenberg: A Dissenting View," The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg, Piers Handling ed., New York: Zoetrope Inc., 1983. See especially pp. 134-35 where Wood comments on the films’ “repulsive and obsessional imagery" and on “the problem of the ‘excessive’ imagery-with its marked sexual overtones—which the premise [the narrative] neither demands nor justifies.” 56the audience scream,” Wood might perhaps be accused of rationalizing his responses. It's as if, in other words, he would be saying: “I like Romero's films because through critical Feasoning we can see how they have a progressive message, whereas Cronenberg's don't” instead of “the way Romero shoots and edits his images is more to my liking than Cronenberg's way." In reading Wood, one never gets a sense that the spectator might be engaging with the fantastic narratives offered by the modem horror film at a level transcending his or her attitudes (be they conscious or unconscious) toward contemporary society's oppressive norms. Which, of course, it is not to say that this level, the level Wood discusses, is not there. Rather, | am trying to suggest that instead of focusing only on the narrative aspects of the horror films (mainly plot and actants) as Wood does, we ought Perhaps to examine other aspects of the films as well such as, for example, their visual strategies or their overall style of image and sound presentation. Then, perhaps, we will ot see horror films as being merely metaphorical (which is after all still a way to see things literally, since in a metaphor something stands in, substitutes for something else), but rather we might begin to see them as symptomatic, that is as true compromise formations feflecting, and drawing their power from, a number of different and sometimes opposing ‘sources, only one of which (the spectator’s position vis a vis society's norms) falls within the province of Wood's interest. There is no question that Wood is right in noticing differences between texts. His analysis of the "reactionary wing” is convincing and illuminating. But clearly Wood's analysis here is not specific to the horror genre. In so far as he's interested in the films’ underlying political stance, in fact, his kind of critical intervention can be directed to all ‘mainstream films. In this context, however, my point is that if Wood is able to see the S7differences between progressive horror films and reactionary ones, all too often he ‘overlooks, or rather seems truly uninterested in, their fundamental similarities. As Carol Clover suggests, it is undeniable, for example, that different monsters “do more or less the ‘same job,*65 which is a way to say that, notwithstanding their differences, there is ‘something which remains fundamentally unchanged when we experience the monsters’ attacks. The spectator’s emotional involvment in the images and sounds coming at him or her from the screen is, in other words, left unaddressed by a purely textual analysis in which characters and plot elements are “decoded” in order to reveal their cultural meaning and the film's overall political stance. At the risk of repeating myself, | will claim again that such an analysis is not only useful but necessary when dealing with individual texts, for it is never in the abstract that ideological meanings are (re)produced. Instead they can only exist when embodied in individual texts, norms, laws or beliefs. From this, however, it does not follow that once we have identified and uncovered such meanings in the texts our job is done. Rather, | am convinced that what we still have to thoroughly unravel are the ways in which ideological ‘meanings are assimilated by us. | suspect that this assimilation happens through emotional engagement, and not, as we tend to believe, through more or less reasonable ‘appeals to our conscious rational abilities. And this is why, despite his best intentions, ‘Wood's analysis of the modem horror film is not only insufficient from a scholarly point of view (it does not fully “explain” the genre), but also limited in its political value. For itis only if we can offer a satisfactory hypothesis about the very mechanisms through which we ‘accept and embrace our deepest, and yet least thought-out, convictions that we can hope clover (1992): 12. 1 will try to argue this point in greater detail in chapter four when | will deal specifically with the issue of narrative. 58to prove that these convictions are not self-evident truths, but rather disputable beliefs. In order to offer such a hypothesis in the specific context of the modem horror film, identify, and attempt to ‘account for, the emotional engagement the films offer their spectators, The subtending ‘we must at first set our aim toward a much more modest goal: idea is that such engagement is both what the spectators look for in these films, and what allows whatever ideological meaning each individual film carries to be assimilated (or, in the case of the films failure, rejected) by the same spectators. Unfortunately, Robin Wood does not deal with such engagement, choosing instead to concentrate mainly on the texts’ “meanings.” As | have tried to show, even his acute observations on spectatorial “ambivalence” as a helpful concept to understand the satisfaction the films offer their audiences do not move beyond the analysis of the fims’ ‘meaning, of their “messages,” both explicit and hidden. Hence The Omen's success, Wood argues, is due both to its apparent conservative message (aur society's values are the right ones) and to its “Blakean” conclusion (our society is destroyed). According to ‘Wood, that is, the film plays upon the spectators’ ambivalent attitudes toward society and its values. As accurate as this observation might be, itis stil quite different from an analysis of the specific emotional engagement The Omen elicits from its audience through, for example, its mise-en-scene or its use of sound. Literary theorist Franco Moretti does instead focus precisely on this engagement at the end of his “Dialectic of Fear."®7 Discussing Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula Moretti writes: ‘There is another point on which [they] diverge radically from one another: the effect they mean to produce on the reader. The difference, to paraphrase Benjamin, can be put like this: @ description of fear and a frightening description are by no means the "Franco Moretti, “Dialectic of Fear,” Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1983: 83-108. 59same thing. Frankenstein (like Jekyll and Hyde) does not want to scare readers, but to convince them. It appeals to their reason. It wants to make them reflect on a number of important problems (the development of science, the ethic of the family, respect for \radition) and agree - rationally - that these are threatened by powerful and hidden forces. Fear is made subordinate to this design: it is one of the means used to convince, but Rot the only one, nor the main one. The person who is frightened is not the reader, but the protagonist. .. . ‘The narrative structure of Dracula, the real masterpiece of the literature of terror, is different. Here the narrative time is always the present, and the narrative order - always aratactic - never establishes causal connections. Like the narrators, the readers have ‘only clues: they see the effects, but do not know the causes. It is precisely this situation that generates suspense. And this, in its tum, reinforces the readers’ identification with the story being narrated. They are dragged forcibly info the text; the characters’ fear is also theirs. Between text and reader there no longer exists that distance which in Frankenstein stimulated reflection. Stoker does not want a thinking reader, but a frightened one. | find this part of Morett's essay extremely illuminating and convincing. Although he is dealing with literary works, his comments about the works’ different effect on the readers can apply just as well to two distinct “trends* within our genre. On the one hand, similar to Frankenstein, we have the films of directors such as George A. Romero or Larry Cohen (Perhaps not coincidentally favorites of Wood). On the other, in the tradition of Dracula, that is in the tradition of works which do not want “a thinking [spectator], but a frightened ‘one, we have films such as The Exorcist, Jaws and the Alien tetralogy. Morett's observations coincide with our own even on more specific points. When he argues that Dracula's narrative strategy “reinforces the readers’ identification with the story being narrated.” Moretti is suggesting something that | shall argue for in chapter three, namely that identification ought to be understood precisely in relation to the overall ‘Scenario (what by then we shall call the fantasy) rather than as a process “linking* the spectator with @ specific character. Moretti does not elaborate on this point here, but it ‘must be acknowledged that he recognizes the process and describes it correctly. Even more interesting, perhaps, is Morett's assertion that Dracula is “the real masterpiece of the literature of terror.” if | read him correctly, | believe that Moretti here is ibid.: 106-107. 60arguing not so much that Dracula, and works in its tradition, are better, but that they are ‘more representative of a basic mechanism at work in the genre of horror. It is not a Question of establishing hierarchies (although Morett's use of "masterpiece" could lead to that conclusion), but to recognize that producing an emotional effect in the readerispectator is a fundamental~perhaps the fundamental-—feature of horror. Where | differ from Moretti is in his seeing this feature as something inherently ‘reactionary. As is clear from the following quote, here Moretti is altogether more pessimistic than Wood. Having argued that Dracula best represents the genre, he writes that in Stoker's novel fear is not an end in itself: it is a means to obtain consent to the ideological values [of Victorian capitalism) we have examined. But this time, fear is the only means. In other words the conviction is no longer the least rational: itis just as unconscious as the terror that produces it. And thus, while professing to save a reason threatened by hidden forces, the literature of terror merely ensiaves it more securely. The restoration of a logical order coincides with unconscious and irrational adherence to a system of values beyond dispute. Professing to save the individual, it in fact annuls him.6 {tis interesting here to compare the above passage to the following one by Wood: “Halloween and Alien, while deliberately evoking maximum terror and panic, variously seal it over again." Clearly both Moretti and Wood are trying to describe what they see as a similar process whereby the texts use the very fear they arouse to manipulate (note the use of verbs such as “enslave” or “seal aver") their reader/spectator into a coercively restorative ideological position. The difference lies in the fact that in Wood's case he is Contrasting the two films he mentions with films like Sisters, Demon, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which “in their various ways reflect ideological disintegration and lay bare the possibility of social revolution."7! Wood, that is to say, sees the “reactionary wing,” with both its tendency to deliberately invoke maximum terror and pid: 107. Wood (1979): 28. 7*bid. 61panic and what we could call the heightened viscerality of its images, as one of the possible alternatives within the genre. Moretti instead sees the genre itself as inherently reactionary, “illiberal in a deep sense."72 This critical preoccupation with the ideological effects of the texts can already be found in some contemporary reviews of The Exorcist. Pauline Kael, for example, wrote that: "As a movie, “The Exorcist" is too ugly a phenomenon to take lightly... . A critic can't fight it, because it functions below the conscious level. How does one exorcise the effects of a movie like this? There is no way."73 A first point of contention among left-wing critics then is whether we ought to speak of individual reactionary texts within the genre, or whether it is the genre itself that is inherently reactionary. But there also are left wing critics who argue that we should instead ‘see the genre (and not only some of its texts) as fundamentally progressive. Carol Clover is one of these critics and the following passage is a good example of her basic conviction: Because horror film and action film are both low forms and especially violent, they are commonly linked in the public mind. In many crucial ways, however, they are almost contraries, the former a virtual commentary on the latter. What the action film mystifies, the horror fim confesses. if action cinema moums the passing of the “real man." horror ‘general urges it along, and occult films [such as The Exorcist] go so far as to imagine a new, revised edition.’ T2Moretti (1983): 107. We could note here how this “restorative” movement described by Moretti in relation to literary horror is argued by film genre scholar Rick Altman to be typical of genres themselves: “Careful manipulation of opportunities for generic pleasure and ‘eventual retum to cultural values is what makes film genres such devastatingly successful hegemonic devices. (..) Few people savour all genres, but whichever genres we relish, we can be sure that our very pleasure in fleeing culture will eventually be used to seduce us. into celebrating culture's very values. (...) The extent to which genres sequentially promote two different value systems, each providing pleasure by virtue of its difference from the other, explains not only why critics should see genres so differently, buut also how genres an simultaneously perform two different functions.” Rick Altman, Film/Genre, London: BF! Publishing, 1999: 156. TKael: 61. 74Clover (1992): 99. 62Clearly Clover's position is thus radically opposed to Moretti's. Not only is the genre: ‘Not inherently reactionary, but it can also be seen as engaging in a cultural battle with other genres present at the same time in the culture, offering a progressive alternative to the other genres’ reactionary solutions. But let us, for the sake of argument, assume that Clover is mistaken and that Moretti's assertion that horror is “illiberal in a deep sense” is indeed the right one. As | have already suggested, in this case it might be even more important to study its basic strategies, the ways in which it “deliberately evokes maximum terror and panic,” its use of fear as “a means to obtain consent to ideological values,” for unless the critic can identify, isolate, and demystify these strategies he or she will indeed feel, with Pauline Kael, that there is no way that the films can be fought and their effects exorcised. ‘What | would like to stress at this point, thus, is that no matter how challenging and complex Wood's and Moretti's analyses are, they both remain in what | would cail the field ‘of psychoanalytic intepretations. To explain what | mean, it might be worthwhile to ‘pause for a moment and reflect upon some basic similarities between the writings of many of the critics and scholars we have examined so far. ‘What these critics interpret are the monsters and/or the texts they appear in. In this they are already on a much more sophisticated and interesting level than those (Psychoanalytic) critics who persist in interpreting the characters’ actions and behaviors as if they were actual human patients. Our critics’ basic strategy is that of dissecting the ‘monsters or the texts by treating them as symptoms. They try in other words to reveal and illuminate what meanings might lie undemeath the surface, disguised, so to speak, by ‘conscious and unconscious censoring forces, hidden behind apparently banal and mindless “screens.” 63Wood's stress on the never-innocent, never simply “realistic,” depiction of society and interpersonal relations in De Palma’s films such as Sisters and Carrie is one example. ‘And the same can be said about Morett’s penetrating analysis of the way in which both Frankestein and Dracula, once the first layer of their narratives (the ostensibly “fantastic” ‘one) is peeled away, quite clearly reveal themselves to be works dealing in ambivalent and ‘complex ways with the cultural changes brought about by the Industrial revolution. Itis, however, above all to the figure of the monster itself that the psychoanalytic critics usually devote their interpretations. Whether we are dealing with Wood's analysis of the monster as the retum of the repressed or with Moretti's comments on Count Dracula (CVampirisim is an excellent example of the identity of desire and fear7S, itis here that the pychoanalytic critic can often make the claim that the “meanings” he or she reveals could ‘not be uncovered by any other theoretical model. Implicit (but by no means indisputabl in the pychoanalytic critic's argument is the idea that psychoanalysis, by teaching us about the unconscious, displacement, condensation, superego’s commands, and so on, is the only way to make sense of what such texts are trying to communicate. More recent psychoanalytic works on the genre seem to me to have moved in a different direction. Instead of focusing solely on the "hidden" meanings to be found in the texts through interpretations, both Barbara Creed and Carol Clover, for example, have tried to pay attention on unconscious fantasies as the source of the spectators’ fascination with the texts. In the following section | shall attempt to offer a brief summary of Creed's and Clover’s main arguments and of the ways in which they analyze The Exorcist from their respective points of view. In The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, Barbara Creed 7Moretti (1983): 100. 64argues that “[aithough a great deal has been written about the horror film, very little of that work has discussed the representation of woman-as-monster.”7 Creed believes that the work of Julia Kristeva “provides us with a preliminary hypothesis for an analysis of the representation of woman as monstrous in the horror film {for it) suggests a way of situating the monstrous-feminine in the horror film in relation to the maternal figure and what Kristeva terms ‘abjection’, that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’, that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order." Creed! close reading of Kristeva's Powers of Horror allows her to list three ways in which the horror film would appear to be “an illustration of the work of abjection.* First, the horror film abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole ‘and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears and putrefying flesh. (. . | In Kristeva’s view, woman is specifically related to polluting ‘objects which fall into two categories: excremental and menstrual. This in tum gives woman a special relationship to the abject{.] ‘Second, the concept of border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film; that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject. Although the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the fuention of the monstrous remains the same - to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability [.. |] The third way in which the horror film illustrates the work of abjection is in the construction of the matemal figure as abject. Kristeva argues that all individuals experience abjection at the time of their earliest attempts to break away from the mother. She sees the mother-child relation as one marked by conflict: the child struggles to break free but the mother is reluctant to release it (.. ] In the child's attempt to break away, the mother becomes an ‘abject’ {in certain films such as Psycho, Carrie, The Birds] the matemal figure is constructed as the monstrous-feminine. By refusing to relinquish her hold on her child, she prevents it from taking up its proper place in relation to the symbolic. Partly consumed by the desire to remain locked in a biissful relationship with the mother and partly terrified of separation, the child finds it easy to succumb to the comforting pleasure of the dyadic relationship.” This is an apt example of what critics of psychoanalysis call its tendency to dogmatism. Does Kristeva argue that all mothers are “reluctant” to release their children? That ail children succumb to “the comforting pleasures of the dyadic relationship"? It would TBarbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, New York: — bid.: 8. 65‘Seem 50, since it is precisely because she refuses “to relinquish her hold on her child” that the mother "becomes an abject" to the child who's struggling to break free. But if this is Kristeva's argument, what proof, what evidence does she offer for it? | must admit that 1 find these objections justified. Here, in other words, | have no problem siding with the critics of psychoanalysis for indeed, notwithstanding the potential validity and usefuiness of Kristeva’s argument, the way in which it is presented by Kristeva and Creed isn't conducive to the establishment of a fruitful dialogue among scholars coming from different backgrounds. That is to say, to the scholar not steeped in psychoanalytic theory, Kristeva's and Creed's statements might indeed sound dogmatic and even absurd. However, what | would defend in Creed's approach (and this ough! to be apparent ‘even to those who disagree with her psychoanalytic presuppositions) is that it tries to explain its object of study, the horror film, that it tries to unravel its meanings and effects, even if, in order to do this, it has to tum to extra-cinematic terms and theories. It does not feel satisfied when it has reached an extra-cinematic level of presumed ‘common knowledge’ such as, for example, the notion of “disgust. Compare Creed’s argument with Carrolts thinking here. Carroll is satisfied to state that we feel disgust in the presence of an “impure* object and that “an object or being is impure if itis categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless. These features appear to form a suitable grouping as prominent ways in which categorizing can be problematized.‘79 When Creed argues that “the concept of border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film [for] that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject,"®° she is clearly dealing with the same issues: the monster is defined as that which crosses boundaries ("categorically interstitial” is how Carroll puts it) and it is this 78Carroll (1990): 32. Creed (1993): 10-11. 66crossing/impurity that produces disgust. The difference, however (and it is not a minor one), is that whereas Carroll is content with witnessing the process and naming it (the ‘ways in which categorizing can be problematized’), Creed tries to understand why the Problematization of categorizing should produce a physiological reaction, disgust. Carroll simply takes it for granted: he sees the phenomenon happening (when something breaks down categories it disgusts us and we call it “impure"®') and finds words to describe it. One could say that Carrol's approach ends with horror (ends with the proper definition of horror) whereas Creed's approach begins with horror. By examining horror, Creed (and Kristeva) try to account for that process through which the infant becomes a ‘Speaking subject and acquires those powers (such as the ability to categorize) which Carroll takes for granted. For Carroll monsters are “cognitively threatening, (threats to ‘common knowledge."®? Creed puts it differently: “Although the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function of the monstrous remains the same - to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.“@ The monster therefore is not the threat itself, but the vehicle through which that which constantly threatens the symbolic order becomes (at times) visible. | don't think one has to subscribe to Lacanian psychoanalysis (the symbolic order) to appreciate the difference between Carroll's and Creed's goals. For Carroll there is, 84That is, we c it all over again. The irony seems lost on Carroll who, like the classic obsessive patient, is utterly unaware that his highly sophisticated “rational” Categories strike some readers as defensive measures against that very “impurity” which, although by his own definition always “interstitial,” must nonethelss be named, defined, kept in check, “caught up" by him through language. "Carroll (1990): 34. Creed (1993): 11. is not the place to enter into an in-depth analysis and criticism of Lacanian Psychoanalytic theory (the starting-point of Kristeva’s and Creed's arguments) and of its fascinating contradictions. Once again, what | am trying to point out here with this ‘summary of KristevalCreed’s arguments is a specific method and its goals. Let me ‘Suggest, however, that Creed herself seems aware of the problems Lacanian theory poses to those who are interested in examing the position of the female spectator in 67“common knowledge" (presumably acquired through rational thought) on one side and the ‘monsters on the other. His goal is to account for the latter in terms provided by the former. For Creed, the monsters and the rational mind are not ontologically distinct, but are the results of different stages of psychic development. Her goal is to develop a picture of this development through an analysis of (among other things) the abjecthorror. {In such a picture, the Lacanian symbolic order has a prominent place in that it is ‘not simply the reaim of rational thought and “common knowledge” (the adult world of language), but also the realm of authority and prohibitions (the reaim of the Law). And indeed according to Creed, following Lacan and Kristeva, the notion of authority is fundamental to an understanding of the process whereby the infant becomes a subject. Here is where Creed's analysis of the monstrous-feminine as abject specifically links Lacan/Kristeva's theories to our object of study. According to Creed, “Kristeva argues that the subject's first contact with ‘authority’ is with the maternal authority when the child leams, through interaction with the mother, ‘about its body: the shape of the body, the clean and the unclean, the proper and improper areas of the body." This “maternal authority” is to be distinguished from “paternal law": Kristeva] argues that the period of the ‘mapping of the selfs clean and proper body’ is characterized by the exercise of ‘authority without guilt, a time when there is a fusion between mother and nature’. However, the symbolic ushers in a ‘totally different universe Of socially signifying performances where embarrassment, shame, guilt, desire etc. come into play - the order of the phallus’ ®© Kristeva modifies Lacan's distinction between the imaginary and the symbolic into Particular and of woman in the symbolic order in general (Le. his theory's alleged phallocentrism). Creed: "The presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film ‘Speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or feminine subjectivity.” (1993: 7) ®SCreed (1993): 12. ibid. 13. 68adi \ction between the semiotic and the symbolic.87 Kristeva’ semiotic posits a pre-verbal dimension of language which relates to sounds and tone of the voice and to direct expression of the drives and physical contact with the matemal figure: ‘it is dependent upon meaning, but in a way that is not that of linguistic Signs nor of the symbolic order they found’. With the subject's entry into the symbolic, which separates the child from the mother, the maternal figure and the authority she represents are repressed. {tis in this context that Creed inserts her observations on the modem horror film: The modem horror fim often ‘plays’ with its audience, saturating it with scenes of blood and gore, deliberately pointing to the fragility of the symbolic order in the domain of body where the body never ceases to signal the repressed world of the mother. In The Exorcist the world of the symbolic, represented by the priest-as-father, and the world of the re-symbolic, represented by a pubescent girl aligned with the devil, clashed head on in ‘scenes where the foulness of woman was signified by her putrid filthy body covered in blood, urine, excrement and bile. Hf, on the one hand, we could say here that Kristeva's psychoanalytic theory subtends Creed's points on horror, on the other it would be just as accurate to point out that it is precisely in so far as Creed's points strike us as accurate that the theory can be judged to be of some value. It is not, therefore, simply a question of seeing horror “through* psychoanalysis. Rather, it is a question of deciding the merits of the theory on the basis of its pertinence to the objects under study and of its explanatory value. That is to say, if Creed is right in pointing out that it is crucial to The Exorcist that its monster is a Pubescent gir, then Carrols claim about the “interstitial” quality of the monster begin to ‘appear as altogether too general. For, after all, Carroll's theory would apply just as well to @ possessed boy, but then we would be hard put to find in it an explanation of the different effect(s) The Exorcist would produce if its little protagonist was called Ray instead of Regan. However it is a fact that it was a possessed girl that possessed the popular 571 owe this observation to Toril Moi. See her introduction of The Kristeva Reader, Torii Moi ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 1986: 12. ®8Creed (1993): 14. bid.: 13-14. 69imagination in the early 1970s. But it is also a fact that the (allegedly) true 1949 case on which William Peter Biatty based his screenplay was the story of a possessed 14-year-old boy.® Are we unjustified in assuming that the change of sex had some meaning attached to it? Perhaps, then, on the basis of these facts, a theory which argues that in our culture there exists an inextricable link between the monstrous and the feminine might indeed prove quite suited to analyze horror. Kristeva, Creed tells us, argues that historically it has been the function of religion to purify the abject, but today this work of purification rests solely with art (the catharsis par excellence). Creed adds: This, | would argue, is also the central project of the popular horror film - purification of the abject through a ‘descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct’. The horror fim attempts to bring about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, the monstrous-feminine) in order finally to eject the abject and redraw the boundaries between the human and non-human. As a form of modem defilement rite, the horror film attempts to separate out the symbolic order from all that threatens its stability, particularly the ‘mother and all that her universe signifies. In this sense, signifying horror involves a representation of, and a reconciliation with, the matemal body." We shall return to this “catharsis” theory in chapter three, but for the time being let Us only notice how the idea of “purification” achieved through “descent into,” “confrontation with" and “ejection of the abject resembles closely what in the popular mind is the "classical" psychoanalytic idea that one has to face his or her demons (i. repressed) in order to get rid of them. ‘The following quote well illustrates the crucial place The Exorcist occupies in Creed's overall argument: ‘The ideological project of horror films . . . which feature the monster as female, appears to be . . . constructing monstrosity's source as the failure of paternal order to ensure the break, the separation of mother and child. This failure, which can also be viewed as a ‘For a brief account of the case see Kenneth L. Woodward, “The Exorcism Frenzy," Newsweek February 11, 1974: 63. 51Creed (1993): 14. 70refusal of the mother and child to recognize the patemal order, is what produces the ‘monstrous. The possessed female subject is one who refuses to take up her proper place in the symbolic order. Her protest is represented as a retum to the pre-Oedipal {to the dyadic relationship with the mother whose authority brought about the mapping of the selfs clean and proper body]. The normal state of affairs, however, is reversed; the dyadic relationship is distinguished not by the marking out of the child's ‘clean and proper body’ but by a return of the unclean, untrained, unsymbolized body. Abjection is constructed as rebellion of fithy, lustful, camal, female flesh.22 Itis as if The Exorcist was, literally, the archetypal horror film, the perfect example, the very embodiment (down to its narrative premise: a divorced woman struggling to raise @ daughter by herself) of Creed's basic points. Let us also note, however, the relevance of Creed's argument to the specific cultural and historical moment of the film's release (the ‘end of 1973). In this context the “rebellion of fithy, lustful, camal, female flesh" and the “refusal to recognize the patemal order” are not specific references to the youth ‘movement, the sexual revolution, and the student protests, but it is nonetheless. impossible to overtook the connection. Creed is talking about psychic phenomena whose time span is much wider than the sixties. Unlike Robin Wood, she does not see them as being “produced” by contemporary socio-political conditions, but by Westem civilization’s Process of acculturation. Thus, although these phenomena are neither ‘universal* nor “eternal” (unless one believes that Western civilization is), they are nonetheless not limited to the sixties. Perhaps Creed would suggest that an analysis of the contemporary cultural situation might explain why they “surface” at particular times in history (.e. the theory whereby the success of horror resulted from the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise), but not why such phenomena exist in the first place. These phenomena belong to deeper, ‘more “archaic* levels of human experience which cannot be accounted for only by references to contemporary historical moments. It is because of her belief in the founding importance of these archaic levels that 38. 71Creed can write paragraphs such as the following: On the one hand {images of blood, waste, etc] threaten the subject that is already constituted, in relation to the symbolic, as ‘whole and proper. Consequently, they fil the subject - both the protagonist in the text and the spectator in the cinema - with disgut and loathing. On the other hand they also point back to a time when a ‘lusion between mother and nature’ existed: when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as ‘objects of embarassment and shame. Their presence in the horror film may invoke a response of disgust from the audience situated as itis within the social order but at a more archaic level the representation of bodily wastes may invoke pleasure in breaking the taboo on fith - sometimes described as a pleasure in perversity - and a pleasure in returning to that time when the mother-child relationship was marked by an untrammeled Pleasure in ‘playing’ with the body and its wastes.°3 Certain critics of psychoanalysis usually have a field day in attacking passages Such as these as examples of its *a-historical” nature. What this criticism overtooks, however, is the possibility that certain phenomena might transcend specific historical ‘moments within a culture, or rather might have a temporal span larger than, say, one or two generations while remaining both cultural and historically produced and variable all the ‘same. Is it really so absurd to hypothesize that certain (and by no means all or even most) psychic characteristics of Westem subjects might have remained very similar in the last five hundred years? Kristeva and Creed, for example, obviously think that the abject can be traced back to pre-Capitalist times, but this does not necessarily mean that recognizing its existence and understanding its functioning might not help us unravel a number of contemporary questions such as, for example, our present popular culture's representation of women. For in so far as these psychic mechanisms can be shown to be still operative, we must assume they interact with present socio-economic conditions to “produce” the various human identities within our present-day culture. Indeed psychoanalysis’ most Useful insight might be that there are “hidden* (yet ultimately analysable) reasons for the ‘See. for example, Mark Jankovich, Horror, London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1992: 9-13. For a specific critique of Creed's use of Kristeva's theories, see Michael Grant, “Psychoanalysis {and the horror film,” Free Associations (1995) Volume 5, Part 4 (No. 36): 483-91. 72Wester subject's propensity for being manipulated into cultural conformity, an insight which is unfortunately all too easily overlooked by those critics focusing exclusively on Psychoanalysis’ presumed “universalizing” tendency. But, to go back to our more specific subject, what most interests me in Creed’s last ‘quote is her “incidental” pairing under the rubric of the “subject” of both the protagonist in the text and the spectator in the cinema. Here she has, almost imperceptibly, slid again into the issue of the spectator’s involvement with the images. We had already encountered her version of the “catharsis” theory. Now she offers us another hypothesis: the spectator might find it pleasurable to “retum to a pre-Oedipal, pre-Symbolic stage ‘where the subject's relationship with the mother and with his or her body and bodily wastes was stil outside of paternal law (of cultural prohibitions). Creed does not try to loss over this duality but states it up front: Viewing the horror fim signifies 2 desire not only for perverse pleasure (confronting sickening, horrific images/being filled with terroridesire for the undifferentiated) but also a desire, once having been filled with perversity, taken pleasure in perversity, to throw up, threw out, eject the abject (from the spectator's seat). Like any other scholar of horror she does, in other words, point out a fundamental ambivalence in the genre: “abjection is by its very nature ambiguous; it both repels and attracts.” But | would argue that, although she recognizes the “ambiguous nature” of abiection/horror, she dilutes its importance by narrowing it down to the repulsionvattraction dichotomy, a dichotomy which remains centered (not unlike what happens in Carrol's thesis) in the figure of the monster. In this respect, itis interesting to note that there is a discrepancy in the analyses ‘On this presumed “universalizing” tendency of psychoanalytic criticism, see Andrew ‘Tudor, “Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre,” Cultural Studies 11.3 (1997): 443-63. ‘bid.: 10. 73that Creed offers of the two poles of the dichotomy as they relate to the spectator (and Not the protagonist). For if we have no problems understanding the basic mechanism of the catharsis explanation (to “eject the abject" is pleasurable for the subject who's had to come face to face with it),8 the theory of the pleasurable “retum’ to a pre-Oedipal, pre- ‘Symbolic stage does not apply equally well to both the spectator and the protagonist. That is to say, in the first case, the catharsis explanation, the subject can indeed be either the protagonist in the text or the spectator in the cinema: both are faced with images of abjection and both get rid of them. But in the second case, the “return” theory, the ‘spectator can only witness such retum as it is experienced by someone else. Whereas in the first case the spectator saw the abject just like the protagonist (and here it is not relevant whether the spectator saw a “real” thing or a cinematic fiction, for the abjection of the image lies in its quality and not in its “reality” or lack thereof), in the second case the ‘Spectator sees someone else's “retum." As Creed puts it in the case of The Exorcist: “the ‘Spectator [is allowed] to wallow vicariously in normally taboo forms of behavior before restoring order."® Now this “vicarious wallowing" can only happen if we assume that the spectator identifies with Regan for in fact it is she that is engaging in such behavior. Leaving aside for naw the thomy issue of identification, are we to understand that Creed is here suggesting that we imagine ourselves in Regan's place and enjoy “lashing out" at the priests, cursing, vomiting and shitting all over the place? But if this the case (as it might perhaps be), what about Regan's all too visible sufferings? What about her initial puzzlement and fear when the strange events begin to Although seen from this point of view, i.e. from the point of view of the catharsis ‘explanation, the modem horror fim would appear to be inherently reactionary for, as Moretti argue, its project would indeed be that of reinforcing patriarchal law through a feinstatement of the original repression (ejection) of the abject. Creed (1993): 37. 14happen in her bedroom, her anxiety during the highly uncomfortable medical tests, her physical pain when the demon achieves total possession of her body? Do we “identify” with them as well? And if we do, how do these “unpleasures" relate to or interfere with the pleasurable, albeit vicarious, “retum* to the pre-Oedipal, pre-symbolic stage? Moreover, are we indeed sure that these “unpleasures” are not part and parcel of the “perverse” pleasure Creed rightly identifies, but which she too quickly limits to “confronting sickening, horrific images/being filled with terror/desire for the undifferentiated"? {1am going to suggest that, as sophisticated and well-argued as it is, Creed's thesis is still an example of what | would call interpretation (of the texts) rather than an analysis. and an attempt at explanation of the spectator's enjoyment of the text, or, at least, of his ‘or her emotional engagement with it. Creed does move beyond the historical specificity of Wood's 1970s analysis, she does look for something deeper, does recognize ‘archaic! elements, but ultimately stil remains within an analysis of representation/images (the figure of the monstrous-feminine) and of narrative (the focus on the way the conflicts raised by the film are resolved through “ejection*). Moreover Creed still pays practically no attention to the formal qualities of the films ‘as being conducive to the production/elicitati of emotional effects. interestingly we could quote a review of the first re-release of The Exorcist by none other than Noel Carroll as an ‘example of the wa) which a critic can recognize and try to articulate the cinematic ways in which the film produces its effects. Prociaiming director William Friedkin to be “at the height of his talent," Carroll argues that it is Friedkin's use of editing, framing, sound (to Cite just a few of the techniques at his disposal) that allows him to charge the stairs in Regan's home ‘with meaning," to develop “the theme of Regan's door as a ritual Passageway into another cosmological realm," or “to underscore the unpredictability of 75Regan’s outbursts of rage.~100 What | think Carroll is rightly trying to point out here is the fact that a great part (perhaps even most?) of the film's emotional effect on the spectators is not produced by viewing an abject Regan (the monster), but by the use of cinematographic techniques. Given the prominence that Carroll will later assign to the figure of the monster in his theory of “art horror,” the recognition that “the mere appearance of a stairway is instantly threatening" seems here particularly revealing. To return to Creed, then, we could argue that the spectators might “vicariously wallow in taboo behavior" during the viewing of a film like The Exorcist, but they also, and perhaps above all, wallow in emotional states which, as we shall soon see, do not necessarily have to coincide with those of the protagonists. Itis interesting at this point to turn to Carol Clover's analysis of The Exorcist. Before doing this, however, let me offer a very brief summary of her major points. it seems, to me that what immediately distinguishes Clover from most other critics of the genre is her attention to issues of narrative construction as relating to the spectators’ involvement in the films. She does not, to put it very bluntly, look at the monster either as the defining ‘characteristic of the genre or as the privileged way the films produce meaning. Rather she looks at the films the monsters appear in, with a particular focus on the actual way these films are put together (shot, edited, scored, etc). Central to her argument is the refutation of those critiques of horror (widespread both in the popular press and in academic circles) which define the genre as founded upon an inherently sadistic desire to witness the victimization of (mainly female) victims. 12 10Noe! Carroll bid. '@in its barest outline the argument is sketched in Roger Ebert's "Why Movie Audiences Aren't Safe Anymore,” American Film, March 1981: 54-56. I, "Empathy with the Devil," The Soho Weekly News May 17, 1979: 62. 76Her major claim is that the opposite is tru | shall be arguing . . . that by any measure, horror is far more victim-identified than the standard view would have it-which raises questions about film theory's conventional ‘assumption that the cinematic apparatus is organized around the experience of a mastering, voyeuristic gaze." This leads her to a conclusion that can be shared (assuming that her point about victim-identification is correct) by anyone familiar with the films in question. Given, in fact, that horror victims are prevaiently females (or at least that attacks on female usually are more spectacularly “chorographed"), then we are indeed faced with the possibility that male viewers are quite prepared to identify not just with screen females, but with screen females in the horror-film world, screen females in fear and pain.'04 We have seen how Barbara Creed argues that too much attention has been paid in the literature to the female victim at the expense of the “monstrous-feminine.” Is Clover here making the same mistake? Perhaps she is, but perhaps Creed's pre-existing interest in the abject leads her to an overvaluation of one aspect of the films at the expense of ‘other, equally important ones. For, after all if the victims are indeed prevalently female, we are perhaps justified to assume that this is a meanigful aspect of the films, worthy of ‘examination. Moreover the fact that the victims are female acquires in Clover’s analysis of the films an altogether different meaning from what it had been assumed to have up until the ‘The difference between Clover's and Creed's arguments however rests on Something more relevant than whether the focus ought to be on the female victim or on the female monster. What Clover makes clear is that she sees the films as fantasies, as Scenarios produced by (popular) culture and aimed at engaging the spectators. Leaving aside for the moment Clover’s claim that she is interested in studying only the effects beg (1992) : 8-9. ‘OMbid.: 5. 77these scenarios have on younger male spectators, what is crucial here is that Clover sees the figures within the films, including the female victim, as parts of these fantasies, as elements (perhaps even functions) that the fantasies need to work in a specific way. In the case of Creed's analysis of the monstrous-feminine, things were not so clear-cut. These was an ambiguity undertining Creed's argument about the status of the ‘monstrous-feminine. At times she too seemed to suggest that the abject was a male fantasy, an embodiment of his fears. But at other times. she seemed to suggest that the Fepresentation of the abject “worked” (obtained its effects) precisely as a representation, as a recreation of images from an archaic stage of psychic development. To watch the abject was to re-experience, to be brought back, to “retum” to the pre-symbolic. There is no such ambiguity in Clover: As the title suggests The Exorcist is less about the possessed girl than about Father Damian Karras. 105 Certainly the novelist’s (and the filmmmaker's) target is not the female body, but the transformation that body prompts in the male psyche. {tis in the reaim of the occult that issues of masculinity and male sexuality come under long and hard scrutiny. On the face of it, the occult film is the most “female” of horror genres, telling as it regularly does tales of women oF girls in the grip of the supematural. But behind the female “cover” is always the story of a man in crisis, and that crisis is what the occult film {is about]. italics mine) Here we can immediately see how Creed's monocular vision is problematized. All of ‘a sudden it is as if an entire area of the text (Karrass's story) comes back into existence after having been forgotten or deemed unimportant. Moreover, Clover's observations apply to the entire sub-genre, making Creed’s lack of interest in the “mal story“all the ‘more remarkable. Whenever occult horror offers us stories of possession, Clover suggests that we find “dual focus” narratives where 5ibid.: 86. 105)bid.: 88. 78attention alternates between the story of female possession on one hand and the story of male crisis [Father Karras's spiritual crisis] on the other. The question is how to explain this gendered division of narrative labor-to understand what it is about the male crisis that needs hamessing to a narrative of female hysteria or indeed psychosis. 108 {n order to answer this question ("what it is about the male crisis that needs hamessing to a narrative of female hysteria or indeed psychosis") we have to keep in mind what Clover sees as the ultimate project of modem horror, the rezoning of gender categories. Therefore where the slasher concems itself, through the figure of the Final Girt, with the rezoning of the feminine into territories traditionally occupied by the masculine, the occult concems itself, through the figure of the male-in-crisis, with a shift in the opposite direction: rezoning the masculine into territories traditionally occupied by the feminine. .. . The difference of course is that masculizing a woman is a far more acceptable project than feminizing a man. In the specific case of The Exorcist, Father Karras's spiritual crisis (he has been losing his faith) is resolved when, ostensibly to save Regan, the innocent child, he sacrifices himself and invites the Devil to “Take me instead!” That is, “his spiritual reawakening is cast,” Clover writes, “in the language of opening up, of letting things in."110 At the level of representation, then, the male story of occult horror is an echo version of the female story: it tells of being opened up by and to something, letting something in. It is ‘only by referring to her body that his story can be told. 11? This, Clover argues, is the only way in which, in the present cultural situation, the “femininization of a man" can be fantasized. it comes with a price, though, which is Precisely what must happen to the representation of woman. The overflowing “abjection* of Regan's body is there precisely to allow the male story to unfold. Therefore for a space to be created in which men can weep without being labeled feminine, women must be relocated to a space where they will be made to wail uncontrollably: for men to be able to relinquish emotional rigidity, control, women must be 719relocated to a space in which they will undergo a flamboyant psychotic break."2 Ultimately this is the reason why “[t}he cultural observer hoping for signs of change in the representation of females and femininity will find litle satisfaction in the female story, the spectacular story, of occult horror."113. Yet Clover's conclusion is a waming to those dissatisfied cultural observers who, recognizing in the films the neverchanging, offensive representation of females and femininity circulating in our culture, may be tempted to dismiss the films too quickly. For, Clover insists, if such representation is that offensive it is because it has much to hide, [and] we have much to leam, in the study of popular culture, from what frightful women are meant to conceal as from what they are ‘meant to represent." (italics mine) | think that this brief comparison of Creed's and Clover’s work on the genre (and on The Exorcist in particular) highlights a significant difference in their approaches. On the whole, Clover’s theoretical framework is psychoanalytic just like Creed's. But, unlike Creed's, so is her (critical) method. That is, Clover starts with the films, looks at them in their entirety, examines their narrative structures, pays attention to the way all the principal characters are affected by the story, and then she interprets. She lets, so to speak, the fiims “do the talking" and only then, only when she has been able to offer us a cogent description of what the films are trying to do, only then does she tum to psychoanalytic theory to try to offer us an explanation for the phenomena she has so carefully pointed out. Creed's method instead proceeds in the opposite direction. She comes to the films ‘equipped with a specific psychoanalytic theory (Kristeva's theory of abjection), recognizes Mi ppl 80the use of abjection in them (the possessed Regan in our case), and thus feels she can interpret the films (not just their monsters) through the lens of the theory. This is the reason why, although she does offer us a number of very interesting and acute ‘observations about the abject in the modem horror film, she does nof, in my opinion, Ultimately offer us a satisfying interpretation either of the films or of the genre itself. in focusing mainly on the representation of the monsters (the symptoms), Creed undervalues both the way in which each individual film's narrative construction determines the meaning of its symptomatic monsters, and the distinct ways in which the genre attempts to produce € specific position for the spectator. Carol Clover, on the other hand, seems to me to offer a well-argued and cogent theory of the modem horror film as a specific genre. She attempts, that is to say, to study both its underlying working mechanisms and their relation with the historical context in Which the films were produced. What still needs to be added to Clover's formulations, however, are some reflections on the role of spectatorial affect in the modem horror film. We have seen how, analysing The Exorcist in particular and the occult horror film in general, Clover deal: xxtensively with the issue of what it might mean for a man in our Culture to be willing to “open up" (albeit only in fantasy). Clover stresses how such an impulse might produce psychic conflict, but also how our cultural "zoning" system is shifting constantly (albeit only slightly). Although | find myseif for the most part in agreement with her on these issues, nonetheless | think we should also focus our attention on the affect(s) subtending the modem horror film's narrative. When, in the case of The Exorcist, Clover talks of the fear/desire of being invaded or possessed or penetrated (of “opening up"), we should ask: what exactly is the affect that accompanies this fantasy? What do we know about it? What are its origins? What, if any, are its functions? And, above all, how 81‘and why is it mobilized by this particular form of commercial cinema? Let me be clear. | do not want to stress affects over cultural meanings. But | am convinced that we must eventually attempt an analysis of affects, of the way certain images and stories make us feel, precisely so that we can grasp, unravel and understand the cultural meaning of affects. Precisely so that, in other words, we can grasp, unravel ‘and understand how culture informs affects, how it teaches us to name and recognize them, how it imbues them with meaning-and how, in the worst cases, it uses them against ourselves. {n the preceding pages, | have tried to let a basic idea come to the surface through my ‘comments on contemporary reviews and later critical writings on The Exorcist and Jaws. This idea, this intuition if you will, is that there is something the audience looks for in ‘a modem horror film before and beyond any specific representation of monsters or any ‘Specific narrative formula (i.e. any sub-genre such as the possession film, the monster- from-outer-space film, or the slasher film). Clearly both representations and formulas can and do change. Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997), the fourth and currently last installment of the series, ‘ostensibly deals with cloning and the ambivalent feelings it elicits in late-1990s audiences, {a topic which obviously was not similarly charged with meaning in the early 1970s. On the other hand, the vague but powerful feelings of disorientation, confusion and loss derived from the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate “malaise” of the early 1970s are most likely not part of our present psychic make-up. And yet there clearly is a level at which Alien Resurrection and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre can be recognized as belonging to the ‘same genre. This, | would argue, is precisely the level of the affect both films try to elicit. 82‘The next chapter is devoted to identifying and defining such an affect. But, as a way of introduction, | shall make two observations about this affect here. First, perceptive reviewers and critics have sporadically recognized and named it themselves, although almost always onl passing. They have, that is, “felt” that the fear/desire or attraction/repulsion dichotomies were insufficient to account for the effect the films tried to produce, and therefore they ha looked to other words and concepts for communicating their ideas to their readers. | shall point out relevant examples of this as we encounter them. ‘Second, although the films work hard to elicit it, it is an affect that the spectators “bring” to the theatre in the first place, and do so knowingly. That is to say, the audience ‘of a modem horror film is quite clear on what it expects (i.e. desires) from the film. We have already encountered the following quote from director William Friedkin (in which he does ‘not name the affect | am referring to). Perhaps we can take a second look at it here for it ‘might serve as an apt transition to our next chapter: Alfred Hitchcock takes advantage of the fact that an audience comes into the theatre expecting to be scared. When they are standing in line they are afraid. So he takes them {for about an hour and dangles them and lets them do it for themselves until he hits them with something. . . . The same is true for The Exorcist. People are afraid while they're standing in line. And for the first hour of the film, while there is litte more than exposition ‘and some of that very hard to follow unless you've read the book, people are working themselves into an emotional state that is inducive to becoming terrified.""S (italics mine) ‘"SQuoted in Clover (1992): 205, from an interview with Friedkin in Charles Derry, Dark Dreams: A Psychological History of the Modern Horror Film, London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1977: 123-124, 83CHAPTER 2 ‘Anxiety in the Modem Horror Film’ Unlike the Westem (a place) or the Musical (a structural component), the modem horror film is a genre identified by an affective response. Its very name points to its intended effect. As | have claimed, the overall goal of this dissertation is the exploration of the paradox intrinsic to the very promise that the moder horror film makes to its audience to horrify them). Why, we ask, do the spectators pay to be horrified"? in order to examine this paradox, however, | believe it is first necessary to explore in greater depth the state of being horrified itself. What do we mean exactly when we talk of “horror” in the context of ‘mainstream cinema? From this set of questions, it ought to be clear that my goal here is not that of defining the modem horror film (i.e. to offer structural or formal parameters for identifying films as belonging to the genre, to judge whether they ought or not to be included in it, to trace historical developments within the genre, and so on). Rather, my analysis moves from the genre and its texts as they are already discussed as such (that is to say, as. ‘modem horror films) in the literature. Accepting this body of texts as a widely recognized genre, | try to identify and explore the kind of emotional response they elicit. ‘As we saw in the previous chapter, most of the work on the modem horror film (and erhaps on horror in general), including most of the best work, focuses on the figure of the ‘monster as if this figure was synonymous with the genre itself. | have tried to indicate a ‘umber of shortcomings related to such a position. Here | shall more explicitly argue that ‘Parts of this chapter have been revised from a previously published article: "Projections, ‘Symptoms, and Anxiety: The Modem Horror Film and Its Effects," The Psychoanalytic Review Volume 85, Number 6, December 1998: 889-908. 84‘an exclusive focus on the figure of the monster is altogether detrimental to an understanding of the modem horror film and its intended emotional effect. For if it is true that sometimes—and perhaps even often-the horror effect is indeed produced by the ‘monster, itis far from being true (a) that this is always the case, and (b) that even when this is the case, the effect is exclusively produced by the monster. On the contrary, ! shall propose that the representation of the monster is one of four representational strategies that the modem horror film employs to elicit an emotional response. {In the greatest majority of modem horror films, we find all these four strategies at ‘work more or less simultaneously, so that one could suggest that a modem horror film is a text in which these four representational strategies are consistently used in various not consistent) use of any one of the strategies by itself, on the other hand, would indicate that a film has taken a momentary tum toward the horrific (examples abound, above all in the case of the thriller, but even in a number of animated cartoons), but would Not, in and of itself, be enough to identify such a film as a horror film. In the following pages, | will at first attempt to identify and define, through a ‘umber of textual examples, the four strategies through which the modem horror film elicits ‘an emotional response in its spectator. Then | will proceed to define such a response as the affect of anxiety. This will be done mostly through an examination of Freud's revised theory of anxiety. | shail point out, in fact, how the various stages of anxiety described by Freud in his theory are strikingly evocative of the effects produced by the four representational strategies. | will then retum to the strategies to theorize more in depth, with the help of yet ‘more textual examples, this connection between the affect of anxiety and the structural 85qualities of the modem horror film. In this section, we will encounter, and deal with, a umber of issues such as the uncanny, the psychic mechanism of projection, and the otion of disgust, that have traditionally been central to horror scholarhip. My study of the four representational strategies within a general theory of anxiety in the modem horror film thus will, | hope, offer a valuable framework into which to integrate these various issues (by and large usually discussed in the literature separately) in a coherent and comprehensive way. Finally, with the introduction of the notion of spectatorial anxiety, | will try to identify and define the specific kind of anxiety which the modem horror film tries to elicit in its spectators. ‘THE FOUR REPRESENTATIONAL STRATEGIES ‘The names | give to these strategies are: (1) the representation of disturbing images, (2) the representation of the monster, (3) the mise-en-scéne of impending physical assault, and (4) the mise-en-scéne of ‘all hell breaking loose."? 't must be noted once again that itis in effect impossible for any one of these Strategies to appear by itself in a modem horror film. They are always combined and Superimposed, often within the same sequence, in such a way as to make them virtually indistinguishable from one another. Nonetheless | believe that from a theoretical Perspective they can be distinguished, both in terms of their formal factors and of their thematic and narrative functions. | will therefore try to discuss each representational ‘strategy by |. when possible, some of its purest examples or, when this is not 2At this stage | must ask the reader to allow for a degree of vagueness in the definitions (above all in relation to th “disturbing"), a vagueness which will be hopefully ‘overcome in the course of the argument. 86Possible, by differentiating it from the others through descriptions of what I take to be happening in the sequences in which they appear. ‘TION. ES |n Hitchoock's The Birds, Mitch's mother stops by a neighbour's farm only to find the man’s corpse lying beside his bed, a victim of the previous night attacks. Through a celebrated Series of quick point of view shots we are offered a closer and closer look at the farmer's. face as the mother's attention is drawn to his eyes and she makes the horrifying discovery that the birds have plucked the eyeballs out of the sockets. AA similar scene occurs in Jaws when one of the first victims of the shark's attacks is discovered underwater trapped inside his sunken boat. Here again we are forced to share the horror of the diver who is exploring the wreck as he comes face to face with an eyeless face, fish stil feeding from the sockets. ‘Such images of violated eyes are typical examples of the first of our strategies, the representation of disturbing images. "Disturbing" obviously refers here to a certain discrepancy between what might reasonably be expected (eyes in their sockets) and what instead is shown to be the case by the images. In this sense, therefore, the accent falls not only and not so much on the violent violation of the eyes (on the fact that they have been ced, plucked out, perforated, etc.), but on their being “out of place." That the ‘effect in these cases is not simply derived from the violence done to the body becomes ‘even clearer if we compare this type of images with those depicting wounded soldiers in war movies. As excruciatingly “disturbing” as the latter images might be (because of the gory violence they depict), stil they do not disturb us in quite the same way as the empty 87‘sockets in Hitchcock's and Spielberg's films do.> {In order to be disturbing in the sense that | have in mind here, thus, the kind of images we are discussing do not have to suggest egregiously violent mutilations. Indeed ‘sometimes the milky white eyes of a blind person can, if the film specifically draws our attention to them, achieve such an effect. Such is the case in Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look ‘Now where the smiling face of the blind medium the protagonists meet in Venice provokes ‘a8 much uneasiness as her claim that she is in contact with their dead daughter. Of Course part of our (and the protagonists’) uneasiness is that the woman claims to be a "seer" into another realm, the land of the dead from which the daughter tries to contact ‘her parents. But even more disturbing perhaps is that, thanks to Roeg's mise-en-scéne, the blind medium seems at times to be able to "see" the protagonist's movements in the fictional world as well, although she is unmistakaoly blind. Don't Look Now also offers us what might be the archetypal example of a disturbing image: a killer dwarf dressed in a bright red mackintosh. This truly horrible little red riding hood suggests that perhaps another reason we find certain images disturbing has to do with the way they combine, on the basis of the most fleeting perceptual similarities, apparently irreconcilable entities and/or qualities (in this case the “innocence" of childhood with an abnormal" murderous rage). ‘Another example, and perhaps an even more appropriate one since, again, it carries no connotation of violence, is the image of a sheep trotting down a high school's hallway during the first nightmare of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street. What disturbs here, as in similar cases, is the fact that the image describes an occurrence that is another example of a similarly disturbing image ‘s the shot of a dismembered leg floating toward the surface of the sea in Jaws. In genera, amputated hands or legs abound in horror and never fail to produce a cringing effect. 88peculiarly strange, although not necessarily impossible. Such strange, disturbing occurrences--strange and hence disturbing; but also “strangely” disturbing~are indeed a staple of the modem horror film. Perhaps the most typical (and ubiquitous) instance of such occurrences is the door that closes by itself behind a character, an image so common that | do not think | need to cite any single representation of it. Yet another example of such images can be found in The Blair Witch Project when the three protagonists finally realize they are truly lost as they come across the very same bend of a creek they thought they had walked away from the whole day. Here there is othing in the image itself that is disturbing, the creek looks just like a creek, no threat or ‘danger comes from it. What is disturbing, in other words, is not what the image shows (its object), but what it reveals (the inexplicable fact of their getting lost). Finally, we might want to keep in mind as a last example of this class of images an image that in fact we never see, but whose importance cannot be overlooked for the text to which it belongs. It is the image of the screaming lambs Clarice Starling so passionately relates to Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. This image, announcing itself through sound (young Clarice was awakened in the middle of the night by the screams of the spring lambs about to be slaughtered), combines many of the features we have ‘encountered so far: first, a threat of violence and injury; second, a peculiar contrast between the usual (the quiet, peaceful iambs) and the exceptional (their panic screaming); ‘and third, but just as important, the sense of strong disorientation it elicits in the observer. This last point is, | think, crucial. Disturbing images in the modem horror film are more than confusing. They have to power to make the observers lose their bearings, as Mitch's ‘mother’s reaction in The Birds and the diver's in Jaws well testify. 89Because of this, we could perhaps also refer to them as “unsettling,” a term which would include both the violent connotations of the images and the being “out of place" of that which they depict, both the “strangeness” of their objects and the “strangeness” (the uneasiness) felt by their viewers. PRESENTA {fam right in claiming that most of the scholarly work on the modem horror film has been devoted to the study of the monster then, perhaps, | can hope that I don’t need to offer an extensive series of examples here. The reader will be already familiar enough with the likes of Regan (The Exorcist), “Bruce” (the mechanical shark in Jaws), Michael (Halloween), Jason (Friday the Thirteenth), the Thing in John Carpenter's The Thing, the Alien(s) in the Alien tetralogy, and so on. ‘What | will repeat and stress is one observation that most scholars rightly make: the monster is far from being simply dangerous. One of its defining characteristics is instead that of exerting a strong attraction upon whoever looks at it, notwithstanding its. killing powers. What makes the monster so powerful, indeed, is precisely the fact that it, fascinates. And, even more paradoxical, such fascination has more than a little to do with the disgusting way the monster looks. That is to say, far from being a threat simply because of its superhuman attributes, the monster is so dangerous because it attracts, and it attracts because it disgusting. ‘That a great part of the monster's “appeal” lies in its disgusting features is made evident by the numerous scenes in which the characters stare transfixed at it without the ‘monster being at that point in the narrative an actual and immediate threat. Interesting in this respect are the autopsy scenes from Cronenberg's The Brood and Carpenter's The 90Thing. Both are typical of the genre in the way they attribute the fascination to the interest of a doctor or a scientist whose examination of the monster allows him or her to be the first to fully realize its enormous destructive powers. But as the camera dwells on the "impossible" characteristics of the alien organisms, and the doctor performing the autopsy Points out their significance (the dwarfish creature in The Brood has no navel and therefore “has never really been bor’; the “thing” on the operating table of the American research station in Antartica has been killed in the midst of its attempt to “shape its own cells to imitate the station's dogs"), it soon becomes clear that the creatures lying on the table are on display for our gaze. They are the contemporary version of Medusa's head. ‘Once we look upon them, we can't tum our eyes away. But unlike our mythological ancestors, instead of being simply paralyzed by the sight of the monstrous, we become ‘caught in a desire to investigate it, to probe deeper and deeper into its most innermost (and most disgusting) recesses. Exposed to the monster, we “catch,” together with the characters in the narrative, epistemophilia, the disease/desire to know, to find out, to see it all, ‘The modem horror film in this respect, thanks to the techniques at as disposal, easily surpasses both literary horror and its own cinematic predecessors. Indeed itis impossible not to acknoweldege that the special effects innovations of the late 1970s, ushered in the most profitable era of filmic horror to date. In the space of a few years, ‘modern horror films became able to show, in excruciating detail and to a degree unprecedented in the entire history of visual representation, monstrous bodies in Perpetual movement both within the narrative world and, possibly more importantly, within themseives. These exploding, metastizing, and setf-procreating monstrous beings, with their entire repertory of cracking bones, squirting liquids, and exposed organs made their 91‘creators “stars in their own right. The careers of high-tech makeup artists like Dick Smith, Rick Baker, Tom Savini and Rob Bottin became the subject matter of magazines like Fangoria and the term “splatter” became for a time almost synonymous with horror in the popular mind.* All this, however, is far from supporting the position which sees the monster as the crucial feature, the sine qua non of the genre. After all the technical advances in special effects improved the quality of the representation of the victims’ physical damage (to which indeed the term ‘splatter refers) just as much as that of the representation of their ‘monstrous attackers. What it does suggest, instead, is that the extreme “realism* of its images~be these images those of the monsters or of their victims—is to be considered an important factor in the modem horror film's achievement of its effect. THE MISE-EN-SCENE OF IMPENDING PHYSICAL ASSAULT {tis night. A young attractive woman is walking back home, alone. The streetiamps paint the quiet street into a series of patches of light and dark. As the woman traverses this ‘empty. eerie space the only sound that fills the air is that of her elegant heels clicking on the pavement. But then, slowly, other sounds begin to superimpose themselves on the heroine's footsteps, imperceptibly at first, then more and more clearly. Might someone be following her? She stops, and the sounds do to. She starts walking agi this time a litte Quicker. Have the sounds behind her started again? Now the woman is getting scared. To cross the dark areas between one streetlight and the next begins to feel unconfortable. ‘She'd like to stay in the light ail the time, but at the same time she wants to go home, to “For a brief survey of these makeup artists’ work see David A. Cook, Lost ilusions: ‘American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979, New Yo Charles Scribner's Sons, 2000, pp. 229-238. 92leave this empty street (but is it really empty?) behind as quickly as she can. ‘The camera is tracking alongside the woman who, by now, is practically running. It keeps her in a somewhat tight medium shot, allowing us to see only a couple of feat behind and ahead of her. Sometimes the woman throws worried looks backwards, but even if these are followed by point of view shots there is nothing to see. Only the empty street, brightly lit around the streetlamps, pitch dark in between them. 's the woman about to be attacked? And by whom? This scene, from Jacques Tourneur's 1942 Cat People, serves as an apt ilustration of our third strategy, the mise-en-scéne of impending physical assault. it Suggests how, in its basic elements, this strategy has a long history both within filmic horror (even before the modem period) and suspense cinema in general. in fact it is so well known and easily recognizable to have become a veritable cliché, ready to be exploited in self-referential texts (the Scream trilogy) and in parodies (Scary Movie). Its paradigmatic version requires a young woman moving alone through some ‘empty space (a street, an apartment, an abandoned builiding, an alien-infested ‘spacheship). A moving camera, often handheld, follows her in a close medium shot. This allows us to register beth the growing worry on the character's face and just enough of the space around her to be able to understand the direction of her movements. What the framing and the editing constantly forbid us to see are precisely those areas, a few feet from her, from which her attacker(s) might spring at any moment. ‘The effect of these sequences is therefore in part based upon a discrepancy between the spectator’s cognitive ability and the character's. Because of this, the kind of ‘suspense this strategy elicits is, in one crucial respect, different from the suspense described in Hitchcock's well-known theory. There, according to Hitchcock, it is because 93we, the spectators, know something that the character does not, that we feel suspense, 9. worry for his or her fate. Here it is not so much a question of us knowing “more” than the character does (often in the modem horror film the character krows very well, or ‘Suspects, or fears, that s/he is in danger), but of “knowing’-that is, of being able to see~ less than s/he does. This produces the peculiar feeling of being “stuck” with a character who often frustratingly refuses to look where we would want to look and who, even worse, tends to move in the opposite direction we would want to take. Like all cases of suspense, however, the mise-en-scéne of impending physical assault involves above all a specific feeling of anticipation. Is an attack going to take place? When? And from what direction? It is in this context that the question of what Noel Carroll calls the “startle response" should really be addressed. For if we keep in mind the role of generic expectations, then it becomes clear that the horror spectator knows very well that he or she will be “startled” during the viewing of a modem horror film. In fact it can ‘be argued that the horror spectator “expects” as much. And in this sense the startle response (‘an innate human tendency t ‘jump’ at loud noises and to recoil at fast movements") is here far from being dependent upon the element of shock or surprise. On the contrary, it would appear that in the modem horror film this response is exploited not 80 much for its “starting” power, but for the very tension its expected occurence can elicit. What seems to be important in other words is, once again, not the "jump" in itself, but the anticipation of it. ‘Sometimes, it is true, the jump comes (almost) totally unexpectedly; we seem indeed to be startled out of the biue. Even in these cases, however, the question of ‘Noel Carroll, "Prospects for Film Theory: A Personal Assessment,” in D. Bordwell & N. Carroll eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: The University of Winsconsin Press, 1996), p. 50. See also my discussion of Carroll's position in the Introduction. 94generic expectations must be kept in mind. For after all, in so far as we are aware that we are watching a horror fim, that is to say a film during which we expect to be startled a few times if we are to judge the film to be effective, then our response, even in these cases, is ‘always more complex than it might at first appear. We might be forced to admit that we have been caught off guard, that this last “jump” did indeed come as a surprise, but immediately afterwards we would most likely break into a nervous laugh and secretely indulge within ourselves the feeling that the film has managed to sneak up upon us not so much un-expectedly, but when we least expected it to do so. ‘What would be truly starting would be if a fim that did not present itelf as horror attempted such a “trick" on an unknowing audience. Then, | think, we really would be dealing with a true “startle response” and Carol's point would, perhaps, be sufficient to ‘account for the spectators’ reaction. In the case of horror, however, things are not so ‘simple. We must assume that the spectator expects and in fact looks for the “startle ‘esponse.” and thus perhaps we should consider whether the pleasure here might not lie Precisely in the waiting, in the unsure anticipation of a shock that might or might not be coming at the next step, or around that comer, or once the character opens that door.... THI Nes HELL BREAKII * ‘The modem horror films often offers us sequences in which the fictional world is literally falling apart. Regan's infamous display of her diabolical powers and obscene vocabulary in The Exorcist is a good example of this. As her mother enters the bedroom the possessed child is shaking and bouncing violently on the bed, objects and pieces of furniture are flying across the room, and the devil's hoarse voice is ranting profanities. Everything is out of control. Then, to offer us the ultimate proof that the world is truly out of joint, morally as Ledwell as physically, Regan begins to maturbate with a crucifix. The mother, and presumably the spectator as well, is horrified. Usually, although by no means always (see the example above), these sequences come towards the end of the fims. In Alien, Ripley is trying to escape from the spaceship before its self-destruct mechanism goes off. As she runs through the winding corridors, the ‘ship looks as if itis on fire: sirens are howling, emergency lights are flashing, water falls from the ceilings, steam fils the hallways. To make it worse, the alien is after her. And, of course, we know the place is about to blow up. The same effect, however, can be obtained with much simpler means. In The Brood, a little girl escapes her murderous siblings by locking herself inside a closet. The same does the protagonist, Laurie, at the end of Halloween. In both cases their attackers find them, and we are then given an extended scene in which the two victims crouch terrified behind the doors as the monster(s) pound furiously upon them. Soon the wood starts to splinter and, through the cracks, hands frantically try to grasp the litle girl and Laurie. In fact, after reaching what was perhaps its highest point with the "Here's Johnnnnny! scene in Kubrick's The Shining, this breaking-through-the-door motif has by now become a cliché itself.© ‘The mise-en-scéne of “all hell breaking loose" defines the space enclosed between these two sets of examples (Ripley's escape and the closet scenes). On the one hand, we have the tight race against the clock (the self-destruct device), the frantic fight from an overwhelming danger. On the other hand we have, so to speak, the opposite end of the line, the death of hope, the catatonic reaction which occurs when panic has. ®As is often the case we find an early “archetypal” example of this sequence in the work of Alfred Hitchcock: the birds’ prolonged attack on Mitch's mother's house in The Birds (the violent invasion of a closed space, wood splintering, the ever growing panic of those trapped inside-the motifs are all there). 96reached an unbearable intensity. In both cases the danger is clear and present, the monster—uniike what happened in the previous strategy-is out in full view. We are past the point in which the victim can hope that “this isn't happening,” or that “I can still run away from it." Now the choice is literally between doing or dying. Action~albeit at times only irrational, panic-driven action-has taken the place of anticipation. |tis above all within this representational strategy that we can appreciate the ‘enormous importance of the role of sound for the modem horror film. Surely sound is ‘extremely important for the representation of the monster (our second strategy). Part of the “success” of a monster, in fact, has to do with the repertory of distinct, peculiar and, of Course, disgusting sounds that its creators can assign to it (here the hissing, sucking and cracking sounds of the Aliens and the Thing come especially to mind). Similarly, the mise- en-scéne of impending physical assault (strategy number three) is greatly enhanced by the skilful manipulation not only of off-screen space, but of off-screen sound as well (a ‘noise whose source cannot be seen seems to be the ultimate harbinger of danger in the ‘moder horror film). But itis here, in the mise-en-scéne of “all hell breaking loose,” that the overall importance for the economy of the moder horror film of its entire soundtrack (including characters’ voices, diegetic sounds, sound effects and musical score) becomes evident. In this respect it should be clear that when, earlier on, | referred to the influence the special effects innovations of the late 1970s had on the modem horror film, | was referring to innovations in sound technology as well.” For indeed what these sequences have in 7Note how the advent of these innovations (and their importance for the development of mainstream cinema) historically coincided with that of the modem horror film. Cf. Cook: "it ‘was, in fact, in the domain of sound alone that a major formal change was apparent during the 1970s: audiences attending Dolby-equipped theaters showing Dolby-encoded films in the latter part of the decade would hava detected a perceptible shift from undistinguished monoaural to precision-honed stereo surround.” (2000: 396-96). 97‘common, from the simplest ones in which characters hide in closets to the most complex and expensive ones in which huge futuristic sets are destroyed, is a sense of panic disorientation which is achieved in very large part through the soundtrack. It is not merely question of volume here (although at times it can certainly seem so), but rather of what might be termed sound saturation. The spectator is “overwhelmed” by a barrage of ‘screams, explosions, sounds effects and pulsating music in much the same way the characters are overwhelmed by their panic excitation. The ultimate goal of these sequences is that of completely enguifing the spectator in their chaos so that it is only when the screaming, the pounding, the shattering and the crashing quiet down, and everything seems to stand relatively still, that one is reminded once again that what the ‘moder horror film plunges us into is first and foremost a state of agitation ® Obviously, this state is produced by the combination of what we hear and what we ‘ee, that is to say by the combined effect of the soundtrack and of camera mavements, lighting, editing, etc. However, to better appreciate the overlooked, yet fundamental, role of sound we might want to imagine how we would react to these sequences if we were to watch them with the soundtrack tured off. Most likely, | would argue, we would stil be able to understand what is happening in them, yet their effect, that sense of panic ‘excitation that we get from them in their final version, would be absent. On the contrary, ‘merely listening to a tape of the soundtrack of these very sequences at a sufficiently high volume would most likely elicit a feeling of uneasy apprehension, even without the support of the images. It could, of course, be argued that the mise-en-scéne of “all hell breaking loose" is jain it was Alfred Hitchcock who offered his audience what was perhaps the first (and to this day one of the most effective and celebrated) example of these sequences: the shower murder scene in Psycho. 98simply the mise-en-scéne of impending physical assault brought to a higher degree. Indeed often the two are quite clearly related chronologically. The final sequences of both Halloween and The Brood slowly build themselves up as mise-en-scéne of impending physical assaults (Michael stalking Laurie and the brood surrounding Dr. Raglan) only to conclude as mise-en-scéne of “all hell breaking loose" (the pounding attacks on the closet doors behind which the two female victims are hiding, accompanied by frantic screams and music). The implied suggestion here would be that what distinguishes the two mise-en- Scénes is not the different effects they try to produce, but merely their temporal position in relation to the monster's attack: one comes before the attack, the other during it. Yet if itis true that often the two are chronologically related, we still have too many examples in which this is not the case to suggest that it might be worthwhile to maintain their theoretical difference.® Moreover itis not without interest that some of the most “unforgettable” scenes in the history of the genre could be described in my terms as unannounced sequences of “all hell breaking loose.” Without any preceding mise-en- ‘scéne of impending physical assault, both the shower murder in Psycho and the alien birth from John Hurt's stomach in Alien shocked two different generations with similar images of utter powertessness accompanied by shrieking music and primal screaming. ‘TOWARD A DEFINITION OF THE HORROR AFFECT If the four representational strategies of the modem horror film are designed to SCr., for example, the following comments by Thomas Doherty: “Unlike Alien, the spectatorial experience of Aliens is more in the way of an adrenaline rush than nervous anticipation.” Although Doherty is comparing two different films rather than sequences within the same film, the difference between an “adrenaline rush” and ation” is precisely the difference | am trying to point out between the effect produced by the fourth and that produced by the third strategy. Thomas Doherty, “Genre, Gender, and the Aliens Trilogy,” The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, B.K. Grant ed., Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996: 187. 99Produce, individually or in combination, an emotional effect, we must at this point ask what kind of effect we are talking about. If, in other words, in order to investigate the “paradox” (why do spectators pay to be horrified?) we have set out to identify and define the means through which spectators are horrified (the four strategies), it is now time to ask: what exactly does “to be horrified" mean? | suggest that we could begin to answer this question by looking at the dictionary. At the very least, in fact, by pausing to (re}-consider the literal meanings of many of the words usually used to refer to our films we might come up with a number of clues which, | ‘would argue, soon reveal themselves to be far from insignificant. | would first like to draw the reader's attention to the definition of horror: HORROR? 1. An intense and painful feeling of repugnance and fear. 2. Intense dislike; abhorrence. 3. One that causes horror. 4. Informal. Something unpleasant, ugly, or disagreable: That hat is a horror. 5. Slang. Intense nervous depression or anxiety: a bad case of the horrors. What should be immediately noted is that nothing in this definition suggests that one of horror's inherent qualities is that of attracting the subject. That horror attracts is, however, staple of film (and literary) criticism. Even more, it is considered to be its ultimate paradox, the mystery every critic (myself included) tries to solve. And yet in its dictionary definition there is no mention of this assumed power of horror. Note that its other qualities are clearly represented: horror threatens and disgusts. That is to say, what horrifies is ‘supposed to be perceived as both dangereous (hence the fear) and revolting (hence the repugnance). Horror, in other words, offends in two distinct ways. But it does not, at least ot in its dictionary definition, attract. 10This and the following definitions are taken from the American Heritage Dictionary (Second College Edition). A look at other comparable dictionaries (i.e. Collegiate ones) ‘would produce extremely similar results, confirming, | believe, the "exemplary" quality of my choice. 100To use Carrols terminology we could say that ‘horror’ disgusts and terrifies but does not attract, whereas art-horror, ike the monster with which it is all too quickly ‘identified, paradoxically attracts notwithstanding (because of?) its ability to disgust and terrify. The point | am trying to draw attention to here is that it is precisely in the transition from “real horror (in its dictionary definition) to specific products such as the modern horror ffir that the founding quality of attraction makes its appearance. Here we find our first ‘clue, for it might be perhaps precisely by virtue of this acknowledgment (of the founding Presence of attraction) that the coliapse/confusion between the monster and the genre so often takes place. We have seen how easily critics tend to collapse the horror text with the monster it represents, or rather to study the monster as if it were the sine qua non of the genre or its ‘most important feature. | have argued against such form of interpretation, pointing to its limits and, above al, to the oversights it leads to (hence my “demotion* of the ‘epresentation of the monster to being just one out of four representational strategies in the modem horror film). My claim is instead that the ultimate “object” of attraction for the Spectator is in fact the modem horror film itself, with al its strategies (the representation of the uncanny or the mise-en-scéne of impending physical assualt, for example, clearly bbeing as able to “attract” the spectators and hold them spellbound as the sight of the monster). But since the monster's power of attraction upon both the characters within the arrative and the spectators is something that, as we shall soon see, is often foregrounded by the films themselves, it is easy to see how this might lead some commentators to identify what appears as the main locus of attraction within the films (the monster) with the attraction exercised by the films themselves, and thus assign a inordinate importance to the monster within the economy of the genre. 101We should keep in mind this essential quality of attraction (as related not only to the monster, but fo the modem horror film in general) as we move on to examine the

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