Horror Studies - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2020

Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique of anthropocentric philosophies throughout the 1990s before leaving academia at the turn of the century and moving to Shanghai. While he is now best known for his controversial pro-capitalist political writings, he has also recently developed a theory of what he calls ‘abstract horror fiction’, as well as applied it in practice by writing two abstract horror novellas. Although one might think that Land’s horror fiction, like his recent far-right politics, marks a new and independent body of work from his earlier academic writings as a philosopher, this article argues that Land turns to writing horror fiction, because he sees the genre as a better compositional form than traditional philosophy to continue his critique of anthropomorphism insofar as it is able to stage a confrontation with that which lies beyond all parochial human comprehension. I begin by outlining Land’s earlier critique of anthropocentric philosophies with recourse to the brute fact of humanity’s inexorable extinction as a way to undermine their attempts to project human values and concepts onto an inhuman cosmos for all time. I then examine Land’s theory of abstract horror to see how he envisions horror fiction as the best aesthetic means for transcendentally channeling the traumatic limits of human experience. I conclude with an analysis of Land’s two horror novellas, Phyl-Undhu and Chasm, to draw out the ways in which his earlier critical philosophy continues to inform their literary motifs. What ultimately emerges from this analysis of Land’s fiction is a conception of horror as the dark heir to critical philosophy.

New England in 1692 was a community grappling with the cosmic meaning of capitalism in an age during which the market came to define life in the Atlantic world. Binding contracts, mobile capital and commodity exchange offered both philosophical proof and significant peril for a community rooted in a firm belief in the sacredness of contract covenants and in the reality of spectral forces intervening into the material world. As a result, the legal documents produced during the bloody witchcraft crisis that swept Massachusetts in those terrible years articulate a widespread anxiety about the potentially accursed nature of commodities that travel through and index social connections, the morally ambiguous incursions of invisible economic forces into everyday life, the compelling experience of contracts given divine or diabolical aegis and the cultural syncretism of a constellated culture bound together through market interrelations. As tales of witchcraft have taken root firmly as American narrative touchstones, those anxieties have remained central to representations of the witch trials in popular imagination. The novels, plays and films that return to the crisis’ collection of legal documents, economic contracts and oral performances, position contested issues of obliterative commodification, troubled economic social contact and cultural and racial insecurity at the heart of American folklore. This reading re-centres both primary sources and subsequent popular depictions of the witch crisis around the stories told through contracts and around the commodities and commodity exchanges that remained persistent features of Massachusetts Bay’s imbricated modes of storytelling. It reads these documents as evidence for the emergence of Atlantic market capitalism as a cosmic force, an obscure but interventionist God made powerful through market logic, and it argues that this force continues to define America’s central bloody myth of self.

In this article, I examine how the use of repetition structures in the 2015 horror film Southbound accentuate the genre’s concern regarding the relationship between a peculiar experience of time and the emotion of fear. While analysis of the urge to repeat in horror texts can be examined through a psychoanalytic lens, I suggest that applying a Nietzschean perspective provides an equally helpful framework for reading these films at the levels of both form and content. Specifically, Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence offers us much in the way of understanding these films which use a time-loop device to disrupt the experience of both the characters and audience. After delineating how Nietzsche’s ideas can help guide analysis of such repeated action tropes in horror, I provide a close reading of Southbound in an attempt to flesh out this particular theoretical orientation.

Aesthetics philosopher Noël Carroll affirms that grotesque forms ‘are all violations of our standing categories or concepts; they are subversions of our common expectations of the natural and ontological order’. In breaking structural boundaries, consequently, the grotesque appears as deformations, aberrations, exaggerations, metamorphosis or startling portmanteaus. Given both its nightmarish texture and the evil ingenuity of Dr Lecter’s murders, Hannibal (NBC, 2013–15) ploughs fertile ground in putting together conceptually distant and even contradictory elements. Hence, this article explores how the aesthetic and philosophical principles of the grotesque are a pervasive presence throughout the entire Hannibal TV series, defining its style, characters’ personality and metaphorical themes. Putting art theory in dialogue with the Hannibal televised text, this article demonstrates how the grotesque – one of the key concepts in Gothic horror – permeates every level of the show, from the opening credits to the protagonist’s inner transformation, converting the narrative into a comprehensive and cohesive liminal artistic ecosystem.

Since Bernard Rose’s Candyman (1992) was first released more than 25 years ago, there has been a great deal of scholarly commentary on the film’s treatment of class, race, gender and urban legends. To a lesser degree, Clive Barker’s short story, ‘The Forbidden’ (1986), has received some critical attention largely because of its status as the source material for the film’s general premise and now-iconic central monster. This article expands on such existent scholarship by analysing regional mythologies and the cross-cultural adaptation of place-specific monsters within and across both texts. To develop these primary arguments, this article extracts a theory of adaptation and location from Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods ([2001] 2011), and applies that theory to the acts of adaptation pervading ‘The Forbidden’ and Candyman. In complementary ways, all three of these texts explicitly reflect on the complexities of adapting monsters to precise locales. Notably, both American Gods and Candyman take place in the American Midwest; this regional setting greatly impacts the conceptualization of each narrative’s supernatural beings (Gaiman’s cohort of gods and the Candyman, respectively). Within popular culture, the Midwest is regularly depicted as both a site of nostalgic memory and a cultural space defined by the willful forgetting or elision of history. This article asserts the importance of recognizing the Midwest as a recurrent staging ground for horror narratives, particularly those featuring monsters who embody forgotten, misremembered, suppressed or denied pieces of history. Further, by examining such regional dynamics in American Gods and Candyman, this article develops the concept of ‘adaptive monsters’, which describes horrific beings who assume symbolic attributes of the historical, cultural and/or spatial environments into which they are adapted. Overall, through analyses of ‘The Forbidden’, Candyman and American Gods, this article demonstrates how regional mythologies (especially those of the Midwest) shape the adaptation of monstrous beings in horror narratives and across textual forms.

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America, to great surprise. His election has been connected to the emergence of authoritarianism as a political force in America, as political scholars have argued Trump’s campaign success lay in how his rhetoric is authoritarian in nature, and how it activates an authoritarian tendency in a sizeable portion of the voter base in response to social and demographic changes within the country. This article argues that contemporary horror cinema reflects and responds to the rise of American authoritarianism. Building on the work of scholars of authoritarianism, this article outlines a number of characteristics of authoritarian horror films. Specifically, it analyses the case study of Jigsaw to argue that two understandings are possible, linked to the coding of both the authoritarianism associated with the villain and the social threats they react to as troubling. It then draws on a number of further examples (Unfriended, Don’t Hang Up and the Purge films) to suggest that the emergence of this tendency within horror cinema is reflective of an increasingly polarized population and that, although the films explicitly condemn authoritarianism through their villain characters, they simultaneously cater to both halves of this divide by also depicting the world in which these authoritarians rise as horrific.