"….uncanny tales play on a creeping awareness that reality is unstable. As we have seen, horror often arises out of a blurring or transgressing of clear category distinctions. The uncanny tends to arise out of a sense of uncertainty as to whether we are encountering or experiencing something which is alive or dead, organic or inert, material or supernatural. It is the statue that moves, the portrait whose eyes follow you around the room, the doll that comes to life, the mirror that reflects back a different room, or a different face, the door that suddenly will not open, or that opens of its own accord, or that rattles as if being violently shaken from the outside when you know there's no one there. It is the window that looks out onto an unexpectedly strange vista, or onto nothing at all."
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Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018) is a useful, competent historical survey of the horror mode.
For most of the very brief book, Jones addresses the market-driven historical vicissitudes of horror film and TV work. As a teacher he's probably learned that students are willing to discuss "True Detective" or "Buffy," but not Melmoth the Wanderer or "Laura Silver Bell." (Sorry to be wearing my Sneering S.T. Joshi hat today.)
I was surprised that the most recognized and influential contemporary stylists of horror prose today get little mention. Stephen King is discussed, as are Victor LaValle and Michelle Paver, but not Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, or Reggie Oliver. Perhaps that's just me, though. Jones is clearly aiming at a short, popular outline, employing sexy tops like "body horror" and "torture porn." His discussions of these topics are sober and thoughtful, and do point readers at the best examples.
Some excerpts I posted on Facebook during my time reading the book:
....Horripilation can be a pleasurable experience. In Jane Austen's quasi-Gothic Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney reads Ann Radcliffe: 'The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again;—I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.' Horror audiences laugh as often as they scream, or laugh and scream at the same time.
The pleasures of genre are, in fact, often akin to those of ritual. They are based on repetition, on the acting out of predetermined roles, on the precise fulfilment of expectations. Horror audiences are often highly knowledgeable, with an acute intuitive knowledge of the codes and conventions of the genre. They often know exactly what to expect, and this explains the enduring popularity of many of the most generically formulaic kinds of horror, from Radcliffe's Gothic novels to slasher movies. Nobody went to see Friday the 13th, part 8, or Saw 6, expecting a whole new cinematic experience from the one they got when they went to see Friday the 13th, part 7, or Saw 5. Sometimes, this genre-familiarity can indeed lend a ritualistic or even a participatory experience to the work or art, as we go self-consciously through the conventions of the genre while experiencing it, or even start to take part in the work ourselves (like the audience for The Rocky Horror Picture Show). The great success of the Scream franchise (1996–2011), for example, is to a large extent predicated on its audience's genre expertise. We have been here before….
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....who actually believes in vampires?'
Though unquestionably revenants, 'folkloric' vampires such as Arnold Paole and his ilk tend to be peasants or rural villagers, intensely localized in their effects. In appearance, they are often described as ruddy faced, as though bloated with blood. How did we get from these frankly unsexy undead yokels to the characteristic vampire of modern popular culture—suave, aristocratic, cultivated, pale, and desirable?
This vampire is a distinctive product of the literary culture of Romanticism. As the critic Mario Praz identified as long ago as 1933, there is a recurring strain of 'Dark Romanticism' which is fascinated by the allure of supernatural and demonic creatures (Lamia, Geraldine, and other serpent-women, Life-in-Death, La Belle Dame Sans Merci) and by human transgressors and overreachers standing apart from the common concerns of humanity (Faust, Frankenstein, Napoleon). In April 1819, the New Monthly Magazine published a tale entitled The Vampyre, whose protagonist, the charismatic and seductive Lord Ruthven, returns to London from his European Grand Tour, having died in Greece and arisen as a vampire. Published anonymously, the work was assumed to be by Lord Byron (Goethe thought it among his best work), though it was in fact written by the Edinburgh physician Dr John Polidori. Polidori was present at the evening of supernatural tales told at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816 which was the genesis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Told as they have been from a variety of different and differing sources, the events of this evening are difficult to reconstruct with certainty, but it seems likely that Polidori based The Vampyre on the supernatural tale which Byron himself told that night (a fragment of which was subsequently published), and drew heavily on the scandalous public persona of Byron himself for Lord Ruthven.
With Romantic writers such as Byron and Polidori, the vampire became, importantly, both sexualized and aristocratic, a demon lover, running riot across the poetry, fiction, and theatre of the nineteenth century right up to the publication of the single most important text in the history of horror, Bram Stoker's Dracula, in 1897. At the same time, Karl Marx habitually deployed the vampire as a metaphor for the 'bloodsucking' economic exploitation of capitalism (one wonders what he would have made of the Twilight phenomenon, capitalism red in fang and claw?). Marx was much given to Gothic metaphors, and when casting around in Capital (1867) for an exemplar of 'The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour', settles on 'a Wallachian Boyar…in the Danubian Principalities' (was he thinking of Vlad the Impaler?). A couple of pages earlier, Marx offers his celebrated account of bloodsucking capitalism:
[The] capitalist…is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
The class polarities of vampirism have been reversed. Marx's vampiric 'Wallachian Boyar' exploits the labour of the very people (the Eastern European poor) who were traditionally prone to vampirism.
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It is difficult to think of a body of mythology or folklore that does not contain narratives of lycanthropy or other forms of beast transformation, and contemporary popular culture is suffused with such narratives. These may originally have emerged from widespread beliefs in types of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls from one bodily form to another, and might be said to reflect the unity of humanity and nature in a polytheistic order, or even a sense of innate pantheism, in which all living things are divine spirits. Ovid's Metamorphoses is in essence an enormous catalogue of such narratives.
Beast transformations of this kind are rarer in monotheistic mythology and theology, much of which emerged from the necessities of harsh desert survival, and thus stresses an essential separation of humanity and nature, which is a force which needs to be mastered and controlled, governed by a series of laws and interdicts, from the Abominations of Leviticus (many of which are dietary) to the Ten Commandments (which emerge out of a period of national survival in the wilderness). One of the few such narratives in the Bible is that of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, 'deposed from his kingly throne' for his pride and reduced to a life of feral madness: 'And he was driven from the sons of men, and his heart was made like the beasts, and his dwelling was with the wild asses; they fed him with grass like oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven' (Daniel 5:20–1). (This is the subject of a famous painting by William Blake, and it has been suggested that Blake drew for this on an illustration of a cannibalistic werewolf by Lucas Cranach; see Figure 5.)
Sometimes lycanthropy is, as Pliny maintained, a straightforward curse, a misfortune brought upon an innocent through sheer bad luck, or as a result of a family history over which they have no control. This remains a significant impetus for modern cinematic lycanthropy, in Werewolf of London (1935), The Wolf Man (1941), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), or An American Werewolf in London (1981). Modern beast transformations have also found a powerful explanatory narrative in Darwinism, a major source of anxiety ever since the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, as we shall see in Chapter 5. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) are both explicitly post-Darwinian narratives of beast transformation, and all subsequent tales of lycanthropy are in their different ways necessarily informed by the implication of natural selection that there is no existential division between man and beast.
In many cases, as with Lycaon himself, lycanthropy is both a punishment and a metaphor for savagery. In serving up human flesh (the flesh of a baby; the flesh of his own child) to Zeus, Lycaon violates numerous taboos against blasphemy, unclean eating, familial ties, and the obligations of a host. He transforms into a wolf as an externalization of his own inhumanity. This is very much the interpretation for lycanthropy which the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould offered in his influential 1865 treatise, The Book of Were-Wolves.
Baring-Gould was a kind of super-Victorian, an Anglican clergyman who was also an astoundingly prolific man of letters—a novelist, an antiquary (he wrote A Book of Dartmoor, one of Arthur Conan Doyle's sources for The Hound of the Baskervilles), a folklorist, a hymnist ('Onward Christian Soldiers'), and much else besides. Baring-Gould's interest in lycanthropy dates, he maintains, from a walking tour in a remote part of Brittany, where he is warned against setting out after dark, for fear of the loup-garou, 'a fiend, a worse than fiend, a man-fiend—a worse than man-fiend, a man-wolf-fiend'.
For Baring-Gould, lycanthropy is a moral category. As well as Lycaon himself, Baring-Gould identifies as lycanthropes a number of moral monsters—notorious serial killers and cannibals such as Elizabeth Báthory and Gilles de Rais. He also associates the Berserkers with lycanthropy. These were terrifyingly savage Scandinavian warriors, apparently impervious to pain and injury, who dressed in the skins of beasts for battle: 'The berserkir were said to work themselves into a state of frenzy, in which a demoniacal power came over them, impelling them to acts from which their sober senses would have recoiled…and as they rushed into conflict they yelped as dogs or howled as wolves.' Berserker (or 'Bersicker') is the name Bram Stoker chose for the giant wolf that escapes from London Zoo at the Count's bidding in Dracula. Dracula commands wolves ('Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make!'), and is himself a lycanthrope, referred to by the locals as '"Ordog"—Satan, "pokol"—hell, "stregoica"—witch, "vrolok" and "vlkoslak"—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other Servian [sic] for something that is either werewolf or vampire'. When the Count disembarks the ship he has commandeered, on English soil, he does so in the guise of 'an immense dog', or wolf.
In part because of its association with cannibalism, lycanthropy is also a directly political category, a means of subhumanizing aliens and Others by rendering them as bestial. As we have seen, the further we get from the polis, from metropolitan centres of population and civilization—to Colchis, Castle Dracula, the Yorkshire Moors, the Asiatic steppes, Prospero's island, the Island of Doctor Moreau—the closer we get to monstrosity and savagery, as though we are travelling back in time. For Herodotus, the lycanthropic Neuri and their neighbours, the Anthropophagi, lived in remote Eastern Europe and Central Asia. For Pliny, beast-men lived in unexplored Africa:
Then come regions which are purely imaginary: towards the west are the Nigroi, whose king is said to have only one eye, in his forehead; the Wild-beast-eaters [Agriophagi], who live chiefly on the flesh of panthers and lions; the Eatalls [Pamphagi], who devour everything; the Man-eaters [Anthropophagi], whose diet is human flesh; the Dog-milkers [Cymanolgi], who have dogs' heads; the Arbatitae, who have four legs and rove about like wild animals.
You will notice that Pliny's primary method of taxonomy here is dietary; beast-men are monstrous because they violate food taboos.
Baring-Gould also recognized that lycanthropy was a psychological as well as a moral and geopolitical category. Lycanthropes, he speculated, 'may still prowl in Abyssinian forests, range still over Asiatic steppes, and be found howling dismally in some padded room of a Hanwell or a Bedlam.' The 'zoophagous' R. N. Renfield in Dracula was one such lunatic. Another was a patient of Sigmund Freud, Sergei Pankejeff, known as the Wolf Man. Pankejeff suffered from a variety of physical and psychological conditions, and under analysis recounted to Freud a particularly terrifying childhood dream of white wolves sitting in the walnut tree outside his bedroom. Freud interprets this as a displaced rendition of a traumatic episode in which the infant Pankejeff, sleeping in a cot in his parents' bedroom, witnesses a 'Primal Scene', an act of 'coitus a tergo, more ferrarum' ('sex from behind, like the animals'), allowing him simultaneously to see both parents' genitals, and to interpret his mother's vagina as lack, a castrated bleeding wound. Pankejeff grew into a 'savage' child; for the Wolf Man, Freud concludes, 'the sexual aim could only be cannibalism—devouring'.
The anxious relationship between humanity and wolves is also a recurring trope in folklore, and particularly in the European fairy tale, in which the Big Bad Wolf is a recurring figure. The tale of 'Little Red Riding Hood' is especially ripe for interpretation and adaptation. One of the most widely circulated folktales, 'Little Red Riding Hood' has direct analogues and antecedents that can be traced back to medieval Europe, and was collected by both Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers. The tale, with its pubescent heroine and her grandmother, its red cloak, and its rapacious antagonist, is ripe with psychoanalytic suggestion. For the Freudian theorist Bruno Bettelheim in his influential study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, the wolf is 'the male seducer', who 'represents all the asocial, animalistic tendencies within ourselves'. The devouring wolf-grandmother ('What big teeth you have!') who lives in a cottage in the woods has clear links to the cannibalistic witch of the related tale of 'Hansel and Gretel' (also collected by the Grimms). In her feminist study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner draws together the wolf, the grandmother, and the adolescent girl, as figures linked by their liminality:
The wolf is kin to the forest-dwelling witch, or crone; he offers us a male counterpart, a werewolf, who swallows up grandmother and then granddaughter. In the witch-hunting fantasies of early modern Europe they are the kind of beings associated with marginal knowledge, who possess pagan secrets and are in turn possessed by them.
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Science and Horror
In 1995, the year before his death, the distinguished astronomer and science writer Carl Sagan published a book entitled The Demon-Haunted World. Subtitled Science as a Candle in the Dark, the book had its origins in a course Sagan taught at Cornell University, 'Critical thinking in scientific and non-scientific contexts'. The Demon-Haunted World is an analysis of the follies, but also the temptations, of occult thinking and pseudoscience, which offer misleading or simplistic, if sometimes emotionally satisfying, answers to complex questions. Sagan was no philistine—he was the most polymathically humanistic of public intellectuals, with a real understanding of the power of myth, the importance of religion, the necessity of art. But he was acutely aware of the cultural and intellectual deficit that results from scientific ignorance. Without some understanding of and sympathy for science, intellectual citizenship was under threat, and with that the very possibility of educating a responsible electorate.
In part, Sagan realized, scientific illiteracy arose out of a climate of distrust. This was understandable:
Our technology has produced thalidomide, CFCs, Agent Orange, nerve gas, pollution of air and water, species extinctions, and industries so powerful they can ruin the climate of our planet. Roughly half the scientists on Earth work at least part-time for the military….There's a reason people are nervous about science.
This fear and distrust of science and scientists is a major component of modern horror. In part, this is an aspect of horror's suspicion towards authority, in this case the overwhelming claims made for science as the only explanatory model, the only approach to existence worth taking seriously, the only method that matters. As we saw in Chapter 4, scientific genius is often understood in horror as a dangerous species of madness. Victor Frankenstein is only the most famous of a large group of unethical experimentalists in bloodstained laboratory coats, scalpel or serum in hand, or else of bloodless, abstract theoreticians who would, like Edward Teller, destroy the world in order to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. Fiat experimentum in corpore vili ('Let the experiment be performed on a worthless corpse'). The attitude expressed in this Latin proverb informs much of the anxiety horror has about science, the fear people have of being treated as corpora vilia, expendable experimental subjects.
This kind of anti-scientific popular culture is a fundamentally modern affair, and in essence dates from the climate of scientific materialism which followed in the wake of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859. The term 'scientific materialism' was coined in 1872 by the Irish physicist John Tyndall; T. H. Huxley, Charles Darwin's colleague, preferred the term 'scientific naturalism', which he understood as antithetical to 'supernaturalism'. Tyndall and Huxley were at the centre of a group of Victorian scientists who challenged the cultural and intellectual authority of the Church of England, one important battle in a broader Victorian 'crisis of faith'. Famously, Huxley debated evolution with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce in the Oxford University Natural History Museum on 30 June 1860, a debate which history, at least, judged Huxley to have won by knockout when he answered Wilberforce's snide question 'was it through his grandfather or grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?' with the answer that 'He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.' Huxley recognized that evolution's dethroning of humanity from the pinnacle of creation was psychologically and existentially shocking, causing 'the awakening of a sudden and profound mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly-rooted prejudices regarding [humanity's] own position in nature'.
Huxley taught evolutionary biology to H. G. Wells in what is now Imperial College in London. Wells acknowledged that his intellectual debt to Huxley was immeasurable, and it can be seen very clearly in his own Darwinist horror, The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which a crazed vivisector attempts to demonstrate the relationship between man and beast by transforming a variety of animals into human beings. These concerns about the status and place of humanity raised by scientific materialism in general and Darwinism in particular are anxieties with which horror continues to wrestle, because culture at large does. 'Mad science'—scientific progress completely severed from any ethical concerns—is a recurring trope in horror, and can be understood as giving form to genuine concerns about unchecked technological progress and its potential for dehumanization....
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[Body Horror]
Such cinematic transformations are inevitably technology-driven, and entered a decisively modern phase in the early 1980s, as advances in visual effects and make-up, pioneered by the likes of Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Tom Savini, and Stan Winston, meant that monstrous transformations could be shown onscreen for the first time in ways that often comprehensively exceeded the power of the audience's imaginations. In An American Werewolf in London, Baker's transformation of David Naughton into a wolf, with elongation of limbs and face, cracking of spine, and agonizing screams, is one of the defining moments of modern horror cinema. In Bottin's effects for John Carpenter's The Thing, the human body is given a nightmarish plasticity, seemingly able to recombine in any form, as a severed head sprouts spider's legs, Arachne-like, or a huge, fanged gash opens up in a torso, like the very mother of all vaginae dentatae. This was the world of 1980s 'body horror', which radically figured, disfigured, and refigured the human body, focusing on it relentlessly as a site of pain, and anxiety and disgust, but also of transformation and transcendence, often with highly sophisticated philosophical and intellectual underpinnings. Body horror of this kind is particularly associated with the work of the Canadian auteur David Cronenberg and the British writer and film-maker Clive Barker.
Consistently across a very distinguished body (corpus) of work, from early low-budget films such as Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1978), to 1980s classics like Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), or The Fly (1986), and beyond the millennium (including his 2014 novel, Consumed), Cronenberg has given artistic form to his sense of the human body as a corporation, composed of parts which have their own identities and individuality, which they seek to assert, in what is a radical literalizing of mind–body dualism. As a university literature graduate, Cronenberg is also an articulate theorist of his own work:
I don't think the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism…I think to myself: 'That's what it is: the independence of the body, relative to the mind, and the difficulty of the mind accepting what that revolution might entail.'
Cronenberg's use of the rhetoric of decolonization here, and his insistence on the relationship between the corporation and the corporeal, suggests a political reading of his work, underlined by his tendency to invent imaginatively named shadowy scientific/commercial organizations (Spectacular Optics, ConSec, the Raglan Institute for Psychoplasmics) which seek to distort and exploit the body for commercial gain. From rapacious capitalism to the AIDS crisis to the 'beauty myth' and its discontents, body horror became an effective means of engaging with and representing the grotesque elements of contemporary lived reality in the 1980s.
The politics of the body are even more to the fore in the work of Clive Barker. Another humanities graduate (English and Philosophy), Barker is, like Cronenberg, a ready theorist of his own work, which he has discussed across numerous, often very candid interviews. Barker, to begin with, is no believer in what was defined in the Introduction as the aesthetics of terror, arising out of implication, restraint, or uncanny uncertainty. There is no fear of the unknown here, and certainly no sense that the reader's or viewer's own imagination should be allowed to conjure the greatest horrors:
The kind of horror which is all suggestion and undertow, and 'it's what you don't see that horrifies you' kind of stuff—that doesn't do a thing for me.…I like imagining horrors in detail. I like to be able to give the reader everything I can imagine on a subject.…Horror fiction is about confrontation.
Barker's aesthetic radicalism—his uncompromisingly confident representational style—is matched by a commensurate political radicalism. His best work, the stories collected in the Books of Blood, are tales of riotous fleshly mutability, often with an avowedly feminist and/or an openly gay politics. In 'Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament', for example, a bored and frustrated housewife discovers that she has the power to mould flesh, and turns her sexist doctor into a woman:
She willed his manly chest into making breasts of itself and it began to swell most fetchingly, until the skin burst and his sternum flew apart. His pelvis, teased to breaking point, fractured at its centre…It was from between his legs all the noise was coming; the splashing of his blood; the thud of his bowel on the carpet.
Deliberately extreme and often brilliant, Barker's work is a classic example of horror at its most divisive, self-consciously setting out to shock and alienate large sections of the population, while establishing a devoted cult following. As Barker himself maintained:
I like to think there's some kind of 'celebration of perversity' in the Books of Blood. That's a response, simply, to normality. What I cannot bear is 'normality'. What I'm trying to upset is not something hugely repressive—but something banal, that is, the lives most people lead.
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Jay
23 August 2021
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