The transition from the incoherent texts of the 70s to the all-too-coherent ones of Lucas and Spielberg is paralleled by the progress—more accurately, regression—of the horror film. Of the filmmakers whose work I examined in chapters 5 and 6, only Larry Cohen could be said to have remained obstinately true to himself, and that at the cost of virtual obliteration: at time of writing he has no fewer than four completed films unreleased. Q scarcely marks an advance on his earlier work, or adds significantly to its thematic complex, but it is characteristically odd, subversive, inventive, and marvelously acted, if once again confused and unsatisfying. One may also reasonably hold out hope for Tobe Hooper (despite his nominal involvement in Poltergeist). The Fun House, while burdened, especially in its second half, with the ritualistic formula of the “teenie-kill pic,” achieves a genuine if intermittent distinction. Of the others, Bob Clark, with the upward mobility of someone ready to take on anything, has moved from The Night Walk to Porky’s and its sequel (on which he produced the memorable comment that it contains less social comment than its predecessor). Wes Craven’s career has achieved a certain consistency, in that each of his films since Last House on the Left has been worse than the one before. Deadly Blessing, with potentially rich material, is so incoherent as to be virtually unreadable; Swamp Thing is merely childish. The intensity and disturbance that gave Last House its peculiar and appalling distinction have not been in any way resolved—they have simply evaporated.
Saddest of all is the case of Romero, because after Dawn of the Dead it seemed legitimate to expect of him the most. Knight Riders has a certain symptomatic interest in relation to the persistent quandary of the American radical who wants to make some kind of positive statement yet is barred from embracing any coherent political alternative: essentially, the film is another Alice’s Restaurant, ten years too late, and lacking Penn’s sensitivity and complexity. It is the archetypal liberal American movie, with something nice to say about every minority group, some pious platitudes about the corrupting power of commercialism, and a lament for the failure of a counterculture that couldn’t possibly succeed. Nothing, however, had prepared one for Creep Show, either here or in any of the early work. It combines the worst of Romero with the worst of Stephen King, without bearing any interesting relation to the work of either. It is, in fact, almost indistinguishable from the British Amicus productions of the 70s: a series of empty anecdotes in which nasty people do nasty things to other nasty people, the nastiness being the entire point and purpose. One continues to hope, of course, that Romero will recover, and his current projects (at time of writing) encourage such a hope: Day of the Dead (the completion of the trilogy) and a film version of Pet Sematary, one of King’s most haunting and disturbing works.
Vestiges of a Tradition: Wayne Doba and Kevin Conway in The Fun House
There is indeed little to salvage from the period: a few minor works such as Alligator and Blood Beach which represent the vestigial traces of the 70s tradition. Certainly, they no longer represent a mainstream. At the end of the 70s, the prevailing current began to flow in quite another direction, the decisive film being Halloween, with its great commercial success.
THE REACTIONARY WING
I suggested earlier that the theory of repression offers us a means toward a political categorization of horror movies. Such a categorization, however, can never be rigid or clear-cut. While I have stressed the genre’s progressive or radical elements, its potential for the subversion of bourgeois patriarchal norms, it is obvious that this potential is never free from ambiguity. The genre carries within itself the capability of reactionary inflection, and perhaps no horror film is entirely immune from its operations. It need not surprise us that a powerful reactionary tradition exists—so powerful it may under certain social conditions become the dominant one. Its characteristics are, in extreme cases, very strongly marked.
Before noting them, however, it is important to make one major distinction between the reactionary horror film and the apocalyptic horror film. The latter obviously expresses despair and negativity, yet its very negation can be claimed as progressive: the apocalypse, even when presented in metaphysical terms (the end of the world), is generally reinterpretable in social/political ones (the end of the highly specific world of patriarchal capitalism). The majority of the most distinguished American horror films, especially in the 70s, are concerned with this particular apocalypse. They are progressive in so far as their negativity is not recuperable into the dominant ideology, but constitutes, on the contrary, the recognition of that ideology’s disintegration and its untenability, as all it has repressed explodes and blows it apart. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Sisters, Demon are all apocalyptic in this sense; so are Romero’s two “living dead” movies.
Outlined here are some of the characteristics that have contributed to the genre’s reactionary wing:
1. The designation of the monster as simply evil. Insofar as horror films are typical manifestations of our culture, the dominant designation of the monster must necessarily be evil: what is repressed (in the individual, in the culture) must always return as a threat, perceived by the consciousness as ugly, terrible, obscene. Horror films, it might be said, are progressive precisely to the degree that they refuse to be satisfied with this simple designation—to the degree that, whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously, they modify, question, challenge, and seek to invert it. All monsters are by definition destructive, but their destructiveness is capable of being variously explained, excused and justified. To identify what is repressed with evil incarnate (a metaphysical, rather than a social, definition) is automatically to suggest that the only recourse is to strive to keep it repressed. Films in which the monster is identified as the devil clearly occupy a privileged place in this group, though even the devil can be presented with varying degrees of deliberate or inadvertent sympathy and fascination—The Omen should not simply be bracketed with The Sentinel for consignment to merited oblivion.
2. The presence of Christianity (insofar as it is given weight or presented positively) is in general a portent of reaction. (This is a comment less on Christianity itself than on what it signifies within the Hollywood cinema and the dominant ideology.) The Exorcist is an instructive instance—its validity is in direct proportion to its failure convincingly to impose its theology.
3. The presentation of the monster as totally nonhuman. The progressiveness of the horror film depends partly on the monster’s capacity to arouse sympathy; one can feel little for a mass of viscous black slime. The political (McCarthyite) level of 50s science fiction films—the myth of Communism as total dehumanization—accounts for the prevalence of this kind of monster in that period.
4. The confusion, in terms of what the film wishes to regard as monstrous, of repressed sexuality with sexuality itself. The distinction is not always clear-cut; perhaps it never can be, in a culture whose attitudes to sexuality remain largely negative and where a fear of sex is implanted from infancy. One can, however, isolate a few extreme examples where the sense of horror is motivated by sexual disgust.
A very common generic pattern plays on the ambiguity of the monster as the return of the repressed and the monster as punishment for sexual promiscuity (or, in the more extreme puritanical cases, for any sexual expression whatever: two teenagers kiss; enter, immediately, the Blob). The Jaws films—their sources in both 50s McCarthyite science fiction and all those beach party-monster movies that disappeared with the B feature—are obvious recent examples, Spielberg’s film being somewhat more complex and less blatant than its sequels, though the difference is chiefly one of ideological sophistication.
John Carpenter’s films reveal in many ways an engaging artistic personality: they communicate, at the very least, a delight in skill and craftsmanship, a pleasure in play with the medium, that is one of the essential expressions of true creativity. Yet the film-buff innocence that accounts for much of the charm of Dark Star can go on to combine (in Assault on Precinct 13) Rio Bravo and Night of the Living Dead without any apparent awareness of the ideological consequences of converting Hawks’ Fascists (or Romero’s ghouls, for that matter) into an army of revolutionaries. The film buff is very prominent again in Halloween, covering the film’s confusions and its lack of real thinking with a formal/stylistic inventiveness that is initially irresistible. If nothing in the film is new, everything testifies to Carpenter’s powers of assimilation, as opposed to mere imitation: as a resourceful amalgam of Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist and Black Christmas, Halloween is cunning in the extreme.
The confusions, however, inform its very foundation, in the conception of the monster. The opening is quite stunning both in its virtuosity and its resonances. The long killer’s point-of-view tracking shot with which the film begins establishes the basis for the first murder as sexual repression: the girl is killed because she arouses in the voyeur-murderer feelings he has simultaneously to deny and enact in the form of violent assault. The second shot reveals the murderer as the victim’s bewildered six-year-old brother. Crammed into these first two shots (in which Psycho unites with the Halloween sequence of Meet Me in St. Louis) are the ingredients for the definitive family horror film: the child-monster, product of the nuclear family and the small-town environment; the sexual repression of children; the incest taboo that denies sexual feeling precisely where the proximities of family life most encourage it. Not only are those implications not realized in the succeeding film, their trace is obscured and all but obliterated. The killer is identified with “the Bogeyman,” the embodiment of an eternal and unchanging evil which, by definition, can’t be understood; and with the Devil (“those eyes … the Devil’s eyes”), by none other than his own psychoanalyst (Donald Pleasence)—surely the most extreme instance of Hollywood’s perversion of psychoanalysis into an instrument of repression.
The film proceeds to lay itself wide open to the reading Jonathan Rosenbaum offered in Take One: the killer’s victims are all sexually promiscuous, the one survivor a virgin; the monster becomes, in the tradition of all those beach party-monster movies of the late 50s and early 60s, simply the instrument of puritan vengeance and repression rather than the embodiment of what puritanism repressed.
Halloween is more interesting than that, if only because more confused. The basic premise of the action is that Laurie is the killer’s real quarry throughout (the other girls merely distractions en route), because she is for him the reincarnation of the sister he murdered as a child (he first sees her in relation to a little boy who resembles him as he was then, and becomes fixated on her from that moment). This compulsion to reenact the childhood crime keeps Michael tied at least to the possibility of psychoanalytical explanation, thereby suggesting that Donald Pleasence may be wrong. If we accept that, then one tantalizing unresolved detail becomes crucial: the question of how Michael learned to drive a car. Only two possible explanations present themselves: either he is the devil, possessed of supernatural powers; or he has not spent the last nine years (as Pleasence would have us believe) sitting staring blackly at a wall meditating further horrors. (It is to Carpenter’s credit that the issue is raised in the dialogue, not glossed over as an unfortunate plot necessity we aren’t supposed to notice, but he appears to use it merely as another tease, a bit of meaningless mystification.) The possibility this opens up is that of reading the whole film against the Pleasence character: Michael’s evil is what his analyst has been projecting on to him for the past nine years. Unfortunately, this remains merely a possibility in the material that Carpenter chose not to take up; it does not constitute a legitimate (let alone a coherent) reading of the actual film.
RETURNING THE LOOK
Confronted over the past few years with the proliferation of increasingly violent and gruesome low-budget horror movies centered on psychopathic killers, one may take away the impression of one undifferentiated stream of massacre, mutilation and terrorization, a single interminable chronicle of blood-letting called something like “When a Stranger Calls after Night School on Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth, Don’t Answer the Phone and Don’t Go Into the House because He Knows You’re Alone and is Dressed to Kill.” In fact, however one may shrink from systematic exposure to the films or deplore the social phenomena and ideological mutations they reflect, distinctions can be made in terms both of function and quality. Their popularity, especially—indeed, almost exclusively—with youth audiences, suggests that, even if they were uniformly execrable, they shouldn’t be ignored; an attempt both to understand the phenomena and to discriminate among the films seems valid and timely.
The films fall into two partially distinguishable categories, answering to two partially distinguishable cultural needs: the violence against women movie (of which Dressed to Kill is the most controversial, as well as the most ambitiously “classy,” example), and what has been succinctly dubbed the “teenie-kill pic” (of which the purest—if that is the word—examples are the four Friday the 13th movies). The distinction is never clear-cut: the two cycles have common sources in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween (which in turn have a common source in Psycho); the last survivor of the teenie-kill movies, endurer of the ultimate ordeals, terrors and agonies, is invariably female; the victims in the violence against women films are predominantly young. But the motivation for the slaughter on both the dramatic and ideological levels is somewhat different: in general, the teenagers are punished for promiscuity, while the women are punished for being women.
Both types represent a sinister and disturbing inversion of the significance of the traditional horror film. There, the monster was in general a creature from the id, not merely a product of repression but a protest against it, whereas in the current cycles the monster, while still produced by repression, has essentially become a superego figure, avenging itself on liberated female sexuality or the sexual freedom of the young. What hasn’t changed, making the social implications even more sinister, is the genre’s basic commercial premise—that the customers continue to pay, as they always did, to enjoy the eruptions and depredations of the monster. Where the traditional horror film invited, however ambiguously, an identification with the return of the repressed, the contemporary horror film invites an identification (either sadistic or masochistic or both simultaneously) with punishment.
On the whole, the teenie-kill pic seems the more consistently popular, which can be interpreted as a logical consequence of a “permissive” (as opposed to a liberated) society. The chief (indeed almost the only) characteristic of the films’ teenagers (who are obviously meant to be attractive to the youth audience as identification figures) is a mindless hedonism made explicit by a character in Friday the 13th, Part 3, who remarks without contradiction that the only things worth living for are screwing and smoking dope. The films both endorse this and relentlessly punish it; they never suggest that other options might be available (what, after all, might happen if young people began to think?). What is most stressed, and nowhere explicitly condemned, is promiscuity—the behavior that consumer capitalism in its present phase simultaneously “permits” and morally disapproves of. The satisfaction that youth audiences get from these films is presumably twofold: they identify both with the promiscuity and with the grisly and excessive punishment. The original Friday the 13th dramatizes this very clearly: most of the murders are closely associated with the young people having sex together (a principle that reaches ludicrous systematization in the sequels, where one can safely predict that any character who shows sexual interest in another will be dead within minutes); the psychopathic killer turns out to be a woman whose son Jason drowned because the camp counselors who should have been supervising him were engaged in intercourse. In the sequels, Jason himself returns as a vaguely defined mutant monster, virtually indistinguishable from the Michael of the Halloween films, which introduces another indispensable component of the cycle, the monster’s unkillability: the sexual guilt which the characters are by definition incapable of analyzing, confronting or understanding can never be exorcized.
The violence against women movies have generally been explained as a hysterical response to 60s and 70s feminism: the male spectator enjoys a sadistic revenge on women who have begun to refuse to slot neatly and obligingly into his patriarchally predetermined view of the way things should naturally be. This is convincing as long as one sees it as accounting for the intensity, repetitiveness and ritualistic insistence of these films, and not for the basic phenomenon itself: from Caligari to Psycho, women have always been the main focus of threat and assault in the horror film. A number of variously plausible explanations may account for this: First, that, as women are regarded as weak and helpless, it is simply more frightening if the monster attacks them; the male spectator can presumably identify with the hero who finally kills the monster, the film thereby indulging his vanity as male protector of the helpless female. That he may also, on another level, identify with the monster in no way contradicts this: it merely suggests its inadequacy as total explanation. Second, that, as men in patriarchal society have set women up on compensatory pedestals, thereby constructing them as oppressive and restrictive figures, they have a strong desire to knock them down again. As in every genre, the archetypal male-constructed opposition of wife/whore operates here: in the traditional horror film the women who get killed are usually whore figures, punished for bringing out the beast in men; the heroine who gets terrorized and/or abducted, but is eventually rescued, is the present or future wife. The ideological tensions involved here are still central to our culture. Third, that the films obliquely express what Hitchcock’s films, for example, have consistently dramatized—the anxiety of the heterosexual male confronted by the possibility of an autonomous female sexuality he can’t control and organize. But the key point, for present purposes, is that in the traditional horror film the threatened heroine was invariably associated with the values of monogamous marriage and the nuclear family (actual or potential): the eruption of the Frankenstein monster during the preparations for his creator’s wedding in the 1931 James Whale movie is the locus classicus. What the monster really threatened was a repressive, ideologically constructed bourgeois normality. Today, the women who are terrorized and slaughtered tend to be those who resist definition within the virgin/wife/mother framework.
The dominant project of both these overlapping, interlocking cycles is, then, depressingly reactionary. However, as both can be shown to have their source in contemporary ideological tension, confusion and contradiction, both carry within them the potential for subverting that project. There is, for example, no inherent reason why a filmmaker of some intelligence and awareness should not make a teenie-kill movie that, while following the general patterns of the genre, analyzed sexual guilt and proposed opposition to it: it would chiefly require characters who were not totally mindless, for whom both filmmaker and spectator could feel some respect. The recent Hell Night perhaps shows vestiges of such an ambition (it at least produces an active and resourceful heroine—Linda Blair—capable of doing more than screaming and falling over), but in general the apparently total complicity of the youth audience in these fantasies of their own destruction has licensed a corresponding mindlessness in the filmmakers.
Feminists (of both sexes) have, on the other hand, been quite vociferous on the subject of violence against women, and this can be credited with provoking various degrees of disturbance in recent specimens of the genre, ranging from vague uneasiness to an intelligent rethinking of the conventions. In Dressed to Kill the violence to women is consistently countered by a critique of male dominance and an exposure of male sexual insecurities. He Knows You’re Alone, while finally very confused, makes a highly sophisticated attempt through a conscious, intermittently self-reflexive play with narrative to analyze violence against women in terms of male possessiveness and the fear of female autonomy. It is certainly worth discriminating between it and Don’t Go into the House, which may be taken as representing the cycle at its most debased: a film in which the most disgusting violence (flaying alive with a blowtorch) is significantly juxtaposed with some more than usually strident dialogue about “faggots” in a way that may be taken as indicating, however inadvertently, some of the sexual tensions that motivate the cycle as a whole.
Ken Wiederhorn’s Eyes of a Stranger strikes me as the most coherent attempt to rework the conventions of the cycle so far, resulting in a film that, while it doesn’t escape contamination (the generic patterns are to some degree intractable), comes closest to embodying a systematic critique of the dominant project. Disgracefully mishandled and thrown away by its distributors, it seems to have come and gone virtually unnoticed on both sides of the Atlantic, apart from some predictable abuse from journalist-critics incapable of distinguishing between different uses of the same generic material. The film follows the basic rules of the cycle very faithfully, so the necessary plot synopsis can be brief: a psychopath is terrorizing women (obscene phone call, followed by rape and murder); a TV news reporter (Lauren Tewes) comes correctly to suspect a man in the apartment opposite her own; she endangers her own life by searching his apartment for evidence while he is out; he discovers who is harassing him and, in the climactic scene, invades her apartment in return, assaulting her younger sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is blind, mute, and deaf from shock at being raped and beaten when she was a child. I shall restrict analysis to three aspects, representing the major components of the genre.
The Terrorization of Women
Friday the 13th, Part 2
Halloween
1. The Psychopath, “The Look” Much has been made of the strikingly insistent use (in both teenie-kill and violence against women movies) of first-person camera to signify the approach of the killer, seen by many critics as an invitation to sadistic indulgence on the part of the spectator. A simple alternative explanation for the device, which in fact works with rather than against this, is the need to preserve the secret of the killer’s identity for a final “surprise” The latter motivation might be seen merely as supplying a plausible alibi for the former: the sense of indeterminate, unidentified, possibly supernatural or superhuman menace feeds the spectator’s fantasy of power, facilitating a direct spectator/camera identification by keeping the intermediary character, while signified as present, as vaguely defined as possible. In Eyes of a Stronger the psychopath’s identity is revealed quite early in the film: a rather ordinary-looking, confused, ungainly, unattractive man who strongly evokes memories of Raymond Burr in Rear Window. The (for the genre, surprisingly infrequent) point-of-view shots of strippers, naked women, etc., are always attached to an identified figure: if the male spectator identifies with the point-of-view, he is consistently shown precisely whom he is identifying with. Hence, although the film is posited on the terrorization of women (and, during its first half, certainly gets too much mileage out of that for its own good), this is never presented with simple relish, and the sadism can never be simply enjoyed (it is difficult to imagine audiences cheering the murders—a not uncommon phenomenon within this cycle—deprived as they are of all possible perverse glamour).
2. The Other Male Characters The two “attractive” young men (potential hero figures, though one is murdered very early in the film) are both associated with the killer on their first appearances, a device also employed, though less strikingly, in He Knows You’re Alone. The first (when the film’s first victim is already threatened—we know, but she doesn’t, that the murderer is in her apartment) frightens her by appearing in her doorway wearing a grotesque mask that resembles the killer’s face under its concealing stocking; the second (Lauren Tewes’ lover, the film’s apparent male lead) leaps on her violently in bed in a parody of sexual assault. Male aggression is thus generalized, presented as a phenomenon of our culture (the lover, significantly, is trying throughout the film to circumscribe Tewes within his values and his apartment).
Consistently, the men in the film are either unhelpful, uncomprehending, or active impediments. The police refuse to investigate the first victim’s reports of harassment in time to save her because Tewes’ fully justified warning newscast has provoked an epidemic of obscene calls that turn out to be jokes (compare the lover’s pretended assault). The lover refuses to accept Tewes’ evidence (circumstantial, but strong, and strongly supported by that intuition men like to see as the prerogative of the female so that they can condescend to it) until it’s too late, because of his commitment as a lawyer to one of the dominant institutions of patriarchy. Tewes’ attempts to express her concern on television are met by her fellow newscaster with bland indifference; the film is very shrewd in pinpointing the tendency of television to cancel out and reassure, Tewes’ warning to women being immediately followed by the determinedly comic antics of the male weather-reporter.
3. The Women The film is consistently woman-centered. Our identification figures are exclusively female, and the temptation to produce a male hero who springs to the rescue at the last moment is resolutely resisted, the women handling everything themselves. Tewes and Leigh are both presented—in their different ways, and within the limitations of the generic conventions—as strong, resourceful, and intelligent. Here, too, comparison with Rear Window is interesting. When Grace Kelly, in Hitchcock’s film, invades the murderer’s apartment, it is in order to demonstrate her courage to a man; Tewes’ motivation in the corresponding scene of Eyes of a Stranger is a genuine and committed social concern. Although this is shown to have roots in personal psychology (her feeling for her younger sister, and largely irrational guilt about what happened to her), the film strongly suggests that this has become generalized into a concern about the victimization of women in contemporary society. Crucial to the film is its reversal of the patterns of male domination: the turning point is the moment when Tewes phones the killer, to persuade him to turn himself in, but also to let him know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an anonymous phone call.
The conclusion of the film is particularly satisfying by virtue of its play on “the look” and the way in which it answers the beginning. The opening images show a man photographing marine life along the Florida coastline, who suddenly finds himself photographing a woman’s body: the look, innocent enough on the personal level, is symbolically established as male, the looked-at female and passive. The psychosomatically blind sister’s recovery of her sight during the murderer’s assault—dramatically predictable and, if you like, corny (I find it, like many “obvious” moments in the cinema, very moving)—takes on corresponding significance in relation to this and to the film’s play on looking throughout (from its title onwards). Tracy’s regaining of her sight and her voice can be read in terms of “pop” psychology, that is, the reliving of a traumatic experience; the film also makes clear that she sees at the moment when she finally realizes she has to fight for her life. The regaining of sight represents the renunciation of the passivity into which she has withdrawn: immediately, the power of the look is transferred to the power of the gun with which she shoots the murderer, the reappropriation of the phallus. In accordance with current convention he isn’t really dead, and Tewes, returning just in time, has to shoot him again; unlike Michael and Jason, however, he is by no means signified as indestructible. The contemporary horror film has, typically, two possible endings (frequently combined): the heroine/last survivor alive but apparently reduced to insanity; the suggestion that the monster is still alive. (Like so much else in these twin cycles, the endings were initiated by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween respectively.) Eyes of a Stranger ends with the murderer, definitely dead, slumped ignominiously in the bathtub, his eyes closed, his glasses still perched incongruously on his nose—an unflattering reflection for any male in the audience who has relished the sadistic assaults.