Sleeping with the Lights On
Sleeping with the Lights On
The Unsettling Story of Horror
Darryl Jones
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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© Darryl Jones 2018
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First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
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To Margaret and Morgan
with all my love in a world of horror
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction
1. Monsters
2. The Occult and the Supernatural
3. Horror and the Body
4.Horror and the Mind
5. Science and Horror
6. Afterword: Horror Since the Millennium
Further Reading
Index
Acknowledgements
I have been thinking about a book like this for years. I would like to thank Jenny Nugee at OUP for giving me the opportunity to turn this from an imaginary book to an actual one, and for her patience while I tried to do it. The anonymous reviewers at OUP made many helpful suggestions, and helped to give shape and form to this book.
I have the best colleagues, who are the best friends. I am enormously grateful to Bernice Murphy, who read and commented on the manuscript with such generosity of time and spirit. This book is very much the better for her advice. I have had so many conversations about so many things for so many years with Jarlath Killeen, and the record of some of them can be found in these pages. Eve Patten has been a constant source of moral and intellectual support.
I would also like to thank Mary Bridgeman, Ailise Bulfin, John Connolly, Nick Curwin, Nick Daly, Ruth Doherty, Dara Downey, Triona Kirby, Miles Link, Judith Luna, Elizabeth McCarthy, Orla McCarthy, Ben Murnane, Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Ed O’Hare, Maria Parsons, and Conor Reid, all of whom have made contributions to this book in their different ways. Valerie Smith, Cathy Gibson, Shumane Cleary, Marian Harte, Eimear Leonard, Laura Cusack, and Jade Barreto have kept me sane and kept me going for the past few years.
As ever, the first, last, and deepest debts of love and gratitude are to my wife, Margaret Robson, and my daughter, Morgan Jones. This horrid book is for them.
List of Figures
1. Death of Pentheus, from The Bacchae, Greek Vase c.480 bc Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images
2. Albin Grau, poster for Nosferatu (1922) Matthew Corrigan/Alamy Stock Photo
3. Brains! A Dublin zombie walkerSebastian Kaczorowski/Alamy Stock Photo
4. A characteristically lurid Dennis Wheatley paperback By permission of Penguin Random House, UK
5. (a) Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Werewolf (c.1500–15); (b) William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar (1795) (a) Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1942; (b) Digital image © Tate, London 2017
6. Richard Mansfield transforms from Dr Jekyll to Mr Hyde Howarth-Loomes Collection. Image © National Museums Scotland
7. Fredric March as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931)BFA/Alamy Stock Photo
8. Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
9. Galactus: ‘death, the devourer of worlds’Everett Collection Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
10. Sadako, the unappeasable ghost of Ring (1998)© Omega/Kadokawa/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
11. The Slender ManFREMOX (CC BY 3.0)
The publisher and author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
Introduction
Horror in Civilization
A human eyeball shoots out of its socket, and rolls into a gutter. A child returns from the dead and tears the beating heart from his tormentor’s chest. A young man has horrifying visions of his decomposing mother’s corpse. A baby is ripped from its living mother’s womb. A mother tears her son to pieces, and parades around with his head on a stick. These are scenes from the notorious, banned ‘video nasty’ films (a series of controversial, violent VHS releases prohibited in the UK under the Video Recordings Act of 1984) Eaten Alive, Zombie Flesh Eaters, I Spit on Your Grave, Anthropophagous: The Beast, and Cannibal Holocaust.
Well, no. They could be—but they’re not. All these scenes and images can be found in any bookshop, safely inside the respectable covers of canonical literary classics, in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, M. R. James, James Joyce, William Shakespeare, and Euripides. Only the first two of these are avowedly writers of horror, and none of these books comes with any kind of public health warning or age-suitability guideline. What is the relationship between culture and violence?
Euripides’ The Bacchae, first performed around 400 bc, is one of the foundational works of the Western literary canon. In describing graphically the actions of Agave and her Maenads, dismembering King Pentheus while under the frenzied influence of the god Dionysus, and putting his head on a pole, it also sets the bar very high for artistic representations of violence and gore (Figure 1). The spectacle of violence, then, is encoded in art from its very beginnings. Palaeohistorians have argued plausibly that the capacity to make art is one of the crucial distinguishing features of humanity, and a very significant evolutionary advantage: Homo sapiens made art, we survived; Neanderthals did neither. It is likely that Greek tragedy and perhaps all art has its deep origins in ritual. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz usefully defines ritual as ‘consecrated behavior’, and suggests that elaborate or public religious rituals might best be thought of as ‘cultural performances’, simultaneously providing both models of an external or social reality (they reflect reality) and models for that reality (they shape reality). We will return to the ritualistic element of horror throughout this book, but for now I want to give an example of the interweaving of culture, religion, and horror.
Figure 1. Death of Pentheus, from The Bacchae, Greek Vase c.480 bc.
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea (1969) is a free adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy of the same name, directed by a major European film-maker
and intellectual, and starring the legendary operatic diva Maria Callas in the title role. It is, in other words, unmistakeably a high-cultural artistic product, deeply influenced by Pasolini’s own studies in anthropology, mythography, and religious history, and by his Marxist politics. But this is art-house cinema red in tooth and claw. Shot in the beautiful unearthly volcanic landscape around Göreme in Cappadocia, Turkey, the film opens with a sparagmos, a graphically rendered ritual sacrifice: a young boy is killed and dismembered, his blood and body parts cast over the land in order to assure its fertility. In travelling to the ends of the earth—to Colchis, in what is today Georgia—to retrieve the Golden Fleece, the film suggests, Jason is also symbolically travelling back in time, to witness the origins of civilization in a religion of magic, ritual, and human sacrifice. Jason takes Medea back with him to Corinth, the city state of modernity and intrigue (these scenes are filmed in Pisa), but Medea carries the primal world within her (she lives beyond the polis, outside the city walls), and this enables her to summon up the appalling forces of vengeance, the Furies, in order to kill her own children.
The film’s opening episode of human sacrifice is unquestionably a shocking scene in itself, but for certain viewers of horror cinema it is also a disorientating one, as it clearly prefigures, both aesthetically and thematically, some of the most controversial films ever made. Medea’s sparagmos closely resembles (or anticipates) a number of scenes of ritual human sacrifice and dismemberment from Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1980), Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981), and a number of other Italian cannibal movies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Unlike Medea, all of these films were banned under the Video Recordings Act of 1984. Cannibal Holocaust, in particular, has an infamous place in popular demonology as perhaps the archetypal ‘video nasty’. It is a film so powerful, and for many so unacceptable, that its director was arrested and tried shortly after its release, on charges not only of obscenity but also of murder, as the authorities initially refused to believe that the film’s scenes of violence and torture could possibly have been staged. (They were, and Deodato was acquitted when the actors involved were revealed to be alive and well.)
The episode of the baby ripped from the mother’s womb to which I alluded in the first paragraph is from Macbeth, of course—it’s Macduff’s account of his own birth. And Macbeth, though certainly no slouch in the mayhem department, isn’t even Shakespeare’s most violent play. That would be Titus Andronicus, whose opening scene makes the connections between civilization and horror very clear: the origins of civilization are in violence; ritual and other forms of sacred violence are used to channel otherwise uncontrollably violent, destabilizing urges into socially licensed forms. At the beginning of Titus Andronicus, Tamora, Queen of the Goths, sees her son brutally killed by the conquering Romans:
See, lord and father, how we have performed
Our Roman rites: Alarbus’ limbs are lopp’d,
And entrails feed the sacrificing fire,
Whose smoke, like incense, doth perfume the sky.
What follows is well known: further mutilation, rape, cannibalism—the full Jacobean panoply. Shocking, yes; surprising, no. After all, the greater part of the Western literary tradition follows, or celebrates, a faith whose own sacrificial rites have at their heart symbolic representations of torture and cannibalism, the cross and the host. A case could plausibly be made that the Western literary tradition is a tradition of horror. This may be an overstatement, but it’s an argument with which any honest thinker has to engage.
The classic argument in defence of the brutality of tragedy (a form which I have come to think of as highbrow horror) is the Aristotelian concept of catharsis, according to which the act of witnessing artistic representations of cruelty and monstrosity, pity and fear, purges the audience of these emotions, leaving them psychologically healthier. Horror is good for you! I confess I have always had difficulty accepting this hypothesis (though I recognize that many people far more learned and brilliant than me have had no trouble accepting it). It seems to me to be a classic example of an intellectual’s gambit, a theory offered without recourse to any evidence.
And yet catharsis seems to me to be far preferable to another, more common, response to horror: the urge to censor or ban extreme documents and images in the name of public morality. If catharsis is Aristotelian, then this hypothesis is Pavlovian: horror conditions our responses; a tendency to watch violent acts leads inexorably to a tendency to commit violent acts. For many people, this seems to make intuitive sense (on more than one occasion, I’ve noticed people backing away from me when I tell them I work on horror), and it’s the impetus behind the framing of the Video Recordings Act of 1984, after which Cannibal Holocaust and all those other video nasties were banned.
As a number of commentators and critics have noted, there’s no evidence for this Pavlovian hypothesis, either. Worse than that, there’s a distinct class animus behind such thinking. You and I, cultured, literate, educated middle-class folks that we are, are perfectly safe: when we watch Cannibal Holocaust (which I do, even if you don’t) we know what we are seeing, we can contextualize the film, interpret it, recognize it for what it is. The problem, the argument implicitly goes, is not us, it is them, those festering, semi-bestial proletarians whose extant propensity for violence (always simmering beneath the surface) can only be stoked by watching these films. That’s why no one seriously considers banning The Bacchae or Titus Andronicus—why any suggestion that we do so would be treated as an act of inexcusable philistinism. They are horror for the educated classes.
Horror is, unquestionably, an extreme art form. Like all avant-garde art, I would suggest, its real purpose is to force its audiences to confront the limits of their own tolerance—including, emphatically, their own tolerance for what is or is not art. Commonly, when hitting these limits, we respond with fear, frustration, and even rage. Even today, this is not an unusual reaction on first reading Finnegans Wake, for example: I see it occasionally in my students, who are (a) voluntarily students of literature; and (b) usually Irish, not to say actual Dubliners. So we shouldn’t be surprised that audiences respond to horror with—well, horror. But we need to recognize that the reasons for doing this are complex, and are deeply bound up with the meaning and function of art, and of civilization. Horror runs very deep, and is part of what we are.
‘Gothic’, ‘Horror’, and ‘Terror’
These are terms which recur in thinking and writing about our subject, sometimes used interchangeably, and certainly often defined and understood very loosely. In many ways this is understandable, as a too-rigid taxonomy can lead to an inability to see the wood for the trees. I will be using the umbrella term ‘horror’ throughout this book to signify a variety of artistic genres and cultural forms, modes, and moods, some of which are, if not incompatible with one another, then certainly contradictory in their aims and effects. Nevertheless, it is important to establish a reasonably clear sense of what commentators mean when they use the terms ‘Gothic’, ‘horror’, and ‘terror’.
The Gothic is a cultural and aesthetic mode associated with and expressive of darkness and death, irrationality and obsession, sensuality and disorder, the past and its mysteries. The Gothic is always dressed in black. Fred Botting’s famous assertion that ‘Gothic signifies a writing of excess’ is perceptive but incomplete. There is certainly something excessive about the Gothic—a transgression of aesthetic propriety or social respectability, an overpouring of emotion, an obsession with madness, the unconscious, and extreme psychological states. All of these statements suggest that the Gothic bursts through or exists beyond the boundaries of respectable society—of bourgeois capitalism and the literary and artistic form which grew to give it expression, realism.
But one of the Gothic’s many excesses is an excess of definition. It has become an overdetermined signifier, a word with too much meaning. As Nick Groom notes in The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction, the term ‘Gothic’ can be used
to refer to ethnography, architecture, literature, youth subculture, fashion, music, and much else besides. It is a major cultural mode, and an oppositional one. The original Goths were a Germanic people who harried the Roman Empire and made serious incursions into its territories in the first millennium ad. Gothic in this sense is to be understood as a force acting in opposition to the civilizing polis and order of Rome, signifying wildness, disorder, ‘barbarism’. Medieval Gothic architecture, a primarily ecclesiastical form characterized by a soaring use of light and space and an ostentatious asymmetry of design and ornament, is understood as existing in opposition to the balance, symmetry, and simplicity of classical architectural forms. Similarly, the outrageously ornate styles of Victorian neo-Gothic architecture were themselves developed in opposition to the rational symmetry, balance, and harmony of Enlightenment neoclassical architecture. As part of the same reaction, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the Gothic novel, with its recurring focus on darkness and decay, madness and the past, developed alongside and in opposition to the classic realist novel. In their dress and music, modern Goths clearly define themselves in opposition to middle-class social respectability.
The continuing popularity and success of the Gothic is in part an acknowledgement that there are whole areas of human existence about which realism has little or nothing to say: extreme psychological states and the limits of consciousness, for example; or profound existential, metaphysical, or spiritual questions; the paranormal and the supernatural. In its scrutiny of the limits of rationalism, horror in general has often drawn upon the concept of the sublime, first theorized in classical antiquity by ‘Longinus’ (we don’t know the exact name of the author), but given a powerful new articulation in the eighteenth century. In 1757, the Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke published what was to become one of the key intellectual documents of Romanticism, and one of the most important works of aesthetics of its time, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The sublime, Burke argued, was a fundamentally metaphysical, or even numinous, category (that is, one infused with the divine), short-circuiting reason completely in its presentation of images and spectacles so vast, so overwhelming, that they produced an effect of reverent awe, and even terror, in those who experienced them. Pain, Burke wrote, is ‘an emissary of the king of terrors’—Death—and thus:
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