Sleeping with the Lights On

by Jones, Darryl

  William Friedkin’s 1973 adaptation of the novel is rightly understood as one of the most powerful horror films ever made. Its indelible images of radical Satanic evil literally inscribing itself on the flesh of the adolescent Regan MacNeil in scars and mutilation, disfigurements, and even words understandably proved too much for many audiences, some of whom believed that watching the film was itself an encounter with Satanic forces. The evangelist Billy Graham believed that the very film itself was possessed by the Devil. And yet The Exorcist was made with the support and participation of the Catholic Church, and features among its cast a number of Jesuit priests playing versions of themselves. The success of the film contributed directly to a spike in applications for the Catholic priesthood in the 1970s, and for obvious reasons. In both book and film, the priest-psychiatrist Father Karras and his medical colleagues exhaust every somatic and psychological explanation for Regan’s condition before confronting the obvious fact that the Devil is real, and it is only through the traditional rites and sacraments of Catholicism that he can be defeated.

  The Exorcist was an important part of a post-war cultural phenomenon. The artistic and commercial success of Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, based on Ira Levin’s bestselling novel of the previous year, is often credited as marking the beginning of the 1970s’ ‘satanic screen’—and, along with Romero’s genuinely radical Night of the Living Dead (also 1968), is seen by many as the foundational work of modern horror cinema. Rosemary’s Baby has nothing like the degree of religious horror to be found in The Exorcist. Levin’s novel in particular does gesture towards the travails of Catholicism in 1960s America, but in not very much detail. Rosemary Woodhouse is ‘Catholic but no longer observing’; her family had ‘not forgiven her for (a) marrying a Protestant, (b) marrying in a civil ceremony, and (c) having a mother-in-law who had had two divorces and was now married to a Jew up in Canada.’ She has nightmares about her convent education, and one startling dream sequence in which the Pope, the Devil, and JFK seem all to be conflated.

  In 1977, Jeffrey Burton Russell, one of the Devil’s greatest historians, wrote scornfully about The Exorcist for presenting ‘a Devil who is stupid enough to choose to possess a little girl rather than a national government, which would enable him to do much greater harm to the world’. This seems like a reasonable observation—albeit that it rather misses the point of The Exorcist—and is certainly representative of the position of much modern popular cultural theodicy, which is, as we have seen, keen to explore the possibility of large-scale political Satanic conspiracies. Rosemary’s Baby is an important cinematic example of the major preoccupation in modern horror with the birth and upbringing of the Antichrist. In this specific concern, Rosemary’s Baby anticipates works coming out of a Protestant or even an Evangelical tradition, such as The Omen (1976), and in our own century Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins’s monster-selling series of Evangelical eschatological thrillers, Left Behind (1995–2007), in which the Antichrist is a Romanian politician who gets elected Secretary General of the United Nations.

  The Omen, in particular, is a film which propounds, through the influence of the Evangelical pastors Robert Munger and Don Williams, who are both listed in the credits as ‘religious adviser [sic] to the producers’, a covert ideological agenda that is very much in tune with the apocalypticism of the religious right. The Omen is also markedly anti-Catholic. When Cathy Thorn (Lee Remick), wife of the American ambassador to Rome, loses her baby in childbirth, a Catholic priest suggests to her husband Robert (Gregory Peck) that they secretly switch the dead child with another born at the same time, whose mother has died. What Thorn has not been told, however, is that the baby who is to become young Damien Thorn was born of a jackal. Father Brennan (played by Patrick Troughton), the crazed Catholic priest who was present at the birth, has a birthmark on his thigh which reads 666. The implication of the film is obvious: that the Vatican, which not only nurtures and protects the Antichrist, but places him where he is in a position to do the greatest harm, as the son of ‘the future President of the United States’, is in league with the Devil. The film closes at Robert Thorn’s funeral, with little Damien holding the hands of the President and First Lady.

  Ghosts and Spirits

  Satanism is of necessity a limit case, an extreme far shore of belief. Being a believer in—or even a practitioner of—the supernatural or the occult does not necessarily, of course, make you a Satanist. Nor, for that matter, does enjoying books about magic, although there have been calls in the UK to ban the Harry Potter books from classrooms because, according to Tom Bennett, an advisor to the British government on matters of educational behaviour, the series ‘normalises acts of magic’ and even ‘glorifies witchcraft’ for some of its readers: ‘There are many parents who are uncomfortable with their children discussing or looking at or reading anything at all to do with the occult.’ In the US, fringe members of the religious right have conducted several public burnings of the Harry Potter books. And yet, as I suggested at the beginning of the chapter, most religions—and in fact even the very concept of religion—have their deep origins in magical belief and ritual. For many, perhaps most, people of faith, a belief in the reality of the supernatural is by no means incompatible with, say, deeply held Christianity. As any reader of the Gospels—and most particularly of St Mark, generally held to be the oldest of the Gospels and thus the closest in time to the events it describes—will testify, exorcism, the casting out of demons, was a major component of Christ’s earthly mission. While there are certainly those who remain willing to ascribe a variety of physical and psychological illnesses to demonic possession, for most of us an actual encounter with the supernatural is likely to mean ghosts and spirits, not devils and demons.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ ‘Have you ever seen a ghost?’ As someone with a research interest in the supernatural, I get asked these questions all the time (my simplistic answers are ‘no’ and ‘no’, but I have, and prefer, more nuanced ones). According to a 2016 YouGov survey, more British people believe in ghosts than in ‘a Creator’ (interestingly, only 40 per cent of self-identified British Christians claim to believe in a Creator, according to the same survey). According to a 2013 Harris Poll, 42 per cent of Americans believe in ghosts, while the figure for Britons is 52 per cent.

  If anything, I am surprised that these figures are so low, as a belief in ghosts is a consistent component of human culture. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian text which is perhaps the oldest surviving work of literature, dating from 1500–2000 bc, closes with the warrior-king Gilgamesh meeting the spirit of his dead companion Enkidu, who gives him an account of the underworld. In the Old Testament Book of I Samuel, composed around 800 bc but describing events from the eleventh century bc, King Saul seeks advice on the eve of a battle with the Philistines from the Witch of Endor. The Witch summons up the ghost of Samuel, who asks Saul, ‘Why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?’ In Homer’s Odyssey (eighth century bc), Odysseus, journeying through the underworld, encounters the shade of his mother Anticlea, who tells him:

  You are only witnessing here the law of our mortal nature, when we come to die. We no longer have sinews keeping the bones and flesh together, but once the life-force is departed from our white bones, all is consumed by the fierce heat of the blazing fire, and the soul slips away like a dream and flutters on the air.

  In the Eumenides, the final part of the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus (fifth–sixth century bc), the first of the great Greek tragedians, the ghost of Clytemnestra awakens the Furies to act as instruments of her vengeance on her matricidal son Orestes. There seems to be no established body of religion, mythology, or folklore that does not allow for the existence of ghosts. Ghosts, like horror more generally, are intrinsic to civilization.

  For a modern audience, at least, there should in principle be something comforting about the appearance of ghosts, an assurance that there is a world beyond the material, that death is not the end. After all, as Ho
mer’s Anticlea avows, a ghost is the soul slipping away from its bodily moorings, fluttering on the air. In his book The Concept of Mind (1949), the philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined the phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’ as a description of a dualistic view of (material) body and (non-material) mind. Ryle intended the term to be part of a critique of the fallacy of mind/body dualism, but it has entered popular discourse as a resonant metaphor, encapsulating the sense many have that the workings of consciousness are something categorically quite separate from the corporeal matter of our flesh. In 1981, the rock band The Police, whose lead singer, Sting, was rather given to displays of his erudition, released an album entitled Ghost in the Machine; its opening track was ‘Spirits in the Material World’. For many, the concept of the ghost in the machine—what spiritualists would have called the survival of the human personality after death—is a reassuring one.

  There can, in fact, be something comforting about certain ghosts and ghost stories. Telling ghost stories can have an apotropaic function—that is, it serves to ward off evil. Their very generic status gives ghost stories an air of participatory ritual. Ghost stories are told on the longest nights, when the forces of darkness are at their most powerful. This is why there is such a strong connection between ghost stories and Christmas. ‘A Christmas Carol’ is simultaneously the most celebrated ghost story and the most celebrated Christmas story, and its publication in 1843 inaugurated a popular series of Dickensian Christmas tales, most of which were supernatural. Many of M. R. James’s ghost stories were first told on Christmas Eve, around the fire to a select group of colleagues and students in King’s College Cambridge. In ‘Oh, Whistle’, Professor Parkins unearths the titular supernatural artefact on ‘the feast day of St. Thomas the Apostle’—that is, 21 December, the winter solstice. Since the 1970s, viewers of BBC television have regularly enjoyed a series of ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’, many of them adaptations of the works of M. R. James.

  Although belonging to a non-material order, ghosts can also have a material dimension, or leave physical traces, often of the category-violating disgusting kind we encountered in the Introduction—from the viscid ‘ectoplasm’ detected by spiritualists and psychical researchers to the slime of Ghostbusters.

  Ghosts are spiritual; ghosts can be unpleasantly material; but mostly, of course, ghosts are terrifying. In part, this is because they carry with them a sense of desolation, or of disjuncture. In M. R. James’s story ‘Lost Hearts’ there is an utterly despairing image of a ghost boy, ‘a thin shape, with black hair and ragged clothing, [who] raised his arms in the air with an appearance of menace and of unappeasable hunger and longing’. As James writes elsewhere, ‘a withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost’. Ghosts are severed from the bonds of human kindness, family, and love. It is the hollowness, the existential emptiness of the ghostly that disturbs. This is what Jacob Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge:

  It is required of every man…that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!

  Ghosts are condemned to walk the earth because they are excluded from the divine, barred entrance to heaven. This is the case with Hamlet’s Father:

  I am thy father’s spirit,

  Doom’d for a certain time to walk the night,

  And for the day confin’d to fast in fires,

  Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

  Are burnt and purged away.

  Traditionally, then, the appearance of ghosts served a narrative or moral purpose. Like Clytemnestra’s ghost or the ghost of Hamlet’s Father, they appeared in order to right wrongs, atone for crimes, or correct injustices. These ghosts can be violent, vengeful, fearsome, unappeasable. Like Banquo’s ghost in Macbeth, they could appear as a warning or an omen, often portending death. Or, like the ghosts of Samuel or Anticlea, they came back from the dead bearing privileged information, including prophecies of future events. Some ghosts, like that of Jacob Marley, do all three at once.

  But not all ghosts are purposeful narrative actors, and this is especially true of some of their modern manifestations, who are often characterized by the very arbitrariness of their hauntings. For the reasons discussed at the beginning of the chapter, the second half of the nineteenth century saw a renewed interest in ghosts. The historian Owen Davies has argued that this Victorian ghost may represent a new development in thinking about the supernatural in its very purposelessness. In his 1894 study of psychical research, the folklorist Andrew Lang concluded that the modern ghost was ‘a purposeless creature’, appearing ‘nobody knows why; he has no message to deliver, no secret crime to reveal, no appointment to keep, no treasure to disclose, no commissions to be executed, and, as an almost invariable rule, he does not speak, even if you speak to him’.

  The teenagers in Hideo Nakata’s Ring cannot in any meaningful way be said to deserve the terrifying supernatural visitation of the cursed videocassette, unless we count sheer curiosity as a moral failing (which M. R. James, the greatest of all ghost story writers, perhaps did—one of his most celebrated stories, and the volume which contains it, is called A Warning to the Curious). Similarly, unless we take a very stern view of low-level obnoxiousness, the protagonists of many modern ghost stories, from Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape (1972) to The Blair Witch Project (1999) to Insidious (2010), are arbitrary victims, all stumbling as if by accident into the haunted locations which prove their undoing.

  Buried in certain spaces and objects, it seems, waiting to be uncovered, as though by an archaeological excavation, the past and its spirits lurk. The appearance of a ghost is the eruption of the past into the present, and troubles our sense of progress, of a one-directional arrow of time. Marley’s ghost promises Scrooge on Christmas Eve that he will be visited by three ghosts on three nights: ‘Expect the first tomorrow when the bell tolls One….Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate.’ And yet, in the time-less spirit world, these three separate nights all happen simultaneously, and when Scrooge awakens from his last visitation, it is Christmas morning. In the spirit world the arrow of time can fly in all directions, and so precognition, the uncanny possibility of being haunted by the future, is an important component of the ghost story, as when Scrooge is haunted by the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, or when the protagonist of another Dickens story, ‘The Signal-Man’, is haunted by recurring visions of his own death. Ghosts are time out of joint.

  3

  Horror and the Body

  What is the locus of fear? Where is fear? In Chapter 2 we looked at some forms of supernatural horror. In these works, the threat is radically Other, emanating from the outside, from different categories of being or philosophies of existence. But running alongside this is a tradition of internal horror, in which that which we have to fear is inside us. Sometimes, this internal fear emerges out of the labyrinthine ways of our own minds, showing the uncanny means by which we can be alien to ourselves. This will be the subject of Chapter 4. But sometimes, as we have seen, it is our own bodies that are horrifying to us. Bodies, I have suggested, can be viewed as symbolic systems, sites of meaning, power, threat, and anxiety. Viewed in this way, our skin functions as a boundary, as we have seen—a vulnerable, malleable, porous, leaky border between inside and outside, self and other, a site of abjection and of pain. In this chapter, we will look more closely at the horror of the body.

  Metamorphosis

  To begin thinking about horror and the body, we will look at those narratives in which the body changes form, from the ‘normal’ to the ‘monstrous’ body. Often, these narratives record the transformation from the civilized, social human body to the violent, uncontrollable beast body. The werewolf is the locus classicus of this kind of narra
tive.

  The word lycanthrope derives from the myth of Lycaon, king of Arcadia in the Peloponnesian Peninsula of Greece. The best-known version of the tale is to be found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Lycaon, ‘well known for savagery’, is cursed by Zeus after attempting to feed human flesh to the king of the gods:

  The king himself flies in terror, and gaining the silent fields, howls aloud, attempting in vain to speak. His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter. His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns to a wolf, and yet retains some of his former shape. There is the same grey hair, the same fierce face, the same gleaming eyes, the same picture of beastly savagery.

  There are several different extant versions of the Lycaon myth, often serving to heighten his depravity. According to the Greek geographer Pausanias, ‘Lycaon brought a human baby to the altar of Lycean Zeus, and sacrificed it, pouring out its blood upon the altar, and according to legend immediately after the sacrifice he was changed from a man into a wolf (lycos). I for my part believe this story.’ In the account of the Church Father Clement of Alexandria, ‘Lycaon set before [Zeus], as a dainty dish, his [Lycaon’s] own child, Nyctimus by name, whom he had slaughtered.’ Pliny’s Natural History ‘classes werewolves among persons under a curse’, and describes an Arcadian ritual in which a man is taken to a marsh and is there transformed into a wolf for nine years, ‘and that if in that period he has refrained from touching a human being, he returns to the same marsh, swims across it, and recovers his shape’. He also recounts the tale of Daemenetus of Parrhasia, who ‘tasted the vitals of a boy who had been offered as a [sacrificial] victim and turned himself into a wolf’.