Sleeping with the Lights On
Page 14
Produced by del Toro, the Spanish director J. A. Bayona’s haunted house film The Orphanage (2007) is a masterly example of a traditional ghost story adapted to modern cinema. The sensibilities of [REC] (2007) are altogether more contemporary. Like so much post-millennial horror, [REC] is a found footage film. Set entirely in a Barcelona apartment building which has been sealed off by the authorities owing to an outbreak of a rabies-like zombification virus, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s electrifying film draws much of its effect from its extraordinarily traditionalist fidelity to the classical dramatic unities of place, time, and action—one building, one night, one relentless narrative.
Where, finally, is horror today? The location of horror moves with culture, I have argued. We may be seeing signs that it is moving, with geopolitics, away from an American axis. It may also be that, in our concentration on horror’s traditional media, fiction and film, we have been, if not looking in the wrong places, then certainly not looking in all the right places.
When it was released in 1992, Fran Rubel Kuzui’s film Buffy the Vampire Slayer received mixed reviews, and passed without much notice. Unsatisfied with both the film and its reception, its writer Joss Whedon tried again, adapting it for television. The first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was broadcast on 10 March 1997, with Sarah Michelle Gellar, an authentic nineties ‘scream queen’, in the title role (in that same year, 1997, she appeared in the neo-slashers I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2). Looking back from the perspective of twenty years, it is tempting to view this moment as marking a tectonic shift in American horror. Playing over seven seasons (1997–2003), Buffy developed into a work, and a world, of considerable complexity, intelligence, and imagination, the very antithesis of the risk-averse, compromised, moribund condition of much mainstream cinematic American unhorror around the millennium, which seemed incapable of ever surprising or delighting its audience. Buffy also came into being with the internet, and so its success was greatly augmented by the rise of the blogosphere, and by the online culture of fandom. It also captured the academic imagination: the sub-discipline of ‘Buffy studies’, combining institutional academic criticism and theory with fandom and unlicensed criticism in the public sphere, has produced a small library of often very sophisticated cultural and textual analysis.
Buffy was one of the early signs that the millennial generation was experiencing what is often characterized as a (or the) Golden Age of television, from The Sopranos (1999–2007) to The Wire (2002–8) to Breaking Bad (2008–13) to Game of Thrones (2011–18). The medium has shed much of its cultural inferiority complex relative to film. First broadcast in 2013, Hannibal took the continuing story of our great modern demon to creative heights seemingly foreclosed to film versions after Brett Ratner’s unforgivably lumpen 2002 adaptation of Red Dragon. With seasons entitled ‘Murder House’, ‘Asylum’, ‘Coven’, ‘Freakshow’, ‘Hotel’, ‘Roanoke’, and ‘Cult’, American Horror Story (first broadcast in 2011) engages with the satisfyingly familiar tropes and locations of horror. The Louisiana-set first season of True Detective (2014) drew explicitly on the history of American weird fiction, most particularly with its references to the lost land of Carcosa, originally to be found in Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow and in the works of Ambrose Bierce.
However, from a historical perspective this Golden Age of television might come to be viewed as a last gasp. Certainly, it is a product of the moment in which the dominant cultural medium of the second half of the twentieth century, television, began to be subsumed within the dominant cultural medium of the twenty-first, the internet.
What might authentic internet horror look like? One place to look might be at podcasts such as the hugely enjoyable fake radio show Welcome to Night Vale or the riotously inventive Down Below the Reservoir. The brilliance of these podcasts rests on the rather twentieth-century notion that they are produced and controlled by highly creative auteurs (Joseph Kink and Jeffrey Cranor for Night Vale, Graham Tugwell for Reservoir). Another distinctive internet product, meme culture, has the potential to be altogether more decentred and anarchic. It may be uncontrollable.
Here is one example. On 10 June 2009, a pair of photoshopped images appeared on Something Awful, a comedy website and online forum. Credited to Victor Surge, the photographs showed two groups of children, photographed in black and white. In the background, blurred and indistinct, was a tall figure dressed in black, and seemingly with tentacles for arms. This was the Slender Man (Figure 11). Beneath the images were these captions:
Figure 11. The Slender Man.
‘we didn’t want to go, we didn’t want to kill them, but its persistent silence and outstretched arms comforted us and surrounded us at the same time…’
1983, photographer unknown, presumed dead
One of two recovered photographs from the Stirling City Library blaze. Notable for being taken the day which fourteen children vanished and for what is referred to as ‘The Slender Man’. Deformities cited as film defects by originals. Fire at library occurred one week later. Actual photograph confiscated as evidence.
1986, photographer: Mary Thomas, missing since June 13th, 1986.
Lacking any kind of central controlling narrative beyond a vague but palpable sense of menace and threat, particularly to children, the Slender Man took on a life of its own as a self-replicating, evolving internet meme, recurring first in user-generated ‘creepypasta’ online fiction and art, and in YouTube videos, video games, and more generally as an elusive cultural referent. On 31 May 2014, two twelve-year-old Wisconsin girls stabbed a classmate nineteen times after a night reading online Slender Man creepypasta. They did this, they said, in order to become the Slender Man’s servants, or in the language of the internet, his ‘proxies’. Fears that the Slender Man seems capable of infecting reality, and transforming it, have led to the most recent of horror’s ongoing series of moral panics. The case went to trial in September 2017. The defence attorney claimed the girls had ‘swirled down into madness together’. The defendants, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, were sentenced to forty years and twenty-five years in mental hospitals, the maximum sentences possible for their respective crimes.
The internet is too vast, and too fast, for a book of this size. It has given horror an infinite library in which to play, an endless labyrinth in which to hide. The Slender Man is its most distinctive monster thus far. He is the scariest thing in ages. But there will be others.
Further Reading
Quotations from classical texts throughout are from the Loeb Classical Library editions. Quotations from the Bible are from the King James Version.
All references to Freud are to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955).
Introduction
Some of the arguments in the early part of this chapter are informed by Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London: Continuum, 2005). The insights of Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge, 1966) inform the whole of this book. For palaeohistorians and the importance of art for the formation of Homo sapiens, see, for example, Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), chapter 1; Jill Cook, Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind (London: British Museum, 2013); Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage, 2011), part 1. For ritual, see Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (London: Fontana, 1993). For moral panics and video nasties, see Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972); David Kerekes and David Slater, See No Evil: Banned Films and Video Controversy (Manchester: Headpress, 2000); Martin Barker and Julian Petley, eds, Ill Effects: The Media/Violence Debate, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2001). For the Gothic, see Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996); Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford Un
iversity Press, 2012). Stephen King’s writings on horror can be found in Danse Macabre: The Anatomy of Horror (London: Futura, 1982) and On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000). For the uncanny, see Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’ (Works, vol. 17). For the weird, see Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016). For the ‘culture industry’ and popular culture, see Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991); Curtis White, The Middle Mind: Why Consumer Culture is Turning Us Into the Living Dead (London: Penguin, 2003); John Storey, An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1993); Dominic Sandbrook, The Great British Dream Factory: The Strange History of Our National Imagination (London: Penguin, 2015). The major work on sociophobics is David L. Scruton, ed., Sociophobics: The Anthropology of Fear (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986). For the classic account of reverse colonization, see Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle: Identity and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
Chapter 1: Monsters
For general studies of monsters, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui, eds, Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Freud’s writing on taboo can be found in Totem and Taboo (Works, vol. 13). For an excellent overview of cannibalism, see Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). For a hugely influential reading, see William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). The best single work on vampires remains Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber, 1992) is an invaluable guide and sourcebook. For the folkloric vampire, see Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death: Folklore and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). For an account of the vampire’s journey to the cinema, which includes the quotation from Maxim Gorky, see David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Stage to Screen (London: Deutsch, 1990). Much less has been written on zombies, but Roger Luckhurst, Zombies: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion, 2015) is superb.
Chapter 2: The Occult and the Supernatural
For Weber on disenchantment, see Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). Conan Doyle’s comments on spiritualism are from Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation and the Vital Message (London: Psychic Press, 1981). For general studies, see Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture, 2 vols (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005–6). For magic, see Éliphas Lévi, The History of Magic Including a Clear and Precise Exposition of its Procedure, its Rites and its Mysteries, trans. Arthur Edward Waite (London: William Rider, 1922 [1860]); Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science During the First Thirteen Centuries of Our Era, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923). For the section on the Devil, I draw heavily on Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). See also Peter Stanford, The Devil: A Biography (London: Heinemann, 1996); Gareth J. Medway, Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001); Darren Oldridge, The Devil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Everyone should read Rollo Ahmed, The Black Art (London: Senate, 1994). Much has been written on ghosts and the ghost story, but for this chapter I have particularly drawn on Owen Davies, The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (London: Palgrave, 2007). For a comprehensive modern critical account, see Scott Brewster and Luke Thurston, eds, The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (London: Routledge, 2017).
Chapter 3: Horror and the Body
Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1865) is a fascinating book. Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ is discussed in ‘An Infantile Neurosis’ (Works, vol. 17). For fairy tales, see Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London and Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995). David Cronenberg’s interviews can be found in Chris Rodley, ed., Cronenberg on Cronenberg (London: Faber and Faber, 1997); Clive Barker’s are collected at
Chapter 4: Horror and the Mind
For madness as a social problem, see Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization (London: Routledge, 2001); R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). For Victorian asylums, see Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty, and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (London: Vintage, 2013). Psychoanalytic accounts of the double can be found in Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, and in ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (Works, vol. 14), and in Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study, trans. Harry J. Tucker (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012 [1914]). Horror and the suburbs is discussed in Bernice Murphy, The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009). For influential analyses of the slasher movie, on which I draw here, see Vera Dika, ‘The Stalker Film 1979–81’, in Gregory A. Waller, ed., American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain-Saws (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Chapter 5: Science and Horror
The quotations from Carl Sagan are all from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (London: Headline, 1997). For the ‘two cultures’, see C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). For scientific materialism (or naturalism), see Gowan Dawson and Bernard Lightman, eds, Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Community, Identity, Continuity (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2014). Popular cultural mad science is discussed in Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); David J. Skal, Screams of Reason: Mad Science and Modern Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Christopher Frayling, Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (London: Reaktion, 2005). The information on Faust is from Leo Ruickbie, Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician (Stroud: History Press, 2009). The section on the politics of monstrosity in Frankenstein and beyond draws heavily on Chris Baldick, In Frankenstein’s Shadow: Myth, Monstrosity, and Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
Afterword: Horror Since the Millennium
For contemporary Gothic, see Catherine Spooner, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). For ecohorror, see Bernice M. Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Andrew Smith and William Hughes, eds, Ecogothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). For an impres
sive overview of folk horror, see Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Leighton Buzzard: Auteur, 2017); see also Robert Macfarlane, ‘The Eeriness of the English Countryside’, The Guardian, 10 April 2015. For TV horror, see Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott, TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013).
Index
Adorno, Theodor 21, 56, 141
Aeschylus 76, 128 Eumenides 76
Prometheus Bound 128
Prometheus Unbound 128
Ahmed, Rollo 67–70
Albertus Magnus 126
Allen, Woody 108
American Horror Story 104, 160
American Werewolf in London, An 84, 94
Amityville Horror, The 70, 147
Anthropophagous: The Beast 11
Arens, William 32
Argento, Dario 120
Aronofsky, Darren 109 Black Swan 109
Asylum 104
Auerbach, Nina 34
Austen, Jane 16 Northanger Abbey 16
Baker, Rick 94
Balagueró, Jaume 159
Banks, Leslie 157
Baring-Gould, Sabine 87, 89
Barker, Clive 14, 94–7 Books of Blood, The 96–7