In the previous section I discuss Kristeva theories regarding the possible origins of the abject, or that which causes us to experience horror. She describes feelings of horror emanating from disgust and revulsion at that which defies expectation and explanation, but also that which defies the boundaries of the human body. The Latin root of the word “horror”, horrēre, means “bristling” (Santilli, 2007:181). This seems apt, since “bristling” is what a character feels against their leg when the monster toys with him or her in the dark. Leaves bristle in the cold dank air of Slaughter Swamp under the bat-ridden sky. The rushes below the open window rustle while teenage Tammy and Jim are making out on the couch while watching I Was a Teenage Werewolf Part 3. A reader also bristles in fear while devouring the latest Stephen King or Dean R. Koontz novel.
The horror genre ostensibly has its origins in mythology, folklore, and religion (Corstorphine, 2018:1). In mythology we find that Medusa’s head full of snakes can turn any man who looks upon her into stone. A horrifying prospect and spectacle. All over the world we find folktales of a young woman who hitchhikes and promptly vanishes, or turns into a frightening spectre, or kills the driver if he is male. In the Book of Revelations we find descriptions of devils, demons, and strange beings who will inevitably lay waste to the world. Mythology, folklore, and religion are all part and parcel of society and they inform our cultural ideals and motivations (Belsky, 2007:226-227; Croft, 2006:1071- 1072; Lynch, 2001:1174). These stories and the monstrous beings contained within them, though influential and a mirror of societal values and fears, are not constant and their meaning changes and flares up over time. There is however a relative constant, namely power structures, and these power structures influence and are influenced by sociocultural norms. When we look at the past and the power structures that reigned throughout history we find that cultures succeed and attain longevity through control and scientific achievement. Control only occurs when many individuals conform to the same norms and ideals. Historically control was and still is enabled through the combined efforts of many individuals to control or overcome nature. To control nature, scientific progress is required.
In many instances western cultures have always aligned this control and scientific achievement with the male gender, but also with their gods and heroes. For instance, the Abrahamic religions
historically attempted to control women’s bodies and female agency. Medusa (woman and nature) was defeated by Perseus when he surprised her with her reflection in a mirrored shield (a man with a weapon based on science). Red Riding Hood trespasses in the forest to visit her grandmother and is saved from a wolf by an axe-wielding lumberjack. Hansel and Gretel, the product of a nuclear family (progress), kill a witch who lives in the forest (nature) by shoving her into an oven, a manmade device. Western stories are filled with similar scenarios of man versus woman, order versus chaos,
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and nature versus progress. Early examples of these conflicts are mirrored in the children of Zeus, Apollo and Dionysus.
In her aforementioned influential work Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (2001) Camille Paglia discusses works of art and Western culture through Apollonian and Dionysian perspectives. Apollo was, after Zeus, the most revered god of the Greek pantheon (Taft, 2014:30). He was the god of religious law who purified men, and with the exception of Leto and Zeus (his parents) none of the other gods could endure his presence (Taft, 2014:30). To this day he is associated with the sun and with brightness and purity (Taft, 2014:30). He, like Christ, is the son of a god of the highest order who helps mankind by negotiating their sins through divine law.
Dionysus was also a son of Zeus, but his mother was Semele, a mortal woman and the daughter of the king of the Thebes, Cadmus (Taft, 2014:57). Zeus accidently killed the pregnant Semele when he appeared to her. He was able to save Dionysus though by slicing open his own thigh and carrying Dionysus to full term (Taft, 2014:57). Dionysus was the god of nature, ecstasy, and wine – he
represented the sap and blood of nature (Taft, 2014:57). The Dionysus cult was popular among Greek and Roman women, but he never gained the same notoriety among men (Taft, 2014:57). Dionysus is also able to turn men mad, blind, and impotent (Taft, 2014:57).
Paglia links the Dionysian with the chthonian. The chthonian, which means “of the earth”, existed and ruled as unnamed and pagan belief system before the Olympian Greek religion gained a foothold in ancient Greece (Paglia, 2001:5). Paglia (2001:5-12, 18) associates man, order, the sky, science, logic, and western civilisation with Apollo, while connecting rot, fear, woman, chaos, nature, pregnancy, the unknown, menstruation, putrid swamps, and the underworld with Dionysus – in other words, things usually linked to the horrific in horror films. Paglia (2001:5) says that the Apollonian is western society’s hope “that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated”. In other words, science is humanity’s struggle and attempt to understand nature. By understanding nature, humanity can control nature. Since Dionysus is the god of nature, fertility, and wine, it makes sense that Apollo represents notions that seek to control that which Dionysus stands for. The sciences like biology and geology contain the liquid shapelessness of nature by establishing boundaries in which nature exists (Paglia, 2001:6, 30). Comparably, the Christian church is Apollonian as it attempts to control women and nature (Paglia, 2001:18-19).
Paglia (2001:57) argues that man fears nature because it is primal, rugged, and turbulent. The concept of beauty is used by man against nature as weapon – boundaries, proportion, and symmetry are all used to objectify and constrain nature within a set of boundaries (Paglia, 2001:57). Beauty is used to
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freeze nature in place, rendering her harmless (Paglia, 2001:57). Dionysus is an extension of the chthonian as he is associated with the shapeless sap, blood, and liquids of nature – that which the Apollonian seeks to control through naming and classification. The female body’s curves and shapes, namely the hips, breasts, and buttocks are fluid-like, which is why man is obsessed with the female body (Paglia, 2001:30). Just as man objectifies nature in order to control it, so does he objectify the female body in the hope of containing its fluid curves (Paglia, 2001:30). Paglia (2001:29-30) makes a similar case for art and says that the creation of artefacts is intertwined with man’s objectification and conceptualization of nature and woman.
Man seeks to control woman because their fluidity reminds them of the unclean and primal swamp that she embodies – the miasma that all life crawled from, or as she describes it: “menstrual albumen, lukewarm matrix of nature, algae, bacteria … uterine jellies … blood” (Paglia, 2001:92). This shapeless mass is psychologically and aesthetically disturbing to man (Paglia, 2001:92). Apollo’s torch is extinguished by Dionysus’s “fleshy muck of generative matrix” (Paglia, 2001:93). Nothing disgusts Dionysus, because he embodies everything that man has labelled as disgusting or putrid (Paglia, 2001:93). Disgust is an Apollonian concept, an aesthetic judgement which originates from man’s fear of losing control of nature and women (Paglia, 2001:93).
Purity and the virginal are all concepts created by man to control a woman (Paglia, 2001:94). The chaste woman is rendered holy by men, because she embodies a sexually non-threatening woman who cannot lead a man astray (Paglia, 2001:94). The virgin woman is the Apollonian ideal created by man for a woman and which sets her aside from nature’s raw and unbridled sex. The virgin is pure pleasure for a man as the unsullied woman cannot compare him to other men or sexual experiences she has had in the past.
Dionysus in comparison is wanton, promiscuous, and destructive (Paglia, 2001:96). Dionysus is also the god of free love and rape (Paglia, 2001:98). Women being aligned with Dionysus are thus threatening to the hierarchy of the family and western society. She will devour a man sexually and discard him when done. She will repeat this exercise over and over again, as Dionysus is cyclical, a being who destroys just to rebuild (Paglia, 2001:94-96). Where Christians eat the body of Christ for the sake of sacramental ritual, the Dionysian cult members saw babies, people, and animals as representations of gods which they then viscously dismembered and ate in an effort to become gods themselves (Paglia, 2001:95).
From the above it becomes clear that Dionysus is linked to horror, disgust, and the abject. These feelings and experiences are not new and have been part of society long before the horror genres in
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film and fiction existed. What we find horrifying has changed over the centuries to fit the current zeitgeist. The horror story evolved and changed over the decades, leading up to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is regarded as the first gothic novel, which in turn paved the way for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Edgar Allan Poe’s short novellas (first half of the nineteenth century), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891), and finally Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897 (Hutchings, 2008:xi).
When it comes to the study of horror literature, Gothic studies seems to dominate over all other studies of the genre (with the exception of gender and psychoanalytic studies). Some attribute this domination of the genre in academic discourse to the popularity of the late eighteenth century Gothic novel (Corstorphine, 2018:2). Interestingly, Gothic novels were especially popular amongst young women during the late eighteenth century (Corstorphine, 2018:3; Kilgour, 1997:6). The idea of young women reading lurid tales of death and murder was controversial at the time and deemed
inappropriate by many (Corstorphine, 2018:3; Kilgour, 1997:6). There were complaints that the novels were not preparing young women for their future domestic lives and that these types of stories were causing harm to their “fragile” feminine minds (Corstorphine, 2018:3; Kilgour, 1997:6-7). This type of reasoning is still prevalent today and many question and harshly judge those men and women who enjoy horror novels and films (Martin, 2019).
Most of these literary analyses concerning Gothic literature hinge on the inescapability of the past and how it forces itself into the present, bringing destruction and chaos to all those it touches
(Corstorphine, 2018:2; Kilgour, 1997:6; Morgan, 2002:54). It is therefore not just about fear, but how we perceive the world and the internal systems and mechanisms we create in it (Corstorphine, 2018:2;
Morgan, 2002:61). In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), for instance, Count Dracula is from Eastern Europe’s violent past and he goes to a then present England to murder and seduce. The monster in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is abandoned by his creator and then exacts his revenge on him in the present. Both novels have also been shown to play with sociocultural issues of the time.
Dracula can easily be interpreted as an enemy of repressed Victorian era sexuality while
Frankenstein’s monster can be seen in terms of scientific advancement going awry when it attempts to appropriate the power of God. Again we find these monsters aligned with Dionysus.
In a similar vein, H.P. Lovecraft’s novellas were more concerned with the anxiety brought on by scientific discovery and the realisation that for all of mankind’s efforts on Earth, the universe is indifferent to our actions. Even more so implicit in Lovecraft’s work we find the fear of the unknown which is compounded by scientific discovery where the more we discover about the universe the more
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we realize how insignificant we are (Corstorphine, 2018:5; Morgan, 2002:100). Lovecraft’s monsters are also frequently formless and shapeless creatures that defy explanation, much like Dionysus.
From the wealthy trappings associated with the characters in the Stoker’s Dracula to the rural farm house in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), we find a strong socio-political undercurrent that asks questions about social class, race, and society as a whole. These are often discussed in academic discourse with some notable works by Wendy Fall, Dara Downey, and Anya Heise-von der Lippe. Dracula, a wealthy nobleman, feeds on the poor, and justice only prevails when he starts feeding on the wealthy Lucy Westenra and her compatriots. Night of the Living Dead is an exaggerated spectacle of the trappings of modern society. This becomes even more apparent in the sequel when the protagonists are trapped in a mall with shambling zombies all converging on the shopping centre due to old habits of commercialism.
It is thus safe to assume that gender, culture, society, and scientific advancement all seem to intersect upon and influence the horror genre. Feminist discourse and psychoanalytic theory form but a very small part of cultural and societal schemas, yet they seem to be the focus when it comes to horror.
While many academic discourses appear to be preoccupied with the Gothic novel or psychodynamic approaches, others focus on why individuals enjoy horror. According to Carol Clover (2015:167) horror cinema is about eyes, especially the eyes of the audience.
Judith Mayne (2002:4) regards spectatorship as the most important area in the field of film studies and the most misunderstood. She finds issue especially with the preoccupation some academics have with critical versus complacent spectatorship and argues that there is an on-going relationship between the viewer and film after they have left the theatre (Mayne, 2002:2-4). According to Mayne (2002:5), the idea of complacent spectatorship leading to a society of complicit individuals, as touted by some academics, is flawed (Mayne, 2002:5). Film viewers do not consume films or any other imagery without some contemplation taking place afterwards, in fact, the consumption and resulting contemplation on visual media has replaced many forms of human communication as we see, for instance, with the use of memes, animated gifs, and emoji’s on social media (Mayne, 2002:5). This could mean that the viewer’s enjoyment of a film reflects much more about society than just mindless viewing to fill a void of boredom in modern society. It would also mean that popular films that are often disregarded by academics and critics as low art, like the horror genre, may say more about society than critically acclaimed films that were only viewed by a small audience. It has to be noted however that an art film can and often do explore the same topic as a popular film, but it is presented in a much more challenging way and therefore sometimes inaccessible to the layman, as will be explored in the upcoming section on Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009).
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Horror films seem to fall in an in-between of popular ‘trash’ and film, attracting a small viewership with even the most popular horror movies not being as financially profitable as other genres.
According to The Numbers (2021a), an online resource that records financial data of films, the three highest grossing horror films of all time are IT (2017) with $701.01 million, IT: Chapter 2 (2019) with $469.57 and The Exorcist9 (1973) at $428.21 million. There is a 46 year period between them where only 29 other films broke the $200 million barrier (The Numbers, 2021). The same website reveals that IT (2017) does not even rank among the 120 highest grossing films of all time and is placed 126th on the list of highest grossing films of all time (The Numbers, 2021b). There is also not a single horror movie on Rottentomatoes.com’s list of the 50 highest grossing films of all time
(Childress, 2019). This could also indicate why the horror film genre is not a popular subject amongst film scholars as the viewership might seem inconsequential.
Those who do study horror film viewership tend to focus on the viewer’s experience. Judith Mayne (2001:1), and many other theorists as noted in Martin (2019), suggests that viewing a film relates to the pleasure or the disgust derived from viewing, while others experience pleasure from experiencing fear (Lynch & Martins, 2015:313). Fear has also been shown to contribute to identity formation and life experiences (Alexander, 2008:176-178) and can be pleasurable within the right context (Hanich, 2010:4). As the individual’s identity is formed and changed by these experiences, they often spill over into peer groups, thus creating a ripple effect that changes those around us (this is discussed in much more detail in the Sociocultural and New Historical Perspectives section on pages 42-58).
According to Andrew Tudor (1997:444), studies concerned with the viewer relating to horror cinema can be grouped into two categories. The first category asks questions about the type of person that enjoys horror. The second category asks what is it about horror that viewers find appealing. Tudor (1997:445-446) states that these questions are fundamentally flawed, since they imply generalised and reductive answers.
Some theorists argue that viewers enjoy horror films because of the catharsis they receive (Tudor, 1997:445), while others believe that only a perverted or severely deranged and repressed mind can enjoy these types of narratives (Grixti, 1989:86, Tudor, 1997:449). Some believe that pleasure is gained by way of experiencing dangerous and impossible situations in safe surroundings (Tudor,
9 If we adjust The Exorcist’s global receipts according to global inflation it would $1.154 billion it 2019 (Bean, 2019). The popularity of this film can be described as a fluke and could be attributed to the notoriety of the film at the time (Kline, 2018:16- 17).
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1997:449), while another group equates pleasure with indulging in the taboo (Tudor, 1997:449).
Though these ideas are plausible, they are still too entrenched in Freudian theory and too simplistic.
Noël Carrol makes some intriguing observations regarding horror in his 1990 book The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart. The work does not rely on psychoanalysis or psychodynamic theories as mode of analysis, but advances two core arguments to explain his theories. The first of the two is his “universal” theory which suggests that the anomalies found in horror, like the monsters, create attention and curiosity (Carroll, 1990:189-190, 195). The second of the theories, the “general”
theory, focusses more on the structures of the horror narrative where the monsters are involved in the narrative and its disclosures (Carroll, 1990:190).
What Carrol neglects to mention though is the role of fear in horror films. Fear is a complex emotion and is an important evolutionary trait (Shepard, 1996:29). Mathias Clasen (2012:222) also questions why individuals find pleasure in horror cinema and seeks the answers in evolutionary psychology and biocultural analysis. In his paper, Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories, Clasen (2012:223) states that ancient man lived a life in constant fear. Dangerous predators roamed the landscapes and the world was very much unknown, making early man prone to superstitions and running amok with their imagination. This served an important biological function and kept human beings alive for centuries (Clasen, 2012:223). Studies have also shown that man is still equipped with these biological traits and that horror films like The Shining (1980) and Silence of the Lambs (1991) can engender genuine fear responses. Even more interesting is that these fear responses seem to be quite universal across all people and that people will often have the same reactions (Clasen,
2012:224). Not only did studies reveal these universal feelings of fear, but they also revealed changes in attention and arousal states which suggest that horror captivates the audience while also terrifying them (Clasen, 2012:224).
What is interesting in most of the arguments mentioned in this section is that many of them attempt to create and employ basic and universal distinguishing characteristics on the viewers of the horror genre. Not only are the purveyors reduced to generic categories of users, but so is the whole genre reduced to an all-encompassing and unsophisticated genre where only Gothic literature (from which the horror genre extensively borrows) seems to hold any value. Assumptions are thus created about the viewers which others these viewers in relation to the rest of society. It is precisely this othering of individuals that sent many to the pyre during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though it does give the critic a foundation from which to analyse the witch’s body and supernatural abilities, such a study becomes one dimensional due to its overreliance on gender and the power struggles linked to it.
Also, it ignores societal norms of the time in which the films were produced.