Horror Studies - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2024

This article argues that two classic films made in 1973, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, both anticipate and give nightmarish form to an underlying political shift that historians often originate at exactly the same moment: the advent of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative order that would come to define American life for at least the next 40 years. Rather than seeing these films as centred on ancient demons or obsolete workers, this essay reverses the standard ‘Gothic temporality’ of the past’s persistence and positions the horror film as, instead, a form of speculative fiction; not a registration of history’s traumatic aftermath but a barometer of the emerging political future.

Horror films often feature lone individuals stranded in strange, remote locations, threatened both by mysterious, unknown forces and by the reactions of their own minds. On the other hand, Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019) suggests that it might be even more terrifying to be stranded with someone else, who might be a source, less of companionship and support, than of additional threat. Moreover, The Lighthouse is a horror film in which the principal danger might not come from spectacular, supernatural monsters so much as from sheer, mind-numbing tedium, exacerbated by growing tensions between the two central characters. While this film might (or might not) involve such things as mermaids or animals inhabited by the spirits of dead sailors, it is probably ultimately best read as a film about the horror of gruelling, repetitive, menial labour performed without any hope of genuine accomplishment, reward or appreciation.

While the term ‘psychedelic horror film’ may seem simple on its surface, the category it describes has never been thoroughly examined and defined. This article, using Harry M. Benshoff’s ‘The short-lived life of the Hollywood LSD film’, as an entry point, will analyse recurrent examples of psychedelic horror film, focusing on the nature of their recurring appeal. Given the lack of scholarship on this category, this analysis aims to begin filling in a notable gap in the history of the horror film. I also hope to provide insight into the histories of countercultural and conspiratorial movements past and present, using these films as a sociohistorical bellwether for the national mood. While many of the films in this category may appear reactionary, even their most genuinely conservative, paranoiac iterations also seem to function as a form of anti-establishment lament for the failure of countercultural movements to effectively cause social change.

Swearwords typically reference one of five subjects: the supernatural (‘Jesus Christ!’), sex (‘fuck’), bodily effluvia (‘shit’), disease (‘poxy’) or disfavoured social groups (insert your own). Monsters typically embody some or all of these characteristics and, this article argues, capture attention involuntarily in the same way swearwords do. Monsters can thus profitably be theorized as anthropomorphized swearwords.

This article seeks to address the phenomenon of glitches and ‘creepypasta’, or short anonymous stories (usually in prose but sometimes presented in other media), that focus on video games and related ludic media. The inherent uncanniness of the glitch – as an affront to player agency and an assertion of mysterious operations performed ‘under the hood’, as though possessed of an agency of their own – is assessed, as well as the ways in which such eerie interruptions are put to use in fictional narratives about haunted video games. It is argued that the glitch, as an instance of a video gamer asserting its own agency which is alien and often actively opposed to that of the player, is fertile ground for narratives about games which exert their own occulted willpower. Stories about such games often feature the player being overpowered by the media they engage with, inverting the normal ontological hierarchy between the player and the played.

The article presents a post-humanist reading of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). At 40, the second adaptation of John Campbell’s Jr novella Who Goes There? (1938) has recently undergone a revival of critical interest. However, this interest has only elicited – to date – new iterations of the traditional paradigm of ideological readings of the film. This article attempts to read The Thing outside the paradigm of ideology and human(ist) subjectivity, as per the formulation of Louis Althusser (2014), as well as to critique such paradigm. First, the article offers an analysis of the ideological components at work in various traditional readings of the film. Then it scrutinizes ways in which these traditional readings can be overcome. This opens the possibility of a post-humanist interpretation of the film, an interpretation in which the Thing is not just a manifestation of otherness, but a material and effective realization of life seen from a non-humanist perspective. This reading arises after dispensing with the subject–object relationship enforced in Althusser’s ideological structures. Outside these structures, the article then ponders on the materiality of the Thing through Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs (‘BwO’), which envisages the body as a material dimension for the flow of becoming, a dynamic force field free of fixed and normative pre-conceptions. Finally, the article explores the new sources of horror in the film, as well as the ethico-political implications this analysis brings to fore.