Assignment:
1. Summarize Carroll's 9 major characteristics of horror (most of these are in the Fantastic Biologies section).
2. Apply as many of the points as possible (and relevant) to specific passages in "Herbert West, Reanimator" (and if you like, specific clips from the Stuart Gordon film Reanimator).
This work will build your analytical tools for working with Zombies in text and film.
From Noel Carroll, Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart (1990, Routledge, London UK)
27/The Nature of Horror
Defining Art-Horror
Using this account of the emotions, we are now in a position to organize these observations about the emotion of art-horror. Assuming that “I- asaudience-member” am in an analogous emotional state to that which fictional characters beset by monsters are described to be in, then: I am occurrently art-horrified by some monster X, say Dracula, if and only if 1) I am in some state of abnormal, physically felt agitation (shuddering, tingling, screaming, etc.) which 2) has been caused by a) the thought: that Dracula is a possible being; and by the evaluative thoughts: that b) said Dracula has the property of being physically (and perhaps morally and socially) threatening in the ways portrayed in the fiction and that c) said Dracula has the property of being impure, where 3) such thoughts are usually accompanied by the desire to avoid the touch of things like Dracula.25 Of course, “Dracula,” here, is merely a heuristic device. Any old monster X can be plugged into the formula. Moreover, in order to forestall charges of circularity, let me note that, for our purposes, “monster” refers to any being not believed to exist now according to contemporary science. Thus, dinosaurs and nonhuman visitors from another galaxy are monsters under this stipulation though the former once existed and the latter might exist. Whether they are monsters who are also horrifying in the context of a particular fiction depends upon whether they meet the conditions of the
28 / The Nature of Horror
analysis above. Some monsters may be only threatening rather than horrifying, while others may be neither threatening nor horrifying.26 Another thing to note about the preceding definition is that it is the evaluative components of the theory that primarily serve to individuate arthorror. And, furthermore, it is crucial that two evaluative components come into play: that the monster is regarded as threatening and impure. If the monster were only evaluated as potentially threatening, the emotion would be fear; if only potentially impure, the emotion would be disgust. Arthorror requires evaluation both in terms of threat and disgust. The threat component of the analysis derives from the fact that the monsters we find in horror stories are uniformly dangerous or at least appear to be so; when they cease to be threatening, they cease to be horrifying. The impurity clause in the definition is postulated as a result of noting the regularity with which literary descriptions of the experiences of horror undergone by fictional characters include reference to disgust, repugnance, nausea, physical loathing, shuddering, revulsion, abhorrence, abomination, and so on. Likewise, the gestures actors on stage and on screen adopt when confronting horrific monsters communicate corresponding mental states. And, of course, these reactions—abomination, nausea, shuddering, revulsion, disgust, etc.—are characteristically the product of perceiving something to be noxious or impure.27 (With regard to the impurity clause of this theory, it is persuasive to recall that horrific beings are often associated with contamination—sicknesses, disease, and plague—and often accompanied by infectious vermin—rats, insects and the like.) It should also be mentioned that though the third criterion about the desire to avoid physical contact—which may be rooted in the fear of funestation—seems generally accurate, it might be better to consider it to be an extremely frequent but not necessary ingredient of art-horror.28 This caveat is included in my definition by means of the qualification “usually.” In my definition of horror, the evaluative criteria—of dangerousness and impurity—constitute what in certain idioms are called the formal object of the emotion.29 The formal object of the emotion is the evaluative category that circumscribes the kind of particular object the emotion can focus upon. To be an object of art-horror, in other words, is limited to particular objects, such as Dracula, that are threatening and impure. The formal object or evaluative category of the emotion constrains the range of particular objects upon which the emotion can be focused. An emotion involves, among other things, an appraisal of particular objects along the dimensions specified by the emotion’s operative evaluative category. Where a particular object is not assessable in terms of the evaluative category appropriate to a given emotion, the emotion, by definition, cannot be focused on said object. That is, I cannot be art-horrified by an entity that I do not think is threatening and impure. I may be in some emotional state with respect to this entity, but it is
The Definition of Horror / 29
not art-horror. Thus, the formal object or evaluative category of the emotion is part of the concept of the emotion. Though the relation of the evaluative category to the accompanying felt physical agitation is causal, the relation of the evaluative category to the emotion is constitutive and, therefore, noncontingent. It is in this sense that one might say that the emotion is individuated by its object, i.e., by its formal object. Art-horror is primarily identified in virtue of danger and impurity. The evaluative category selects or focuses upon particular objects. The emotion is directed toward such objects; art-horror is directed at particular objects like Dracula, the Wolfman, and Mr. Hyde. The root of the term “emotion,” as we noted above, comes from the Latin for moving out. Perhaps, we can read that playfully and suggest that an emotion is an inner moving (a physical agitation) directed outward (toward) a particular object under the prompting and guidance of an appropriate evaluative category. Much of the next chapter will be concerned with the ontological status of the particular objects of art-horror. However, by way of preview, some comment may be helpful now. The problem with discussing the particular object of the emotion of art-horror is that it is a fictive being. Consequently, we cannot construe “particular object” here to mean something like a material being with specifiable space-time co-ordinates. The Dracula who arthorrifies us doesn’t have specifiable space-time co-ordinates; he doesn’t exist. So what kind of particular object is he? Though this will be clarified and qualified in the next chapter, for the time being let us say that the particular object of art-horror—Dracula, if you will—is a thought. Saying that we are art-horrified by Dracula means that we are horrified by the thought of Dracula where the thought of such a possible being does not commit us to a belief in his existence. Here, the thought of Dracula, the particular object that art-horrifies me, is not the actual event of my thinking of Dracula but the content of the thought, viz., that Dracula, a threatening and impure being of such and such dimensions, might exist and do these terrible things. Dracula, the thought, is the concept of a certain possible being.30 Of course, I come to think about this concept because a given book, or film, or picture invites me to entertain the thought of Dracula, that is, to consider the concept of a certain possible being, viz., Dracula. From such representations of the concept of Dracula, we recognize Dracula to be a threatening and impure prospect, one which gives rise to the emotion of art-horror. In Descartes’s “Third Meditation,” he draws the distinction between what he calls objective reality and formal reality. The objective reality of a being is the idea of the thing sans a commitment to its existence. We can think of a unicorn without thinking that unicorns exist. That is, we can have the idea or concept of a unicorn—i.e., a horse with a narwhal horn—without thinking that that concept applies to anything. A being that has formal
30 / The Nature of Horror
reality exists; that is, its idea is instantiated by something that exists. In this mode of speech, Dracula might be said to have objective reality but not formal reality. Twisting Descartes’s vocabulary somewhat, we can say that the particular objects of art-horror, our Draculas, are objective realities (but not formal realities). The use of the notion of impurity in this theory has caused misgivings in two different directions. Commentators, hearing my lectures on this theory, have worried that it is too subjective (in the contemporary rather than the Cartesian sense above), on the one hand, and too vague on the other. In the remainder of this section, I will take up these objections. The charge of subjectivity involves the fear that the emphasis on disgust in the theory is really a matter of projection. It goes something like this: Carroll is a delicate sort of guy whose toilet training was probably traumatic. He hasn’t actually done any empirical research into the reception of works of horror by audiences. He doesn’t know that they find horrific monsters disgusting and impure. At best, he’s identified his own reaction by introspec- tion and projected it onto everyone else. However, the method that I have adopted to isolate the ingredients of arthorror is designed to blunt charges of projection. I am interested in the emotional response that horror is supposed to elicit. I have approached this issue by assuming that the audience’s responses to the monsters in works of horror are ideally intended to run parallel to and often to be cued by the emotional responses of the relevant fictional characters to monsters. This presupposition, in turn, enables us to look to works of horror themselves for evidence of the emotional response they want to engender. I have not depended on introspection in fastening on disgust and impurity as part of the emotion of art-horror. Rather, I found expressions and gestures of disgust as a regularly recurring feature of characters’s reactions in horror fictions. It is true that I have not done any audience research. Nevertheless, that does not entail that the theory has no empirical base. Rather, the empirical base is comprised of the many stories, dramas, films, etc., that I reviewed in order to track how fictional characters react to the monsters they encounter. I believe that my hypotheses about art-horror can be confirmed by, for example, turning to the descriptions of character reactions to the monsters in horror novels and checking them for the recurring reference to fear and disgust (or the strong implication of fear and disgust). Whether art-horror is supposed to involve impurity, then, can be corroborated by scanning works of horror in order to see whether or not disgust and suggestions of impurity are regularly recurring features. Moreover, there may be another way to bolster the claims of my theory. For the theory, as stated above and in terms of some of the structures to be discussed below, can be used to create horrific effects. That is, one can use this theory as a recipe for making horrific creatures. The theory, of course, is
The Definition of Horror / 31
not an algorithm that guarantees success by the blind application of rules. But it can be used to guide the construction of fictive beings of the sort that most of us would agree are horrific. The capacity of the theory to facilitate simulations of horror, then, may argue for the sufficiency of the theory. Again, the object of my study concerns the emotional response that works of art-horror are supposed to elicit. This is neither to claim that all works of horror succeed in this matter—Robot Monster, for example, borders on the ridiculous—nor that every audience member will report that they are horrified—one can imagine macho teenagers denying that monsters disgust them, claiming instead that they are amused. I am not preoccupied with the actual relations of works of art-horror to audiences, but with a normative relation, the response the audience is supposed to have to the work of arthorror. I believe that we are able to get at this by presuming that the work of art-horror has built into it, so to speak, a set of instructions about the appropriate way the audience is to respond to it. These instructions are manifested, by example, in the responses of the positive, human characters to the monsters in horror fiction. We learn what is to be art-horrified in large measure from the fiction itself; indeed, the very criteria for what it is to be art-horrified can be found in the fiction in the description or enactment of the human character’s responses. Works of horror, that is, teach us, in large measure, the appropriate way to respond to them.31 Unearthing those cues or instructions is an empirical matter, not an exercise in subjective projection. Even if I can avoid the charge of projection, it might still be argued that the notion of impurity employed in my definition of art-horror is too vague. If a work of horror does not explicitly attribute “impurity” to a monster, how can we be satisfied that the monster is regarded to be impure in the text? The concept of impurity is just too fuzzy to be of use. But perhaps I can relieve some of these anxieties concerning vagueness by saying something about the kinds of objects that standardly give rise to or cause reactions of impurity. This, moreover, will enable me to expand my theory of art-horror from the realm of definition to that of explanation, from an analysis of the application of the concept of art-horror to an analysis of its causation. In her classic study Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas correlates reactions of impurity with the transgression or violation of schemes of cultural categorization.32 In her interpretation of the abominations of Leviticus, for example, she hypothesizes that the reason crawling things from the sea, like lobsters, are regarded as impure is that crawling was a defining feature of earthbound creatures, not of creatures of the sea. A lobster, in other words, is a kind of category mistake and, hence, impure. Similarly, all winged insects with four legs are abominated because though four legs is a feature of land animals, these things fly, i.e., they inhabit the air. Things that are interstitial, that cross the boundaries of the deep categories of a culture’s conceptual
32 / The Nature of Horror
scheme, are impure, according to Douglas. Feces, insofar as they figure ambiguously in terms of categorical oppositions such as me/not me, inside/ outside, and living/dead, serve as ready candidates for abhorrence as impure, as do spittle, blood, tears, sweat, hair clippings, vomit, nail clippings, pieces of flesh, and so on. Douglas notes that among the people called the Lele, flying squirrels are avoided since they cannot be categorized unambiguously as either birds or animals. Also, objects can raise categorical misgivings by virtue of being incomplete representatives of their class, such as rotting and disintegrating things, as well as by virtue of being formless, for example, dirt. 33 Following Douglas, then, I initially speculate that an object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless.34 These features appear to form a suitable grouping as prominent ways in which categorizing can be problematized. This list may not be exhaustive, nor is it clear that its terms are mutually exclusive. But it is certainly useful for analyzing the monsters of the horror genre. For they are beings or creatures that specialize in formlessness, incompleteness, categorical interstitiality, and categorical contradictoriness. Let a brief inventory carry this point for the time being. Many monsters of the horror genre are interstitial and/or contradictory in terms of being both living and dead: ghosts, zombies, vampires, mummies, the Frankenstein monster, Melmoth the Wanderer, and so on. Near relatives to these are monstrous entities that conflate the animate and the inanimate: haunted houses, with malevolent wills of their own, robots, and the car in King’s Christine. Also many monsters confound different species: werewolves, humanoid insects, humanoid reptiles, and the inhabitants of Dr. Moreau’s island.35 Or, consider the conflation of species in these descriptions of the monster in Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”: “Bigger’n a barn…all made o’ squirmin ropes…hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step…nothin’ solid abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed clost together…great bulgin’ eyes all over it…ten or twenty maouths or trunks a- stickn’ aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an’a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’…all, with kinder blue or purple rings…an’ Gawd in Heaven—that haff face on top!….” And: “Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face—that haff face on top of it…that face with the red eyes an’ crinkly albino hair, an’ no chin, like the Whateleys…. It was a octopus, centipede, spider kindo’ thing, but they was a haff-shaped man’s face on top of it, an’ it looked like Wizard Whateley’s, only it was yards an’yards acrost….” The creature in Howard Hawks’s classic The Thing is an intelligent, twolegged, bloodsucking carrot. Now that’s interstitial. Indeed, the frequent resort to referring to monsters by means of pronouns like “It” and “Them”
The Definition of Horror / 33
suggests that these creatures are not classifiable according to our standing categories.36 Moreover, this interpretation is also supported by the frequency with which monsters in horror are said to be indescribable or inconceivable. Recall our previous examples from Stevenson and Lovecraft, or movie titles like The Creeping Unknown; while sometimes Frankenstein’s creation is referred to as the “monster with no name.” Again, the point would appear to be that these monsters fit neither the conceptual scheme of the characters nor, more importantly, that of the reader. Horrific monsters often involve the mixture of what is normally distinct. Demonically possessed characters typically involve the superimposition of two categorically distinct individuals, the possessee and the possessor, the latter usually a demon, who, in turn, is often a categorically transgressive figure (e.g., a goat-god). Stevenson’s most famous monster is two men, Jekyll and Hyde, where Hyde is described as having a simian aspect which makes him appear not quite human.37 Werewolves mix man and wolf, while shape changers of other sorts compound humans with other species. The monster in King’s It is a kind of categorically contradictory creature raised to a higher power. For It is a monster that can change into any other monster, those other monsters already being categorically transgressive. And, of course, some monsters, like the scorpion big enough to eat Mexico City, are magnifications of creatures and crawling things already ajudged impure and interstitial in the culture. Categorical incompleteness is also a standard feature of the monsters of horror; ghosts and zombies frequently come without eyes, arms, legs, or skin, or they are in some advanced state of disintegration. And, in a related vein, detached body parts are serviceable monsters, severed heads and especially hands, e.g., de Maupassant’s “The Hand” and “The Withered Hand,” Le Fanu’s “The Narrative of a Ghost of a Hand,” Golding’s “The Call of the Hand,” Conan Doyle’s “The Brown Hand,” Nerval’s “The Enchanted Hand,” Dreiser’s “The Hand,” William Harvey’s “The Beast With Five Fingers” and so on. A brain in a vat is the monster in the novel Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak, which has been adapted for the screen more than once, while in the film Fiend Without a Face the monsters are brains that use their spinal cords as tails. The rate of recurrence with which the biologies of monsters are vaporous or gelatinous attests to the applicability of the notion of formlessness to horrific impurity while the writing style of certain horror authors, such as Lovecraft, at times, and Straub, through their vague, suggestive, and often inchoate descriptions of the monsters, leaves an impression of formlessness. Indeed, many monsters are literally formless: the man-eating oil slick in King’s short story “The Raft,” the malevolent entity in James Herbert’s The Fog and The Dark, in Matthew Phipps Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, in Joseph Payne Brennan’s novella “Slime,” in Kate Wilhelm’s and Ted Thomas’s The
34 / The Nature of Horror
Clone, and the monsters in movies like The Blob (both versions) and The Stuff.38 Douglas’s observations, then, may help dispel some of the fuzziness of the impurity clause of my definition of art-horror. They can be used to supply paradigmatic examples for the application of the impurity clause as well as rough guiding principles for isolating impurity—such as that of categorical transgression. Furthermore, Douglas’s theory of impurity can be used by scholars of horror to identify some of the pertinent features of the monsters in the stories they study. That is, given a monster in a horror story, the scholar can ask in what ways it is categorically interstitial, contradictory (in Douglas’s sense), incomplete, and/or formless. These features, moreover, provide a crucial part of the causal structure of the reaction of impurity that operates in the raising of the emotion of art- horror. They are part of what triggers it. This is not to say that we realize that Dracula is, among other things, categorically interstitial and that we then react, accordingly, with art-horror. Rather that monster X is categorically interstitial causes a sense of impurity in us without our necessarily being aware of precisely what causes that sense.39 In addition, the emphasis Douglas places on categorical schemes in the analysis of impurity indicates a way for us to account for the recurrent description of our impure monsters as “un-natural.” They are un-natural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge.40 Undoubtedly, it is in virtue of this cognitive threat that not only are horrific monsters referred to as impossible, but also that they tend to render those who encounter them insane, mad, deranged, and so on.41 For such monsters are in a certain sense challenges to the foundations of a culture’s way of thinking. Douglas’s theory of impurity might also help us to answer a frequent puzzle about horror. It is a remarkable fact about the creatures of horror that very often they do not seem to be of sufficient strength to make a grown man cower. A tettering zombie or a severed hand would appear incapable of mustering enough force to overpower a co-ordinated six-year-old. Nevertheless, they are presented as unstoppable, and this seems psychologically acceptable to audiences. This might be explained by noting Douglas’s claim that culturally impure objects are generally taken to be invested with magical powers, and, as a result, are often employed in rituals. Monsters in works of horror, by extension, then, may be similarly imbued with awesome powers in virtue of their impurity. It is also the case that the geography of horror stories generally situates the origin of monsters in such places as lost continents and outer space. Or the creature comes from under the sea or under the earth. That is, monsters are
The Definition of Horror / 35
native to places outside of and/or unknown to the human world. Or, the creatures come from marginal, hidden, or abandoned sites: graveyards, abandoned towers and castles, sewers, or old houses—that is, they belong to environs outside of and unknown to ordinary social intercourse. Given the theory of horror expounded above, it is tempting to interpret the geography of horror as a figurative spatialization or literalization of the notion that what horrifies is that which lies outside cultural categories and is, perforce, unknown.42 The theory of art-horror that I am advancing has not been derived from a set of deeper principles. The way to confirm it is to take the definition of the nature of art-horror, and the partial typology of the structures that give rise to the sense of impurity along with the fission/fusion model to be developed below, and to see if they apply to the reactions we find to the monsters indigenous to works of horror. In my own research, though admittedly informal, these hypotheses, so far, have proved rewarding. Moreover, these hypotheses seem worthwhile candidates for more rigorous attempts at corroboration than I have the training to pursue; that is, perhaps the definition could be tested by social psychologists. Furthermore, the definition of horror, the discussion of impurity, and the fission/fusion model might be used by authors, filmmakers, and other artists to generate horrific images. The degree to which the theory provides a reliable guide to making or simulating monsters would be a further test of its mettle.
(counterexamples section, pp. 36-41, omitted)
..................................................
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery/42
The objects of art-horror are essentially threatening and impure. The creator of horror presents creatures that are salient in respect to these attributes. In this, certain recurring strategies for designing monsters appear with striking regularity across the arts and media. The purpose of this section is to take note of some of the most characteristic ways in which monsters are produced for the reading and viewing public. This section could be subtitled: “How to make a monster.” Horrific monsters are threatening. This aspect of the design of horrific monsters is, I think, incontestable. They must be dangerous. This can be satisfied simply by making the monster lethal. That it kills and maims is
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery / 43
enough. The monster may also be threatening psychologically, morally, or socially. It may destroy one’s identity (William Blatty’s The Exorcist or Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla”), seek to destroy the moral order (Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby et al.), or advance an alternative society (Richard Matheson’s I am Legend). Monsters may also trigger certain enduring infantile fears, such as those of being eaten or dismembered, or sexual fears, concerning rape and incest. However, in order to be threatening, it is sufficient that the monster be physically dangerous. If it produces further anxieties that is so much icing on the cake. So the creators of art-horror must be sure that the creatures in their fictions are threatening and this can be done by assuring that they are at least physically dangerous. Of course, if a monster is psychologically threatening but not physically threatening—i.e., if it’s after your mind, not your body—it will still count as a horrific creature if it inspires revulsion. Horrific creatures are also impure. Here, the means for presenting this aspect of horrific creatures are less obvious. So I will spend some time looking at the characteristic structures through which horrific impurity is portrayed. As discussed in an earlier section concerning the definition of horror, many cases of impurity are generated by what, adapting Mary Douglas, I called interstitiality and categorical contradictoriness. Impurity involves a conflict between two or more standing cultural categories. Thus, it should come as no surprise that many of the most basic structures for representing horrific creatures are combinatory in nature. One structure for the composition of horrific beings is fusion. On the simplest physical level, this often entails the construction of creatures that transgress categorical distinctions such as inside/outside, living/dead, insect/ human, flesh/machine, and so on. Mummies, vampires, ghosts, zombies, and Freddie, Elm Street’s premier nightmare, are fusion figures in this respect. Each, in different ways, blur the distinction between living and dead. Each, in some sense, is both living and dead. A fusion figure is a composite that unites attributes held to be categorically distinct and/or at odds in the cultural scheme of things in unambiguously one, spatio-temporally discrete entity. The caterpillars in E.F.Benson’s story of the same name are fusion figures insofar as they defy biology not only due to their extraordinary length but also because their legs are outfitted with crab pincers. Similarly, the blighted victim in John Metcalfe’s “Mr. Meldrum’s Mania” falls into this category since he is a combination of a man with the Egyptian god Thoth, already a fusion creature compounding an ibis head with a human body, not to mention his moon-disk and crescent accoutrements. Lovecraft’s amalgams of octopi and crustaceans with humanoid forms are paradigmatic fusion figures, as are the pig-men in William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. Fusion examples from film would include figures such as the
44 / The Nature of Horror
babies in the It’s Alive series and the grotesqueries in Alligator People and The Reptile. The central mark of a fusion figure is the compounding of ordinarily disjoint or conflicting categories in an integral, spatio-temporally unified individual. On this view, many of the characters in possession stories are fusion figures. They may be inhabited by many demons—“I am legion”—or one. But as long as they are composite beings, locatable in an unbroken spatio-temporal continuum with a single identity, we shall count them as fusion figures. Also, I tend to see the Frankenstein monster, especially as he is represented in the Universal Pictures’ movie cycle, as a fusion figure. For not only is it emphasized that he is made from distinct bodies, along with electrical attachments, but the series presents him as if he had different brains imposed upon him—first a criminal’s and later Igor’s. In this, the films appear to uphold the unlikely hypothesis that somehow the monster has a kind of continuing identity—one that is perhaps innocent and benign—in spite of the brain it has. Obviously, this is, to say the least, paradoxical, but if we allow the fiction of brain transplants, why quibble about whether the monster is in some sense the still the same monster it would have been had it not had a criminal’s or Igor’s.brain foisted upon it? The fusion aspect of the Frankenstein monster becomes quite hysterical in Hammer Films’ And Frankenstein Created Woman. Dr. Frankenstein transfers the soul of his dead assistant Hans into the body of Hans’s dead, beloved Christina, and Hans, in Christina’s body, seduces and dispatches the hooligans who had driven Christina (i.e., Christina unified in mind and body) to her death. The fusion figure may find its prototype in the sort of symbolic structure that Freud called the collective figure or condensation with respect to dreams. Freud writes that one way
…in which a ‘collective figure’ can be produced for the purposes of dreamcondensation [is] by uniting the actual features of two or more people into a single dream-image. It was in this way that Dr. M. of my dream was constructed. He bore the name of Dr. M., he spoke and acted like him; but his physical characteristics and his malady belonged to someone else, namely to my eldest brother. One single feature, his pale appearance, was doubly determined, since it was common to both of them in real life. Dr. R. in my dream about my uncle with the yellow beard was a similar composite figure. But in his case the dream-image was constructued in yet another way. I did not combine the features of one person with those of another and in the process omit from the memory-picture certain features of each of them. What I did was to adopt the procedure by means of which Galton produced family portraits: namely by projecting two images onto a single plate, so that certain features common to both are
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery / 45
emphasized, while those which fail to fit in with one another cancel one another out and are indistinct in the picture. In my dream about my uncle the fair beard emerged prominently from a face which belonged to two people and which was consequently blurred….”50
For Freud, the condensatory or collective figure superimposes, in the manner of a photograph, two or more entities in one individual. Similarly, the fusion figure of art-horror is a composite figure, conflating distinct types of beings. In his discussion of condensation, Freud stresses that the fused elements have something in common. However, in art- horror what the combined elements have in common need not be salient—in T.E.D.Klein’s “Nadelman’s God,” the horrific entity has literally been constructed from a hodgepodge of garbage. As in the associationist writings of the British Empiricists, the fantastic fusion beings of horror are colligations of ontologically or biologically separate orders.51 They are single figures in whom distinct and often clashing types of elements are superimposed or condensed, resulting in entities that are impure and repulsive. Freud notes that the collective structures we find in the dream-work are not unlike “…the composite animals invented by the folk imagination of the Orient.”52 Presumably, Freud has in mind here figures like the winged lions of ancient Assyria. Other examples of this type of condensation-figure would include the gargoyles on medieval cathedrals, the demon-priest (part rodent, part man) in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony triptych, the chickens with the heads of human babies in Goya’s “Ya van desplumadoes” in Los Caprichos, and characters like The Thing (a.k.a. Ben Grimm)—literally a man of stone—in the Marvel comic book series The Fantastic Four. Of course, in these examples, the elements that go into the condensation or fusion are visually perceptible. However, this is not necessary. One might condense different ontological orders such as the animate and inanimate— e.g., a haunted house—and here nothing that meets the naked eye signals the fusion. And, furthermore, whether any of the preceding examples shall count as horrific fusion depends upon whether or not, in the representational context in which they appear, the beings so concocted match the criteria of art-horror. As a means of composing horrific beings, fusion hinges upon conflating, combining, or condensing distinct and/or opposed categorical elements in a spatio-temporally continuous monster. In contrast, another popular means for creating interstitial beings is fission. In fusion, categorically contradictory elements are fused or condensed or superimposed in one unified spatiotemporal being whose identity is homogeneous. But with fission, the contradictory elements are, so to speak, distributed over different, though
46 / The Nature of Horror
metaphysically related, identities. The type of creatures that I have in mind here include doppelgangers, alter-egos, and werewolves. Werewolves, for example, violate the categorical distinction between humans and wolves. In this case, the animal and the human inhabit the same body (understood as spatially locatable protoplasm); however, they do so at different times. The animal and the wolf identities are not temporally continuous, though presumably their protoplasm is numerically the same; at a given point in time (the rise of the full moon), the body, inhabited by the human, is turned over to the wolf. The human identity and the wolf identity are not fused, but, so to speak, they are sequenced. The human and the wolf are spatially continuous, occupying the same body, but the identity changes or alternates over time; the two identities—and the opposed categories they represent—do not overlap temporally in the same body. That protoplasm is heterogeneous in terms of accommodating different, mutually exclusive identities at different times. The werewolf figure embodies a categorical contradiction between man and animal which it distributes over time. Of course, what is being said of werewolves here applies to shape changers of every variety. In Kipling’s “Mark of the Beast,” the victim is on his way to becoming a leopard, while in Machen’s “The Novel of the Black Seal,” the boy-idiot seems to be transmutating into a sea lion. One form of fission, then, divides the fantastic being into two or more (categorically distinct) identities that alternatively possess the body in question. Call this temporal fission.53 Temporal fission can be distinguished from fusion in that the categories combined in the figure of the fantastic being are not temporally simultaneous; rather, they are split or broken or distributed over time. A second mode of fission distributes the categorical conflict over space through the creation of doubles. Examples here include the portrait in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, the dwarf in the cavalier’s body in Mary Shelley’s “Transformation,” and the doppelgangers in movies like The Student of Prague and Warning Shadows. Structurally, what is involved in spatial fission is a process of multiplication, i.e., a character or set of characters is multiplied into one or more new facets, each standing for another aspect of the self, generally one that is either hidden, ignored, repressed, or denied by the character who has been cloned. These new facets generally contradict cultural ideals (usually morally charged ones) of normality. The alter-ego represents a normatively alien aspect of the self. Most of my examples so far employ some mechanism of reflection—a portrait, a mirror, shadows—as the pretext for doubling. But this sort of fission figure can appear without such devices. In the movie I Married A Monster From Outer Space, a young bride begins to suspect that her new husband is not quite himself. Somehow he’s different from the man she used to date. And, she’s quite right. Her boyfriend
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery / 47
was kidnapped by invaders from another planet on his way back from a bachelor party and he was replaced by an alien. This double,54 however, initially lacks feelings—the essential characteristic of being human in fifties sci- fi films of this sort—and his bride intuits this. Thus, the categorical distinction between humanity and inhumanity—marked in terms of the possession versus the lack of feelings—is projected symbolically by splitting the boyfriend in two, with each corresponding entity standing for a categorically distinct order of being. The basic story of I Married A Monster From Outer Space—its sci-fi elements aside—resembles a very specific paranoid delusion called the Capgras syndrome. The delusion involves the patient’s belief that his or her parents, lovers, etc. have become minatory doppelgangers. This enables the patient to deny his fear or hatred of a loved one by splitting the loved one in half, creating a bad version (the invader) and a good one (the victim). The new relation of marriage in I Married A Monster From Outer Space appears to engender a conflict, perhaps over sexuality, in the wife that is expressed through the fission figure.55 Just as condensation suggests a model for fusion figuration, splitting as a psychic trope of denial may be the root prototype for spatial fission in art-horror, organzing conflicts, categorical and thematic, through the multiplication of characters. Fission, then, in horror occurs in two major forms—spatial fission and temporal fission. Temporal fission—which the split between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde exemplifies—divides characters in time—while spatial fission—for instance, the case of doppelgangers—multiplies characters in space. Here characters become symbols for categorically distinct or opposed elements. In the case of fusion, on the other hand, categorically distinct or opposed elements are conflated or colligated or condensed into a single, spatio- temporally continuous entity whose identity is stable. Both fission and fusion are symbolic structures that facilitate—in different ways—the linkage of distinct and/or opposed categories, thereby providing vehicles for projecting the themes of interstitiality, categorical contradictoriness, and impurity. The fantastic biologies of horrific monsters are, to a surprising extent, reducible to the symbolic structures of fusion and fission. In order to make a horrific monster—in terms of the impurity requirement—it is enough to link distinct and/or opposed categories by fission or fusion. In terms of fusion, one can put claws on Rosemary’s baby, the devil in Regan, or a fly’s head on Vincent Price’s body. By fission, discrete and/or contradictory categories can be connected by having different biological or ontological orders take turns inhabiting one body, or by populating the fiction with numerically different but otherwise identical bodies, each representing one of the opposed categories. In the most fundamental sense of fusion and fission, these structures are meant to apply to the organization of opposed cultural categories, generally of a deep
48 / The Nature of Horror
biological or ontological sort: human/reptile, living/dead, etc. But it is also true that in much horror, especially that which is considered to be classic, the opposition of such cultural categories in the biology of the horrific creatures portend further oppositions, oppositions that might be thought of in terms of thematic conflicts or antinomies which, in turn, are generally deep-seated in the culture in which the fiction has been produced. For example, the horrific creatures in Blackwood’s celebrated “Ancient Sorceries” are were-cats. An entire French town goes feline, at night indulging all manner of unmentionable (and unmentioned) debaucheries in the presence of Satan. In terms of my model, these creatures are the product of temporal fission. But this division—between cat and human—heralds other oppositions in the context of the story. An Englishman (perhaps the reincarnation of a cat man from bygone days) visits the town and is gradually tempted to join the coven. The opposition of cat versus human plays into further oppositions—sensual versus staid, nondirective activity versus conscientious, female versus male, and maybe even French versus British. That is, the salient opposition of different elements at the categorical level of biology might be thought of as prefiguring a series of further thematic oppositions. Another example along the same lines would be Val Lewton’s film Cat People. Irena is a shape-changer whose divided self is not only categorically fissured but also represents the opposition of chaste love versus violent sexuality. In terms of fusion, the vampire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla may be a case in point; for the opposition between living and dead in the monster’s make-up portends a further thematic conflict concerning lesbianism.56 The notions of fission and fusion are meant to apply strictly to the biological and ontological categorical ingredients that go into making monsters. So it is sufficient for a being to be part man and part snake for it to qualify as a horrific fusion figure, or for a woman to be a lady by day and a troll or gorgon by night in order for her to qualify as a horrific fission figure. However, it is frequently the case that the oppositional biologies of fantastic beings correlate to an oppositional thematics. This is generally the case with what are thought to be the better specimens of horror. As a result, much of the work of the critic of horror, as opposed to the theoretician of horror, will be to trace the thematic conflicts that appear in her objects of study. That the creatures are fission or fusion figures may be less interesting than what this dimension of categorical interstitiality prefigures at the thematic level.57 However, for purposes of theoretically identifying the symbolic structures through which myriad monsters are made, the notions of fission and fusion are crucial. Along with fission and fusion, another recurring symbolic structure for generating horrific monsters is the magnification of entities or beings already
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery / 49
typically adjudged impure or disgusting within the culture. In the concluding paragraphs of M.R. James’s “The Ash-Tree,” the gardener looks into the hollow of a tree trunk, his face contorts “with an incredulous terror and loathing,” and he cries out with a “dreadful voice” before fainting. What he has seen is a poisonous spider—spawned from a witch’s body for the purposes of revenge—that is as big as a man’s head.58 The spider, already a phobic object in our culture, exceeds in horribleness not only because of its supernatural provenance and unearthly abilities but especially because of its increase in size beyond the normal. Things that creep and crawl—and that tend to make our flesh creep and crawl—are prime candidates for the objects of art-horror; such creatures already disgust, and augmenting their scale increases their physical dangerousness. In Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot,” a hellish creature is summoned by means of an unholy book.
Calvin pushed me and I tottered, the church whirling before me, and fell to the floor. My head crashed against the edge of an upturned pew, and red fire filled my head—yet seemed to clear it. I groped for the sulphur matches I had brought. Subterranean thunder filled the place. Plaster fell. The rusted bell in the steeple pealed a choked devil’s clarion in sympathetic vibration. My match flared. I touched it to the book just as the pulpit exploded upward in a rending explosion of wood. A huge black maw was discovered beneath; Cal tottered on the edge, his hands held out, his face distended in a wordless scream that I shall hear forever. And then there was a huge surge of gray, vibrating flesh. The smell became a nightmare tide. It was a huge outpouring of a viscid, pustulant jelly, a huge and awful form that seemed to skyrocket from the very bowels of the ground. And yet, with a sudden horrible comprehension which no man can have known, I perceived that it was but one ring, one segment, of a monster worm that had existed eyeless for years in the chambered darkness beneath that abominated church! The book flared alight in my hands, and the Thing seemed to scream soundlessly above me. Calvin was struck glancingly and flung the length of the church like a doll with a broken neck.
Monsters of the magnified phobia variety were quite popular in fifties’s movies (undoubtedly, they were suggested by the first radiation experiments on seeds). Some examples include: Them!, Tarantula, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Deadly Mantis, Giant Gila Monster, Monster From Green Hell, Attack of the Giant Leeches, The Spider, Black Scorpion, The Fly, The Monster That Challenged The World, The Giant Spider Invasion, Mothra, The Return of the Fly, the humungus octopus in It Came From Beneath The Sea, the big crawlers in Rodan, the giant grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End, and the proportionately towering black widow in The Incredible Shrinking Man, among others.
50 / The Nature of Horror
Insofar as detached body parts can elicit revulsion, we encounter the Crawling Eye attempting to conquer the world. More recently, giant ants have eaten Joan Collins in Empire of the Ants and outsized rats have surrounded Marjoe Gortner in Food of the Gods. Of course, one cannot magnify just anything and hope for a horrific creature; few seem to have been convinced by the monster rabbits in Night of the Lepus. What needs to be magnified are things that are already potentially disturbing and disgusting.59 For the purposes of art-horror, one may exploit the repelling aspect of existing creatures not only by magnifying them, but also by massing them. In Richard Lewis’s novel Devil’s Coach Horse armies of bloodthirsty beetles are on the rampage, while the identity of the monstrous masses in Guy Smith’s Killer Crabs and Peter Tremayne’s Ants requires no further comment. These swarms of crawling things, grouped for an ultimate showdown with humanity, are, of course, really fantastical beings, invested with strategic abilities, virtual invulnerability, a hankering for human flesh, and often mutated powers unknown to present-day biological science. Carl Stephenson’s “Leiningen versus the Ants”—surely the Moby Dick of the insect genre—is based on the scientifically correct observation that certain types of ants forage in large co-ordinated collectives, but he imbues these ants with qualities and powers that experts of the day would have found unprecedented.60 They are hunting people and horses—rather than other insects like spiders, cockroaches, and grasshoppers—and the story strongly suggests that they knock out Leiningen’s weir in order to cross the channel. Saul Bass’s movie Phase IV presents the army of ants as a superior intelligence while in Kingdom of the Spiders the invading tarantulas enwrap an entire town in their web for purposes of food storage; in Kiss of the Tarantulas, the spiders become hit-men. As with the case of magnification, with massification it is not the case that any kind of entity can be grouped into horrific hordes. It must be the sort of thing we are already prone to find repellent—a point made comically by The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (and its sequel, The Return of….). Massing mountains of already disgusting creatures, unified and guided by unfriendly purposes, generates art-horror by augmenting the threat posed by these antecedently phobic objects. Fantastic biologies, linking different and opposed cultural categories, can be constructed by means of fission and fusion, while the horrific potential of already disgusting and phobic entities can be accentuated by means of magnification and massification. These are primary structures for the construction of horrific creatures. These structures pertain primarily to what might be thought of as the biologies of horrific monsters. However, another structure, not essentially connected to the biology of these creatures, warrants discussion in a review of the presentation of horrific beings, for
Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery / 51
though not a matter of biology, it is an important recurring strategy in the staging of monsters. This strategy might be called horrific metonymy. Often the horror of horrific creatures is not something that can be perceived by the naked eye or that comes through a description of the look of the monster. Frequently, in such cases, the horrific being is surrounded by objects that we antecedently take to be objects of disgust and/or phobia. In “The Spectre Bride,” The Wandering Jew, a fusion figure, does not initially appear disgusting; however, the wedding is associated by contiguity with disgust:
[The Wandering Jew] “Poor girl, I am leading thee indeed to our nuptials; but the priest will be death, thy parents the mouldering skeletons that rot in heaps around; and the witnesses [of] our union, the lazy worms that revel on the carious bones of the dead. Come, my young bride, the priest is impatient for his victim.” As they proceeded, a dim blue light moved swiftly before them, and displayed at the extremity of the churchyard the portals of a vault. It was open, and they entered it in silence. The hollow wind came rushing through the gloomy abode of the dead; and on every side were the mouldering remnants of coffins, which dropped piece by piece upon the damp earth. Every step they took was on a dead body; and the bleached bones rattled horribly beneath their feet. In the centre of the vault rose a heap of unburied skeletons, whereon was seated a figure too awful even for the darkest imagination to conceive. As they approached it, the hollow vault rung with a hellish peal of laughter; and every mouldering corpse seemed endued with unearthly life.
Here, though the horrific bridegroom himself doesn’t elicit disgust perceptually, everything that surrounds him and his hellish ministrations is impure by the lights of the culture. In a similar vein, Dracula, both in literature and on stage and screen, is associated with vermin; in the novel, he commands armies of rats. And undoubtedly, the association of horrific beings with disease and contamination is related to the tendency to surround horrific beings with further impurities. In Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game—a sort of update of Melmoth the Wanderer—the Mephistophelian character Mamoulian is ostensibly normallooking but his associated minion, the Razor-Eater is a hulking zombie undergoing graphically described putrefaction throughout the novel, a feature made more unsettling by his always messy indulging of his sweet tooth. Likewise, the child possessed by the spirit of Beth in John Saul’s Suffer the Children, though not outwardly disgusting herself, is surrounded by stomach-turning ceremonies such as a make-believe tea party attended by blood-splattered children, the skeleton of Beth, and a decapitated cat in a doll’s outfit whose head keeps rolling off its shoulders. With Mamoulian and Beth the fantastic being is not perceptually repulsive but is linked by metonymy to perceptually disgusting things. Of course, even those creatures like Dracula though they may not, in the main, be portrayed as perceptually
52 / The Nature of Horror
loathsome, are nevertheless still disgusting and impure; one doesn’t require perceptually detectable grotesquerie in order to be reviling. Dracula strikes Harker as sickening though his appearance is not literally monstrous. In such cases, the association of such impure creatures with perceptually pronounced gore or other disgusting trappings is a means of underscoring the repulsive nature of the being. In James Herbert’s novel The Magic Cottage, the villainous magus Mycroft is a stately, altogether human figure who has at his disposal agencies marked by incredible noxiousness. In the final confrontation with the narrator, he summons them: the “carpet was ripping explosively all around me, and sluglike monsters oozed over the edges in shiny slimes. Hands that were scabbed and dripping pus clawed at the frayed carpet in an effort to drag the rest of their life forms out into the open. Those membranes, full of wriggling life, quivered their snouts in the air before curling over the edge. Wispy black smoke tendrils drifted up in lazy spirals, and these were full of diseased microorganisms, the corrupting evil that roamed the depths, subversives that searched for ways to surface, intent on finding exposure, definition—actuality. These were the infiltrating substances of evil.” Horrific metonymy need not be restricted to cases where the monsters do not look gruesome; an already misshapen creature can be associated with entities already antecedently thought of in terms of impurity and filth. Think of Murnau’s Nosferatu and the remake by Werner Herzog, where the vampire is linked to unclean, crawling things. Similarly, zombies with great gobs of phlegm dangling from their lips exemplify horrific metonymy. Fusion, fission, magnification, massification and horrific metonymy are the major tropes for presenting the monsters of art-horror.61 Fusion and fission are means for constructing horrific biologies; magnification and massification are means for augmenting the powers of already disgusting and phobic creatures. Horrific metonymy is a means of emphasizing the impure and disgusting nature of the creature—from the outside, so to speak—by associating said being with objects and entities that are already reviled: body parts, vermin, skeletons, and all manner of filth. The horrific creature is essentially a compound of danger and disgust and each of these structures provides a means of developing these attributes in tandem.
No comments:
Post a Comment