The Seductiveness of Horror
Everything comes back to the zombies' weird attractiveness: they exercise a per- verse, insidious fascination that undermines our nominal involvement with the films' active protagonists. The rising of the dead is frequently described as a plague: it takes the form of a mass contagion, without any discernible point of ori- gin. The zombies proliferate by contiguity, attraction, and imitation, and agglom- erate into large groups. The uncanny power of Romero's films comes from the fact that these intradiegetic processes of mimetic participation are the same ones that, on another level, serve to bind viewers to the events unfolding on the screen. The "living dead" trilogy achieves an overwhelming affective ambivalence by displac- ing, exceeding, and intensifying the conventional mechanisms of spectatorial iden- tification, inflecting them in the direction of a dangerous, tactile, mimetic partici- pation. Perception itself becomes infected, and is transformed into a kind of magical, contagious contact. The films mobilize forms of visual involvement that tend to interrupt the forward movement of narrative, and that cannot be reduced to the ruses of specular dialectics. We cannot in a conventional sense "identify"
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with the zombies, but we are increasingly seduced by them, drawn into proximity with them. The participatory contact that they promise and exemplify is in a deep sense what we most strongly desire; or, better, we gradually discover that it is already the hidden principle of our desire. Romero's trilogy amply justifies Bataille's (1985) suggestion that "extreme seductiveness is probably at the bound- ary of horror" (p. 17).
The first of these modes of seductive implication is a kind of suspension or hesitation. We watch alongside a protagonist who does not see any- thing—but who is waiting, anxiously, for the zombies to appear, or for dead bod- ies to rise. Nothing happens, the instant is empty. Of course, such scenes are a classic means of building suspense. But Romero gives the blank time of anticipa- tion a value in its own right, rather than just using it to accentuate, by contrast, the jolt that follows. Sometimes he even sacrifices immediate shock effect, the better to insist upon the clumsy, hallucinatory slowness of the zombies' approach, for even after the zombies have finally appeared, we are still held in suspense—wait- ing for them to come near enough to devour us, to embrace us with their mortify- ing, intimate touch. Such a pattern of compulsive, fascinated waiting is especially important in Dawn. In one excruciatingly drawn-out scene, one of the barricaded humans waits for the moment when his comrade, having just died in bed from zombie-inflicted wounds, will come back to life as one of them. There is nothing he can do; he simply sits, gun in hand, taking swigs from a bottle of whiskey. Ever so slowly, the sheets covering the corpse begin to move. . . .Again, at the very end of the film, the same character is tempted to remain behind and shoot himself in the head, instead of joining the woman survivor in a last-minute departure by heli- copter. No true escape is possible; running away now only means accepting the horror of having to fight the zombies again someplace else. One can put an end to this eternal recurrence only by not delaying, by shooting oneself immediately in the head, directly destroying the physical texture of the brain. The man hesitates for a long, unbearable moment, his gun at his temple, as the zombies approach— ravening after his flesh, but still shuffling along at their usual slow pace. Only at the last possible instant is he finally able to tear himself away. The dread that the zombies occasion is based more on a fear of infection than on one of annihilation. The living characters are concerned less about the prospect of being killed than they are about being swept away by mimesis—of returning to existence, after death, transformed into zombies them- selves. The screams of the dying man in Dawn sound very much like (and are equated by montage with) the cries of the zombies. The man is most horrified not by his pain or his impending death, but by the prospect of walking again; he promises with his last breath that he will try not to return. Of course, he fails: revivification is not something that can be resisted by mere force of will. To die is precisely to give up one's will, and thus to find oneself drawn, irresistibly, into a passive, zombified state. In these scenes, the protagonist's momentary hesitation is already, implicitly, a partial surrender to temptation. A chain of mimetic transfer- ence moves from the zombies, to the man who dies and returns as a zombie, to the other man who watches him die and return, and to the audience fascinated by the whole spectacle. As the moments are drawn out, a character with whom we iden- tify seems on the verge of slipping into a secretly desired incapacity to act, a pas- sionate wavering and paralysis. Living action is subverted by the passivity of wait- ing for death; indecision debilitates the self-conscious assertion of the will. In Dawn, the protagonists end up resisting this temptation and returning to a stance of action and resolve. But it's only a small step from them to the wounded soldier in Day, who gives himself over entirely to the zombies. At such moments in the three films, it is as if perception were slowed down and hollowed out. As I wait for the zombies to arrive, I am uncannily
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solicited and invested by the vision of something that I endlessly anticipate, but that I cannot yet see. Deleuze (1986, 155-59) argues that the sensorimotor link, the reflex arc from stimulus to response, or from affection to action, is essential to the structure of action narrative. But at such moments of waiting for the zombies' awakening or approach, the link between apprehension and action is hollowed out or suspended, in what Deleuze (1986, 197-215) calls a "crisis" in the act of seeing. The stimulating sensation fails to arrive, and the motor reaction is arrested. The slow meanders of zombie time emerge out of the paralysis of the conventional time of progressive narrative. This strangely empty temporality also corresponds to a new way of looking, a vertiginously passive fascination. The usual relation of audi- ence to protagonist is inverted. Instead of the spectator projecting him- or herself into the actions unfolding on the screen, an on-screen character lapses into a quasi-spectatorial position. This is the point at which dread slips into obsession, the moment when unfulfilled threats turn into seductive promises. Fear becomes indistinguishable from an incomprehensible, intense, but objectless craving. This is the zombie state par excellence: an abject vacancy, a passive emptying of the self. But such vacuity is not nothingness, for it is powerfully, physically felt. The allure of zombiehood cannot be represented directly—it is a kind of mimetic transfer- ence that exceeds and destroys all structures of representation—but it lurks in all these excruciating, empty moments when seemingly nothing happens. Passively watching and waiting, I am given over to the slow vertigo of aimless, infinite expectation and need. I discover that implication is more basic than opposition; a contagious complicity is more disturbing than any measure of lack, more so even than lack pushed to the point of total extinction. The hardest thing to acknowl- edge is that the living dead are not radically Other so much as they serve to awaken a passion for otherness and for vertiginous disidentification that is already latent within our own selves.
A second mode of voyeuristic participation in the "living dead" trilogy comes into play when the zombies finally do arrive. Romero gleefully exploits his viewers' desires to experience and enjoy, vicariously, the rending apart and communal consumption of living flesh. These films literalize obscenity. In their insistence on cannibalism and on the dismemberment of the human body, their lurid display of extruded viscera, they deliberately and directly present to the eye something that should not be seen, that cannot be seen in actuality. Audiences attend these films largely in the hope of being titillated by a violence that is at once safely distant and garishly immediate—extravagantly hyperreal. I'm taken on a wild ride, through a series of thrills and shocks, pulled repeatedly to the brink of an unbearable and impossible consummation. The zombies' almost ritualistic vio- lation of the flesh allows me to regard, for an ephemeral instant, what is normally invisible: the hidden insides of bodies, their mysterious and impenetrable interior- ity. At the price of such monstrous destructiveness, I am able to participate in a strange exhibition and presentation of physical, bodily affect. These films enact the making evident, the public display, of my most private and inaccessible experi- ences: those of wrenching pain and of the agonizing extremity of dying. I am fix- ated upon the terrifying instant of transmogrification: the moment of the tearing apart of limb from limb, the twitching of the extremities, and the bloody, slippery oozing of the internal organs. Fascination resides in the evanescent and yet end- lessly drawn-out moment when the victim lives out his own death, an instant before the body is finally reduced to the status of dead meat.
Cheap Thrills
And this is the real reason people flock to see—indeed, why we passionately enjoy—horror films such as Romero's. What is the nature of this fascination, this dread, this enjoyment? In what position does such sensationalistic excess place the
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spectator, and how does it address him or her? Horror shares with pornography the frankly avowed goal of physically arousing the audience. If these "base" genres violate social taboos, this is not so much on account of what they represent or depict on the screen as of bow they go about doing it. Horror and porn are radi- cally desublimating; they make a joke of the pretensions of establishing aesthetic distance and of offering "redeeming social value." They exceed the boundaries usually assigned to mass entertainment, by ludicrously hyperbolizing and literaliz- ing what are supposed to be merely the secondary, deferred, compensatory satis- factions of fantasy. More precisely, they short-circuit the mechanism of fantasy altogether: they are not content to leave me with vague, disembodied imaginings, but excitedly seek to incise those imaginings in my very flesh. They focus obses- sively upon the physical reactions of bodies on screen, the better to assault and agi- tate the bodies of the audience. This is precisely why porn and horror films epito- mize "bad taste." They do not bring me gratified fulfillment or satiation, but insidiously exacerbate and exasperate my least socially acceptable desires. Romero's trilogy, and the many horror films produced in its wake, do not try to suture the spectator into a seamless world of false plenitude and ideological mystification. Rather, they blithely dispense with the canons of realistic conviction. They indulge themselves in the production of "special effects," in the double sense of grotesque visual effects and of affective and physio- logical effects upon the viewer. What counts is not the believability of the events depicted, but only the immediate response they elicit from the spectator.
Whereas the scenes of anticipation previously discussed hollow out the space between stim- ulus and response, the present scenes of carnage and gore overload this space to the point of explosion. A behaviorist model of discontinuous shock effects replaces the traditional, representational or naturalistic model of apparent depths and plau- sible causal connections. Indeed, these films go out of their way to call attention to
their own irreality, the hilarious and ostentatious artificiality of their spectacular, outrageous special effects. Romero's movies are filled with marvelously tasteless sight gags, reminiscent of 1950s comic books, such as the scene in Dawn in which one character is so absorbed in using a machine to test his blood pressure that he virtu- ally fails to notice the zombies tearing him apart (final blood pressure reading: zero), or the shot in Day of eyes still fluttering frantically in a head that has been sliced in two. These films do not try to disguise, but openly revel in, their recourse to mechanistic, technological means of manipulation. This cynicism on the plane of expression goes hand-in-hand with a self-conscious celebration of simulation and monstrosity on the plane of content. Just as the zombies cannot be categorized within the diegesis (they cannot be placed in terms of our usual binary oppositions of life and death, or nature and culture), so on the formal level of presentation they transgress, or simply ignore, the boundaries between humor and horror, between intense conviction and ludicrous exaggeration. These films are wildly discontinuous, flamboyantly antinatural- istic, and nonsensically grotesque. Yet the more ridiculously excessive and self- consciously artificial they are, the more literal is their visceral impact. They can't be kept at a distance, for they can't be referred to anything beyond themselves. Their simulations are radically immediate: they no longer pretend to stand in for, or to represent, a previously existing real.
Horror thus destroys customary mean- ings and appearances, ruptures the surfaces of the flesh, and violates the organic integrity of the body. It puts the spectator in direct contact with intensive, unrep- resentable fluxes of corporeal sensation. I respond with a heightened tingling of the flesh, with an odd mixture of laughter, anxiety, and disgust. As Romero's films increasingly subvert the pragmatics of survival and slide into a realm of ambiva-
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lent, gory fascination, they come to exemplify a base counteraesthetics grounded in shock, hilarity, relentless violence, delirious behaviorism, contagion, tactile par- ticipation, and aimless, hysterical frenzy. I watch these films, finally, with an alarming, ambivalent, and highly charged exhilaration. At the end of Day, especially, I am seduced and trans- fixed by the joy and the terror—the disgusting, unspeakable pleasure—of the human body's exposure and destruction. As the flesh of the last few soldiers is deservedly torn to shreds, more and more zombie hands thrust themselves into the frame, grasping, tearing, avidly yet impersonally claiming their gobbets of skin and entrails. The zombie potlatch marks a democratic, communal leveling of all invidi- ous distinctions; it is an ephemeral instant of universal participation and communi- cation. As I witness this cannibal ferment, I enjoy the reactive gratifications of ressentiment and revenge, the unavowable delights of exterminating the powerful Others who have abused me. But such intense pleasures are deeply equivocal, iron- ically compromised from the outset, participatory in a way that implicates my own interiority. For one thing, I can scarcely distinguish the agonies of the victims from the never-satisfied cravings of the avengers, the continuing disquiet of the already dead. What is more, the nervous, exacerbated thrills of destruction, the jolts and spasms that run through my body at the sight of all this gore, threaten to tear me apart as well. I enjoy this sordid spectacle only at the price of being mimetically engulfed by it, uncontrollably, excitedly swept away. I find myself giving in to an insidious, hidden, deeply shameful passion for abject self- disintegration. On a formal no less than on a thematic level, the "living dead" trilogy destabilizes structures of power and domination. It accomplishes this by being absurdly reactive, by pushing to an outrageous extreme the consequences of manipulation, victimization, and Nietzschean "slave morality." It does not negate, but appropriates and redirects, the simulationist technologies of postmodern control. It does not provide a cathartic release for, but self-consciously channels and intensifies, our aggressive and destructive drives. It abolishes reflective dis- tance, and desublimates affective response. It does not propose any redemptive or Utopian vision, but overtly imbricates control with the loss of control. These painful ambiguities continue to pursue those few protagonists who do manage to escape. The survivors who reach a tropical island at the end of Day have nothing to look forward to but an empty, eventless, nightmare-ridden time—or, worse, the eventuality that the zombies will reach them by learning how to swim. There is no possibility of evasion, just as there is none of mastery, and none of firm and stable identification, for the zombies always come in between: they insinuate themselves within the uncanny, interstitial space that separates (but thereby also connects) inside and outside, the private and the public, life and death. In this liminal posi- tion, they are the obscene objects of voyeuristic fascination. In a deeper sense, however, the zombies are the bearers or the subjects of this fascination as well: their endless desire, their deindividuated sub- jectivity, infects and usurps my own. They literalize and embody an extremity of agitation, an ecstatic emptying out of the self, a mimetic contagion, in which I can participate, alas, only vicariously. Yet in the long run, this inauthentic, vicarious participation is more than enough. The most intense and disturbing passion is the most factitious. Voyeurism implies a strange complicity, less with the agent of destruction than with the victim. I have survived the vision of hell and apocalypse, I am only sitting in a movie theater after all. My intense enjoyment of this specta- cle, my thrilling, pornographic realization that humankind "can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (Benjamin 1969, 242), is not
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something to moralize against, but something to be savored. In the postmodern age of manipulative microtechnologies and infectious mass communication, such a pleasure marks the demoralization and collapse of the fascist exaltation Benjamin was warning against, and the birth instead of a politics of mimetic debasement, a subtle and never-completed opening to abjection.
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