by Jonathan Kieran

It’s hardly surprising that horror movies have developed a complex about the nature of their own content.  Physical violence, cruelty, and retribution, while largely uncontroversial elsewhere, must as material for the horror film be provided with a rationale at all costs, lest their presence be judged gratuitous.  For a sector of the horror audience not limited to the most instinctively censorious, violence unmotivated by story means poor filmmaking.  The horror film, having internalized this standard, responds in several ways. A fussily sustained plot, never mind how dramatically egregious, is cooked up to provide a logical path from killing to killing  The perpetrators are granted radical moral systems justify their castigation of innocents.  At all costs, a display of fleshly transgression must occur for a reason.  And while a liberal helping of gore is the common denominator of all contemporary horror films, few if any films are ever made about the visual experience of violence.  The most thoughtful of recent horror films have sought to invest the element of bodily harm with aura of “seriousness” of more laboriously developed characters and subtext (Wolf Creek and The Descent follow these strategies, respectively).  While it persists in reproducing the formal values of the film industry at large, the horror film abjures much of the aesthetic potential of its defining element: filmed displays of violent death.

Writing in 1969 about pornographic literature, Susan Sontag described its universe—the site that the form creates for its action and the rules that define its possibilities—thus:

It has the power to ingest and metamorphose and translate all concerns that are fed into it, reducing everything into the one negotiable currency of the erotic imperative.  All action is conceived of as a set of sexual exchanges.

This radical aesthetic situation—the formal universe being dominated by a single quality—seems to me repeatable in the genre of horror.  Works of pornography view everything through the lens of sex: they are like unceasing variations on a small group of themes, all played in the same key. Sontag calls this state of affairs “totality.”  Superficially speaking, the winnowing-down of the horror film to the condition of pornography may be more expeditious in light of their shared preoccupation with the human body and reliance as entertainment on visceral arousal.  The crucial point of correspondence, however, is the existence in each of a pervading quality and a repetitive type of relationship between items in the universe.  The relation of the intruding object to the victimized human body is of primary importance in the horror film, and its corollary quality is that of bodily vulnerability.  I will call this quality, this relationship, and the universe that they create “body horror” for short.

The primary sensible trace of a fictional universe—the most powerful key to an evaluation of the rules that govern the action in it—is the sense one gets while watching of the possibilities of what could conceivably happen.  Films that replicate the usual human universe are quite predictable in their possibilities: though what happens might surprise the audience, it won’t defy what they perceive to be possible. A fantasy film, likewise, is judged in part on its ability to obey the rules of the universe with which it replaces the human one.  This is by extension true of horror films, whose glimpses of life outside of episodic violence are often governed by human conventions.  Whatever vignettes of bodily intrusion and vulnerability may follow, however, present an altered set of possibilities; the universe of normal human relationships is undercut by the transition to one of body-hatred—physical misanthropy—and extraordinary victimization.  All horror movies are concerned largely with the play of these two universes.  The first killing to make the break between them, even if it is not material to the story, is the most important to the film’s aesthetic impact, and is often left to the last possible moment (as in Halloween).  After the breach is made, the film is in a sense successful insofar as it can banish the trace of the one universe from the other, keeping the non-protagonist victims in a state of cheerful oblivion until the proper moment.  The relative state of knowledge regarding who is dead and why serves to make the plunge of the innocent into the universe of body-horror as profound as possible, and dramatic irony is exploited for the suspense that drives the remaining action of the film.

So much for the conventional film of body-horror.  Throughout its narrative trajectory, the negative universe of bodily violence is strategically deployed as a counterpoint to that of naïve security.  And yet: any attentive viewer of the horror films has, at one point or another, had the experience of this rigorously ordered scheme giving way to something else.  This happens most easily when the mechanics of the body itself are broken.  There is a scene in the first Sleepaway Camp movie where a Psycho-style shower curtain knifing becomes a full rear-entry evisceration, in apparent disregard of the bony structures of the human spine (this exaggeration is repeated in one of the more extravagant killings in Candyman).  Similarly, the night nurse being boiled to death in a hot tub in Halloween II.  Yes, the body-hating antagonists are super-strong, but in this they are no different than the Western’s super-sighted Apaches or the preternaturally cunning enemy in the war movies.  What stuns is the violation not only of the rules of physicality—of having human form—but as well of the regularities of the usual universe.  The body becomes a limp, boneless thing to be butchered, and a piece of therapeutic furniture becomes a cauldron where its flesh can be cooked.

Better still when breaches in the niceties of realistic story-violence occur not through the zeal of special effects designers but as a result of the planful elements of the film’s premise.  Although the warped causality of the dream has always formed the evil genius of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, the visualization of Freddy Kreuger’s dream-stalking evolves over the course of the series from slo-mo gore from nowhere (Johnny Depp’s death in the first film is the standout example) into fantastically externalized death dreams.  The series’ third installment (subtitled Dream Warriors) takes place on the adolescent ward in a psychiatric hospital.  In it, Freddy Kreuger appears to a vacuous teenage girl on the late-night television program that she is enjoying in the ward recreation room.  First, he bursts through the chest of the host.  His face then fills the screen in a close-up as his knife-hands bursting through the sides of the television. As Freddy’s head presses through the roof of the television in a rubbery prosthetic, the rabbit ears twitch like the antennae of a sneering moon-man.  With a parting one-liner (“Welcome to prime-time, bitch!”), he forces the girl’s head through the television screen.

The scene, on one hand, is the entirely explicable (and, no doubt, psycho-analyzable) product of hypnogogic television and the overtired, psychoactive-addled adolescent brain.  Yet, as always, the unfortunate is found dead in the morning.  The form of the dream sequence—repeated in all the film’s killings—plays perfectly into the conventional horror’s dramatic scheme, its unreality soothing the doubts of Nightmare’s daylight world of Kreuger-deniers while its mortal efficacy drives the tension between the realistic and horror-driven universes.  So Freddy’s twilight rampages are more ingenious recapitulations of the Michael Myers/Jason Voorhees-style slashing.  And yet, they are more:  Freddy’s jump from TV-land to murderous reality, his ability to crawl through normally compartmentalized areas of experience, his magus-like influence over time, space, and material, bring the killings of A Nightmare on Elm Street a step beyond the inverted world of the super-psycho-killer.  Despite occasional efforts to turn Freddy’s fancy to quipping comic-book villainry (see the rabbit ears), his butchery is insistently terrifying because it surpasses the relatively simple universe of body-hatred versus vulnerability through a vertiginous telescoping of possibility.  When Freddy is at his best, a giddy uncertainty dominates the death dream.  The near-guarantee of a fatal ending is leavened by a feeling that, meanwhile, anything could happen.

These ascensions from the predictable universe of conventional body-horror signify more than entertainment’s response to the market demand for innovation and variety.  At these moments the viewer catches the horror film straining at the border of the total universe, threatening to enter it entirely.  As the slasher-saturated 80s foundered in the grunge era, Freddy Kreuger’s dimension-bending behavior was repeated and expanded upon in a number of films including Clive Barker’s Hellraiser and Candyman, executive produced by Barker and adapted from his story.  Though partially swallowed by shrieking subtext (a daughter-stepmother Oedipal conflict in the former examples and racial alienation and paranoia in the latter), the pull of the total universe in these films is real, and its incursions into the everyday universe are no longer bracketed in dream sequences.  Though they give a larger dramatic place (and more screen time) to the total universe, these films fail to alter its basic function as an element to be deployed against the backdrop of the typical as a means to engineer dramatic tension.  The horror film is still essentially a film with, rather than of, the total horror universe.

In the absence of an available example, these questions must be posed in the hypothetical: what would a cinema of total horror achieve?  What is the aesthetic effect of a filmed statement of fatal violence that examines how it happens rather than bothering about who did it or to whom, or why it was done or “in God’s name how can it be stopped?”  In sum: what’s to gain by this fixation on the dissolution of the flesh?

Sontag suggests in her discussion of pornography that the experience of its total universe and the sexual response resulting therefrom has to do with “an underlying direct identification with one of the participants in the sexual act.”  For a critic to say that audiences “identify with” a character in a film has usually meant simply that a filmgoer is liable to feel some compassion towards that character, not that they feel enough of an affinity with the character to mentally become him or her.  That is to say: film audiences may react to the emotions displayed by the a sympathetic hero, and recognize in them feelings they themselves have experienced, but if they weep at the sorrows or gasp at the imperilments, it is not because they are literally imagining themselves in the place of the hero, doing what he is doing.  That mental place-trading, says Sontag, typifies the way that viewers of pornography relate to the characters in it, and that a reaction of sexual arousal probably depends upon such a mental transaction taking place. Whereas one can only fully fantasize oneself into the role of action hero or southern belle after having seen a war movie or comedy, when the details of that character’s subjectivity are fading into memory, the emotional emptiness of porn invites the viewer to insert themselves into the situation that they are seeing.  The unity in time of voyeuristic visual pleasure and the imaginative participation in what is seen seems to me to be a possible element in the experience of total horror cinema.

Through direct identification, the horror film that partakes of the total universe would allow the viewer mental access to incredible fleshly transgressions, and ultimately death, in a way that the traditional film of horror does not. Death would stand empty of content, being neither arranged in any meaningful scheme nor significantly engaged with by the affectually deficient characters undergoing it and imposing it on one another.  Without a ready way to contextualize the display of violence and death, the film audience would be thrown back to its own devices in order to work through the visual experience, death becoming thereby an item for meditation.  The consciousness of the viewer, persisting through the death of his or her fictional counterparts, is offered the opportunity to transcend death.  A momentary immortality, and a kind of metamorphosis as well, seem to me significant potentialities of the cinema of total horror.

In Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, a woman faints in a hospital morgue and a beaker of chemical reagent is upended over her face as she lies unconscious.  The scene is drawn out brilliantly, in close-ups of cascading liquid and dissolving skin.  Corroded flesh expands in a creeping pool of foam, engulfing the body and expanding across the room.  The byproduct of the body’s dissolution becomes animated.  At this moment, the possibilities opened by total horror reach their peak: available for contemplation is an escape from the life of the flesh, through the flesh, to something else.  By creating a universe in which death is the ruling principle rather than a means to an end, total horror offers the aesthetic imagination the possibility to survive death and move into something beyond it.

JONATHAN KIERAN was born and lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts. His interests include film, the ukulele, and early New England history. More of his writing can be found at saltofsaturn.wordpress.com.