Sleeping with the Lights On

by Jones, Darryl

  Terminator 2, released in 1991 after the end of the 1980s, a decade notable for its nuclear nightmares, makes the Bomb central to its dystopian vision. Skynet is given control of defence systems in order to preclude the possibility of ‘human error’, and unleashes a nuclear Armageddon. ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ These, reportedly, were the words that the chief scientist of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, said to himself after testing the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico Desert on 16 July 1945. (Oppenheimer, realizing the implications of what his Los Alamos team had achieved better than anybody, was later to disavow atomic weapons, and became a powerful opponent of nuclear proliferation.) Cultured man that he was, Oppenheimer was quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, and perhaps summoning up a memory while doing so of the work of T. S. Eliot, who had studied Sanskrit at Harvard, and for whom the Bhagavad Gita was a major source of inspiration—and what person of culture in the mid-twentieth century, musing on the Bomb, would not have thought of The Waste Land?

  But Oppenheimer’s musings were too abstruse to speak to the public imagination. And so it was that, a couple of decades later, at the height of the Cold War, in March 1966, edition number 48 of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Marvel superhero comic book The Fantastic Four saw the coming of Galactus, the planet-devouring interstellar deity, whose arrival on earth was foreshadowed by his herald, the Silver Surfer. Now this was ‘death, the destroyer of worlds’ given a form the general public could really understand—gigantic, all-powerful, not so much hostile to humanity as completely indifferent to human affairs (Figure 9). Galactus was terror incarnate. And he was not, in fact, Marvel’s first engagement with the Bomb.

  Figure 9. Galactus: ‘death, the devourer of worlds’.

  The Fantastic Four’s own powers stem from their exposure to ‘cosmic rays’ as they attempt to beat the Russians in the space race (‘Ben, we’ve got to take that chance, unless we want the commies to beat us to it’). In 1962, young Peter Parker was bitten by an irradiated spider, and developed superhuman powers: the Amazing Spider-Man had arrived. Appearing a year later in 1963, the X-Men are human mutants, yet another reaction to the possibility of irradiated mutation. (In this version of popular culture, at least, exposure to radiation will give you superpowers rather than cancer.) Most strikingly of all, in May 1962, nuclear scientist Dr Bruce Banner was accidentally caught in the blast-zone of a nuclear test (the Bomb was set off by a communist saboteur). Rather than being vaporized, as you might think, Dr Banner’s body absorbs the ‘gamma radiation’ (the most powerful form of electromagnetic radiation: Lee and Kirby are not altogether making this up), which transforms him into an unstoppable raging colossus, the Incredible Hulk. What is the Hulk, if not the Bomb made flesh? A major figure of modern popular culture, the superhero, though superficially far removed from horror, derives in part from an oblique engagement with the implications of nuclear weapons.

  But whatever their origins, we are expected to celebrate the superheroes, in a way that is far too blithe and unconsidered for the edgy appeal of horror. In its incorporation of flesh and machine, the cyborg is a better representative contemporary figure. The cyborg is another of horror’s liminal boundary transgressors: flesh/machine; human/inhuman; living/inorganic; sentient/algorithmic; familiar/strange. In ‘The Uncanny’, Freud gives a sustained reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘The Sand-Man’, for him the definitive uncanny tale, whose narrator falls in love with an automaton, which he believes to be a living girl. A ‘doll which appears to be alive’, Freud writes, is a major source of the uncanny; ‘a particularly favourable condition for awakening uncanny feelings is created when there is uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one’. Given this, it is not surprising that one significant effect of computer-generated imagery is known as ‘uncanny valley’, describing the sense of displacement or even revulsion that audiences feel in the presence of human simulacra that, in their very lifelikeness, are utterly, frighteningly inhuman.

  In the Introduction, I discussed the way in which Unfriended explores the impossibility for the millennial generation of a meaningful life offline. In the same way, it seems that our contemporary Victor Frankenstein is not a mad scientist as such, but a computer geek. Brilliant, callow, nihilistic, and plutocratic, this figure is emblematic, or even symptomatic, in modern popular culture, from Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark to Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network (2010) to Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina (2015). In this last film, Isaac plays the CEO of Blue Book, an all-conquering search engine, who creates Ava (Alicia Vikander), a beautiful android who is, like Frankenstein’s Monster, in equal measures utterly sympathetic and ruthlessly murderous. Ava is the authentic creation of a post-millennial Modern Prometheus.

  6

  Afterword

  Horror Since the Millennium

  Where is horror today? Throughout this book, I have tried to stress the cultural proliferation of horror, and its plurality. Horror is tentacular, spreading everywhere. It is Protean, taking many forms. It manifests multiple personalities and has been put to many uses, made to suggest or articulate a variety of positions, ideologies, arguments, and worldviews, not all of them consistent and some of them downright contradictory. While some, including myself, would argue that horror is at its most powerful when it is at its most confrontational—violating taboos, flowing over boundaries, antagonizing respectability—there is no doubt that some of the finest horror shores up traditional worldviews.

  But some of the finest horror also comes from the margins. It arises out of the peripheral, the regional, the provincial, the neglected, the discarded: from Wuthering Heights to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, occluded identities insist on their presence. Some is deliberately cheap and shoddy, an affront to aesthetic as well as moral and social norms; it is the product of single-minded, bloody-minded independent film-makers, or reclusive, autodidactic writers who seem to be trying to remake the world, but are really addressing only themselves, and perhaps a tiny handful of cultish devotees.

  The classic example of this is H. P. Lovecraft, writing in solitude in Rhode Island and barely noticed by any cultural establishment during his own lifetime. M. R. James, the most establishmentarian of horror writers, was scornful of Lovecraft, maintaining that his ‘style is of the most offensive’. It is easy to see why. Lovecraft is, by any traditional literary standards, the author of some of the worst prose ever committed to print. ‘Squamous’, ‘gibbous’, ‘eldritch’, ‘obscene’, ‘hilarious’, ‘tenebrous’, ‘Cyclopean’: you never get far in his writings before coming across a characteristically purple Lovecraftian adjective. When I started teaching Lovecraft to undergraduate students in the 1990s, one of the unexpected pleasures of doing this was getting the class to compare our various editions of the stories, in creased and dog-eared, velvety paperbacks from forgotten publishers, each with a more lurid cover-image than the last. Whatever Lovecraft was, he was not respectable. Today, Lovecraft’s works are widely available in editions published by major academic and commercial publishers, impeccably edited, annotated, and introduced, sometimes by distinguished university professors. In 2005, the Library of America, the great national canon-making institution, published its edition of his works. H. P. Lovecraft has arrived.

  Like all processes of incorporation, the canonization of Lovecraft is double-edged. Recognition means respectability, and respectability is the very thing much horror exists to confront. But academic respectability is largely a harmless affair. More troubling is the incorporation of horror within consumer culture. This is not, of course, a qualitatively new phenomenon—like all forms of popular culture, horror has often eagerly sought its own marketization. But the accelerated incorporation of marginal identities since the millennium threatens the depoliticization of horror, and has led to the creation of a type of horror which has no possibility of ever being horrifying. I want to call this unhorror.

  Unhorror resembles horror, a
nd deploys, often in a very self-conscious and accomplished way, many of horror’s tropes. Its vampires are better looking and have sharper fangs. Its metamorphoses are seamless, using computer-generated imagery to transform its monsters in a way which comprehensively outdoes the attempts of the previous generation of make-up and visual effects artists. Its monsters are bigger and more destructive, from the city-wasting kaiju of Cloverfield (2008), Pacific Rim (2013), or Godzilla (2014) to the most recent iteration of King Kong, Kong: Skull Island (2017), whose giant ape is at least twice the size of the 1933 original—and, we are told, still growing.

  With the success of Twilight, I have suggested, horror became totally incorporated within capitalism. As a vehicle for marketing, including the mass marketing of itself, much post-Twilight unhorror falls firmly within the purview of what Adorno called the culture industry: like pre-digested baby food (to return to Adorno’s metaphor), it is art which does the thinking for its audience, and ideally allows no space for even the possibility of opposition. As such, it is not disturbing or scary, except perhaps to a Marxist.

  Indeed, the critic Catherine Spooner has identified a contemporary mode which she terms ‘Happy Gothic’, suggesting that ‘Contemporary Gothic can increasingly be termed as comic, romantic, celebratory, gleeful, whimsical, or even joyous.’ Spooner is quite correct here, and her analysis of this phenomenon is smart, illuminating, and nuanced, closing with an assertion of her belief that there remains a space within contemporary Gothic for ‘a counter-narrative…in which the tastes of women, children, teenagers, queer and subcultural communities are of particular significance’.

  It is certainly the case that horror appeals to more than one audience, and that the tastes of these audiences may not be compatible. The young adult audiences for paranormal romances such as Twilight, or for Charlie Higson’s zombie books, or Darren Shan’s Cirque Du Freak and Demonata books, or Patrick Ness’s brilliant dystopian novels, are not the same audiences as each other, let alone the same audiences as those who once thrilled to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Evil Dead. Perhaps, also, it’s the case that any identity can ultimately be commodified. But what’s missing is any sense that this contemporary Gothic is horrifying. Can it be that a ‘comic, romantic, celebratory, gleeful, whimsical…joyous’ cultural mode has replaced one which is obnoxious, rebarbative, confrontational, grotty, transgressive, nasty, and dangerous? If so, we have lost much, if only temporarily.

  It is customary, in overviews such as this, to survey the current scene of one’s subject and pronounce upon its multifarious complexity, as though this was some radical departure from a smoothly univocal tradition in the past. I have tried to show throughout the book that horror has always been complex, multifaceted, contradictory, and (at its best) troubling. Nevertheless, any attempt to capture the contemporary state of horror can only remark upon how disparate it seems.

  A viewer of mainstream Hollywood horror cinema in the early twenty-first century might well have concluded that the genre, in this manifestation at least, was creatively moribund. Cinematically, the US film industry appeared content to allow younger directors to plunder its back catalogue of horror films in what seems like an endless (re)cycle of sequels, remakes, and reboots, a corporate production line of unhorror, a waste land. Most particularly, American cinematic horror revisited landmark films of the 1970s, the key decade for American horror (in a 2016 Time Out ‘experts’ poll’ of ‘The 100 Best Horror Films’, six of the top ten were from the 1970s, and a further three from 1968, 1980, and 1982). There were, for example, remakes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (2003), The Hills Have Eyes (2006), and Carrie (2013), and even, unbelievably, of two of the most notorious films in the ultra-controversial rape-revenge subgenre, The Last House on the Left (2009) and I Spit on Your Grave (2010). Some of these 1970s films, in and around their original release, were viewed as genuinely dangerous cultural artefacts, drawing the horrified gaze of legislators, judges, censors, cultural commentators, and the media. Their post-millennial counterparts tend to come and go unnoticed, because they don’t matter.

  Whatever one may think of them, these 1970s originals were marked by a kind of demonic energy, made by film-makers operating far from the mainstream, with a great singleness of purpose and vision. These films were at least honestly sleazy. They even had, in their appalling way, a kind of integrity. While some of these films may have been reprehensible, they were not quite indefensible. In fact, in her enormously influential study of horror cinema, Men, Women and Chain Saws, the critic Carol J. Clover offered an intellectually coherent reading of perhaps the worst of them, Meir Zarchi’s infamous 1978 film I Spit on Your Grave, as being at the very least no worse than many mainstream films containing sexual violence, which tend to excite little commentary or controversy. Potentially, the film was even available for a reclaiming feminist analysis. I Spit on Your Grave certainly does not glamourize rape: its shocking scenes might be read as an attempt at a representation appropriate to the magnitude of the crime; the film’s point of view throughout is that of the woman, Jennifer Hills (Camille Keaton). It is a painful, violent, horrific film about pain, violation, and horror.

  In part this recycling is understandable, as the cultural consumers of one generation age into the cultural producers of the next, and revisit the works with which they grew up. The director and musician Rob Zombie, for example, is clearly besotted by and intellectually indebted to American 1970s independent horror cinema, whose tropes and images he reproduces in films such as House of 1000 Corpses (2003), The Devil’s Rejects (2005), Lords of Salem (2012), and 31 (2016), which are best viewed as 1970s pastiches (complete with cult period actors such as Karen Black, Sid Haig, Michael Berryman, Judy Geeson, and Ken Foree). Viewers of Zombie’s empty Halloween (2007) might conclude that the creativity and imagination of John Carpenter’s landmark 1978 slasher had been replaced by a mean-spirited nihilism.

  Oran Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007) was the most successful American horror film of the twenty-first century up until the release of It in September 2017. In profit-to-budget terms, it is perhaps the most successful film of all time. Viewed in isolation, the film is an exemplar of post-millennial unhorror. It relies on a ‘found footage’ technique which, following the success of The Blair Witch Project (1999), had been overused in horror cinema to the point of cliché. (And Blair Witch itself, although undeniably brilliant, had adapted its own found footage technique from Cannibal Holocaust.) It began a self-recycling franchise, which has produced six films to date. There is nothing distinctively contemporary about this, nor is it inherently problematic. I have already argued that this element of repetition is an important component of the ritual aspect of horror, and the notion of a cinematic horror franchise goes back as far as Universal Studios in the 1930s. But viewed in the context of a horror cinema which seemed to have run out of ideas, this repetition may be just another sign of creative bankruptcy.

  Paranormal Activity is also the foremost exponent of the cinematic technique which is most characteristic of post-millennial unhorror, the jump-shock—long periods of tense silence punctuated by loud noises (what the film critic Mark Kermode has termed the ‘quiet-quiet-BANG!’ technique, and sometimes known in cinematic parlance as ‘the Bus’, in honour of a celebrated scene in the 1941 Val Lewton–Jacques Tourneur film Cat People, in which a scene of great tension is broken by the loud hiss of a bus’s brakes). This is undeniably effective, but as a dominant aesthetic technique it is neither terror nor horror in the way that these terms have come to be understood. Anyone can sneak up behind you, shout ‘BOO!’ very loudly, and make you drop your ice cream. But this says nothing about the state of your soul, your place in the universe, the social function of violence, the evils of political inequality, or any of the other serious questions horror is accustomed to asking.

  Not all contemporary horror is unhorror; and even unhorror can be resisted. This can be done by reading its products wilfully against the grain of their intentions, or by
reading them not as individual works but within larger cultural and political trends and patterns, or by seeking out those works which are (still) produced far from the mainstream. A sense of critical purchase is even possible on Paranormal Activity. As the Introduction argued, horror often works contextually, giving oblique forms to cultural anxieties. Released in 2007, the year of the global financial crisis, Paranormal Activity may now be best viewed as the precursor of a modern economic horror, in a series of films focusing on the themes of property, inheritance, home invasion, or a more generalized financial anxiety. Though very different films, Drag Me to Hell (2009), You’re Next (2011), Dream House (2011), Would You Rather (2012), The Tall Man (2012), The Purge (2013), and mother! (2017) all revolve around these fundamentally economic anxieties. Christine, the protagonist of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, is cursed by an elderly woman whose house is to be repossessed after Christine refuses her application for a mortgage extension. The protagonists of Paranormal Activity, Katie and Micah, move into their new house in San Diego, and begin to be terrorized by a supernatural entity. Significantly, Micah is in financial services, working from home as a day trader. A reading of these films in the context of post-millennial economic horror might understand their supernatural visitations as a form of retributive justice.