Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic 0313275238, 9780313275234

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Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture Religion and Sport: The Meeting of Sacred and Profane Charles S. Prebish Songs of Love and Death: The Classical American Horror Film of the 1930s Michael Sevastakis Hollywood as-Mirror: Changing Views of "Outsiders" and "Enemies" in American Movies Robert Brent Toplin, editor Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967-1976 Glenn Man Stanley Kubrick: A Narrative and Stylistic Analysis Mario Falsetto Ethnicity and Sport in North American History and Culture George Eisen and David Wiggins, editors The Neutral Ground: The Andre Affair and the Background of Cooper's The Spy Bruce A. Rosenberg Post-Franco, Postmodern: The Films of Pedro Almodovar Kathleen M. Vernon and Barbara Morris, editors Populism and the Capra Legacy Wes D. Gehring Auteur/Provocateur: The Films of Denys Arcand Andre Loiselle and Brian Mcilroy, editors Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Svankmajer Peter Hames, editor Queen of the 'B's: Ida Lupino Behind the Camera Annette Kuhn, editor

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

LINDA BADLEY

Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture, Number 48

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GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

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Ii °l '5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Badley, Linda. Film, horror, and the body fantastic / Linda Badley. p. cm.-(Contributions to the study of popular culture, ISSN 0198-9871 ; #48) Filmography: p. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-27523-8 (alk. paper) . 1. Horror films-History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures and literature.• I. Title. II. Series: Contributions to the study of popular culture ; no. 48. PN1995.9.H6B24 1995 791.43'616-dc20 95-16006

Contents Acknowledgments

vii 1

Introduction

5

Chapter 1.

The Body Fantastic

Copyright© 1995 by Linda Badley

Chapter 2.

Spectral Effects: Postmodern Ghosts

39

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.

Chapter?-

Frankenstein's Progeny

65

Chapter 4.

Deconstructions of the Gaze

101

Chapter 5.

David Cronenberg's Anatomy Lessons

125

Chapter 6.

Looking for the Mother in The Silence of the Lambs

137

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-16006 ISBN: 0-313-27523-8 ISSN: 0198-9871 First published in 1995 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

Afterword

151

Notes

159

Bibliography

171

Filmography

187

Index

193

Printed in the United States of America

~The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgments I would like to express appreciation to the many people who have made this project possible. My editors, Peter Coveney and Nina Pearlstein, have been helpful and patient. Middle Tennessee State University provided me with time for research and writing through a Research Grant and a Non-Instructional Assignment. The English Department faculty and chairs Frank Ginanni and David Lavery hetped to provide a working environment in which cultural research is encouraged. I am grateful to Ayne Cantrell for reading an early draft and for her support. I- thank Robert Rucker for guest lecturing on the subject of bioethics in my classes and for swapping classes across the disciplines, an experience that influenced my approach in this book. For the ideas and energy that spirited discussion generates, I thank the Feminist Reading and Theory Groups (Ayne, Charisse, Jill, Sue, Sara, Jill, Elyce, Kim, and Monica). My students, especially the Gothic and Horror classes in which many of these ideas have taken (monstrous) shape, deserve recognition for teaching me at least as much as I have taught them, and for helping me test and focus my ideas. I thank student assistants Claudia Spivey House and Shana Eley for their work in researching and proofreading at various stages. And I thank Bill Badley, my friend, colleague, and husband, for more than I can say.

Introduction This book began in 1982 in a half-whimsical proposal for a sophomore literature general studies course under the general heading of "The Contemporary World ip Literature." This heading was our Lower Division Committee's invitation to develop sections in areas of particular interest or expertise such as Detective Fiction or Women in Literature. For teachers as well as students, it offered a welcome alternative to the American Literature survey requirement and the canon as configured in times past. I proposed "Gothic and Horror" as a flagrant appeal to what then had all the signs of a fad. At the time, the subject meant to me a few su1?-literary classics of the nineteenth century (that I haq not, with the exception of a handful of Poe stories and Mary Shelley's Frank~tein, read), fond memories of Hammer films, triple feature drtve-in movie expeditions in the 1970s, and the Universal Studio classics of tli'e 1930s, their images vividly imprinted from childhood. My inspiration for the course was horror film (rather than fiction) and a taste for camp. I knew of Stephen King's popularity with students (although I had not read any of his books) and planned to use one of his novels as bait. We would read, say, The Shining and transfer whatever enthusiasm might be generated back into the "real" texts, for instance, Frankenstein, Dracula, Poe, Flannery O'Conner, Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, perhaps Joyce Carol Oates. The strategy worked. Stephen King arid Mary Shelley converted many students into readers, as several

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

have subsequently testified.1 This conversion began with the presumption that most of us had come to these texts by way of film. I began incorporating film and, especially, film clips into the class to the extent that Gothic and Horror became a cross-disciplinary course that concerned the close interrelationship of literature and film in the making of a genre. Not surprisingly, I was converted into something of a horror fan. I became interested in the contemporary phenomenon, beginning with the "rebirth" of the genre in the pop culture mainstream and its inroads on Hollywood and avant garde film and rock culture. What in the 1960s was thought to be "low" or marginal entertainment and then a cult phenomenon-beginning, say, with Night of the Living Dead (1968) and culminating in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)-had become ubiquitous by 1986. Horror was a bastard: it plundered the media for its iconographies, and for its themes and metaphors it drew on sources from advertising to biochemistry to postmodern philosophy. Soon it had become more than a genre. It was a widespread mythology that informed and constructed mass culture, causing people to think and speak about themselves and their feelings in particular ways. It was awful and it was interesting for precisely that reason. In this fashion I discovered what is now "cultural studies." Of all the popular genres, horror is now perhaps the best example of a transmedia phenomenon. As Noel Carroll and Douglas Winter reminds us, horror is an emotion and an element present throughout literature, film, and art-in Faulkner or Fuentes or Doctorow as well as King, in Bergman and Fellini as well as Romero', in Goya' and Picasso and Ernst as well as John Giger. By the· 1990s horror's motifs had invaded music and music video Uackson's "Thriller," Alice Cooper, Ozzie Osborne, The Grateful Dead, and heavy metal rock in general) theater and the performing arts (Sweeney Todd, Phantom of the Opera, Carrie, The Vampyr [BBC2], Frankenstein), television (Freddy's Nightmares, USA's Stephen King's World of Horror, A&E's The Life and Loves of a She-Devil and The Cloning ofJohanna May, ABC's Twin Peaks, HBO's Tales from the Crypt, and Fox's The X-Files), animated cartoons (Ghostbusters, Count Duckula; Beetlejuice), graphic novels and comics (Watchmen, The Swamp Thing, Hellraiser, Gotham by Gaslight, Batman Meets Dracula), toys (D-Compose, Slime, The Garbage Pail Kids, Doctor Dreadful Food Lab, Spider Attack), games and video games, the plastic and visual arts. On the one hand, it became a sfereotypology of violent overstatement. On the other, it has begun to erase the boundaries of real life and fantasy. The monsters invaded common life: as Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1990} frightened off one publisher and stimulated the appetite of another, as Silence of the Lambs inspired some of the best acting of 1991, sweeping the Academy Awards, and as Jeffrey Dahmer, hoping to turn his victims into zombies, "operated" on them. When they died, he ate parts of their bodies, becoming the monster

Introduction

3

he could not make. In The Addams Family (1990), Addams Family Values (1993), and A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) Halloween subverted Christmas. By the 1990s, horror films had overtaken several critically acclaimed directors, big budgets, and top stars, In the meantime, as we were shocked to discover around the middle of the 1980s, horror had changed from a norm-affirming genre that provided intimations of immortality to one that just as often revulses or disturbs. As the "horror boom" peaked in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a new and oddly Gothic vocabulary was gobbling up academic space. Terms like deconstruction, schizophrenia, subversion, and even body began to sound as Gothic as they were politically correct. Along came Leslie Fiedler' s Freaks (1978), Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1982), and Nina Aueroacli's Woman and the Demon (1982). Preparing Gothic and Horror alongside courses m contemporary critical theory, Victorian literature, and contemporary women writers, I began to wonder how a subversive "Female Gothic" related to a phenomenon often considered its antithesis: the rape-revenge fantasy of I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and gender shifting transformations of contemporary special effects. These iconographies corresponded in ways that suggested a common coming to consciousness. Meanwhile, the Freudian psyche that dominated modernism yielded territory to the post-Freudian body of French Feminism, discourse analysis, and Marxist theory. Sexual repression was no longer an issue; discussion instead concerned the silen'.ce of women, the repression of the feminine and, (much more recently in the last three years), the denial of death in Western culture. I began to see horror as one of severii discourses of the body that use the fantastic-the iconography of the monstrous-to articulate the anxieties of the 1980s and to re-project the self. , In my view, horror has become a fantastic "body language" for our culture in which a person's self-concept has been increasingly constituted in images of the body. 2 In the ongoing crisis of identity in which the gendered, binary subject of Eurocentric bourgeois patriarchy (in particular, the Freudian psychoanalytical model of the self) is undergoing deconstruction, horror joined with other discourses of the body to..E;,,ovid~ language for imagining the self in transformation,, re-gen9-ered, un&en.:;~ dered, and regenerated, or even as an absence or a lack. Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic is concerned with the cultural origins, technology, and impact of this fantastic body language-with the myths and media through which horror has articulated and modified the embodied self. In Sensational Designs (1985), Jane Tompkins pointed out that popular (sensational and sentimental) American novels such as Charles Brockden Brown's sensational Gothic tale Wieland and Harriet Beecher Stowe's "sentimental" novel Uncle Tom's Cabin can be valued for "doing a certain kind of cultural work within a specific historical situation." She sees their plots and characters and myths as "providing society with a means of

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Film, Horror,, and the Body Fantastic

thinking about itself, defining certain aspects of a social reality which the authors and their readers shared, dramatizing its conflicts, and recommending solutions" (200). This concept of popular texts as "doing work," in the sense of "expressing and shaping the social context that produced them" (Tompkins 200), I find especially useful in discussing contemporary horror. This is the first volume of what I originally saw as one book on horror film and fiction and their cross-pollinations. (Instead, and appropriately, like any good.,horror feature, it has -a sequel in the works; one that will address the works of Stephen King, Clive Barket, and Anne Rice.) In this book, I am interested in relationships between the horror genre and ,other discourS'es of the body, between the horror film and cultural context, amol).g the horror genre,. the film medium, and gender. I apply the term horror quite broadly to-include a range of phenomena, to refer to elements in black comedy (Beetlejuice, 1988), the thriller (Coma, 1978, Silence of the Lambs, 1991), and science fiction (Videodrome, 1983), as well as the slasher film (Friday the 13th, 1980). It is in this spirit that when the issue is bioethics, gender, Ot' the monstrous or fantastic 6oay, I mciuae 'science hctiofi':'3 Horror's d1fius1on and impla;tation of images and mythologies;'9 w'h~r hi contemporary rock culture, children's cereal, television advertising, or critical theory, I consider part of the issue-perhaps even the crucial issue-under discussion. My approach throughout this volume has been to suggest rather than force connections, especially between electronic and print mediums as they are informed 'by what I am calling a modern "body language." Chapter 1 opens the field of discussion with an exploratory definition of horror in relation to the body, particularly as constructed in horror film iconography and apparatus. The next chapters have as organizing centers five archetypes or motifs I trace from the mid-1970s to the present: the "embodied" ghost of the 1980s (chapter 2), Mary Shelley's monster and her/its "hideous progeny" of today (chapter 3), the sado-masochistic gaze that informs the slasher film (chapter 4), the male "hysteric" whose transformations emulate female body language (chapter 5), and the contemporary female (Gothic) gaze (chapter 6). I have used a number of critical perspectives, discourses of the body tpat tell us.much about our self-constructions. However, cultural criticism is dominant in chapters 1, 2, and 3, and psychoanalytic/feminist film theory and gender studies are dominant in chapters 4, 5, and 6.

Chapter 1

The Body Fantastic HALLOWEEN 1986 (MURFREESBORO, TENNESSEE) Five Nashville area theaters offer, as double features, Aliens and The Fly. A campus theater sponsors The Evil Dead. Local and national television stations provide George ~omero' s Night of t~e Living Dead in four ptimetime showings in livid color added specifically for the occasion by computer graphics. Halloween night HBO features Teen Wolf, Transylvania 6-5000, and Return of the'Living Dead, all spoofs with naturalistic themes. A CNN special focuses on the historical b~acula, Vlad Tepes ("The Impaler"), with on-location footage. Elvira hosts MTV until the 11 P.M. Alice Cooper spectacular, culminating in "Tuenage Frankenstein," "I Love the Dead" ("before they rise"), and "School's Out" ("forever," "completely"). On stage Cooper assembles a monster and guillotines himself. The executioner displays.the head and kisses it. The line outside the haunted 'house sponsored by the Murfreesboro Recreation Department has more adults in it than children. We move through a maze, then lurch through primordial ooze (represented in greenish crepe paper and Spanish moss), evading the "Swamp Monster," only to find ourselves in a hospital room that might have been inspired by a Robin Cook medical thriller. A patient, hooked -up to a network of tubes, needles, and straps, sits up abruptly, struggles against her life support, and collapses on the bed, repeating this performance for each

7

Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

group of visitors. Another door reveals an operating arena spattered with "blood" and strewn with organs and appendages and tools of the trade. A nurse with a sledge hammer pounds autistically on the operating table. The doctor waves a gory saw and roars, "Do you need a new heart?" Turning a corner, we are menaced by a maniac wielding a chain saw. The next stop is the funeral home, where we are greeted by a sobbing mourner and a wild-eyed undertaker who ushers us before the open casket, inhabited by a maniacally rising and falling corpse. Viewing the spectacle over our shoulders is the Grim Reaper, who points the way to the cemetery (signified by three headstones), populated by a swooping bat, a mummy, a Frankenstein monster, and several lurching Romeroesque "extras." In 1986, horror was the most popular of the mass media genres, and on Halloween of that year, a middle American college town, some thirty miles south of Nashville, articulated its concerns at the grass roots. On this night of the spirits, the supernatural was conspicuously absent, the ghost nowhere in evidence. The text here was not fear of death in any traditional sense but fear and loathing of life, existence perceived as terminal disease. The haunted house was the human body itself-threatened at every turn, covered with tubes, cannibalized for cells, fluids, tissues, and parts, tortured and reconstructed on the procrustean bed of biotechnology. Haunted houses are always mazes and pilgrimages. Ours went from womb to tomb and contained spaces representing equal states of abjection: the patient and the corpse were choreographed identically; the living were undead, the dead wouldn't or couldn't lie down; the grim reaper and the resurrectionist wielded the same instrument, a saw/scythe. In its dance-of-death-like intensity, its rituals and its myths, Halloween 1986 reflected a trend toward graphic or clinical horror that only increased during the decade. The ayye formerly granted to the supernatural mass culture had invested in clinical images of the physiology of disease, mutation, mutilation, and decomposition. The tableaus combined motifs and scenes from the summer hits Aliens, The Fly, Friday the 13th, Part VI, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2. Films recently available on videotape were Coma (1978), Night of the Living'Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), Return of the Living Dead (1985), Evil Dead (1982) and Evil Dead II (1987), Be-Animator (1985), Basket Case (1982), and The Thing (1981). Out of fear of real horrors (including razor blades in apples and lethal candy, publicized in the TV news), trick or treaters were packed off to parties, theaters, and institutionally sponsored activities that alluded back to the year's crop of special etfects. Mass mediated horror had re laced local customs and legends. In 198 , 1 1p rap y no e m creen magazine that the horror film defied critics' attempts to deal with it as other than plotless carnography, gore, and effects for an increasingly brutalized mass audience. Rather than narrating a story, the modern horror film had become a series of scenes,

each displaying a "graphic sense of physicality" and culminating in a gory display (Brophy 8). Like love scenes in adventure films, the spectacle of effects momentarily arrested the plot. In slasher films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Prom Night, as in pornography, plot was superfluous and character was initialized only to be discarded. The gore, the reward for relatively tame adolescent sex, seemed to be the film's raison d'etre. The slasher subgenre came to rely almost solely on a suspense based in the assurance that the next scene (or sequel) would be graphically violent or fantastically gruesome. And the suspense continued indefinitely, through as many sequels as the market could take. However oddly, as Tonia Modleski pointed out, like the "transgressive" avant garde film valorized by intellectuals, the slasher film refused the assurances of _! ,erogressive order or closun:J:Teiro?' 8- lOf. .' " '" ,. ' Two oilier siil5genres emerged from the late 1970s and early 1980s. These were the• cyberpunk film, a science-fiction, action, and horror combination whose trope was the organic machine (Blade Runner, 1982; The Terminator films, 1984 and 1991; Aliens, 1986; and Robocop, 1987), and the rotesque or fantastique film, whose trope was transformation. The gn;>tesque 1 m evoked the "beast within"-in Alien (1979), Altered States (1980), The Howling (1980), The Company of Wolves (1984), and The Fly (1986)-and went on in the late 1980s and early 1990s to become a staple in fantastic films as varied in tone and genre as The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Beetlejuice (19,88l~ob (1988), Sleepwalkers (1992), and Death Becomes Her (1992). John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (1983) and Evil Dead II (1987), Stuart Gordon's Prom Beyond (1986), and Peter Jackson's pead .dlwi. {1992) culminated in hyperboiically surreal extr,avaganzas whose transformations and contortions only.the 1930s animated pictures or the great fantastic painters could equal. In An American Werewolf in London (1981), whose "date movie" appeal belieµ its undercurrent of black humor, the werewolf did not represent hyperma~culine aggression but the agony of biological existence. Its transformation, in the nude and in "real time," was the film's emotional center. The protagonist's change from college student into wolf was interjected with parallel scenes in which the graphically decaying corpse of his friend visited him, all the while talking like a college student. The moral? Death was a pain, one of life's processes, and whether decomposing or burgeoning with new flesh, embodiment was the horror, its agony so extravagant as to have its own perverse beauty. In the 1980s the horror film became an agonistic "body language" for a culture that perceived itself as grotesquely embodied and in transformation. The monsters and the actors, the Karloffs and Lugosis, were subsumed by the monster makers-the Dick Smiths, Rick Bakers, Rob Bottins, and Tom Savinis-and the effects themselves. It seemed appropriate for the 1990 remake of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead

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Film, Horror, andfhe Bodyfantastic

The Body Fantastic

to be directed by monster makeup effects maestro Tom Savini. The evolution of horror fanzines gives an even clearer picture of the trend. Forrest J. Ackerman's Famous Monsters ofFilmland, the sole horror fanzine of the 1950s and 1960s, was succeeded by Fangoria, Cinefantastique, Gore Gazette, and FX, all lavishly illustrated and devoted to the technology and mythology of gore. Fangoria' s title alone spoke "volumes," as Brophy notes: "fantasy, gore, phantasmagoria, fans" (3). The classics of the 1930s-not their nineteenth-century Gothic prototypes-were directly responsible for the contemporary horror phenomenon. Horror returns to preliterate, somatic modes of knowing, and the cinema, television, and rock concerts most completely articulate the experience. Sitting in the darkened theater, which replicates the den or campfire, we re-encounter our earliest dreams. Cont~mporary horror fiction beginning with Stephen King and continuing through Anne Rice and the splatter fiction of Clive Barker through Poppy Z. Brite and Thomas Ligotti was largely a product of the visual media, especialiy 1950s horror movies, the classics of the 1930s, and E.C. Comics. King brought a cinematic perspective to the naturalistic novel. As he became an institution and his success was imitated, the images that inspired him gave renewed life to underground and adult coniics, which reinfused fantastic film, with Creepshow, HBO's Tales from the Crypt, and Tales from the Darkside the most obvious beneficiaries. Contemporary horror fiction is parasitic and omnivorous, incorporating film and television, theater and the visual arts with equal gusto. When Anne Rice wrote Interview with the Vampire in five weeks in 1973, she claims she was thinking not of Brain Stoker's Dracula, which she had never finished reading, but of "black and white movies" (Ramsland 248). In 1985 Rice's eighteenth-century vampire protagonist Lestat "came out" as a postmodern media event, heavy metal rock singer empowered by the heated blood of plugged in fans and the image making power of MTV. Rock music appropriated horror motifs in the late 1970s, beginning with Alice Cooper, Kiss, and Ozzie Osborne; punk and shock rock fused in a 1980s hybrid called Gothic that inspired clubs with names like Helter Skelter and Theatre of Blood and groups named Castration Squad, Christian Death, Megadeath, Iron Maiden, The Dead Kennedys, Anthrax, and Bauhaus. As the Gothic was taken up in popular clothing and lifestyles, the Splatterpunks, a loosely associated group of writers, drew their"hard-boiled attitude, driving prose rhythms, and violent situations from cyberpunk fiction, heavy metal rock, and horror movies. This intermediary proliferation is not a trend in horror but a fundamental characteristic. Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) was itself the child of the 1924 play by Hamilton Deane and Bram Stoker's Lyceum Theatre reading play of May 1897. But contemporary horror fiction is particularly rooted in the visual, theatrical, and cinematic arts. Writer-director-illus-

trator Clive Barker came to Gothic fiction by way of British avant garde theater and the graphic arts and soon moved into cinema. Clive Barker's short story'"Son of Celluloid" (1986) is in part a confession of these roots. Its monster is a behind-the-screen cancer that absorbs the audience's projected psychic energy and evolves into flesh-eating cinema. The story has been collected in the shared world anthology Silver Scream (1988), edited by Splatterpunk David Schow and with an introduction by Texas Chain Saw director Tobe Hooper. This hybrid form of "splatter-prose" brought the tale of terror into the postliterate era. 1 Horace Walpole realized his and horro'r's intentions most fully (and anticipated Disney) in the creation of his neo-Gothic castle, Strawberry Hill. Horror enacts the formula inscribed in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" of literature as calculated effect: the text was a technological apparatus for producing a unified (intense) response in the reader or, more precisely, audience. In the 1980s, horror did not "degenerate• into special effects; it returned to its wellsprings in the theatrical-in the circus side show (Skal), the phantasmagoria show, the wax museum, the Theatre du Grand Guignol of Paris (Kendrick, Skal), and Theatre of Cruelty (Rockett). It should tell us somethin that horror is "the only genre named for its effect on e rea er," as Gary Wolf has ► pomted out (qtd. in Hartv:rell, Introd.; 1992, 10f. Its history· finally demonstrates how little it has to do with spirits. As the terror tale developed from and absorbed the ghost story, it became centered on 12sxcboseJW~~:thurder, suicide, torture, madness, vampires, Doppelgangers, lycanthtopy, the monstrous. Haunted t~ough he was, Poe was less interested in ghosts than that "most poetical topic in the whole world," the death of a beautiful woman ("Philosophy of Composition,• 55)-the subject celebrated, of course, py the slasher film. And it is the threat to the body that is memorable in Poe-the pit and the pend'ulum', the heart beating after dismemberment or the old man's loathsomely milky eye ("The Tell-Tole Heart"), the artificially sustained "unlife" and sudden decomposition of M. Valdemar, the "premature" burial and ,materialization of Madeline Usher and the Lady Rowena, mortality as disease ("The Masque of the Red Death") or deformity ("Hop Frog"). In the 1980s horror (whatever the medium) became a spectacle offering not mere transcendence of the body but transcendence through the body-albeit the body in a recharged, re-gendered, and regenerated sense-through shock, transposition of the senses, intense feeling, and special effects .• Critics everywhere complained that horror had become nauseating instead of "scary." By the mid-1980s, horror had changed from a norm-affirming genre that had offered intimations of immortality into a carnival-of the perverse, a type of anti- or "deep" horror. Invading the

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

mass market, horror's "new wave" seemed bent on subverting certainty, identity, and reality. The genre became speculative as well, extending its innate self-consciousness to explore the issues it exploited: film violence against women in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, and then, as horror became ubiquitous, violence against any body, against the human body itself as sacred image, unity, and site of the self. Horror had become more "symptomatic" than before, as Douglas Winter remarked in the introduction to his 1988 anthology Prime Evil (5). Director David Cronenberg used the fantastic as a way of "coming to terms with those basic things, like death, aging, and disease, which we all deal with every day." Metaphor makes such themes bearable. "I find it impossible to watch films about children dying of leukemia," he explained in 1986. •1 don't even think that what I do in my films is more extreme than reality," he added. "I just think it illuminates it" (qtd. in Verniere, "Movie" 55). The Fly (1986), noted for its graphic allusions to AIDS, he called "a nature film" (qtd. in Verniere, "Movie" 50). The monsters were becoming victims and protagonists whose difference provoked empathy and fascination as much as horror in The Fly (1986), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and Interview with the Vampire (1994). "This is The Age of Innocence/'lrue innocence," sang the hero, tock star, and vampire of Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat (1985), meaning that mythical projections of evil were no longer believable or necessary: "All your Demons are material/Call them Pain/Call them Hunger/Call them War" (472). Lestat thus called for his own annihilation. Demystified, the vampire was almost, for a time, replaced by the zombie, whose collective, "brain-dead" consumerism came to typify the Reagan era (Winter, Introd. 5). The demythologizing continues in the 1990s and is reflected in a change of terms. We rarely speak of terror, the term used in the eighteenth century to mean a refined, intellectual, and even sublime emotion and its literature. Horror is the preferred term and indicates a broad range of media. Horror's language is somatic, communicating on a preliterate, subconscious level. As distinguished from the detective story, in which the rational subject separates itself from the body of evidence, horror descends into primal fear and desire. It is a loss of ego in cellular chaos. As its holiday, Halloween, makes explicit, horror is Carnival and is rooted in transgression: norms are inverted, taboos acted out, and met~morphosis is celebrated. Stephen King compares horror to a freak show where "you look at the guy with three eyes, or ... the fat lady, ... or Mr. Electrical.... And when you come out ... you say, 'Hey, I'm not so bad' " (''An Evening" 9). In The Monster Show I1992), David Skal traces its descent from Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to Tod Browning's

Freaks (a.k.a. The Monster Show, 1932) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Horror is also the most physiological of genres-with the possible exception of pornography. In the 1980s, the horror fanzines proclaimed themselves gore's equivalent of Playboy or Hustler. Fangoria combined Hustler's hard core appeal with MAD Magazine's adolescent humor, playing on its equivalent transgressions. "You can show as much guts as you like, as long as the guts you're showing aren't nude," claimed Bob Michelucci, president of Imagine, Inc. (Wooley, 1989, 49). Fangoria's finishing touch was a cover foldout that depicted the monster of the month-December 1986 opens to Cronenberg's "Brundlefly" in its final mutation. As Linda Williams suggests in the foreword to her book on pornography, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible" (1989), horror is one of several genres that focus on body spectacle and movement, "involuntary reflexes such as musical rhythm, terror, comedy, or sorrow" and including musicals, low comedies, and "weepies.• All work by moving bodies of viewers or readers to similar reflexes (x). As porno_,gra h ' ose is to arouse desire and stimulate pleasure, h-;'°rror's is to rouse and exorqse latent fear. The p easure o orror s , · Brophy suggests, is "getting the shit scared out of you" (5). At its simplest, it delivers a frisson that originates as a somatic response. horror comes from horrere, which refers to the "bristling of the hair on the nape of-the neck" (Twitchell, 1985, 10). The phenomenon has been taken to its logical conclusion in images of the body that evoke the greatest possible physical response.

11

0

"IS FREUD DEAD?" (THE POST-FREUDIAN BODY)

Most scholars account for horror in psychosexual terms. This is not surprising; psychoanalysis, with its presumption of an u:µconscious, is based in horror. Sigmund Freud defined horror in terms of the irrational, "gut level" fear, the uncanny (unheimlich), inspired by certain images and experiences in which the subject recognizes a repressed memory from childhood or an undiscovered aspect of the self. 2 His essay on "The 'Uncanny' " (1919) was also, notably, our first piece of psychoanalytic criticism, an analysis of E.T.A. Hoffmann's hThe Sandman" as a literary case study. The diagnosis was predictable: castration complex. But even before Freud, psychoanalysis and dark literature had an affinity-in Breuer and Freud's Studies in Hysteria, Jean-Martin Charcot's work 1n hypnotism and hysteria, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing's and Max Nordau~s studies of sadism, masochism, and criminality. Reading back through the early case studies is a most Gothic experience, as feminist and new historical studies, Elaine Showalter's and Michel Foucault's in particular, have recently pointed out. Charcot' s photogenic Augustine,

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

Freud's Dora, Charlotte Bronte's Bertha Mason, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman coexist in a pantheon of larger-than-life Victorian madwomen. Psychoanalysis and the Gothic begin to seem like similar tropes or crossbreeding mythologies. 3 It is almost too easy to account for horror in psychosexual terms-from the oozy, tentacled things in Lovecraft's fiction in Norman Bates' "Mother," to the genital (and gender bending) images in the Alien films. The flourishing of the Gothic novel in the nineteenth century is explained by Freud's "repressive hypothesis," as Michel Foucault calls the concept of culture as the embodiment of sublimated sexual energy. Bram Stoker's very Victorian marriage together with Oedipal, masochistic, and/or homoerotic feelings are thought to have driven him to brothels and to the writing of Dracula (1897). The "king" vampire is the Gothic "heavy" father who wants to possess all daughters a la Freud's Totem and Taboo (1919). "Your girls that you all love are mine," gloats the Count (Stoker 312). His boast that "Time is on,[his] side" and "spread over centuries" (312) has also been validated by twentieth century psychoanalysis. Psychology explains why vampires, werewolves, and zombies, descended from the fin de siecle Gothic novel and the 1930s movie classics, keep coming back: they are empowered by repression and cultural repetition. It also suggests why now, at the end of the twentieth century, our monsters are so manifestly human. Psychoanalytic criticism tells us that horror functions as displaced-and therefore "safe• pornography: its conventions are fetishistic substitutes for the objects of sexual fears and desires. Like pornography, slasher films such as Friday the 13th pry "open the fleshy secrets of normally hidden things," argues Linda Williams 1989, 191. In Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy ofModern Horror (1985), James Twitchell argues1:hat horror films are cautionary tales and rites of passage for adolescents. They covertly demonstrate the dangers of incest and implant taboos while providing safe outlets for sexual energy and anxiety-for instance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Michael Jackson's "Thriller." In Preposterous Violence: Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture (1989), Twitchell accounts similarly for mass media violence. Because adolescent males {who require ritualized aggression for passage into adulthood) monopolize the entertainment market, mass culture is dominated by violent spectacle. "Like fairy tales that prepare the child for the anxieti~s of separation, these fables prepare the adolescent for the anxieties of competition and also of reproduction" (Twitchell, 1989, 284). But Twitchell's argument is reductive in what seems more and more a post-Freudian age. Horror's role in adolescent socialization is obyious, but we should also note that a late 1980s Gallup Poll survey finds most readers of popular horror fiction are women in their thirties and forties (Hartwell, Introd., 1992, 5) and the prevalence of "adult" horror in mainstream fiction

and film from The Exorcist (1972) through Interview with the Vampire (1976) and Coma (1978). In Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Mike Nichols' Wolf (1994), and in David Cronenberg's venereal images, the monsters of the id are demystified and dissected. Disregarding these demographics, what do we make of the trend in which the latent psychosexual contents have become manifest, in which subtext becomes text? This is the case even in "teen" films like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, An American Werewolf in London (1981), Teen Wolf (1984), Teen Witch (1989), The Company of Wolves (1984), Fright Night I and II (1985, 1988), The Lost Boys (1987), the Halloween and Friday the 13th series, Psycho (I through IV) (1960-1990), the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and the ABC miniseries of Stephen King's It (1990). These films are allegories about raging hormones, the Oedipus complex, female sexual power, rape, child abuse, the "crisis" of the family, sexual harassment, dirty old men, misogynistic gynecologists, male narcissism, Victorian sexual repression, and sexually transmitted disease. Often, as in the Nightmare on Elm Street series, David Lynch's Eraserhead (1978) and Blue ¼lvet (1986), and The Silence of the Lambs, they are allegories that problematize psychology itself, often takirtg the form of nightmares set in the "cellar" of the unconscious. In so doing, these movies do not testify to repressed sexuality but instead reflect our saturation with sexual images and options, a state of cultural hyperconsciousness, confusion, and terror. As William Gibson suggests, sexual repression as the Victorians are supposed to have experienced it-"the thought that we are ourselves sexual beings"-has "lost its power to make us shudder and turn pages" (xvi) or watch films. In the film widely recognized as the first modern horror movie, Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), the zombified corpse of a woman wearing nothing but a morgu(;! ticket stumbles randomly into the viewfinder, announcing the desexualization of the (Hollywood) body. What does terrify since the "sexual revolution" is gender confusion and sexual anarchy, the title of Elaine Showalter's 1990 book subtitled Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle: AIDS and venereal disease, teen pregnancies, feminism, the "crisis" of masculinity, sex scandals (evangelists, politicians, superstars), pornography, child pornography, sexism, sexist lariguag_e, sexual harassment, rape, incest, sexual child abuse, pedophilia, homophobia, sexual preference (homo-, hetero-, bi-, and polymorphic), the "social construction" of sexuality, mass mediated sex, unsafe se:X: sex as power and powerlessness, sexual politics, Eros as embodiment, Eros as mortality. In this profusion of alternatives, oppositions, and anxieties, of constantly sc,rambled (yet always entrapping or dysfunctional) gender codes, sex is n6t the shadow or "dirty secret" (as it was for the Victorians) but rather its extroverted alter ego-sexual panic. It is the latter that made Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic Instinct (1992) blockbusters and I Shudder

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

at Your Touch the apt title of Michelle Slung's best-selling 1991 anthology of "22 Toles of Sex and Horror." The horror genre as traditionally defined, as the expression of repressed sexuality, is defunct, and postmodern horror has been energized by something else. Sexual terror has become part of a mu.ch larger anxiety about gender, identity, mortality, power, and loss of control, and Eros is coupled with sadism, masochism, and Thanatos in ways that Freud's "family romance," with its focus on the child and presumption of a male model, overlooked. The films of David Cronenberg, David Lynch, and Neil Jordan use a cross-disciplinary, gender-subverting body discourse for psychosexual issues. Jordan's Interview with the Vampire (1994), based on Ann Rice's Vampire Chronicles, replaces phallic sex with polymorphic sensuality and sadomasochism, the whole eroticized further with homosexual and pedophilic overtones. The postmodern image of Orpheus's dismemberment dominates contemporary horror-for instance in Oliver Stone's The Hand (1981), Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), and Eric Red's Body Parts (1991), which radicalize the film cliche of the hand or body part with a mind of its own. The splatter films of George Romero (Dawn of the Dead, 1978; Day of the Dead, 1985) and Clive Barker (Hellraiser, 1988) make this point in the more generalized and visceral terms of the body in self-articulating pieces. In Barker's short story "The Body Politic" (1986), Charlie George awakens to find his hands have literally left him in a revolt of members from the body as a phallocentric concept: "maybe the ,grandpappy of his sacred profession, Freud, had been wrong," Charlie's bewildered psychoanalyst Dr. Jeudwinde wonders. "The paradoxical facts of human behavior. didn't seem to fit into those neat classical compartments he'd allotted them to" (Barker, "Body Politic" 86). Classical psychology upholds the reality principle, enlightenment rationalism, and logocentrism. The Freudian psyche, or so the popular metaphors have always said, is a matter largely of the head: of "head doctors" and "[head or ego] shrinkers" or "shrinks. "4 Common knowledge has reduced the tripartite psyche (which has more in common with Plato and Aristotle than with contemporary science) to a hierarchy of psychic levels with a crude mechanism of drives and hunts-a picture incompatible with the more currently popular view of the mind as "the neural chemical output of our brains, which in turn are viewed as immensely complex computers" (Kimbrell, "Body Wars" 59). Freud's fundamental concepts of identity formation-the Oedipus complex, for example-presumed the nuclear family as a norm based in biology. But this norm has been rendered all but obsolete by increasing life spans, serial monogamy, birtl:t control, reproductive technology and genetic engineering, and feminist, gay and lesbian, and civil rights movements. "Family values,• whether Freud's or Dan Quayle's, can no longer be presumed.

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970), Thomas Kuhn proposed that revolutionary scientific theories establish paradigms, basic concepts or models of the way things are, such as the Copernican cosmos and the Freudian ego. A "true" paradigm is invisible, taken for granted as part of our cultural common sense as, for example, the theory of repression infuses our ordinary sense of ourselves. The sudden appearance of anomalies signals a paradigm shift. During a shift, as the old paradigm is displaced and a new one emerges, both are defamiliarized. The new theory at first seems strange, fantastic, until it is assimilated into common knowledge. The old theory becomes visible again as anomalies are exposed and the emerging paradigm comes into conflict with it. In recent abuse cases, for example, contradictions from within the Freudian paradigm have been widely exposed. "Is Freud Dead?" asked the 29 November 1993 Time magazine cover. It depicted a troubled Sigmund, the top of his head represented as a jigsaw puzzle most of whose pieces were missing or detached and floating away. In other words, Time announced, Freud was "brain dead," no longer science. Ultimately, the cover story concluded, "psychoanalysis and all its offshoots may turn out to be no more reliable than phrenology or mesmerism• (Gray, "Assault" 51). Social historians, including Freud's biographer Peter Gay, agree that Freudian psychology is not a science but a belief system-a philosophy or religion. In his A History of Sexuality, Foucault deconstructed Freud's "repressive hypothesis," explaining sexualities as socially constructed "discourses" with a grammar of prohibitions, obligations, and roles. Psychoanalysis replaced the discourse of medieval Christianity: the,,soul with the ego, the confessiol} of sin with confession of desire and fantasy, and the priest with the psychiatrist. Psychoanalysis, according to Foucault, is "both a theory of the essential relatedness of the law and desire, and a technique for relieving the effects of the taboo where its rigor makes it pathenogenic" (History 129). Since the 1970s psychoanalysis has married philosophy, been reclaimed by Lacan, and been revised by psychoanalytic feminism. French Feminism shifts the emphasis from Oedipal phallocentrism to the polymorphic pre-Oedipal, froII\ the "realist" ego (dominated by "the demands of reality") to the narcissistic ego, which is "governed by fantasy" (Grosz 31), from the internc;1lized psyche and the symbolic to the imaginary and the Mother's body. The Freudian model has been dissected and reconstructed-by communications theory; poststructuralist, Marxist, and feminist theory; postmodern literature; the mass media; biochemistry; and "hard" psychology. The surfeit of popular and academic reconstructions of Freud indicate that ours is a post-Freudian era. This does not mean that Freudian concepts have lost influence. Freud's "rich panoply of metaphors for the

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

mental life has evolved into something closely resembling common knowledge," reports Paul Gray (''Assault" 49). The Freudian model continues to provide the commonly assumed concepts of the self-the psychic levels and drives, the unconscious, and so on. Now more than ever, psychoanalysis is popular myth and ritual. It is a functioning vocabulary of the self that includes the ego (and alter ego), repression, with its presumption of a hidden or unconscious self, and sublimation, for instance. Group therapies, call-in radio and television shows, sexual abuse survivors' stories, self-help books, psychological profiles of serial killers, and the insanity plea rest on popular translations of Freud. And all interpret them freely. In similar fashion, Stephen King calls himself a Freudian "opportunist" more likely "to use the theories to advance [his] ideas" than otherwise (qtd. in Magistrale, Second Decade 4). Freudian, Lacanian, French Feminist, and Jungian ideas are mixed with the self-help mythos and New Age mysticism and reconstituted, and the mixture is religion for a secular, narcissistic age. In the 1980s the horror genre constructed the primary icons, narratives, and rituals for that religion-the beast within, the doppelganger, the psycho, the wild man, inner child, feral woman, the abused child, the incestuous father, "Satanic" abuse, the alien abduction/molestation narrative, the dream work, the totemization of the terrible father. In the 1990s the hysteric's narrative and the therapeutic process itself has begun to run into myth, trope, or directorial style. As adapted in the mass media, Freud is ubiquitous and, at the same time, nearly unrecognizable. Through MTV and its influence on Hollywood film, surrealism, once a province of modernism and the avant garde, has become pop art. Beyond pop psychology, psychoanalysis provides mystery, romance, and pseudo-science fantasy in novels such as Stephen King's It (1986) and Gerald's Game (1992) and films such as The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Seven Percent Solution (1976), Lovesick (1983), Dressed to Kill (1980), Body Parts (1991), Prince of Tides (1991), F,inal Analysis (1992), Raising Cain (1992), and The Addams Family (1991). These fantastic treatments demystify and retrofit Freud and his theories to the contemporary scene. In The Seven Percent , Solution Dr. Freud meets Sherlock Holmes and treats him for cocaine addiction. The Addams Family is full of post-Freudian allusions, especially to the concept of displacement, and the film makes its overt appeal as a transgressive fantasy. The reality principle is replaced by the plec:)-sure principle and projected as the characters' and the.viewers' shared world. In Final Analysis (1992), the psychologist is duped by his patient (who uses Freudian concepts to manipulate him) and her sister, who seduces and then uses him to set up an insanity plea. The film opens in a seductive appeal to nostalgia for the psychoanalytic scene: the couch, the chair, the (male) therapist and (female) hysteric, transference and counter-transference are all presented

in the simpering soft focus of a Harlequin romance. Yet psychology is easily manipulated and equally baffled. In recent horror texts, psychoanalysis often produces symptoms rather than providing diagnosis, and analysts are portrayed as inept or invasive and manipulative. In Basic Instinct (1992), a psychologist and a novelist (a literature and psychology double major) are the femme fatales and prime suspects in an ice-pick murder case, and their professions are indicators of their lethal skill in manipulating men. Practicing psychology equals plotting equals writing fiction equals murder. Here and in Dressed to Kill, Blue Velvet, Raising Cain, and The Silence of the Lambs psychoanalysis no longer critiques horror; instead, as Judith Halberstam notes of the latter film, "it is the horror.• It "generates horror: it founds its must basic fantasies and demands their enactment" (47). Freud himself predicted Hannibal Lecter, the uncanny psychoanalyst and cannibal, when he wrote that he "would not be surprised to hear that psycho-analysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people" (~The 'Uncanny'" 243). The psychoanalyst who is the "psycho" has become a popular trope and turns a devastating twist on the mad doctax genre in texts from Dressed to Kill, to recent interpretations of the Ja~k the Ripper myth, to The Silence of the Lambs. The bourgeois family, the unconscious, and repression are myths or tropes ndw tainted by cliche, nostalgia (Final Analysis), parody (Raising Cain, Dead Again), or satire (The Addams Family, Addams Family Values). The Freudian "family romance" at the heart of the Gothic novel is told increasingly in body language and with reference to social and 'economic contexts. Last House on the Left (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Parents (1989), American Gothic (1987), Mom (1989), and Children of the Corn (1984) were films with a materialist critique of the family. As in Bret Easton Ellis's novel American Psycho, cannibalism stood for consumer culture and a power-driven economy. In Mom (1990) and Dead Alive (1992), a naive young man's sweet old mother became a flesh eating monster, the Devouring Mother liferalized and with our aging population in mind. In Bob Balaban' s horrifically black comedy Parents (1989), in an allusion to the primal scene, little Michael got out of bed and walked in on his parents (flawlessly polite 1950s types) performing a bloody ritual on the living room floor. The film winked knowingly at viewers with nightmarish scenes and "Freudian" cues, only to return to the fact of predation-to screen-filling shots of rare "roast beef.• Sex was a metaphor for oral aggression rather than the reverse. The ultimate in dreams come ttue was A Nightmare on Elm Street, where Freddy Krueger, a sort of Sandman in reverse, realized teenagers' worst fears in hysterical body language. In contemporary fantasy from the Nightmare series, to Videodrome, to the television series 'Iivin Peaks (1990-91), Total Recall (1990), and Candyman (1992), spectators participate with onscreen

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Film, Horror, and th~ Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

characters in generating consensual hallucinations that contaminate or subsume the real world. The fantastic is not a symptom of psychosexual dysfunction but of socioeconomic and cultural malaise. Or the fantastic is virtual reality, as psychoanalysis is turned completely outside out, postmodern style. Freud's cases are now viewed (and taught) not as psychology but as social history, gender studies, detective fiction, "Female Gothic" narrative, and modernist. literature. The sixth edition of The Norton Anthology of World Literature I1992) includes "From 'Dora': (A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case in Hysteria)" as the first of its "Masterpieces" of modernism, canonizing it as a literary classic. The Instructor's Guide encourages teachers to approach it as a "novel with a given cast of characters and a first-person narrative point of view-in fact, the conventional 'unreliable narrator' " (138). As in Helene Cixous' play Portrait de Dora (1976), the text is a story of power politics, sexual oppression, and betrayal-the story of The Daughter's Seduction, to quote Jane Gallop's title of 1982. In a post-Freudian context, the psychoanalytic model of the psyche and its cornerstone, the repressive hypothesis, has been supplanted by "Dora" and the hysterical medium itself, the erotogenic body. Feminists focus on Freud's clinical experience with female hysterics, noting how the pathology of hysteria is "implicated" in psychoanalysis: "the science enfolds the disease within it and is constituted simultaneously with its pathological interiority" (Bernheimer 1). Psychoanalysis, Catherine Clement suggests, found a confessio,nal and theatrical form in the Inquisition trials which provided a spectacle of "possessed" women for male audiences (Showalter, Female Malady 151-2). Charcot's clinical "seances" were based in a similar theatricalism and may have set a precedent for early cinema. Freud referred to Charcot as "artistically gifted," a "'visuel: a seer" (qtd. in Showalter, Female Malady 150), and Charcot photographed and categorized his patients in expressive poses that seem derived from contemporary painting, often spacing gestures in a succession of images given a narrative meaning (Showalter, Female Malady 151-54). The camera was important to the study (and concept) of hysteria much as the telescope was to astronomy, but Charcot' s reliance on images ultimately undermined his authority as a scientist. Women were photographed again and again, some making "careers• of modeling for asylum pictures (Showalter, Female Malady 152). Early psychoanalysis, according to the feminist critique, was really psychodrama ending in a show-stopping seizure. The "talking cure" meant decoding and transcribing the hysteric's embodied text into language "proper," the imaginary into the symbolic. The talking cure privileged sound and language. But movies, feminist film theory, and pop-Freud, especially the self-help industry, have largely replaced the psychoanalytic process and model of the ego with the graphic, volatile Gothic scene in which the male subject

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(mind, gaze) inscribes (violates, decodes, and manipulates) the female body. Foucault (Madness and Civilization) and Showalter (The Female Malady) argue that madness is a trope, a marginalizing label on the one hand and (for the marginalized) a discourse invalidated by the oppressor. These tracings keep leading back to the "Gothic" Freud and its material contexts-to the early studies in hysteria, hypnosis, and regression, to the hysteric's body language and, recently, the male "shell shock" victim, to the Victorian and postwar scenes-to a pathology based in body language. Decoding and revising that language, feminists wish to release the body . from its inscriptions. In doing so, they have weakened the Freudian edifice perhaps even more than they intended. One popular adaptation of feminist psychoanalysis is the incest-survivor narrative that has recently dominated the self-help book market. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis's The Courage to Heal (1988), Laura Davis's Allies in Healing (1991), E. Sue Blume's Secret Survivors (1990), and Wendy Maltz's The Sexual Healing journey (1991), all presume the concepts of hysteria, neurosis, repression, and regression. At the same time they ignore or discard the Oedipus complex, with its emphasis on fantasy, and return to Freud's earlier Seduction Theory, which assumed that memories were of actual seductions. In the 1990s, accounts of ritual abuse, alien abduction narratives, and accounts of False Memory Syndrome (Lawrence Wright's Remembering Satan [1994], Michael D. Yapko's Suggestions ofAbuse [1994], and Lenore Terr's Unchained Memories [1994] compete for attention. The conflict suggests that true and false metnories cannot be reliably distinguished and undermines the credibility of psychoanalysis. 5 ✓ Incest survivor narratives invariably refer us to the body, which they make an oracle. In January of 1993, after surveying the current crop of incest survivor books, reviewer Carol Thvris concludes that their message is simply "if you feel abused-you were abused" (17). Symptoms ("aftereffects" including eating disorders, arthritis, sleeplessness, depression, feelings of powerlessness, lack of motivation, perfectionism, low self-esteem, and a pattern of victimization) are first experienced as "body memories." Thus the "survivor" is taught to trust her body over her conscious memories or the words of the parent. Her body remembers best. Alleged incest victim Holly Ramona claims that her memories while under "truth serum" (sodium amytal) are "reliable because they're my memories. They're me" ("Dateline", NBC, 17 May 1994). In this scenario, the body cannot lie. But the body does lie, whatever "the body" is, as traditional psychoanalysis is the first to point out. The survivor narratives reflect a popular metaphor of the boqy literal and the mind as a camera or tape recorder or computer, says Tavris: events are recorded in memory, although trauma represses them until they are released by a new trauma or the therapist.

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

This concept, which comes partly from psychoanalysis and partly from popular metaphors of the mind as a machine, is inconsistent with current research into memory that reveal the brain's ability to invent reality. As poets and novelists (and Freud himself) have pointed out, memory is "a process that is constantly being reinvented" (Thvris 16). Freud may not be dead, but he is greatly altered. A competing therapy is a New Age adaptation of Jung that circumvents the Freudian pathology and interiority, stressing individuation through story telling, role playing, and projection-in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992), Linda Leonard's Meeting the Madwoman (1993), and Robert Bly's Iron John (1991). The most recent novels of Clive Barker and Anne Rice draw on Nietzschean, and Jungian models, and the films of Tim Burton employ an iconography of animal masks to "Unleash the beast" (Corliss, "Battier" 70). These psychologies view an individual in relation to a shifting, multicultural collective and a gender-troubled perspective. New Age Jungianism represents an extroversion of Freudian analysis. It emphasizes storytelling as historical connection and self-creation over self-knowledge and rational control. There is no essential self to know but rather a potential self to develop or express. The Freudian edifice is crumbling, and the shock waves are felt throughout the disciplines, Owen Flanagan warns. "Life and culture could survive the demise of psychoanalysis, but not as we know them" (Flanagan 3). What is left? What psychoanalysis was founded in: the unconscious, the legacy of myth and dream and the dream work itself, the genres-the detective story, the Gothic romance, and fantasy itself- the pathenogenic Freud, the Freudian body, the body fantastic. William Patrick Day and Terry Castle have in separate studies suggested that the Gothic perspective helped bring about the shift, by the early twentieth century, from the Neoplatonic/Judeo-Christian model of the soul to the secular concept of the self as the Freudian psyche. In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of Gothic Fantasy (1985), Day argues that Gothic fiction preceded Freud in creating a new concept of an inner life, presenting in fiction what Freud would later represent in ideas and call "science." Freud himself acknowledged that "The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied" (qtd. in Trilling 50). By giving forms to what Freud would call the unconscious, especially in the dream/nightmare narrative, Gothic fiction taught people to heed and read their dreams, preparing them for psychoanalysis as a process of interpreting overdetermined, and displaced symbols (Day 177-90). The Gothic dream narrative subverted traditional linear structures and substituted transformation and metamorphosis for cause and effect. The dream work thus became a recognizable genre, "a type of text, neither a visitation from the gods nor the result of poor digestion. The rhetoric of

the Gothic easily leads its readers to take everything symbolically.... [Its] imaginative pull ... comes in part from our sense that what we see there represents something in ourselves (Day 180). Similarly in "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie," Terry Castle (1988) traces the influence of magic-lantern shows and spectral photography (the use of superimposed images and other "special" effects to represent the supernatural) on the history of the imagination. The phantasmagoria shows of the late 1800s, in a sense the first movies, provided "evidence" of an interior life and technological metaphors for the dream images, hallucinations, and projections that Freud eventually hypothesized. Gothic fantasy provided an iconography, a process, and a mystique for the popular understanding of psychoanalysis, facilitating the shift from the Neoplatonic and Judeo-Christian soul to the secular model of the psyche. Freud in his turn demonstrated the significance of fantasy. If the shift to the Freudian model announced the removal of God and the Judeo-Christian scriptures from the picture, it more than compensated by making the "buried" self fantastic. One's inner, "true" self became the sacred text to be studied. translated, invoked, and consulted. Today, as the ego is challenged and altered, a comparable shift has occurred from the Freudian psyche to a post-Freudian body fantastic, the product of a materialist, post-literate, electronic, image based culture. Horror announced the crisis in the 1970s and 1980s through its images-its bodies in pieces and or.ganic machines, its sexual mutations and re-genderations. Horror also provided the crisis with an iconography, a fantastic body language for re-imagining the self. It has contributed to our cur;ent concept of an embodied self, proposing popular metaphors for the unconscious, existential dread, Fouqmldian discourse theory, postmodern Marxist analysis and "panic" theory, Jungian psychology, and French Feminism. What Twitchell calls "preposterous violence" and Sartre "the fantastic" provides an iconography for a model of the "self" that is, above all, changing.

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THANATOS AND THE DENIAL OF DEATH In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud himself recognized one area where his psychoanalysis was prof6undly lacking: it has offered no psychology of death and dying. He neglected Thanatos, the death drive, much as he neglected the feminine. Implicit in his stance was denial. Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death, 1973) and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (Living With Death and Dying, 1981) were among the first popular philosophers who insisted that death had become the twentieth-century taboo and our last' frontier. Th.ken together, Foucault's texts suggest that if any "drive" has been repressed, it is Thanatos. Death for "most people"

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The Body Fantastic

Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

remains "a hidden secret, as eroticized as it is feared," says physicianwriter Sherwin B. Nuland in his best-selling book, How We Pie (1994, xv). Modern society's official belief is that "you don't have to die, that medicine should be able to snatch you from the edge of the grave" (Nuland, qtd. in May 4F). As capitalism and technology harnessed "bio-power," which Freud had helpfully called libido, Thanatos became nonproductive or morbid, and the true taboos became sadism, masochism, necrophilia, and suicide. The other face of denial is sexual paranoia, mass mediated sexual terrorism, and more generally, the cultural obsession, in the age of AIDS, with sexuality. At a time when pure, unselective, pleasurable sex means death, every body's sex (and sexual preference) is everybody's business. Eros has collaborated with Puritanism in this removal of death, with its myths and rituals of the body, from public view. The shift from supernatural terrorism to horror body language is both a symptom of the repression of Thanatos and a vehicle for its expression. That repression began, as far as Walter Kendrick (1991) is concerned, in the eighteenth century. When the family graveyards and country churchyards began to disappear, the "graveyard school" of poetry and the Gothic novel sprang from the ruins of hallowed ground, the hereditary class system, and the agrarian world (Kendrick 10-33). Once intimately connected with the life of the community, death became separated from life by medical technology, which confined it to the hospital and the funeral home. Death became unmentionable save as the enemy to be fought and overcome. By the 1980s "whole generations [had grown] up believing that immortality was the general rule," swears Barbara Ehrenreich, "except for those who bothered to smoke" ("Ultimate Chic" 694). Popular culture contributed to the modern Wt';stern denial of death by packaging death as violence. In a 1976 essay, "The Cold, Bright Charms of Immortality," Michael J. Arlen surveyed a week of television, noting the references to death or dying. He concluded that, according to the mass media, we did not die "except in numbers, or in Rangoon, or with blank faces in a gunfight" (280). A villain in a western or action film, in which the issue was right over wrong, died a bloodless or glamorous token death. In police procedural and detective genres, corpses (as the television series suggests) are apparatus, bodies of evidence, matters of clues and forensics. Violence is different from death, even sheltering us from it-that is, death experienced as an inevitable, natural process, as dying-Arlen pointed out " (280). Then along came Stephen King who, as William Gibson has pointed out, "cannily targeted the central obscenity, the dark under all our beds" (xvi). The growth of horror paralleled the removal of death from both public and private experience. Walte~J(endrick (1991) suggests that our "recoil" from death is "just one aspect of the overall tidying up that has been going

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on in Western culture for the last two hundred years" (xv), including effective hygiene, waste disposal, and the banning of odors. Thanatos had to enter through the back door, dominating iconographies whose manifest subject was birth. Horror science fiction reflected confusion about genetic engineering. In the films of David Cronenberg, the "metamorphosing" or maternal body became a metaphor for a monstrous future and for the death of the ego in the "New Flesh." "Birth is always painful" (a character in Stuart Gordon's 1985 film Re-Animator put it), and in the 1960s and 1970s, birth was demonic or deadly in films like Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, Larry Cohen's It's Alive (1974), and even Stanley Kubrick's disembodied fetus-in-space in 20Ql. Fetal and phallic-looking aliens burst from the chests and abdomens and heads of women, men, and animals, giving birth to death, in The Thing (1982), Alien (1979), Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992), Basket Case (1982), and Prom Beyond (1986). The earth, a grave, maw, and womb, brought forth hands (Carrie) and hoards of undead, even in mainstream video ("Thriller" and film Raising Arizona). Thanatos erupted with subversive vitality. Horror appealed to special needs in children and adolescents, who had to confront what they repressed and feared as "monstrous" in themselves, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim claimed in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976). Violence, grotesquery, and death were present in the oral folk tales now known as "children's literature" for therapeutic reasons. The fantasies of Tim Burton revealed their darkness in increasingly disturbing films. "I think people connect with the dark stuff because that's the way it really is," Burton stated in an interview in 1992. "In other cultures, death is much more a part of life; it's much more accepted .... [I]n American culture death is such a taboo" (qtd.·in McNichol 5). Burton's work from Beetlejuice (1988) through the "dark" Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), and Batman Returns (1992) addressed and redressed western materialist culture's repression of Thanatos. In the animated film A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Thanatos erupted as the skeletonous denizens of Halloweenland discovered and took over the rich myth and material rituals of Christmas. Burton thus nodded to horror's infusion of all the popular arts as well as the scaling up of Halloween over the last twenty years. Horror, as Burton's allegory suggested, addresses and attempts to fill the void left by "the fading presence of religion and tribal authority," and a need for customs or rituals wl)ich placed "de~th where it belonged, as part of the continuous collective cycle of human life" (Arlen 279). ·/ The modern fear of death is very d,ifferent from the primitive fear of the dead, Walter Kendrick points out .. Older cultures feared the dead as vengeful spirits that could be dealt with through specific rituals. Because "grounded in belief" and ritual, these fe~~ could be assuaged or sublimated. But mddern horror takes little s&ace from "worn-out platitudes

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The Body Fantastic

Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

25

-I about a heaven and the afterlife" (Kendrick xv). The fear and fascination concerns a lack of spirits, vengeful or otherwise: the horror of nonbeing on the one hand and of the corpse, material death, on the other. The real horror is death's aftermath: decomposition, absence, grief, or as Kendrick (1991) terms it, "dreadness." In The Birth of the Clinic (1975), Foucault explored the historical moment at which death became no longer a finite, ultimate event but instead a process, like that of disease and life itself. The dissolution of the boundaries of death and life has also destroyed any simple concepts of soul as an "eternal" or essential self. Its loss raises disturbing questions about identity that have fostered new mythologies of the body. The monster show of the 1970s and 1980s was like the icons it replaced, a rite of passage and a coping mechanism. It constituted both a denial of and confrontation with the "facts" of death. By the war-starved, health and fitness-obsessed consumer culture of the 1980s, the tangible yet mysterious inner spaces of the body· had become sites for new mythologies and a location, after the loss of the soul and the psyche, for the self. As pointed out by the zpmbie craze-from Romero's Night of the Living Dead-(1968), to Pet Sematary (1989), toDeath Becomes Her (1992)death's mystique was linked with a "resurrectionist" technology intent on manipulating the forces and forms of life. In the subgenre of medical horror, which Robin Cook, M.D., invented with Coma (1977), medical technocracy replaced the Gothic villain and the hospital became the castle. As the politically correct termjor "health" became "wellness," the television news becfime a wake, featuring interviews with dying victims of disease and close-up shots of distressed relatives, televised executions, live coverage of fatal motor accidents, and reenactments of violent crimes. Fantastic horror, ever more graphic and led by priest/shaman Stephen King, performed the funeral ritual of "viewing the body." Soon grainy pseudo-documentary videos like The Faces of Death, Parts 1 (1974) and 2 (1985), narrated by a "Dr. Gross" and including footage of autopsies, carnage from natural disasters, and executions, became available in the video rental sections of suburban grocery chains. The biomedical revolution enhanced the "cultural fascination" with death, claims David Lamb in his study of Organ Transplants and Ethics (1990), as death became a different proposition from what it had been. Underlying the fascination was anxiety and a deep "need to be better informed about death" (Lamb 27). Death became the great unknown, the new frontier, in late 1980s films like Jacob's Ladder (1989) and F1.atliners (1989), which investigated the liminal area bet;ween the flat line, the "death" indicated by the cessation of the vital organs, and brain death. The 1990s expanded that space further in "reality based" television. Rescue 991 on Scene: Emergency Response, and Trauma Center, which feature reenactments of viewers' accounts of medical crises, have the manifest

I

purpose of instruction. But they have a larger social function as a coping mechanism in ritual form. They take viewers to the brink of deaththrough the lives, deaths, and near-deaths of real people and their loved ones-and bring them back. They are vicarious near-death experiences that allow viewers to approach death time after time, without risk.

OUR BODIES, OURSELVES?

l

"All our fears add up to one great fear," Stephen King wrote in his foreword to Night Shift (xvi), "of the body under the sheet. It's our body." The broad fear of death (like that of sex) was not the real issue either. Romero's Night of the Living Dead was horrifying because the "dead" were in most technical senses living. They were functioning bodies going about the business of survival, en masse. They were the horror of our embodied-consumed and consuming-selves. "They're us," a character in Romero's Day of the Dead (!985) explained. Writer-director Clive Barker's.greatest fear has always been "the condition of being flesh and blood. Of minps to madness and flesh to wounding" (qtd. in Booe). In the films of David Cronenberg the body had a "mind of its own," said Richard Corliss. It was "a haunted house whose rumblings trigger lust, misery and excruciating pain in the poor tenant. This property is condemned" ("Terminal Case" 84). The modern horror film, as Philip Brophy put the issue, played "on the fear of one's own body, of how one controls and relates to it" (8). By the 1980s, the self was accessed and constituted in body images. Image was everything in everything from fashion as "statement" -to physical fitness to ultrasound technology. One sought to achieve "the look.• A deep-seated Puritanism was easily translated into the new religion of "wellness," which presupposed a morality of health and a psychology increasingly based in biochemistry. However demystified in one sense-as matter that could be manipulated-the body became a bastion of identity and mystery. By the 1980s, the body was no longer a temple or receptacle for the spirit. The popular feminist self-help book published by the Boston Women's Health Collective, made the point admirably: Our Bodies, Ourselves (1984, rev. 1991). Madonna, the consummate Material Girl, was Our Lady of the Eighties. The site of the self had shifted to the body-albeit manipulated, technologized, and transformed. As Pete Boss pointed out in Screen magazine in 1986, modern medicine had "recast the unknown" within its parameters (19), and horror, more than any other genre, registered this shift. The Exorcist (1973 J, directed by William Friedkin, was a sign of this relocation: the battle of God and the Devil was fought with unprecedented clinicism and intensity on and within the body of a twelve-year-old girl. Regan erupted in boils, exuded noxious fluids, and spoke in the monstrous

26

Film, HorrQr, and the Body Fantastic

voice of the bisexual archaic mother. The words "Help me" formed on the inside of her stomach to show through her skin, speaking from deep within for the "real" Regan (Creed, Monstrous-Feminine 36). Horror became a hysterical text or a theater of cruelty specializing in representations of the human anatomy in extremis-in disarray or deconstruction, in metamorphosis, invaded or engulfing, in sexual difference, monstrous otherness, or Dionysian ecstasy: the body fantastic. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) had been typical of its time in being based in the Oedipus complex. In the 1970s and 1980s, psychological states were realized on th'e screen as biological events. The Psycho of contemporary horror films was David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981), which literalized the concept of "mind blowing" and mind control in physiological terms (Brophy 8-9). Scanners also announced that the new Armageddon was an "intimate apocalypse" as Charles Derry puts it: "it is not the earth that explodes, but one's head" (173). Cronenberg's biological vision of things Derry finds "at the very center of the contemporary horror film" (174). His iconography reflects the impact, among other things, of postmodern discourse theory. As libido functions in Freudian psychoanalysis or light in relativity physics, bio-power is its constant. By the 1980s, as Vallie Export has noted, the body had become the symbol of the "real." At the same tirrte, it existed to be transformed. Increasingly mythologized, it was unable to bear the weight of its inscriptions. Panic set in, a paranoia enhanced by medical imaging technology which made the body seem infinite, mysteriously coded, out of control. There were alien worlds within. As a character in The Brood (1979) put the issue, when referring to a melanoma on his throat, "I've got a small insurrection on my hands. The Brood ends in a literalization of the concept of hysterical pregnancy, as a psychotic woman gives birth, through a cancerous-looking sac attached to her abdomen, to an army of murderous drones. She hystericizes her rage. Susan Sontag has pointed out that metaphors for disease are often militant. And yet in sharing that medical perspective, we seem to contain the insurrections: we participate in the technological reconstruction and colonization of the body that continually threatens revolt. And because the body is gendered female as the medical gaze is gendered male, bodies have gecome fields of contestation. Beginning with They Came {ro,ri Within (1975), Cronenberg' s films explore "male horror and envy of the reproductive process, pitting the creativity of male scientists and artists against . . . the monstrous birthing capacities of women" (Showalter, Sexual Anarchy, 141). In this gender war, there are some bloody battlegrounds. Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae, 1990), Carol Clover (Men, Women, and Chain Saws, 1992) and Barbara Creed (The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993) survey the territory, albeit with differing agendas, adding up the wins and losses. 11

The Body Fantastic

27

Aggression toward the body is "not new," Andrew Kimbrell points out, but today's body wars are "different from those of the past": "It's not just that modern technology has increased the rah~ and expanded the manner of our aggression toward our bodies, but also that we are alienated from them as never before" (57). A whole iconography supports his assertion. "Your Body: Friend, Foe, or Total Stranger?" queries the cover headline for the May/June 1992 Utne Reader. On the commentary page of Time, 1 July 1991, Barbara Ehrenreich also stated the issue as a question: "Why Don't We Like the Human Body?" Her answer was that we have expected too much of it. In the 1960s and 1970s we idealized the body into a source of self-transcendence on the one hand and on the other of "getting in touch with ourselves." Feminists celebrated their bodies, female sexuality, and the body's "languages"; Roland Barthes and French Feminists wrote "from the body." Hysteria was celebrated as jouissance. But then we lost sex. AIDS and the aging of the baby boomers changed that text. In the 1980s we consoled ourselves with the joys and obsessions of consumerism. And then, to quote Ehrenreich's punch line, "we lost food." Beyond these losses and disappointments, as Kimbrell points out, we were and are yet "suffering a psychological and philosophical confusio11 about ourselves unknown in earlier times ("Your Body" 57). This confusion about the self as it relates to the body is at.the center of many of our present uncertainties. On the one hand is the sense of powerlessness in the face of AIDS, cancer, heart disease, an aging population and age-related disorders, eating disorders, the drug plague, the "crisis" of the nuclear family, the shifting of the boundaries of gender, sexual anarchy and its media images, pornography and media violence, censorship, medical malpractice, imminent ecological disaster, biological weapons, the appearance of resistant new viruses potentially more lethal than AIDS. All of the above tell us that the human body is vulnerable as never before and hazardous to the ecosystem as well. We feel trapped in the bodies that increasingly determine who we are, projecting a negative or positive image, defining our neuroses as disorders and our rituals and relationships as addictions and codependencies. As gene therapies bring back the specter of eugenics, our sense of identity and the human is undermined. On the other hand, the medical revolution, an emphasis on diet, exercise, and health-a national morality of fitness and a religion of "wellness"orga'n transplantation, gene therapy and replacement, gene patents, genetic screening, "designer" babies, human growth hormones injected into children, cloned human embryos, cryonics, plastic surgery, breast implants, body sculpting (including liposuction and silicone implants), transsexual surgery, steroids, mind-altering drugs, "Frankenfood," artificial intelligence, the technological ·sensorium, virtual reality technology, advertising, repressed memory therapy, false memory syndrome, and Foucauldian discourse theory tell us that the body is, if biologically encoded

Film, Horrqr, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

and culturally defined, then capable of augmentation: self-created, infinitely remakeable, science fiction, virtual reality, the stuff of mythology. The body is terrifying, the body is fantastic. We are living in a time of miracles and wonder, Paul Simon noted in 1986 in a song in his Graceland album. We marvel at "The Boy in the Bubble" and Baby Faye's baboon heart. Simon's refrain, which also soothes a universal "baby, telling it not to cry, turns the song into a deeply ironic lullaby for a world whose technology has outdistanced its ethics. The body was once thought to have been made in God's image; it was the outward sign of spiritual fitness or the reverse, the disease or deformity of sin. Now, as the self's visible image, the joint production of medical imi:l.ging technology and the cinematic gaze, the body is equally an icon, the sign of the self's fitness or wellness. In the 1980s, feeling powerless to change their environment, people began changing "what they [did] have power over: their own bodies" (Vale and Juno 4). Virtue, "drained out of our public lives," reappeared "in our cereal bowls, our "exercise regimens ... and our militant responses to cigarette smoke, strong drink, and greasy food," says Barbara Ehrenreich ("The Morality of Muscle Tone" 65). The body image as a sign of fitness or the reverse constituted the only universal morality left. Sartre wrote that the body is the sign of one's "facticity, one's ontological reality. And the material body continues to signify unity, wholeness, identity, and humanity even as "the body" as a concept becomes increasingly unstable. As medicine, imaging technology, virtual reality, and the deconstruction of gender made our bodies increa_singly fantastic, the body in some enlarged or "enlightened" sense has been identified with the self. Sartre also stressed (after Nietzsche) that in the absence of God we were responsible for choosing our lives and constructing human nature. Now that the body is imagined, perceived as icon, commodity, and disposable machine, we are challenged to reimagine and construct our physical nature as well. Biology and medicine tell us that the old body-mind dualism was wrong, that the body encompasses our genetic history and codes our future, and does much of what we consider our thinking and choosing. If not sacred and indivisible, our bodies in the largest sense are inseparable from our minds. And yet the body is for sale. Organ harvesting, genetic engineering, and gene patents have rendered the body into a natural resource or commodity that as a sign of the self becomes meaningless. An increasingly centralized material culture mirrors, dissolves, reconstitutes, and projects the self in media images of the body, and in so doing undermines the self's integrity. Biotechnology and advertising colonize arid inscribe the body, and definitions of life and death, age, gender, and species are constantly redrawn. As the human and its territory ·are

marginalized, we return to the remaining "hard" fact that testifies to our existence, the body and the experience of the body. In short, our expectations in the 1980s would not have been so great or our body myths so violent had not our bodies become, as never quite so completely before, our selves. The horror boom reflected our ambivalent response to a shift from the self imagined as a soul, to the self imagined in or in relation to a body. The postmodern self, in contrast to the soul or psyche, is depersonalized, lost, or schizophrenic, as Herbert Marcuse and James Hillman in different ways have suggested. As media technology has enhanced the virtual body, mass consciousness has appropriated its private space. It is fragmented into roles and functions that Foucault has called "technologies of the self." Stuart Ewen, Arthur Kroker and David Cook have suggested that we perceive ourselves as "designer bodies" inscribed by the mass media and constantly refashioned. Multinational corporations consolidate the images we choose from, and the result is an impoverishment of the imagination and a loss of self. The clinical gaze collaborates with the camera's gaze, for instance, in the cosmetic surgery industry, which cuts people to fit the reigning standard, briskly marketing boob jobs, nose jobs, liposuction, or lip enhancement. From a feminist perspective, in which technology is gendered male and the body female, and as Naomi Wolf (The Beauty Myth, 1991), and Gena Corea (Man-Made Women, 1987) argue, women are measured and reconfigured by male standards. Like the superstars, the monsters of the 1980s and 1990s-the zombies, cyborgs, psychopathic serial killers, and femme fatales-reflect our stateof exhilaration, confusion, denial, and self-impoverishment. They are fantasies of "bio-power" obtained through consuming and possessing other bodies. Driving George Romero's zombies, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (or the real-life Henry Lucas or Jeffrey Dahmer), sustaining Death Becomes Her' s Hollywood and the compulsion to eviscerate, incorporate, articulate, and manipulate the flesh was a sense of fragmentation and loss of the bourgeois-patriarchal ego. As Ehrenreich suggests, this alienation has been expressed equally in fantasies of physical invulnerability. The cyborg transcends the human condition in a fantasy of replication "in whom all soft, unreliable tissue has been replaced by metal alloys" (Ehrenreich "Why Don't We"). The hypermasculine "hardbody" ideal of the 1980s is the brighter side, paradoxically, of our fascination with serial killers and their "work." In body building, we share mythologies with Thomas Harris's Francis Dolarhyde (Red Dragon, 1981, adapted to film as Manhunter, 1986), who works out with weights in front of mirrors when he is not making movies of himself glorying in front of his victims' corpses, and Jame Gumb (The Silence of the Lambs, 1988, film 1991), who constructs a new skin for himself from his victims' bodies.

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

In images of the deconstructed body postmodern horror literalized a concept familiar since Barthes' "The Death of the Author" (1977), Ihab Hassan's The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1982), Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1983), and Michel Foucault's discourse theory. In Discipline and Punisn. (1979), Foucault evoked the metaphor of a centralized biopower network-the body medicalized and disseminated in surfaces, sensations, organs, and parts as separate sites and texts of power. Horror articulates this peculiarly "postmoctern" dreaa of depersonalization in visions of the self disseminated as plugged-in "bio-power." In the 1983 film adaptation of Coma a network of bodies of potential organ donors is linked by tubes and suspended from a vast ceiling, bio-power imagined as a huge artificial womb. David Cronenberg' s concept of the "video Word made Flesh" in his 1982 film Videodrome owes much to Foucault's Panopticon in Discipline and Punish and corresponds with Jean Baudrillard' s vision in "The Ecstasy of Communication" (1983) of the human subject as schizophrenic and medium. As constructed by media language and image, and when experienced through its various technologies, the subject is no longer divisible into "public" and "private," self and other, mind and body. It is a mixture of body and technology a1'd environment. The subject becomes the "switching center for all the networks of influence," a sort of "human screen," and a "state of terror," of "too great a proximity of everything, the unclean' promiscuity of everything which touches, invests, and penetrates witµout resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore" (Baudrillard 132-33). When the subject is so dislocated, traditional psychoanalytic categories no longer signify. But it was Freud himself who began to decenter the bourgeois ego by demonstrating its formation in the experience of the body, hence locating "mind" in what the cyberpunks refer to as "meat." His later social psychology and cultural studies began following out the implications of this materialism for culture. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud (perhaps thinking of his own ill-fitting prosthesis) conjured up an image of the future that anticipated the iconography of Robocop or Aliens:

Freud's "prosthetic man," the self as a biological machine fragmented into parts or functions, anticipated the postmodern or information-age view of the self. In the late twentieth century, the physical body has become more than ever the sign of the self, the icon representing its existence and unity, at the historical moment when we have become aware more than ever before of how unreal that "self" is-of the dispersal of consciousness in the communications network imaginary. On the one hand a "reality principle" signifying anatomy as destiny, the body is also a site, an iconography, and a mythology. Cronenberg' s term for the body fantastic in Videodrome is the "New Flesh" and refers neither to substance nor idea but a mutation of the two. In one scene, a vaginal slit opens in the abciomen of the protagonist, Max Renn (a pornography distributor) and a videocassette is inserted, "programming" him. Later, he reaches into his abdomen and pulls out a gun dripping ,with gore. This melds with his hand, sprouting tentacle-like cables that hook into his wri&t and morph into a literalized metaphor: hand gun. Like us, Max exists somewhere between substance and signal, between text and context, creator and monster, as "video Word made Flesh." Cronenberg has developed a fantastic film discourse adapted from medical imaging technologies and the clinical gaze: biological process takes the place of action and characterization, remapping "inner space" in terms of the body fantastic. Speaking of The Fly (1986), a film he hoped would at first horrify and then, in the gradual revelation of character, inspire, Cronenberg &aid, "If we were watching life from inside our bodies, we'd ... have a different idea of what was beautiful" (Verniere, "Moyie" 51). Clive Barker's term for his grotesqueries is "celebration" (qtd. in Wiater, "Catching" 46), and many of his protagonists undergo perversely beautiful transformations and transcend their former (stereotypical) selves. And if Cronenberg's "New Flesh" is finally a horror, what feminist biologist Donna Haraway calls "cyborg vision" is instructive. Her argument suggests that the contemporary fascination with anomaly and transformation-from the 1960s revival of Tod Browning's Freaks to Blade Runner, Edward Scissorhands, Addams Family Values, or even Michael Jackson-is not merely a sign of alienation. It implies the recognition of power in difference, a desire to reconfigure identity, and multiple selves, thus transcending limitations of gender, race, species, age, and class. Morphing is becoming-the subject choosing identity in change.

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Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times. . . . Future ages will bring with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more. But ... present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character. (Freud, Civilization 43-44)

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HYSTERICAL NARRATIVES The body fantasies of popular culture are closely related to the discourses of the body informing contemporary theory and literature. These giscourses, such as Foucault's bio-power, French Feminism, and magic

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

realism, privilege the material, the body, and the imaginary-the "right brain" language of the senses and the emotions-over the symbolic. As methodologies they attempt, in the words of Adelaide Morris, to "reclaim the material world for consciousness and language," and they cut "to the quick, to the bone, to the heart" so as to matter "in a deeply personal fashion" (Morris 572). They wish to be felt viscerally, referring to the body as the deep center of meaning. A glance through the notable titles of postmodernist and feminist ur-texts means a season in hell or a ride through a Hieronymous Bosch painting: Hassan's The Dismemberment of Orpheus (1971), Barthes' "The Death of the Author" (1977); Georges Bataille's Death and Sensuality (1977); Arthur Kroker and David Cook's The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (1986); Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1973), The Birth of the Clinic (1975), and Discipline and Punish (1979); Ellen Moers' "Female Gothic" (in Literary Women, 1976); Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman (1979); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979); Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror (1982) and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholy (1989); Elaine Scarry' s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985); Helene Cixous' "The Laugh of the Medusa" (1976); Helena Michie's The Flesh Made Word (1987); Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth's Body/Politics (1990); Gena Corea's Man-Made Women (1987); Adrienne Rich's Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1985); Susan Sontag's fllness as Metaphor (1979); Elaine Showalter's The Female Malady (1985) and Sexual Anarchy (1990). Then there are the buzzwords of the last two decades: "deconstruction," "abjection," "anxiety of authorship," "disease," "magic realism," "hysterical narrative," "subversive," and "carnivalesque." In Kristeva' s Power of Horror, the fundamental reflex of horror (and the Gothic), abjection or revulsion, initiates ego formation. It originates in the child's turning-away or splitting off from the archaic Mother, encountered for the first time as the Other, the "not-me." The term abject is applied to "any kind of transgressive state, or any condition which challenges the limits anq boundaries of being" (Hanson 140), and thus to experimental texts such as those of Celine and Jqyce, in whose gaps and disruptions of meaning we glimpse the mother's body, the body fantastic. Because under patriarchy the feminine is the horror, the mother is imagined as an all-powerful, encroaching bodily presence that threatens castration. As Barbara Creed demonstrates in her book The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), the mother appears in film from The Exorcist and Carrie to The Brood and Alien. Kristeva assumed with Lacan that women have no access to subjectivity and language. Other feminists of the 1970s and 1980s have recognized not only that women have found expression but specifically in an alternative "Female Gothic" tradition, as Ellen Moers first named it. Gilbert and

Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) implies that the feminist tradition in nineteenth-century English literature used fantasy to express the "dis-ease" of female madness, entrapment, drowning, monstrous doubles and mirrors, and death. It has stolen the "powers of horror" often used to express misogyny, employing them perversely against themselves in a language of female rage and desire, reclaiming them for women. Women from Mary Shelley to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from "feminist pornographer" Anne Rice to Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, from Sylvia Plath to Margaret Atwood have used this "monstrous" feminine discourse to subvert the symbolic brder of modern culture Uackson 103-4). Showalter reads the Female Gothic back "through Freud's Studies on Hysteria, 'Dora,' and 'Das Unheimliche; as well as through Lacan and Kristeva," showing how critics "equated the Gothic with the feminine unconscious, and with the effort to bring the body, the semiotic, the imaginary, or the pre-Oedipal [M]Other Tongue -into language" (Sister's Choice 129). These traditions of English/American literature and French Feminist discourse together have provided an empowering myth for the second-wave feminist movement. 6 The Female Gothic acknowledges that under patriarchal ideology women are the embodied gender, "the sex,• and asserts that as a consequence they write most poignantly from the body. Revising Freud, the French Feminists privilege hysteria, the term popularly applied to female psychosomatic illness, using it to mean a language of the body fantastic, a somatic anti-language. Hysteria "speaks" through physiological signs or stigmata what is unspeakable under patriarchy, circumventing the symbolic order through the unconscious. Helene Cixous and Monique Vljttig use the metaphor of the literal body ,i:tS an alternative to the cultural space of the symbolic and as part of a feminist effort to restore wholeness to the self. Feminists of the 1970s and early 1980s disrupted male language, voicing an organic, polysemic, empathetic, interactive consciousness. This reactivation of the senses was compatible with popular movements such as New Age mysticism and the environmental movement. In reclaiming a "hysterical" discourse for themselves Lacan and the Female Gothic writers shared methods and at least one ~urpose with the goriest _of the 1980s horror films. Circumventing the, terrain of the gendered and medicalized body, both articulated the unholy, mute flesh. Since the late eighteenth century women writers have been drawn to fantasy's "violently transgressive function," as Jackson calls it, its ability to undermine the norm by proposing an alternative order (68). The fantastic "exists as the inside, or underside, of realism, opposing the novel's closed, monological forms with open, dialogical structures, as if the novel had given rise to its own opposite, its unrecognizable reflection" Uackson 25). In the last fifteen years, women writers including Carter, Yolen, Morrison, Atwood, and Allende, but also Tunith Lee, Clarissa

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

The Body Fantastic

Pinkola Estes, Lisa Tuttle, Emma Tennant, Anne Rice, Octavia Butler, Johanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Nancy Collins, Melanie Tum, Kathe Koja, and Nancy Holder have moved freely in the margins of gender and genre, high and low culture, indirectly challenging canonicity, and making new myths. ,The horror genre, often equated with the slasher film, is often assumed to be the enemy of women by feminists-or at the very least, the enemy of feminists. In reality, the discourse~ of horror are not separable from the discourses of gender. Horror expresses and diagnoses gender trouble, the schisms of self and other, mind and body, and the cognitive limits of mortality in the language of the fantastic. Drawing on Kristeva and Deleuze and Guattari, Alice Jardine proposes the term gynesis to refer to this process as that through which a new language comes into being and thus a project "filled with both promise and fear":

to its future. Freudian psychoanalysis and existentialism were beh\Ild many of these mythologies. In 1947, in an essay review of Maurice Blanchot's Aminadab and several works by Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre proposed "The Fantasticas a Language" for the modern human condition. In contrast to fantasy in the past, which presumed wit!} religion and metaphysics a "human power to transcend the human" (58), Sartre argued, there was nothing supernatural about the modern fantastic. It was "one of a hundred ways" we have of "mirroring [our] own image." "We recognize the footprint on the shore as our own" (61). In existentialist ontology, as conscious (transcendent) subjects that are simultaneously embodied within the world of objects, alienated from that world and from ourselves as bodies, we produceJhe fantastic. The fantastic expresses a problem of language peculiar to modern discourse. It consists ,of states of being we cannot articulate in "clear, distinct ideas. . . . We are forced to resort to blurred thoughts which are in themselves fantastic [images, metonyms, and half-formed metaphors] to indulge, though wide awake and fully mature and in the midst of civilization, in the magical 'mentality' of the dreamer, the primitive and the child" (58). As an expression of the human condition, the fantastic tends toward anti-language or embodiment. It is "an entire world in which things manifest a captive, tormented thought ... both whimsical and enchained" that never manages to "express itself" purely:

for these spaces have hitherto remained unknown, terrifying, monstrous: they are mad, unconscious, improper, unclean, nonsensical, oriental, profane. If philosophy is truly to question those spaces, it must ... offer itself over to them, embrace them. (73) This articulation of the "abject," unwritten, feminine space is not confined to women's writing or even to writing. Gynesis takes place in perverse forms and is often articulated through misogynistic and hysterical iconographies. Barbara Creed suggests that misogynistic, images of the monstrous feminine in contemporary horror movies are examples: chapters 4 and 5 of this book explore the work of male directors Brian De Palma, David Lynch, Neil Jordan, Stuart Gordon, David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, and Ridley Scott as conscious attempts to subvert the patriarchal or "poetic space," as Gaston Bachelard has called it, in which the historical, gendered body is both articulated and altered. THE FANTASTIC AS A LANGUAGE Dark fantasy has always stimulated strong feeling, however, and the eighteenth-century Gothic revival was part of a culture-wide reactivation of feeling through the senses-a cycle repeated at the nineteenth century fin de siecle. It performs a similar role for the present. "Getting in touch with" one's body, according to materialist discourse theory, restores connection with the larger body politic. As a fantastic discourse that speaks for the body, horror provides a metaphorics for a time of transition. It gives the unknown a shape and a language. Throughout the twentieth century, as the unknown was recovered in the material and the body, fantasy constructed mythologies of the body that lent shape

35

[M]atter is never entirely matter, since it offers only a constantly frustrated attempt at determinism, and mind is never completely mind, because it has fallen into slavery and has been impregnat~d and dulled by matter. All is woe. Things.suffer, and tend toward inertia, without ever attaining it; the debased, enslaved mind unsuccessfully strives towards consciousness and freedom. (58) The fantastic is based in somatic consciousness-in sensational existence that is tragically conscious of its material finitude and the presence of Otherness, in the torture, challenge, and horror-comedy of incessant change. Sartre's argument influenced Todorov, Kristeva, and Jackson, all of whom argue that the fantastic is inherently subversive because it proposes what is patently absurd, and who stress its origins in the paradoxes of embodiment and language. But Sartre himself excelled in the discourse of the fantastic. In his novel Nausea (1964, trans. of La Nausee, 1938), the protagonist Roquentin perceives nature's horrifying otherness-a tree as a "voracious claw tearing at the earth, devouring its food" (133), things in transformation, "divorced from their names" (125), monstrously beyond language; there "a crowd of things will appear for which people will have to find new names-stone-eye, great three-cornered arm, toe-crutch,

36

Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

spider-jaw" (159). The fantastic paradoxically •is our language for such things, according to Rosemary Jackson. It "pushes towards an area of non-signification" to "articulate 'the unnamable,' the 'nameless things' of horror fiction," and to "visualize the unseen," it establishes a "disjunction of word and meaning through a play upon 'thingless names' " (Jackson 41). Thus the fantastic continually demystifies and remythologizes. Kristevan abjection is Sartrean nausea presented in a context of Lacanian psycholinguistics and deconstruction. In myth, art, and pop culture it functions as a rite of defilement (abjection) in which the subject vicariously loses its boundaries in an encounter with the Other, until the reflex of horror reestablishes them. The most primitive of languages, horror simultaneously alters identity and proclaims the subject's reality. Yet even while expressing alienation from the body, it is a kind of writing from the body-Eased in its consciousness of the body on the one hand as prison and, on the other, as medium, as expression and means of transcendence. Thus fantastic horror allows us to re-experience being and transgress its limits at the same time. Beyond the horror per se, Kristeva suggests, is the "semiotic," a revolutionary dissolution or deformation of syntax of the symbolic in an effort to break through it and return to the imaginary. The embodied state that Sartre saw as absurd and even tragic the French Feminists and other discours'es of the body celebrate and choose as • medium. Contemporary horror, a type of the carnivalesque, often operates within a range between these two extremes. Modern horror has a "violent awareness" of its saturation as a genre, _.as Philip Brophy says. It "knows that you've seen it before; ... that you know what is about to happen; and it knows that you know it knows you know. And none of it means a thing, as the cheapest trick ... will still , tense your muscles, quicken your heart and jangle your nerves" (5). When the pleasure of the text is horror, only the phenomenal present counts. Horror film does not deny its cliches; it overplays them, creating an undercurrent. In Creepshow, for instance, stereotypes are totally realized and lived out (Brophy 12). The modern horror film often uses its self-referentiality to literalize itself in the textual event, making the subject of the horror coincide with its medium and context. Like primal scream therapy, horror is a reality check or biofeedback in which the text constantly refers back to the existential present fact of embodiment. Even as it creates and deconstructs myths of transcendence, horror confirms the reader's or viewer's existence.7 The genre's tendency to self-cannibalism means that it logically concludes in anti-horror (Douglas Winter) or metahorror (Dennis Etchison): the medium becomes the monster. Anti-horror, as Douglas Winter called it in 1988, is (however paradoxically) its purest state. It uses conventions subversively, to play against and go beyond them-for instance in

The Body Fantastic

37

"haunted theater" variations from Videodrome and Fright Night (1985) through Shocker (1989) and Brainscan (1994). Presently horror and science fiction fantasy subvert mind/body dualisms and help us imagine and create new spaces within the bodymind continuum, the new frontiers of innerspace. Or the self is interface or information exchange; it is extended in the technological sensorium and indistinguishable from the medium, the virtual body-in the cyberpunk fiction of Bruce Sterling and William Gibs.on and in films such as Videodrome and Total Recall. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), Walter Ong finds that information-age culture supports an increasingly acoustical organization of consciousness that as in oral cultures is holistic, spatially organized, participatory and communal (in the sense of a global village or electronic den), as opposed to binary, linear-historical, and self-reflective. Where Freud hoped to reclaim the unconscioµs for the ego, postliterate consciousness is usurped by information technology, and distinctions between self and world, body and mind, television and human reality, live and recorded, are collapsed. In preliterate culture you knew only what you could recall, and the oral performer functioned as a library or computer whose information could be accessed by a key word or sound formula. In our visual economy or image-based culture, we know what we can see, on the computer or TV or movie screen. In preliterate epics, knowledge was closely related to the lifeworld-to action and agonistic, to physical or verbal conflict. Cyberpunk is about the postliterate future of culture while exempl_lifying, in its own comparatively literary text, its antithesis, argue Eric Rabkin ("Undecidability") and David Porush. In contrast, the horror phenomenon, especially in the 1980s, was postliterate culture in process of becoming. As the old psychology was translated into the image-based visual economy in the 1980s and into multimedia and virtual reality in the 1990s, science-fiction, action, horror movies, and Stephen King novels (and "the Stephen King film") became our epics. King changed the Gothic novel into a postliterate text and a language for an age of secondary orality. In the process he became not merely the world's best-selling author but a mass media guru with an impact on several film and television genres. This volume examines the contemporary horror film in such a literary, theoretical, and cultural context. The following chapters concern cultural attitudes and epistemologies projected in the ghost, the Frankenstein monster, the monstrous feminine, and the predatory male gaze. Chapter 2 analyzes recent representations of the ghost's liminal state in biologically embodied and mass mediated terms. The Frankenstein monster is the ghost's alter ego and often represents the unsettling bioethical concerns of our time. Chapter 3 traces the iconography of Shelley's and Frankenstein's "hideous progeny" (Shelley, Appendix A, Introd. 229) as presented

38

Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

in contemporary popular culture, especially horror and science fiction film: the body in pieces, the zombie, the serial killer, the cyborg, and the superstar. Chapters 4 through 6 concern the dialectic of the camera's gaze (positioned as male) and the body (positioned as female) in selected films directed by men, Brian De Palma' s Body Double (1984) through Jonathan Demme1s The Silence of the Lambs (1991). In response to gender trouble, directors like De Palma, David Lynch, Neil Jordan, Cronenberg, and E>emme go beyond portraying women as victims and monsters. They have used horror film as a diagnostic and subversive discourse to expose and undermine the male gaze, to explore male embodiment and male hysteria, and to propose, within the terms of the Gothic thriller, a female gaze. The body fantastic, as explored in the following chapters, is therefore, at work in gynesis, ecriture feminine, and Jungian storytelling as well as "splatter prose" and "Stephen King" films, in bio-power as well as technohorror. It is innerspace, abject art, and interface. It is a product of the medical perspective and of the camera, a matter of projection and a problem of "the gaze." It is "postliterate" text. It is the inarticulate body paradoxically, hysterically speaking for itself.

Chapter 2

Spectral Effects: Postmodern Ghosts PHANTASMAGORIANA The title character in Clive Barker's story "Son of Celluloid" (1984) is a monster that feeds on the projected emotion of motion picture audiences. Formerly the stomach cancer of a crook who died behind a screen, it has survived its host and grown larger than life on the hopes and fears and aggressions givep over to the image. This "tumor grown fat on wasted passion" (35) now freely roams an old movie palace (a one-time mission) attracting its prey through impersonations of dead movie stars. "Son of Celluloid" is, among other things, a sophisticated ghost story that draws on the "haunted theatre" cliche. It plays on the uncanny sense in which the camera creates "ghosts" by projecting spectral images-images that both are and are not "real." The theatre manager succumbs to the monster's Marilyn Monroe, who though "dead in the flesh" is somehow "alive here [in the thxatre], either in his brain, or in the buzzing matrix of the air or both; and he could be with her. He embraced her, and she him. They kissed. It was easy" ("Son of Celluloid" 3, 27). Two ancestors of th~ movies in this "ghost making" capacity were the stroboscopes and zootropes (also zoetropes), parlor toys that created the optical illusion of lifelike movement by exploiting persistence of visionthe brain's retention of images for a split second longer than the eye sees them. The brain "saw" multiple separate but related images of an object

40

Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

Spectral Effects

41

as a single fluid sequence (Mast 8-9). In its collaboration with the projector, it produced its own ghosts, and what we now know as "the movies" were a kind of haunting of the eye by the mind. Rusty Lemorande' s self-consciously modern (1992) adaptation of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw opens with a panning exploration of a child's room and stops on a toy stroboscope. Spinning uncannily and thus "projecting" the images we see, this toy announces the illusion that constructs the film's reality, the haunting inherent in film itself. Only slightly more remote ancestors of the Son of Celluloid were the "Phantasmagoria" in which ghosts and spirits were made to appear and move with one or more "magic lanterns." The invention of Belgian physicist Etienne-Gaspard Robertson in March 1798, the magic lantern was a "candle-powered slide projector" consisting of a box with a candle, a concave mirror, and a tube with a convex lens at each end (Castle 31-33; Mast 9). In "Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie" (1988), Terry Castle traces the influence of this technology on the history of the imagination. The Phantasmagoria's nominal purpose was to demonstrate how mediums created their illusions by projecting images arid eventually "spectral" photographs ("ghostly" images superimposed on ordinary photographic images). Through tecI:mology they exposed charlatans and routed superstition. But Robertson and his imitators staged their shows as Gothic extravaganzas-in total darkness and accompanied by unearthly music. Robertson opened with a somber speech on death and superstition, emphasizing the power of fear to create illusions. Then followed his repertoire of Gothic iconography: ghostly images of dead celebrities, an apparition from Henry Fuseli's painting The Nightmare, ,Medusa's head, a bleeding nun, and so forth (Castle 36-37). In his parting speech, Robertson referred to having shown "the most occult things natural philosophy has to offer, effects that seemed supernatural to the ages of credulity.... But now, he added, "see the only real horror ..., see what is in store for all of you, what each of you will become one day." With the words "Remember the phantasmagoria," he illuminated the skeleton of a young woman on a pedestal (Castle 37). Like contemporary cinema, Robertson's shows exposed the smoke-andmirror machinery behind his ghosts, even as he confirmed a new kind of reality in which they "existed," as the virtual reality of "art" or "spectral" effects. As the shows sprang up all over the continent and spread to England, the technology became more sophisticated, advancing from candle to magnesium gaslights, from drawn images to projections of actors and actresses reflected from below the stage, to photographic images. Projectionists began using multiple lanterns to create depth and developed lantern slides with moving parts. Specters materialized and disappeared, advanced and receded, and changed colors. These ghost shows gave birth simultaneously to the horror show and cinema itself.

Noting shifts in the etymology of the word phantasmagoria, Castle traces the history through which Robertson's specters were internalized, so that by the time of Freud, thought itself seemed to be haunted. The term ceased to refer exclusively to the lantern shows and began to refer to the "contents" of the mind. Thus the boundary between "ghost seeing" and ordinary thought began to be subverted. The metaphor of the phantasmagoria mediated between the two contradictory perspectives inherent in the rationalist position. As skeptics said, ghosts were hallucinations, artificial products of the internal machinery. The magic lantern was analogous to the brain in the way it "made" illusions. But in another sense, ghosts "lived" as phenomena in the "intimate space" of the mihd itself. Castle points out that "The paradox was exactly like that achieved at the real Phantasmagoria: ghosts did not exist, but one saw them anyway. Indeed, one could hardly escape them, for they were one's own thoughts bizarrely externalized" (58). 1 The mind itself became haunted. Poe was fond of literalizing the idea that if one thought too hard, one's mind might produce phantoms. The neurasthenic Roderick Usher suffers from "phantasmagoric conceptions" in which he believes that his dead sister is alive. These hallucinations are realized at the story's conclusion when Madeline emerges through a doorway, the embodiment of his most hideous thoughts. 2 Meanwhile, in London a new phase of spirit making technology opened when Madam Tussaud's House of Wax joined the Parisian showman Paul de Philipstal's phantasmagoria in 1801 (Castle 37; Huet 195). Tussaud's biggest draw was the Separate Room (subsequently the Chambef of Horrors), which featured wax effigies taken from executed criminals and freshly guillotined victims of the French Revolution (Huet 188-218). Thssaud included figures of living famous people as well, melting down the least favored to provide materials for newcomers. The effigies made the death's heads come alive and the living appear dead or asleep. Like photograph, as Barthes described them, the effigy liad the effect of an eidolon and suggested the "return of the [living} dead" (Camera Ludica 9). Thanks to Madame Tussaud's technology or (as she preferred to see it) art, the departing spirit was captured in the image. The waxworks pro".;ided the other ~ace of the phantasmagoria; .they gave supernatural life to the material and in particular to the image. Milan Kundera {1981) has written that the horror of death is based in two things: the prospect of "non-being" and the "terrifying materiality of the ,corpse" (171). The phantasmagoria and the waxworks (shall we call it the first of the great double feature horror shows) embodied ethereal and material extremes in the expression of this fear and of its other face, the yearning for transcendence. Its technologies also set the stage for the twentieth century.

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

ECTOPLASMIC RESIDUE: POLTERGEIST AND GHOSTBUSTERS In Tim Burton's Beetlejuice (i988), the ghosts of Barbara and Adam Maitland have a problem. No one can see them. At last, by wearing designer sheets, they are able to appear before pre-teen Lydia Deetz, who cannot repress giggles at the spectacle. Then, stricken with awe by a second thought, she asks, ''.Are you gross? Are you Night of the Living Dead in there?" Like most children of the last twenty years, she expects horrors to be visible, tangible, and disgusting. In her essay on Freud's "uncanny,• Cixous says that death in the modern sense, as absence, cannot be shown except in material form, represented as a corpse, an emblem (a memento mori skeleton), or space Uackson 68). Classic ghosts, represented as space or vacuum, are by contemporary standards unphotogenic. "Real" apparitions are rarely visual, reports The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. Most often they are manifested by sounds (thumps, rappings, moans, animal sounds, and other noises), odors, extremes of temperature, and touch (Guiley 13). They are paradoxes of representation: in asserting the "presence" of absence, the unreal, they empty "reality" of meaning, leaving signs without significance. As Cixous suggests, the ghost's uncanny "presence" asserts "a gap where one would like to be assured of unity" (qtd. in Jackson 68), a black hole in the "text" of the symbolic order, swallowing it up. They are like Derridean words; they "kill" meaning. Ghosts pretend to assert transcendence but actually speak the nothingness, the death, of the things they name. According to Gillian Beer, they represent "the insurrection, not the resurrection of the dead" (260). It is in this sense that the ghost story is a rehearsal for death. The classic ghost story embodied the psychological problem inherent 'in "seeing" ghosts or, as Todorov calls it, the fantastic. Taking the point of view of "normal" characters exposed to the extraordinary, the fantastic led readers to "hesitate" between rational and supernatural interpretations of things. James' ghost story The Turn of the Screw turns on the paradox of whether the governess sees ghosts or is the victim of her own repressed fantasies or, somehow, both. 3 Robert Wise's fi\m The Haunting (1962), based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House (1960), drew on the accounts of nineteenth-century psychic researchers. In Wise's film, as in Jackson's novel, ghosts are never seen. In fact, there are no special effects in the modern sense: the ghosts are represented by sounds (a child's crying, laughter, rappings), camera angles, and reaction shots. But The Haunting was a throwback. As the movies replaced the old ghost projection shows, ghosts per se, being the mind's special effects to begin with, were beside the point. As "Son of Celluloid" so eloquently shows, the cinema haunted much more thoroughly and effectively, and movies supplanted the spirits they were originally designed to project.4 The horror classics of the 1920s and 1930s, influenced by Freud by way

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43

of German expressionism, had their hallucinating madmen, somnambulists, and projections from the id (The Cabinet of Dr. Calligan) mummies, vampires, golem, doubles, monsters (Frankenstein), and more monsters (King Kong). Old-fashioned ghosts already inspired laughter or wonder more readily than horror, and ghost stories were really romances (like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), comedies (Topper), or "spooky old house" films that were the setting for a series of comedy skits-The Ghost Creeps (1940), Scared Stiff (1952), Francis in the Haunted House (1956), and Abbott and Costello's meetings with various monsters.s The fear of the dead, of ghosts, was based in beliefs founded in a sense of place and hereditary continuity. In eighteenth-century England, a person might be christened, married, and buried in the same place, and ghosts were someone's .ancestors. With mass migration to the cities during the industrial revolution, the ghost was displaced within tl).e various productions of the Gothic revival. Now manifested in special effects, it changed considerably. The fear of ghosts was replaced, as Kendrick has noted, by the modern fear of deadness-of decomposition and nonbeing, of disease and pain (239). To be uncanny by materialist standards, ghosts have had to manifest their deadness, their "ancestry," in biological forms and special visual effects. The graphically embodied ghost in An American Werewolf in London (1981), whose sense of humor increased as his body decomposed, was a truly modern spirit. In Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead (1983) "haunting" meant an endless series of metamorphoses, the human body as spectacular effect. The modern fantastic, as Sartre and Todorov explain it, reflects thelruly irrational nature of things and "swallows up the entire world" of the text (Todorov 174). Postmodern specters may be manifested in numerous forms: as projections of the collective or public mind in advertising, as consensual hallucinations (Nightmare on Elm Street, Demons, Prince of Darkness) or surveillance (Videodrome), as alien abductors (Intruders), or virtual reality (Lawnmower Man, Wild Palms), or all of the above (Shocker, Brainscan, The Ghost in the Machine). The ghosts of the 1980s and 1990s are often tricksters, and thus explicitly or implicitly the special effects themselves, the fantastic medium as monster. "I am the piece of him which did aspire, that did long to be more than a humble cell," the Son of Celluloid explains, beside himself with projected emotion. "I am a dreaming disease. No wonder I love the movies" (35). Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980), adapted from Stephen King's novel, showed signs of things to come. King's protagonists, the Torrence family, were haunted by alcoholism, domestic violence, child abuse, and writer's block, which the Overlook Hotel multiplied and projected one thousand fold. Kubrick turned the supernatural into psychological projection 'and special hallucination effects, enhancing the hotel's vast empty

Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

Spectral Effects

spaces and resorting to the apparition of a young woman in a bathtub who withers into a crone before one's eyes and an elevator door that opens to relepse a torrent of blood. The withering woman. and the tide of blood foreshadowed the 1980s, when ghosts, like everything and everyone else, required sex, substance, and a package. Jack Nicholson played the alcoholic author Jack Torrence as a psycho, shifting into an early version of the devil, Joker, or trickster that would dominate his later performances. From the beginning of the "boom, films about demonic possession-Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Fury (1978), The Omen series, The Entity (1983)-were more popular than ghost stories. These films had apocalyptic overtones and spectacular effects. Yet their real concerns were domestic, psychosexual, and biological. Because disembodied spirits do not show up well on screen, it was The Amityville Horror (1979), not the Amityville ghost. Houses were no longer genteelly haunted; they were spectacularly "possessed." In the "postfuturist" Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Back to the Future, the future was haunted by the Gothic materiality of the past. Ridley Scott's Alien (1979, followed by Aliens in 1986, and Alien3 in 1992J gothicized outer space, replacing the ghost with a shape-changing bio-mechanical alien. Like the ghost, Alien's monster produced a gap in the symbolic order. It took liminality to new levels, transgressing lines between the natural and supernatural, the biological and the mechanical, male and female, sex and death-all the while dripping viscous, corrosi~e goo. Poltergeist (1982) brought goo into the ghost story proper-buckets and buckets of goo. In nineteenth-century spiritualist jargon, goo was "ectoplasm," the spiritual equivalent of protoplasm. "A lifelike substance, solid or vaporous in nature," typically excreted "from the body of a medium and [capable of being] transformed into materialized limbs, faces or even entire bodies of spirits" (Guiley 104), ectoplasm was necessary for spirits to materialize. It also turned ghosts into images-into something a Hollywood filmmaker could work with. Indeed, this ethereal colloid "proved" in irrefutable (substantive) form the transmigration of souls. In Vi~torian accounts of seances, ectoplasm was excreted in long strands or "ropes" resembling umbilical cords, and through orifices such as the nose, ears, mouth, and vagina. Numerous "spirit" photographs show strands of white slime extruding from the bodies of female mediums in graphic demonstrations of a kind of virgin birth. 6 The very concept of ectoplasm, like the concept of anti-matter, was mind boggling. It was the visual, tangible representation of "spirit," the word made if not flesh something close to it. Ectoplasm destroyed the most basic distinctions between mind and body, medium and message. Beginning with Poltergeist, produced by Stephen Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper (of Texas Chain Saw Massacre notoriety), the history of

ghosts in films of the materialistic 1980s is a lesson in the evolution of slime. This chapter traces the development (if it can be called such) from Poltergeist through The Addams Family (1991 J. During the decade, the ghost became a metaphor for the fantastic in an increasingly sophisticated sense. When contemporary horror cinema discovered ectoplasm, ghosts became inconceivable unless embodied. The medium became the issue, although spirits moved freely between biological and technological mediums. Poltergeist and Ghostbusters (1984) were hauntings of surfaces and satires on corporate consumerism. After these spectacles, ghosts began to be identified with the effects that projected them on the one hand or, on the other, with substance associated with the abject body, such as ectoplasm and earth, or with both. After the sophisticated surrealism of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the issue shifted from the epistemological issue of ghost seeing or being haunted to the ontological situation of the ghost, whose problems of marginality, orientation, and manifestation represented the human condition. In Beetlejuice (1988) and Ghost (1990), the camera occupies the ghost's position, which involves surrealistic dislocation and distortion as well as power. There, as in Sartre's theory of the fantastic, the spectator exists in a fantastic world, a projection of the subject-object problem. In The Addams Family (1991), a film about death, morbidity, and marginality of every sort, the ghost per se -is absent. Instead, it is "manifested" in Gothic-poetic space, and the absurd is domesticated in the instant gratification of pre-Oedipal infancy. Poltergeist, like Alien, naturalized the haunted house movie, turning out an effects extravaganza that culminated in a spectacularly viscous apocalypse, thanks to director Tobe Hooper. But producer Steven Spielberg also (and typically) domesticated the Gothic. The setting was a California suburban tract house, so new that the protagonists, the young, appealing Freeling family, are conscious of occupying the oldest (hence both most and least "authentic") house, the model whose postage-stamp yard boasts an ancient tree. The development is so crowded that the neighbors' remote control changes channels on the Freeling's television set, the home of the disembodied spirits. The nominal ghosts in Poltergeist, as in The Shining, are Native American spirit-ancestors, whose burial grounds have been violated by American technology, capitalism, and greed. But the spirits' mediu~s and methods are as hip to mass media culture as they themselves are supposed to be natural. What happens in the Freeling house is a metaphor for the emptiness of American materialist culture and soul-devouring corporate monopoly. The ghosts enter through the television set, make the kitchen into their playroom, and settle in the children's bedroom, where they wreak havoc with the toys, already uncannily mechanized replications. The images are

44

11

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

Spectral Effects

of suction, vacuum, implosion, anti-matter-;:--the collapse inward of reality-the children's room looks like a surrealist painting. The television set is the spiritual portal. The film opens as the TV plays the national anthem, showing snow and "ghosts" on the screen. The "TV people" ,become four-year-old Carol Anne's imaginary friends, finally sucking her into some "spectral television land" (Benson, ''An Epic Bump," 10). The TV haunts the film through the closing credits, where it stares blankly back at us from a Holiday Inn walkway where Steve Freeling, the father, has shoved it, turned off (but also looking strangely alive and ready to walk off). Mechanical "interference" occurs throughout the film. The Freelings quarrel with the neighbors over remote control interference, and the medium Thngina tells the parapsychologists to turn off their machines, which are causing "interference" with her reception. One senses that like the earth, the air waves are overpopulated, with the dead and living competing for channels and especially for the attention of children. Counter text to the discourse of technology is a discourse of the body, specifically the female body, or the mother. As Carol Clover (1992) points out, the film's supernatural discourse is established in terms of "a discourse of females" (73)-including the parapsychologists, mediums, and family members-with Diane Freeling Uobeth Williams) fully realizing her powers as a mother for the first time. Self-sacrificing mother love triumphs over the avenging spirits, yet the spirits themselves materialize as d\rerwhelmingly female, ultimately cthonian, forms. As in Aliens, mother confronts mother for the possession of the child and the life force itself. Diane Freeling ventures into the maw/womb of death (also the vortex of a tornado) holding onto a rope (umbilical cord) and bearing Carol Anne back to the womb of the family in her arms; thus Mother and daughter are "reborn" together and covered with an afterbirth of red currant jelly slime. 7 The corporate and patriarchal world as represented by nuclear family and tract house is swallowed by the earth. Tangina speaks of "The Beast" to be encountered, and what we see of it is the maw/womb of the mother, glimpsed as an Earth whose crust gives monstrous birth to death, erupting with coffins and corpses. Powering this spirit is natural process, the life of death. '!'he icon for the secure suburban family, the home, collapses inward, revealing its true face as the entrance to a black hole. As Douglas Kellner suggests, the film "ehunciates" and then "soothes" contemporary fears of disintegration ("Poltergeist" 6). But as other critics have noted, the film is divided between producer (and part-time director) Spielberg's domestic-sentimental perspective and director Hooper's cynical and occasionally subversive materialism. Thus the film epitomizes the consumerist culture it indicts. The conflict between the directors emerges in the film's tne and texture and ultimately in its use of the fantastic: its overwhelming materiality struggles against its spiritual message, female

nurturance against devouring mother, occult versus organic, inner versus outer space. In the ghost story according to Gillian Beer, the deepest terror is the "usurpation of space by the immaterial, in the collapse of the "frail and cherished distinctions" (260). In Poltergeist, the gap was the material-the cthonian, often specifically maternal, all-devouring space of the body. The Tum of the Screw had become a Fantastic Voyage or Innerspace. As Poltergeist made clear, ghosts and demons, possessions and hauntings had become variable motifs in the same biomechanical phantasmagoria show. Most subsequent ghost films would be comic extravaganzas venturing into black humor and well-aimed satire. The humor often concerned the substantiality of modern spirits empowered by consumerism. Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters (1984) took pot shots at The Exorcist, the Omen series, and, as David Denby notes, "Saint Spielberg's domestic nightmare, demons;in-the-fridge-style, with its vortex of white light and howling wind" (" 'Oh Zuul' 11 66). Where viscousness was concerned, Ghostbusters took up where Poltergeist left off. Spirits were identified by their "ectoplasmic residue" -by their excess of substance or abject leavings-by trails of slime, afterbirth, gas, and noise-and notably dependent on media effects. In this epic about three fired professors of parapsychology who set up as exorcists for hire in New York City, the ghosts are based in pre-adolescent jokes. The prim librarian's ghost hushes everyone but leaves slime all over the card catalogue and is toothy and terrible when challenged. A smelly green "full roaming vapor" haunts a hotel, bloated from feasting on garbage left on the room service trays in the halls. It is a visual pun based on the idea of a fart. Called to Dana Barrett's kitchen where a spirit rumbles and roars "Zuul!" and eggs jump out of the carton and begin frying on the counter top (an allusion to the reanimated steak in Poltergeist), Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) opens the refrigerator door and excJaims, "Look at all the junk food!" Sexy demons, massive hell hounds, and a demi-god named Gazer must appear before an adequately spectacular show is mounted. Gargoyles come to life and an ecstatically possessed Dana (Sigourney Weaver) writhes and levitates like Regan in The Exorcist, giving the usually unflappable Dr. Venkman more than he can handle. The film culminates in an ultimate ectoplasmic "statement" as Gazer the pestroyer materializes first as a woman and then, through the possession of Ray's (Dan Akyroyd's) stray thought, into a Godzillasized Stay Puff't· Marshmallow Man. Besides looking like a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade float and exploding into the stuff of an apocalyptic pie fight, this "destroyer" neatly fits nineteenth-century descriptions of ectopJasm: "often . . . milky white in color and smell[ing] like ozone.... The substance could be light and airy, like smok~, or sticky and viscous" (Guiley 104).

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Film, Horror, and the Body Fantastic

Spectral Effects

Junk food, which seems to be on the film's mind, is the primary medium in Ghostbusters, much as television is the true spirit of Poltergeist. The film implicates and keeps looping back to the primary theme of the 1980s, mass-media-engineered consumption. The ghostbusters constantly eat, refer to, and litter their quarters with junk food, to the extent that the requisite advertising implanted in the film becomes a self-reflexive joke. Cumulatively-from the bag of Stay Puff't Marshmallows next to the exploded, unnaturally frying eggs in Dana Barrett's kitchen, to the Wise Potato chips the ghostbusters munch, to the 'Iwinkie Spengler (Harold Ramis) uses to draw an elaborate analogy-the substance of advertising foreshadows the culminating apparition. As in The Shining and Poltergeist, social and environmental evils are at the root of the ghost problem. Here garbage, slime, and gases have displaced energy or "spirit." The ghostbusters wear scuba diving outfits topped· with unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their backs, and they drive an Ectomobile, a 1959 Cadillac ambulance with an "ECTO 1" license plate-implying that it runs on something like the "spiritual" substance it is designed to trap. Yet it is the meddling Environmental Protection Agency that opens the exorcists' Pandora's Box and releases the entrapped substances. The film's strange loop of political and self-references returns inexorably to some point that links ectoplasm with material excess and turns out farce. Thus Murray's perpetually horny scientist is really, as Richard Schickel puts it, "some· ultimate Yuppie, seemingly stoned on fern-bar manners, mores and folk wisdom" and whose "imperviousness to anything that cannot be comprehended in those basic materialist terms" is finally the film's most potent weapon against the occult (83). The Shining, Poltergeist, and Ghostbusters were all hauntings of surfaces. Substance took over in the 1980s where the spirits left off. In Larry Cohen's satire on consumer culture of 1985, The Stuff, the stuff in question was an addictive colloid that looked like ice cream and absorbed everything in its path-the Marshmallow Man mated with the Blob and the tumor from Videodrome. The ghost (and the issue it represented) was no longer the invasion of the material by the immaterial but entropy: the machine/organism as breakdown, the random transformation of matter. The Todorovian ghost story was replaced by the Sartrean fantastic, which is based in consciousness of the fact of embodiment. The ghost dripped off fangs and engendered the viscous Frank Cotton in Clive Barker's Hellraiser. In the Alien sequels, Toxic Avenger, and The Blob (1988), it grew increasingly corrosive. As AIDS enter~d public consciousness, slime acquired more sinister connotations. Ghosts, demonic possession, and the apocalyptic overlapped in John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, where the devil took the form of a .canister of swirling green fluid that could "impregnate" and infect. AIDS, cancer, and chaos theory were the issues

at the center of the late 1980s horror film. Rather than fading out of the big picture, and helped out by media technology, the ghost joined the ranks of the substantial.

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FREDDY'S NIGHTMARES/POST-FREUDIAN DREAMS By the time of Freud, the mind itself had become haunted, as Te~ry Castle puts it, "filled with spectral presences." Freud sought to de~ystify consciousness, but reinvented a "demonic" concept of th~>Ught mstead (Castle 59). With surrealism, expressionism, and existentialism, ghosts invaded our nightmares. The dreaming subject was haunted and dream infiltrated reality. Wes Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street (1984-1989) revitalized the ghost by envisioning and dramatizing this idea. The first film opens as blond Tina is running, screaming, lost, in a dank, steaming maze of corridors and pipes and a stray sheep. This is the boiler room in which Freddy was burned and suppressed. It is Craven's revision of the haunted house and hell into pop psychology's image of the unconscious. We tend to forget that Freddy Krueger-the dream maker or trickster as serial killer and the monster dominating the last half of the 1980s-was also a ghost. As a child molester (and former victim himself) hunted down and burned to death by a group of parents, Freddy was linked with the Gothic "heavy father" figure. The parents of Elm Street are ultimately to blame for Freddy because they destroyed and buried (repressed) what he represented, rather than encountering it (bringi1:g his c_rime ~o lig~t and informing their children). Their disavowal, earned on m their children, left present-day children vulnerable. Freddy now haunts their shared nightmare, manifesting himself in his victims' "hysteri