‘Torture Porn’
Cronenberg and Barker are exponents of that strain of confrontational, avant-garde horror which we have been discussing throughout the book—a combination of radical aesthetics and politics, and taboo-busting imagery, to a recognizably serious artistic end. But 1980s body horror was also a precursor to a distinctive post-millennial subgenre often called ‘torture porn’, which concentrates remorselessly on the human body’s capacity for pain and suffering, and on the human motives for inflicting that suffering. Torture porn is contemporary horror at its most controversial, since for many viewers and commentators it seems to dispense with body horror’s ideological agenda and go straight for its spectacle of the human body in pain: in other words, it is empty sadism. This is certainly an argument that needs engaging with, and I think that, of all forms of horror, torture porn may come closest to realizing the nightmares of hostile critics. Often, indeed, as is the case with Tom Six’s The Human Centipede (2010), the very raison d’être of some torture porn seems to be to bait its critics (and it succeeds!), though some films, most notably Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997), raise serious issues about an audience’s enjoyment of pain and suffering, and the role of the entertainment industry in creating or fuelling that enjoyment.
It is important to begin by stressing that the artistic spectacle of the tortured and disfigured human body has long been a major subject of art and culture. The flaying of the piper Marsyas by the god Apollo was a favourite subject of both classical and Renaissance sculpture. Much of the meaning of Christianity derives from the symbolism of torture, of Christ’s scourged and crucified body, penetrated through the side by a spear. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) is often justifiably viewed as a work of torture porn, though its images of Christ’s broken, bleeding body are inherently no more shocking than Matthias Grünewald’s famous depiction of a scarred, emaciated, bleeding Christ on the cross in his Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1515), one of the great masterpieces of Christian art. Even a casual reading of The Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine’s influential twelfth-century compendium of the lives and martyrdoms of the saints, will reveal an astonishing catalogue of torture and mutilation. Saint Christina, for example, is martyred by being placed in ‘an iron cradle…fired with oil, pitch, and resin’, following which she has her breasts cut off, her tongue cut out, and is finally dispatched with ‘two arrows into her heart and one into her side’. Any analysis of torture porn must first take account of the fact its imagery is hardly uniquely modern.
What is distinctively contemporary about torture porn is its reaction to and participation in a post-millennial culture of the normalization of torture. Torture porn is part of a broader cultural-political complex of texts, images, and events from the post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’. These would include, for example, photographs of mistreated prisoners in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, media discussions about the ethics and utility of waterboarding as a means of interrogation, and counter-terrorist popular entertainment such as the TV series 24, which increasingly presented torture as a first resort, as Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) went about his business readily torturing whoever got in his way, including US presidents and members of his own family, all in the name of a supposed greater good. There was, we were informed, a ‘ticking bomb’ out there, and torture was the only way to reveal its location, saving thousands of lives. However, recent studies have shown that political defences of torture (the ‘ticking bomb’ argument) are philosophically empty, and that it has no efficacy as a means of gathering information. In 1985, Elaine Scarry’s influential book The Body in Pain discussed the creation of a theatrical spectacle of pain through, for example, the institutions and instruments of torture. Insofar as torture ‘works’, it does so through spectacle, as a means of spreading (rather than countering) terror, of saying, ‘There is literally nothing of which I am not capable. I have no moral limits. Fear me.’
Our pain is inexpressible. Having no straightforward linguistic object, it lies beyond the limits of language, articulable only through imprecise similes (it is like burning, it is like torture, it is like death, it is worse than death), or else non-verbally (we scream, we howl, we cry). In our pain, we are uniquely alone and vulnerable. To exploit this vulnerability, knowingly to inflict extreme pain on others, is to place oneself beyond the boundaries of humanity. In H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, a crazed vivisector, who has ‘never troubled about the ethics of the matter’, is run out of Britain and sets up a laboratory on a remote Pacific island, where he performs surgery without anaesthetic: ‘It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice.’ Contemporary reactions to Moreau were horrified: the Review of Reviews maintained that the novel ‘ought never to have been published’, and should be withdrawn from circulation; Wells himself believed that it had been received as ‘a festival of ’orrors’.
Many of the films that fell foul of the ‘video nasties’ scandal of the 1980s were certainly disreputable or sleazy (Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave), but they were generally low-budget affairs, often characterized by a manic energy and a certain DIY integrity. Part of the mystique of these films was the challenge of getting to see them in the first place—they rarely had theatrical runs, and could be difficult to find in video libraries. These were films which had no desire to be mainstream. One of the most disturbing things about modern torture porn is its corporatization. The Hostel and Saw franchises were mass-distribution multiplex releases. As a Japanese client says of the torture company in Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005), ‘Be careful. You could spend all your money in there.’ It is difficult to know whether this is critique or celebration.
4
Horror and the Mind
In Chapter 3, we looked at internal threats, at the location of horror within ourselves, in our own bodies and their capacity for metamorphosis or their status as a site of pain. But many of us would consider our minds to be the true location of our sense of identity and individuality, and so internal horror has naturally tended to destabilize this belief, to present the mind as a site of uncertainty. We might be strangers to ourselves, or subject to psychological forces beyond our control. The minds of others may be radically unavailable to us: ineffable, totally devoid of empathy, utterly malignant, or simply blank. These are terrifying ideas, ripe for exploration in horror. Romano Scavolini’s Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) was an ultra-controversial ‘video nasty’ banned under the 1984 Video Recordings Act; the film’s British distributor, David Grant, was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for releasing an uncut copy. While certainly shoddy, exploitative, and unpleasant, the film is inherently no worse than many others in circulation at the time. What ultimately distinguished Scavolini’s film, I believe, was its truly disturbing title.
Madness haunts horror, embodied in the figure of the lunatic, the psychopath, or the split personality. One influential tendency of modern thinking about psychiatric disorders, as exemplified by the work of the historical theorist Michel Foucault or the radical clinician R. D. Laing, is to understand madness as a social or political problem rather than a medical one. Madness is a category, a name given to various forms of socially disruptive or threatening ideas and behaviours, and thus a means of regulating undesirable behaviour and of controlling it through institutions of power and of coercion—the medical profession, psychiatry, the asylum.
Horror is often sceptical of this radical social reading of madness, in a manner analogous to the way in which, as we saw in Chapter 1, it does not subscribe to the liberal ‘man-eating myth’ interpretation of cannibalism. In horror, madness tends to be an existential category of radical Otherness, even or especially when this Other is also ourself. Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), the psychiatrist who has spent the better part of a career attempting to treat Michael Myers in John Carpenter’s Halloween, is the very antithesis of R. D. Laing. Years of studying Michael have convinced Loomis that he is straightforwardly the embodiment of evil; when Michael escapes from t
he asylum, Loomis follows him to Haddonfield, gun in hand, as the only solution is to kill him. Horror’s fascination with madness is often markedly anti-liberal, at odds with progressive modernity. We cannot cure madness, let alone understand it—least of all, like R. D. Laing, embrace it. We can imprison the mad, or we can destroy them, before they destroy us.
But this is a very simplistic view, both of madness and of horror. The practice of the representation of madness in horror can be more nuanced, often turning on the problematic, undecideable relationship between ‘madness’ and ‘normality’. The clear boundary between these states is the very one the asylum and psychiatric pathologizing exists to police. ‘They’ are mad because ‘They’ are institutionalized and treated. I am not in an asylum, therefore I am ‘sane’, normal. But as we have seen many times, horror probes at the weaknesses of such boundaries, breaking them down, troubling our certainties. Beneath the conformist, placid, courteous, deferential, appealing exterior of Psycho’s Norman Bates lies a tangled complex of taboos and cracked binaries: living/dead; male/female; mother/son; mother/lover; straight/queer; self/other.
The psychiatric institution, lunatic asylum, madhouse, or bedlam is one of the great recurring locations of horror, and its narratives often turn on ambiguity, the difficulty in distinguishing madness from sanity. From Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White onwards, we have narratives of sane people committed to asylums for nefarious reasons, or because their behaviour defies social convention, or simply because they are, in the title of Sarah Wise’s study of Victorian lunacy, ‘inconvenient people’. A significant amount of the action of Bram Stoker’s Dracula takes place in Dr Seward’s mental institution, where Renfield’s episodes of unclean eating are punctuated by moments of startling lucidity. It is possible that the entirety of the action of Robert Wiene’s foundational horror film, the intensely political The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), takes place within the confines of an asylum, or that, for this film, the whole world may be mad. Often, protagonists or narrators who gain our trust and sympathy, or who appear to have narrative authority, are finally revealed as lunatics. The great Peter Cushing specialized in such roles, from the appalling Baron Frankenstein in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) to the crazed, vulnerable anthropologist of The Creeping Flesh (1973). Cushing is also one of the inmates in Asylum (1972), a portmanteau collection of stories by Robert Bloch (the author of Psycho), and a film whose framing narrative turns on the challenge of diagnosing the ‘incurably insane’. Asylum is also the title of the lauded second season (2012–13) of American Horror Story, whose episodes attempt to diagnose the fractured history and pathology of the apparent 1960s serial killer Kit Walker (Evan Peters).
‘Madman!’
Madness is the dominant subject of one of the greatest of all horror writers. In the work of Edgar Allan Poe, we return again and again to the figure of the madman, utterly enclosed in the internal world of his (the protagonists are almost always male) own mind. ‘True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?’ This opening sentence of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ draws explicit attention to what is a recurring feature of Poe’s stories: the variety of obsessions, monomanias, and morbid nervous conditions under which their narrators labour.
Poe famously believed that ‘the death…of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world, and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover’. Egaeus, the narrator of ‘Berenice’, suffers from a ‘monomania…[which] consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive’. Monomania is the fixation on one idea to the point of madness, and here Egaeus’s madness takes the form of an obsession with his beloved cousin Berenice’s teeth. After her death, he breaks into her coffin and pulls them out.
The imprisoning sense of interiority makes Poe’s narrators highly unreliable: part of the fascination of Poe’s stories is that they are so unsettlingly monologic—that is, they have only one voice, only one perspective. In ‘Ligeia’, the obsessed, grief-stricken narrator believes that his dead wife, Ligeia, has, through the unconquerable force of her will, possessed the body of his second wife, Rowena. The reader simply has no way of judging the reality of this narrative. In ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, there does at least seem to be an external perspective on events, as the tale is narrated by an old school friend of Roderick Usher. Once again, Usher suffers from a ‘mental disorder’, ‘a constitutional and family evil’ characterized by ‘a morbid acuteness of the senses’. His narcoleptic sister Madeleine is buried alive, and disinters herself from her tomb, as Roderick cries, ‘Madman! I tell you she now stands without the door!’ Who is the ‘Madman’ here? Is it Roderick or the narrator? The reader has no way of knowing, and so yet again no way of accounting for the provenance or the veracity of the story.
Following in the tradition of Poe, ‘madness’ in horror has often been a spectacular, florid, performative affair, and a certain strain of horror madman is characterized by raging egomania, grandiose gestures and grandiloquent rhetoric, and a particular fondness for organ-playing. Often, he has advanced medical or academic qualifications, as though driven mad by intellectual brilliance: Dr Caligari, Dr X, Dr Moreau, Dr Frankenstein, Dr Phibes, Dr Lecter. Hannibal Lecter is, in fact, the major contemporary exemplar of this type of Poe-inflected madness: in his practice as a psychiatrist, he is about as far removed from R. D. Laing as you can get, and certainly no subscriber to the idea of the man-eating myth.
In part, Anthony Hopkins seems to have based his iconic, Oscar-winning portrayal of Lecter on the screen persona of Vincent Price, who made his reputation as a horror star in a series of Roger Corman-directed Poe adaptations for American International Pictures in the 1960s. Musing on Hopkins’s portrayal of Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and his own in Manhunter (1986), the actor Brian Cox suggested that ‘the difference between Anthony Hopkins’s performance and mine is that Tony Hopkins is mad and I am insane!’ Cox is on to something with this observation, counterpointing Hopkins’s grandstanding performance with his own relatively understated one. At the actual opposite end of the scale of performative madness from Poe, Price, and Hopkins are the various lunatic killers of the 1980s slasher movie—Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and their kin, who often have no motivation whatsoever beyond motiveless, unindividuated destructiveness. These psychopathic killers trouble us because they have too little personality, not too much.
The Double
Etymologically, ‘individuality’ means that which cannot be divided: we are indivisible, at one with ourselves. Much psychological horror has worked hard to destabilize this secure sense of the unified self through its presentation of doppelgängers, twins, shadows, mirrors, portraits, repetitions, madwomen in the attic, and other forms of doubling and fracturing. Many of the great works of nineteenth-century horror are tales of the double: Frankenstein, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ‘William Wilson’, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The split personality, the evil twin, the double life, the cursed mirror, the living statue, the changing portrait, the return of the repressed, the cycle of events across generations, the dream which infects or overwhelms reality. These narratives and themes, all suggestive of the uncanny possibility that we are not at home with ourselves, or that our lives are being lived elsewhere, are all familiar ones in horror culture.
The idea of the double has understandably preoccupied psychoanalysis, and in this context has its origins in the pioneering work of Freud and Otto Rank. Both Freud and Rank suggest that the figure of the double was originally a religious one, expressive of the sense of the duality of body and soul. If our double is originally the embodiment of our soul, then it follows that an encounter with the double should portend death, that moment when body and soul are finally divided. Paradoxically, then, the double, originally an embodiment of our immortality, is also a remin
der of the mortality of our own bodies. An encounter with the double is a rupture in time and space, a moment when the world of matter and the world of spirit, this life and the afterlife, meet.
In Mary Shelley’s novel, Victor Frankenstein builds a creature out of dead tissue, animating it with a spark of life, as a means of discovering human immortality through the overmastering power of Enlightenment science. The Monster’s threat to Victor Frankenstein, ‘I will be with you on your wedding night’, can be read in a number of ways. Victor interprets the threat as meaning, ‘I [the Monster] am coming to get you [Victor] on your wedding night.’ The events of the novel suggest that it means, ‘I am coming to get your bride on your wedding night.’ But it can very plausibly be interpreted as meaning, ‘I will be your bride’—as any viewer of The Rocky Horror Picture Show will recognize.
The double, I have suggested, can signify the death of the self, but it can also signify narcissism, morbid self-love. In Greek myth, when the beautiful Narcissus gazed upon his reflection in the pool, he was so entranced by his own beauty that he could not look away, and so he withered and died (or in some versions threw himself into the pool and drowned). The concept of narcissism as a psychoanalytic pathology was first formulated in the last years of the nineteenth century by the sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis and the psychiatrist Paul Näcke, who coined the phrase ‘Narcismus’. For both Havelock Ellis and Näcke, narcissism essentially meant masturbation (sex with someone you love, as Woody Allen put it). Rank and Freud both wrote important studies of narcissism, broadening the term to denote a variety of megalomania in which attention cannot be redirected from the self to others: ‘The libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego and thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism’, Freud wrote.
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