Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  The number of scholarly publications on horror and Gothic fiction has exploded over the last few decades. There are now dozens of new books—anthologies, monographs, readers, companions—coming out every year. There are several peer-reviewed academic journals devoted to the study of scary entertainment, such as Gothic Studies and Horror Studies. There are regular conferences and meetings for academics interested in these topics. It has become quite legitimate for academics to work professionally with horror fiction, and academics are applying a range of theoretical perspectives to horror.

  In a review article from 2009, Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith note that “serious critical attention to ‘Gothic’ in literature and film” was “signalled most powerfully by David Punter’s The Literature of Terror” (1), which was published in 1980 and reissued in an updated two-volume version in 1996 (Punter 1996). Punter’s book, subtitled A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, traced the historical development of Gothic and horror fiction and documented how, for all its surface melodrama and outrageous supernaturalism, the genre engages with real and important psychological and social issues. Punter implicitly challenged a widespread perception of the genre as mere escapism. He invoked Freudian psychoanalysis to get into focus the strange, norm-breaking sexuality and repressed psychological complexes that seem to lurk in these texts, and he invoked Marxist social theory to get into focus the class struggle that plays an important role in much Gothic fiction. While Punter received some criticism for not being quite Freudian enough, and for not being quite Marxist enough (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1982)—for using psychoanalysis and historical materialism in a superficial way, merely as stepping stones for traditional literary and cultural analysis—he was widely praised for demonstrating that Gothic and horror fiction is worthy of serious, sustained academic attention. As Gina Wisker puts it, Punter’s study “made horror criticism respectable” (2005, 232).

  Another early and highly influential study, Robin Wood’s “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (1979), also used psychoanalysis and Marxism in its attempt to invest horror with real-world importance, particularly as an ideological vehicle. Wood claimed that horror films can be either progressive or reactionary in the way that they engage with “the Other” as it is represented in the figure of the monster (1979, 11). Monsters, in Wood’s Freudian perspective, are embodiments of whatever a culture represses or oppresses. For example, a culture may repress homosexuality, women, and/or the proletariat. These repressed concepts are then transcoded into monstrous agents in horror films. From this perspective, a film such as The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973) invests female sexuality with a horrifying quality. Regan gets possessed by the demon as she is on the cusp of puberty—possibly because her father is not around and her mom is sexually and politically liberated—and starts masturbating with a crucifix and using very nasty language. The film thus perpetuates a pernicious reactionary sexual politics, according to which female sexuality should be kept on a very tight patriarchal leash lest it turn monstrous. Wood, like Punter, provided an argument for how and why to take horror films seriously. However, he was more interested in using his horror film analyses as radical weapons in an ideological war than he was in the films as objects of disinterested academic inquiry. He added to his theoretical brew of Freudo-Marxism a good dose of ideological critique, arguing for the necessity of this particular concoction thus: “It is here, through the medium of psychoanalytic theory, that Feminism and Gay Liberation join forces with Marxism in their progress towards a common aim, the overthrow of patriarchal capitalist ideology” (Wood 1979, 7). Wood’s focus on horror monsters as ideological acts allowed him to get a fix—biased as it was—on the politics of horror, but also made him invest those monsters with untenable psychosexual significance and overlook their literal, visual significance.

  Wood wanted to change the world, and he saw his study of American horror films as a means to that end. His essay is symptomatic of a greater trend in literary and film study in the late twentieth century, a trend that Jonathan Gottschall calls the “liberationist paradigm” (2010). Gottschall argues that academic literary study has since its inception been concerned with providing for itself a rationale, a raison d’être, sometimes feverishly so. While the scientists are busy sending people to the moon, and the biologists are helping cook up vaccines against deadly diseases, what good are academic literary scholars? It is out of such feelings of inferiority and insufficiency, says Gottschall, that literary scholars in the late 1960s started embracing an “active commitment to achieving radical or progressive political ends through scholarly means” (462). Wood certainly was driven by such a commitment. In a retrospective essay published 25 years after The American Nightmare, the book in which his essay was printed, Wood reflected: “What was crucially determinant of The American Nightmare was our political commitment—leftist, radical, and with at least an interest in Marxist ideology and especially the confluence of Marx and Freud in 1970s thought. That commitment was vastly more important to us than any desire to tell ‘the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ about the horror film” (2004, xiv). That kind of rationale for film study issues a blanket invitation for distorted, biased scholarship. Political activism certainly has its place in the world, but it should not be the driving force of film or literary study—our aim should be to get at the truth of our objects of study.

  In Gottschall’s analysis, a commitment to the liberationist paradigm is usually bound up with a commitment to poststructuralist epistemology and social constructivism, with their concomitant rejection of biology as a significant causal factor in human social and imaginative life (2010). As I mentioned above, humanists have been busy for decades ignoring biology or actively denying it any shaping role in human lives. Academic horror study is no exception. Poststructuralist thinking, primarily Foucauldian cultural critique, has blended with Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxist social theory to produce paradigms that have become highly influential in the field of horror study, paradigms that focus on excavating the ideological and psychosexual dynamics of horror texts. Take as an example the influential work of Barbara Creed on the “monstrous-feminine,” defined by Creed as “what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” (1996, 35). Creed builds on the work of the theorist Julia Kristeva, who in turn built on Lacan, who reinterpreted Freud. Creed then adds a dose of radical feminism to critique the gender politics of horror films. According to Creed, horror films tend to depict feminine monsters that threaten patriarchy or “the order of the phallus” (43), in a Lacanian turn of phrase derived from Kristeva. Like so many other critics adopting a Freudian or neo-Freudian perspective, Creed sees repressed complexes everywhere; she claims that the “horror film’s obsession with blood, particularly the bleeding body of woman, where her body is transformed into the ‘gaping wound’ [i.e., a menstruating vagina], suggests that castration anxiety is a central concern of the horror film” (44). The argument is unconvincing because it rests on a flimsy symbolic correspondence that can be legitimate only if predicated on an a priori acceptance of a whole string of dubious Freudian assumptions (Tudor 1997, 450–451).

  A Freudian perspective on horror can thus have a profoundly distorting quality. Consider this claim: “horror cinema always trades on irrationality, and irrationality, in psychoanalytic terms, is always sexual in origin” (Dumas 2014, 22). That may be true in psychoanalytic terms, but then those terms are false. As I discuss in later chapters, the fear of dangerous, supernatural, or psychotic agents—what Dumas means by “irrationality”—has roots in psychological dispositions that evolved in response to threats in the environment, not in psychosexual repression. Moreover, the claim that horror always trades on irrationality is so broad as to be virtually meaningless. It doesn’t tell us anything interesting about the genre. Consider also this statement: “one might say that all violence in horror films is always about castration and punishment, and therefore always about gender” (Dumas 2014, 26). It’s anot
her Freudian distortion. Freud himself (2003) reduced the fear of amputation generally to the specific fear of castration, but the claim rests on a putative symbolic correspondence—losing an eye is sort of like losing the penis—and no empirical science. Taken to its logical conclusion, this idea should make females (and other individuals who have no penis) impervious to horror stories that dwell on cut-off limbs. That’s clearly not the case.

  As another example of the distorting effect of a psychoanalytical perspective, consider Barbara Creed’s assertion that the shark in Jaws (Spielberg 1975) is really a “toothed vagina/womb” (Creed 1996, 56). The great white has teeth, yes, and a lot of them. Its mouth is concave, as is a vagina, and cavernous, as is a womb. But does the shark register, even subconsciously, as a toothed vagina/womb for even a fraction of viewers? Is there any empirical evidence to suggest, even circumstantially, that the sight of a shark evokes in spectators, consciously or subconsciously, the notion of a vagina/womb with teeth? And if that is not the case, what epistemological or interpretive value could Creed’s reading have? I see very little. Nonetheless, the reading is representative of psychoanalytical interpretive scholarship. In the psychoanalytical perspective, horror is not really about horrible things, it’s about repressed desire presented in metaphorical guise, which allegedly explains why we react with horror to symbolic depictions of our most secret, repressed fantasies.

  It is a curious fact that Freud’s legacy is clearly registered in horror study today—in orthodox as well as revisionist versions (Schneider 2004). While orthodox psychoanalysis has been relegated to the historical curiosity cabinet in psychology departments, it somehow survives in literary university departments and, to a lesser extent, film and media departments. Perhaps this is because Freud’s theory has tremendous creative, generative power; it is like a Rube Goldberg contraption with a receptacle for texts at one end and an interpretative spout at the other, churning out thrillingly arcane and counterintuitive explanations. It is not hard to see why some literary and media critics find the Freudian framework appealing: it gives them an illusion of privileged access to a hidden layer of textual reality, discernible only to highly-trained specialists. It also allows them to talk endlessly about sexual organs, but with straight-faced gravitas. Mark Jancovich has a different explanation. He claims that psychoanalytical approaches to horror “reinvest horror with seriousness. Through psychoanalysis, the fantastical nature of many horror plots can be read not as escapism, but as an attempt to deal with repressed materials” (2002, 21). Psychoanalysis when wedded to ideological critique, such as Marxism or gender politics or queer theory, lets critics feel that they get a handle on the deep structure of horror and connect it to burning political questions.

  Psychoanalysis naturally has a place in interpretive practice insofar as the work under discussion is shaped by psychoanalytical thinking; Freud’s theory profoundly influenced twentieth-century intellectual life, and obviously many artists were inspired by his ideas regardless of their scientific validity (Schneider 2004). Making sense of those artists’ works requires an understanding of psychoanalysis. But something must be wrong if a literary or media scholar can legitimately use orthodox psychoanalysis as an explanatory paradigm, just as something would be wrong if a professional astrophysicist could legitimately pursue astrological studies. As a minimal epistemological requirement, literary and media theories that build on extraneous theories (e.g. from psychology, sociology, or linguistics) should use only theories that have been empirically validated in their home disciplines. If orthodox psychoanalysis has been rejected as an explanatory paradigm in psychological science, might it somehow be true or valid in literary and media study nonetheless? I don’t see how. Literary and media theorists who talk about minds talk about the same ontological entities as psychologists do. Claiming that orthodox psychoanalysis is valid as an explanatory paradigm within literary and media study is a sophistical maneuver that only makes sense if one supposes that “science and literature occupy themselves with ontological and epistemic realms that are radically separate from one another” (Carroll 2008, 329), if those minds that are absorbed in storyworlds and enjoy films are radically, qualitatively different from those minds that psychologists study. That is clearly not the case.

  Punter’s and Wood’s pioneering efforts made horror an acceptable area of academic study. Many of their successors got lost in thickets of radical speculation, but the fact remains that by the end of the twentieth century, a multitude of critical offshoots from the liberationist paradigm were crowding the scene of academic horror study—“revisionist psychoanalysis and Marxism, feminism and gender studies, post-structural deconstruction, ‘new’ historicism and cultural studies, and the even more recent extensions of all these, especially the latter, into queer theory, critical race studies, postcolonial criticism” (Hogle and Smith 2009, 1, see also Baldick and Mighall 2012, Brewster 2014, Hogle 2006, Hughes 2006). In my view, it is a good thing that horror fiction is now being taken seriously as an object of academic analysis, but theoretical pluralism is not unconditionally desirable. Jonathan Gottschall makes a strong case for “shrinking the space of possible explanations” in humanities scholarship (2010, 464). One way of shrinking possibility space is by weeding out those approaches that rely on defunct theories from other disciplines. If psychology and psychiatry have abandoned orthodox psychoanalysis because it is scientifically invalid, literary and film scholars shouldn’t use orthodox psychoanalysis as an explanatory paradigm. If economists have abandoned Marxism, then so should humanists, and so on. In line with Gottschall’s argument, I think it is problematic that the currently most prevalent academic approaches to horror either operate on false epistemological assumptions and are based on theoretically obsolete psychological foundations—or ignore the psychological underpinnings of horror, as is the case in most historicist approaches.

  Scholars of horror who build their theories and interpretive practice on scientifically defunct theories of mental functioning, such as psychoanalysis, would benefit from leaving Freud and his followers behind, turning instead to modern naturalistic psychology when they explore the psychological underpinnings of the genre. Rather than being compelled to recycle epistemologically and ontologically dubious claims about Oedipus complexes, vagina/wombs, and the transcendent significance of the Phallus, they could have recourse to the latest findings and theories in evolutionary psychology, human behavioral ecology, affective and cognitive neuroscience, and so on (Carroll 2010). Likewise, scholars who ignore biology and the evolutionary underpinnings of mental functioning, including many gender-oriented horror scholars (e.g., Grant 1996, Humphrey 2014) and those horror scholars who work in a historicist (e.g., Loewenstein 2005, Phillips 2005, Skal 2001) or philosophical framework (e.g., Carroll 1990, Schneider and Shaw 2003), would benefit from the deeper explanatory reach provided by an evolutionary paradigm (Clasen 2012d). Historicist horror scholars, in Phillips’s phrasing, tend to look for ways in which horror films “resonate” with aspects of their culture, typically widespread anxieties that in these films are given metaphorical expression (2005, 7). As an example, Phillips reads Romero’s bleak Night of the Living Dead (1968) as an imaginative response to the sociopolitical tensions of the late 1960s. There is some truth to such a symptomatic reading, but as I show in my chapter on the film, an evolutionary approach can subsume such a reading within a more comprehensive and analytically rich framework. Yes, Romero’s film did register a certain disillusioned Zeitgeist, but it did so within an emotionally and imaginatively engaging representation that effectively targets evolved mechanisms for survival in dangerous environments. That’s why the film retains at least some of its power to engage and disturb, even in sociopolitical environments far-removed from the American late-1960s.

  In this book, and building on previous research efforts—my own, as well as those of others (Boyd 2005, 2009, Clasen 2004, 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2012d, 2012e, 2016, Carroll 1995, 2004, 2011, Carroll et al. 2
012, Carroll 2012b, Gottschall and Wilson 2005, Gottschall 2012, Grodal 2009, Plantinga and Smith 1999, Swanger 2008)—I argue for a biocultural approach to horror. Such an approach integrates attention to cultural particulars within a biologically informed framework. I do so partly to take advantage of advances in the evolutionary social sciences and partly as a corrective to academic horror studies that have for a long time been mired in untenably reductive, monocausal explanatory paradigms (versions of cultural constructivism) and a reliance on arcane and unscientific psychologies. But given that academic horror study is home to a wide variety of critical schools and approaches with different aims, methods, and theoretical convictions, do we really need yet another approach, the biocultural one? The rhetorical question is ill-conceived, because bioculturalism is not just another approach. It is an attempt to subsume viable existing approaches within a framework that is vertically integrated with the social and ultimately the natural sciences (Carroll 2010). Such a framework can only improve our understanding of horror fiction, and that is why we need it.