PHILOSOPHIZING HORROR (pt. 1)
9:54pm, June 28, 2008
In anticipation of what I hope will be a healthy conversation/debate on the aesthetics of horror cinema, I'm posting a short introductory piece on horror narratives below. Look forward to your thoughts! -ss
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Horror as a narrative mode can be traced back to the origins of representational art. Cave paintings depicting terrifying creatures wreaking havoc on defenseless humans find contemporary analogues in the monster movies playing to packed houses in theaters across the globe. The timeless popularity of horror as a cross-medium genre appealing primarily to young men and women - perhaps as adolescent rite of passage, or as practice ground for the display of socially-sanctioned gender roles - is well-established, and the primitive human need to consume fictional tales of horror indisputable.
When theorising horror, three questions frequently arise:
(1) What is the main affect that horror narratives seek to engender in audiences?
(2) Why is it that people are so often frightened by what they know isn't real?
(3) Why do so many of us take pleasure from threatening beings and scenarios that would truly horrify if encountered in real life?
There are several different schools of thought concerning the first question above. Sigmund Freud characterised the 'uncanny' as that which arouses dread and horror: 'something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression'. In contrast, contemporary philosopher and film theorist Noël Carroll invokes the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas, who attributes feelings of disgust and aversion to apparent transgressions or violations of a particular culture's accepted norms and values. For Carroll, horror narratives produce an admixture of fear and disgust in audiences through the dangerous, unnatural figure of the monster.
Tzvetan Todorov, meanwhile, distinguishes between the 'fantastic', the 'uncanny', and the 'marvelous' in literature, all of which find a place within the horror genre. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by someone familiar only with the laws of nature, confronting a seemingly supernatural event. The uncanny for Todorov ultimately offers a resolution governed by natural laws; while the marvelous offers a resolution governed by supernatural laws.
With respect to the question why we are so often frightened by what we know isn't real, one influential theory (elaborated by Carroll and others) holds that, when people consume horror fictions, the only thing required is that they 'entertain the thought' of the frightening entities and events in question -- a belief in the monster's existence is not necessary for feelings of horror to result.
As for the seemingly perverse pleasures often produced by fictional horror narratives, a popular view has it that consuming such fictions is akin to riding a roller coaster: although we get the adrenaline rush that comes with feeling momentarily unprotected and out of control, we know that ultimately no harm will come to us. As film scholar Isabel Pinedo puts it, fictional horror allows for a 'bounded experience' of fear.
HORROR FILMMAKING IN THE AGE OF TERROR
12:23pm, April 24, 2008
For most Americans, the latest Age of Terror officially opened when the planes hit the towers on September 11, 2001…although the denizens of a dozen or more countries around the world all have good (meaning terrible) reasons for setting this date back by years or even decades.
Because film is our main medium for both reflecting and reinterpreting large-scale social, cultural, and political events, it came as no surprise to find in the weeks immediately following 9/11 that Hollywood was engaging in some strategic self-censorship (the establishment of the MPAA ratings system in 1968 was just an earlier and more dramatic example of this same strategy). Films like Big Trouble, Windtalkers, and Collatoral Damage, the latter with its predictably black-and-white take on the terrorist threat and America’s (or at least Schwarzenneger’s) ability to respond to it, were postponed for a time. And other ones, like Serendipity and Spider-Man, reshot or else digitally erased images of the Twin Towers from the final cut, out of an impulse not to interrupt their romanticized, comic-book fantasies with real-life tragedy. However, the absence of the World Trade Center in the New York City cinematic skyline proved more disturbing to American audiences than those films in which the Towers were left in for a posthumous cameo.
All of this is to beg the question: What is the relationship between horror in the world and horror in the movies? It’s interesting to note that perennially war-torn countries like Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and the former Yugoslavia, despite their long cinematic histories, have few if any horror films to their credit. It is tempting to conclude from this fact that the omnipresence of violence in everyday life makes the fictional portrayal of violence—horror films arguably occupying a position at the extreme end of violent genre filmmaking—both pointless and in very poor taste. Although there is certainly some truth to this argument, one shouldn’t overstate the conclusion, considering that a number of formerly or currently divided nations such as Korea, Germany, India, and the Czech Republic can all boast significant horror film traditions of their own.
It is tempting to assert that filmmaking in the age of terror is ultimately no different than filmmaking in any other age, if only because movies—horror movies included—inevitably offer a temporary escape from reality, even when they exploit real-life fears and anxieties. Documentaries are the closest cinema comes to capturing the real, but as we all know, documentaries themselves are often subjective, rhetorical, and misleading. The cutting edge of horror over the past ten years has been the introduction of variations on the mock, “snuff,” and pseudo-documentary (e.g., The Last Broadcast, Thesis, Man Bites Dog, The Blair Witch Project, The St. Francisville Experiment, Special Effects, and The Last Horror Movie), in which the aesthetics of the form serve to blur beyond recognition the boundaries between fact and fiction. 2007-2008 in particular has seen the horror mock-doc reach new heights, both commercially and creatively, what with the Spanish sensation [Rec] and its upcoming US remake Quarantine, the J.J. Abrams-produced Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead by George Romero, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, American Zombie, and Oren Peli’s Slamdance sensation Paranormal Activity. Cannibal Holocaust, we salute you.
In any case, one thing is certain: as human beings we always have and always will need fictional horror in our lives. Whether to distract us from the real thing or force us to contemplate it is for each of us to decide for ourselves.
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