Horror Studies - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2015

This article presents an analysis of horror stars of the 1940s, particularly Lon Chaney Jr, Laird Cregar, Lionel Atwill and George Zucco, and argues not only that these stars demonstrate the linkage between the figures of the horror monster and/or villain, the gangster and the spy, particularly the Nazi spy, but also that this linkage was due to their supposedly shared psychological characteristics. These films are preoccupied with the themes of psychological domination and submission, in which both the villain and his victim experience a crisis of subjectivity in which they no longer seem to be the author of their own actions, and in which their actions seem to be the effect of forces over which they have no control, forces that challenge any sense of clear division between the internal and the external, the self and the other. In this way, these films not only challenge the common linear and teleological history of the horror film but also the sense of 1940s Hollywood cinema as straightforwardly affirmative. In other words, these films demonstrate a profound sense of ontological insecurity within the period, however much the films might try to counter this insecurity.

This article examines William March’s The Bad Seed ([1954] 1997), an American naturalist novel about a violent serial killer, 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark, and its film adaptation, Mervyn LeRoy’s The Bad Seed (1956). When read as a hypotextual narrative, March’s The Bad Seed has multiple, significant intertextual variations, such as Ruben’s film The Good Son (1993) and Collet-Serra’s film, Orphan (2009), which focus on the theme of the biological, non-supernatural child serial killer. These films should be read critically as products of the materialistdeterminist philosophy of Emile Zola’s modernist notion of natural, quasi-scientific causalities leading to criminality: genetic malfunctions in action. This article also suggests LeRoy’s film adaptation is more appropriately viewed as a re-interpretation of Maxwell Anderson’s popular stage horror-melodrama, Bad Seed, produced in New York, 1954. In particular, ‘Error Bred in the Bone’: The Bad Seed examines the appropriation of the monster-child by popular culture. From the living room, to the dollhouse, and to the hospital bed, bad seeds liberally germinate.

Psychoanalysis is one of several sociomedical discourses that work to defamiliarize human subjective identity in three film adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel, 1956), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman, 1978) and Body Snatchers (Ferrara, 1993). In each film a subdominant narrative about human mental aberration overlaps with, and complements, the more overt narrative about alien replication of seemingly unique individual identity, the total effect being to render ‘Type H’ (the aliens’ shorthand term for the human species in the 1978 film) as a pathological type, self-divided, deranged, heterogeneous and phantasmatic.

This article examines the relationship between 1970s-era supernatural horror films, the emergence of new delivery systems in cable television and home video and the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s. It demonstrates the role of the 1970s supernatural horror film in the historically situated cultural feedback loop that produced the Satanic Panic, with Hollywood films such as The Exorcist by Friedkin (1973) and The Amityville Horror by Rosenberg (1979) being consumed within new social and technological contexts in the early 1980s. It also investigates how cable television and home video forever altered moviegoing practices during the period, bringing horror into the home and arousing fears surrounding young people and contact with sinister and supernaturally associated forces beyond control.

Chronicling the power-struggles of angels and demons drawn broadly from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and deploying a cast of vampires, ghosts, demons, shapeshifters, tricksters, mad scientists, zombies and monsters from urban legends, the TV gothic serial Supernatural is both a quintessentially American narrative and a sustained critique of the internal contradictions of neo-liberalism. Revelling in the mass cultural products of the United States, it incorporates the generic characteristics of the western, the road movie and the mystery-thriller whilst evoking the formats of the serial novel, the game show, the police procedural, reality television and gothic film and television. Thus addressing the epistemological incertitude engendered by the ‘grave economic distress’ (4:17) of the present, Supernatural charts the disjunction between public fantasies of free market freedoms and the trauma wrought to social and psychological integrity by industrial decline and community breakdown. What emerges is a terrifying picture of a country that has been plunged into existential chaos by neo-liberal economics. In the world of Supernatural, as in our own, exceptionalist models of national identity have been dismantled, compromised or exposed as ideologically expedient fantasies, whilst their neo-liberal substitutes have made both the self and the socius unstable, fragmented and mutable. Freedom, the protagonist Dean Winchester argues, is simply the rope God gives people to hang themselves (6.20), in the certainty that hang themselves they will. Meantime the brothers inhabit a world in which, it is frequently reiterated, both justice and liberty are nothing more than abstract concepts, the rule of law has become irrelevant and the power of the powerful knows no bounds whatsoever. Across ten seasons, therefore, the Winchester brothers cross and re-cross not only the American landmass but a series of temporal, ethical, epistemological and ontological frontiers. In so doing, they undertake a highly gothic interrogation of what it means, in the age of neoliberal corporatism, to be both ‘an American’ and a man.

Absence is crucial to the evocation of horror, marking out limits to sense, knowledge and representation. Linked to space, horror’s architectural, anthropological, philosophical and literary dimensions open up to darkness, emptiness, revulsion or dread, to raise questions of rationality, the sacred, home, corporeality and human subjectivity. Horror’s movements broach an otherness that is both unpresentable and intimate, imaginary and real. House of Leaves, a text situated in a fissure between modern, postmodern and post-human articulations of walls, words and webs, both registers and resists changes in contemporary modes of literary production, recording and reading. Yet, engaging digital and media forms in a dense aesthetic network of allusions, the novel’s use of familiar and disturbing spaces and figures such as house, labyrinth and void reworks horror’s textual and affective armoury. It also foregrounds generic techniques and effects like terror, doubling and excess, patterns that have been in play since the eighteenth century as modes that have preceded and enabled the emergence of post-Romantic literary values.

The early twentieth-century weird writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft is today best remembered for his genre defining style of academic noir pulp fiction. Yet in focusing on certain tropes of his work, such as the many memorable monsters he created to populate his stories, from the infinite effervescence named Yog-Sothoth to the dreaded cephalopod Cthulhu, scholars have overlooked a deeper terror structuring practically all of his writings, the chillingly resonant fear that, amidst the chaos of globalization, miscegenation, and economic decline, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization would surrender to lesser races. Fundamental to this fear was his understanding of atavism – of evolutionary throwbacks, survivals and regressions – in modern industrial society, and his extraordinary stories were only one expression of a contemporary culture involving eugenicists, political economists, and prominent authors of the Gothic and ‘weird’ traditions between the 1890s and the 1930s. Lovecraft himself in effect penned a number of economic manuscripts on the crisis of the Great Depression, and this article contextualizes his ideas in relation to his wider writings as well as to contemporary traditions of economics and eugenics, drawing a new picture of one of the greatest horror writers of all time.

Canadian horror film is one of those strange phenomena that seem incongruent with the cultural sensibilities from which it emerged, and has remained veritably hidden beneath the dominant American horror cinema industry that it mimics and infiltrates. Much to the surprise of many horror aficionados, however, it not only exists, but maintains a canon of celebrated cinematic texts and its own set of critical concerns. Typically, in the context of its ostensible ‘Canadianness’, it has been interpreted in terms of its nationalist sensibilities and its subversion of American conventions. But is there a set of anxieties hidden within these narratives that are peculiar to the nebulous concept of Canadian culture? This question might be answered in part through an examination of popular Canadian horror films and the critical literature that forms the discourse surrounding them. However, while Canadian horror film is astonishingly prolific beyond the expectations of the layman cinema fanatic, and the otherwise strange nature of its existence, the academic discourse surrounding Canadian horror cinema is embarrassingly scant, although refreshingly intelligent and accessible. This survey of some of the more salient texts proffers a strong case for the entertainment value-added with intelligent enquiry and analysis with its own critical taxonomy of the texts. Combining fascinating cinema with good reading, the survey inherently encourages readers from a range of lifestyles and disciplines to discover an intertextual entertainment within both the frequently under-appreciated films they discuss, and the entertainingly intelligent and revelatory texts themselves.

Psychoanalytic theorists argue that the creation of the ego is largely a product of how we perceive the surface of our skin. The horror genre literalizes these moments of skin gazing by centring the plot around the spectacle of cutting skin, where the victim’s body is opened up for the audience’s viewing pleasure. Pedro Almodóvar’s La piel que habito/The Skin I Live In (2011) inverts the classic horror trope of bodily cutting by showcasing a villain who gives his victim impenetrable skin as a way to pacify and torture him. Survival, therefore, depends on the victim’s ability to overcome the horror of living within another skin, even one that is differently gendered. Such transgender narratives bring to horror cinema a way to rethink Freudian and Lacanian concepts of the gaze that structure our affective responses to seeing bodies cut on-screen. In exchange, we might say that cinema brings to these transgender narratives a suturing technology that allows for a layering of bodies with time otherwise unattainable outside the medium of cinema. Instead of trying to separate out the self from the skin it inhabits, we must understand our identity as an interplay between different forms of embodiment.

Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror, Joseph Crawford (2013) 1st ed., London: Bloomsbury, 217 pp., ISBN: 9781472505286, h/bk, £60