Horror Studies - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2012

This article deals with the bewildering question of the human fascination with evil: how is it possible that what is frightening, that what arouses dread and horror, is simultaneously fascinating, inviting of the spectatorial gaze, and the embodiment of terrifying enjoyment? The tremendum and fascinas coincide and irreversibly overlap in Kant’s and Hegel’s respective philosophies of art, defined as an ability to produce sublime effects, effects that are – like the acts of monsters themselves – majestic, immeasurable and unspeakable. The discourse of theoretical psychoanalysis is employed here to demonstrate and account for the fact that the subject willingly participates in, and enjoys, his or her own horror. The sublime object becomes uncanny through our detecting in it the representation of our own wish, the Lacanian object petit a. In this sense, the evil core of monstrosity appears to be nothing less than the fulfilment of the subject’s wish to stand firm on the ethics of desire, the ethical programme formulated by Jacques Lacan. In turn, psychoanalytical rereadings of Kant develop two modalities of the human artistic predicament: distinguishing moral acts from ethical ones, the paper differentiates ‘moral art’ from ‘ethical art’, a distinction according to which morality corresponds to a pacified, socialized, ‘compromised’ or ‘pathological’ sublime, a sublimity known also as beauty, and ethics to an excessive, unsocialized sublime, a sublimity known also as the monstrous. The first is governed by the pleasure principle that aims at ‘civilized discontent’, the latter by the principle of desire that aims at enjoyment.

This article provides a close reading of the Charles and Thomas Guard film, The Uninvited (2009), exploring the ways in which it traces Freudian psychoanalysis in general, and the Oedipal narrative in particular. Emphasizing the indeterminacy of both Oedipus and The Univited alike, the article discusses the temporal disorientation opened by the very process of interpretative analysis. The argument concludes with an account of how the film, in order to expose the way in which Freudian psychoanalysis provokes rather than remedies nightmarish haunting, makes use of false memories and convoluted references to effect what is called jamais vu, a mode of foreshadowing which generally reveals that which has been concealed.

This article is an attempt to move the study of the horror film from the kinds of explanation that typically derive from a certain mode of psychoanalytic interpretation into an area suggested by Wittgenstein’s discussion of seeing aspects. To this end, the article examines various forms of explanation in the literature on horror cinema, and in the case of Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960), for example, argues for the position that it is the film itself that is constitutive of the myth that gives rise to it, and not an externally given system or a set of explanatory paradigms. The argument is taken up with reference to the work of J-L Schefer on cinema, and the thought of Maurice Blanchot on literature.

In horror cinema, psychoanalysis remains the dominant methodology for interpreting the relationship between gender and genre, both in terms of characters within the diegesis and the extradiegetic cinematic spectator. This Oedipalization of horror cinema relies on the disturbing sight/site of female sexuality, the embodiment of male fears of dispossession and castration. However, as Donato Totaro points out, such psychoanalytical models of horror cinema rely mainly on analyses of the American cinematic tradition, rooted in a puritanical tradition; as such, they fail to account for the more liberal ‘gender-political range’ of European horror cinema. Totaro points out that,

in the European horror film there are many instances where (a) the victims are exclusively or mainly male, and (b) the male victim/hero is sexually attracted to the female killer, not repulsed, as with the monstrous-feminine, and hence there can be no disavowal of her femininity.

2002

In this article, I use Dario Argento’s directorial debut, L’Uccello dalle piume di cristallo/The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970), as a demonstrative paradigm of Totaro’s argument concerning the limitations of psychoanalytical models in relation to international horror cinema, where the killer is as likely to be female as male and female sexuality is not predetermined as monstrous, but rather provides a place of renegotiation of gendered norms. Specifically, I utilize Deleuze’s taxonomy of the time-image in order to explore the multiple ways in which The Bird With the Crystal problematizes not only the process of detection, but also the very possibility of detection, a process that calls into question the applicability of psychoanalysis to specific forms of horror cinema, represented here in the form of the Italian giallo.

This article suggests the possibility that psychoanalytic frameworks may prove insufficient to apprehend the workings of post-millennial horror. Through a sustained exploration of how affect theory may be applied to horror, and, more specifically, how it may exceed cognitivism in favour of an understanding of the genre founded on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘body without organs’, I consider the implications of a new theoretical approach that accounts for the popularity of films such as Saw (Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Roth, 2005). The article proceeds by considering how psychoanalysis offers limited help in the study of a form of horror that appeals directly to the somatic body. It then considers the potential benefits of a theory that acknowledges its viscerality and its recent three-dimensional investments.

In Patrick McGrath’s gothic fiction there are ‘psychoanalysts everywhere’, and therapy itself generates horror. From early gleeful parodies of Freudianism such as ‘The Skewer’ (1988), McGrath’s fiction would develop a sustained attack on psychotherapy and psychiatry, as well as the broader field of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Horror is revealed not only behind the walls of the asylum, but also, and especially, in a mistaken diagnosis and perspective on mental anomaly. McGrath’s attacks on psychoanalysis can be aligned with the anti-Oedipal project of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In this article I contend that novels such as Asylum and Spider have affinities with the concept of schizoanalysis, and that this offers a creative method of thinking through horror after Freud. Via McGrath’s fascinatingly ‘mad’ characters and his richly textured style, the act of reading itself induces virtual derangement.

Exploring links between speculative materialist philosophy and the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, this article tracks how theories of horror have been defined, developed and transformed in relation to literary and philosophical notions of the ‘Thing’. Moving from Kantian ideas of ‘noumenon’ to Gothic Things and from post-structuralist engagements with subjective and cultural limits, the argument plots the interrelationship between speculative realism and Lovecraft in terms of changing ideas of matter, science and the human.

HORROR AFTER 9/11: WORLD OF FEAR, CINEMA OF TERROR, AVIVA BRIEFEL AND SAM J. MILLER, EDS(2012) Austin: University of Texas Press, 263 pp., ISBN: 978-0-292-72662-8, p/bk, $55.00

HITCHCOCK AND THE CINEMA OF SENSATIONS: EMBODIED FILM THEORY AND CINEMATIC RECEPTION, PAUL ELLIOTT (2011) London and New York: I. B. Taurus, 231 pp., ISBN: 978-1-84885-587-8, h/bk, £56.50

THE THEOLOGY OF DRACULA: READING THE BOOK OF STOKER AS SACRED TEXT, NOËL MONTAGUE-ÉTIENNE RARIGNAC (2012) Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 246 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7864-6499-9, p/bk, $40.00, £34.95 (print), ISBN: 978-0-7864-8709-7, $25.21, £15.96 (Ebook)