Sleeping with the Lights On Read online

  Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.

  The Burkean sublime was to become a central concept for understanding the Gothic. In 1826 Ann Radcliffe, the most celebrated Gothic novelist of her generation, and one of the pioneering figures in modern horror, outlined what was to become an important distinction for many theorists of the form, between ‘terror’ (metaphysical dread) and ‘horror’ (shocking, often disgusting revelation):

  Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakspeare [sic] nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?

  Though not all commentators accept it, the distinction between terror and horror has proved lasting and influential. For example, Stephen King, by far the most prominent living horror writer, makes it one of the cornerstones of his analysis of the genre in his important study, Danse Macabre (1981): ‘So: terror on top, horror below it, and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion.…I recognize terror as the finest emotion…and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.’

  To offer some generalization, to which there are always counterexamples: ‘terror’ poses existential questions for the audience as to the nature of reality, the validity of their beliefs, the reliability of perception. It is often expressed in the paranormal or supernatural, in ‘things which should not be’, in challenges to the integrity of the self (the doppelgänger) or the arrow of time (precognition, ‘we have been here before’). It is productive of fear. ‘Horror’ might best be thought of as embodied, corporeal, articulated through pain or through the dissolution of the flesh. It can be productive of shock.

  King’s identification of ‘the gross-out’ as the lowest form of horror is an interesting one. The desire to make your audience puke may not be a very exalted artistic aim, but it is an artistic aim nevertheless. The aesthetics of disgust are real, and governed by powerful taboos. My mouth is full of saliva, which I swallow all the time, and yet I would not readily drink a glass of milk into which I have just spat. The social and intellectual origins of these taboos have been the subject of an influential analysis by the anthropologist Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (1966). Douglas writes:

  The body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex structure. The functions of its different parts and their relation afford a source of symbols for other complex structures. We cannot possibly interpret rituals concerning excreta, breast milk, saliva and the rest unless we are prepared to see in the body a symbol of society, and to see the powers and dangers credited to the social structure reproduced in small on the human body.

  For Douglas, social and mental organization seeks order, a clear classification and categorization of events and objects. Pollution and taboo occur at the margins of these categories, or in the interstices (spaces) between them, the cognitive and categorical gaps: ‘bodily margins [are] thought to be specially invested with power and danger…[because] all margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins.’ Horror, then, occurs at the boundaries of these clear category distinctions, where our sense of certainty, integrity, unity is suddenly profoundly challenged, destabilized. Self/other, living/dead, male/female, adult/child, human/non-human, inside/outside, solid/liquid—as we will see many times in this book, horror tests the limits or margins of these (and other) categories, and in doing so tests our responses to them. Our skin, for example, is a clear boundary between self/other, inside/outside, living/dead. These binaries are clearly transgressed when the skin is ruptured or breached (slashed) by external trauma: what is outside should stay outside. But the converse is in its way equally traumatic. What is inside can become taboo, polluted, abject when it crosses the boundary of the flesh, as in the case of my saliva in the glass of milk. Urine, blood, mucus, shit, pus are all abject once outside. This explains horror’s recurring fascination with a variety of abject substances, often viscous materials which violate clear solid/liquid boundaries—blood, gore, goo, slime, drool, guts, vomit, semen, menses. In horror, all of these are, in their various ways, matter in the wrong place. This also explains horror’s recurring imagistic and symbolic fascination with the body’s orifices, its permeable boundaries between self and other, inside and outside, its points of anxiety and doubt: the mouth, the vagina, the anus, the eyes. From the vagina dentata—the vagina with teeth—to the related image of the vampire’s fanged, red mouth, to the eyeball piercings of King Lear, Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, or Zombie Flesh Eaters, horror is full of such images.

  Perhaps understandably, then, horror’s violation of taboos can often be seen as an affront to decency. While the products of horror can often be readily incorporated into capitalism, always eager to commodify its own dissent (Twilight is an obvious modern example), nevertheless part of the power of horror lies in its transgressive nature. It can be, as I suggested, an avant-garde art form, whose function is to shock us out of our respectability and complacency—épater la bourgeoisie (to shock the middle classes), as French fin-de-siècle poets put it. Since it probes at the boundaries of the ethics of representation (what can or cannot be shown, what should or should not be articulated), the history of horror is also the history of outraged responses to horror, of censorship, moral panics, video nasty scandals, and other forms of social and political anxiety. Some practitioners of horror have, in turn, drawn strength and inspiration from the edginess of their relationship with censorship, as in the case of Clive Barker: ‘Paradoxically, I thank God for them [censors]. I think it’s important that there should always be somebody around who says that this is forbidden territory. We are, after all, trading on taboo.’ When horror gets too respectable, too near the mainstream, it can lose much of its power.

  Horror brings us face to face with our own flesh, our corporeality, and with the mutability and malleability of that flesh, its softness, its porousness or leakiness, its vulnerability, its appalling potential for pain, its capacity for metamorphosis or decay, its stinkiness and putridity, its transience and mortality. Etymologically, horror originally signified an involuntary embodied response: it derives from the Latin horrere, ‘to stand on end’, ‘to bristle’ (hence horripilation: hair standing on end; goose flesh). From its original definition of hair standing on end, horrere came to mean to shake, to tremble, to shudder at, to dread, to be afraid of, and conversely to be frightful, be terrible, be desolate.

  On Halloween 1990, the BBC broadcast Horror Café, a panel discussion which brought together different practitioners of horror, writers and film-makers, from different traditions and generations. Among them was the horror auteur John Carpenter, director of Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, and many others, who made the following observation:

  There’s an essential question that you have to answer, and it’s basic when you make a film. There’s two kinds of [horror]. There’s a left-wing horror and a right-wing horror. Now, the right-wing horror—we’re all a tribe, and the evil is out there. [Points to the distance.] It’s gonna come and get us.…There’s also a left-wing horror, and it’s right in here. [Points to his chest.]

  Carpenter’s comment here astutely bri
ngs together two ostensibly different issues: the politics of horror and the location of horror. Horror can be, I have argued, an intensely political form, but its politics are not uniform. Some horror is, we have seen, radical and avant-garde, deliberately oppositional, setting out as a matter of central policy to shock, to affront sensibilities, to undermine authority.

  This idea of radical horror is not misguided or wrong, but it is partial. Stephen King, incomparably the most influential and successful living horror writer, recognized that for him horror spoke to the ‘inner Republican’. It’s a subversive conservatism, perhaps, with undeniable streaks of rebellion, but nevertheless a conservatism marshalled in the service of an agenda that can only be called traditionalist. ‘In my character’, King writes in his extraordinarily revealing ‘Memoir of the Craft’, On Writing, ‘a kind of wildness and a deep conservatism are wound together like hair in a braid’. Horror, we will see, can emerge from intensely conservative values, ranging from the comfort and convention of traditional ghost stories, to a genre such as the slasher movie, which in its original form tended to police the sexual behaviour of its teenage cast with extraordinary severity, presenting a world in which the punishment for premarital sex was a violent death. For some kinds of horror, threats to order are everywhere; they need to be contained, controlled, or preferably destroyed. Horror as a cultural form maintains a dialogic relationship between radicalism (the urge to confront) and conservatism (the desire to control).

  Horror occupies extreme terrain—it deals in shock and outrage, nausea and abjection, fear and loathing. And yet it is also a highly pleasurable genre. The large popular audiences for horror movies don’t just go along to have their souls harrowed or their lunch returned. They certainly don’t go, as some censorious accounts of horror would suggest, because they are sick people in search of ideas and in need of psychological treatment. They go because they enjoy horror. Horripilation can be a pleasurable experience. In Jane Austen’s quasi-Gothic Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney reads Ann Radcliffe: ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again;—I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.’ Horror audiences laugh as often as they scream, or laugh and scream at the same time.

  The pleasures of genre are, in fact, often akin to those of ritual. They are based on repetition, on the acting out of predetermined roles, on the precise fulfilment of expectations. Horror audiences are often highly knowledgeable, with an acute intuitive knowledge of the codes and conventions of the genre. They often know exactly what to expect, and this explains the enduring popularity of many of the most generically formulaic kinds of horror, from Radcliffe’s Gothic novels to slasher movies. Nobody went to see Friday the 13th, part 8, or Saw 6, expecting a whole new cinematic experience from the one they got when they went to see Friday the 13th, part 7, or Saw 5. Sometimes, this genre-familiarity can indeed lend a ritualistic or even a participatory experience to the work or art, as we go self-consciously through the conventions of the genre while experiencing it, or even start to take part in the work ourselves (like the audience for The Rocky Horror Picture Show). The great success of the Scream franchise (1996–2011), for example, is to a large extent predicated on its audience’s genre expertise. We have been here before.

  The Uncanny and the Weird

  We have all experienced moments, or feelings, in which the world is suddenly not quite as we thought it was—in which that which was familiar is suddenly revealed to us as strange, or that which was strange suddenly seems familiar. These experiences can be disconcerting, leading to a sense of unease, in which our certainties momentarily dissolve, to give a sense of a quite different reality or order of existence. In this mood of uncertainty, we can no longer be sure of our own senses, of our secure interpretation of reality based on an accumulated lifetime of experiences. We begin to question the nature of that reality: Did I just see that, or didn’t I? What’s that noise? Is someone outside? Wasn’t that door closed the last time I looked? Am I alone in the house? Why do I keep getting the sense of a presence, just over my shoulder? Is someone—or something—following me? Am I going mad?

  This feeling of existential uncertainty is called the uncanny, and is a familiar one to readers and viewers of horror. It is a category which was famously discussed by Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay, ‘The “Uncanny”’. ‘Uncanny’ here is a translation of the German word unheimlich, which literally means something like ‘unhomely’. This suggests a common definition of the uncanny as that which is strange, unfamiliar, ‘far from home’. And yet Freud suggests that the uncanny occurs when the meaning of unheimlich collapses into its opposite, heimlich (homely)—when the strange and the familiar meet.

  This, for example, can refer to family secrets, things which are kept locked up at home, from madwomen in the attic to prisoners in the cellar. Some of the horror we will encounter in this book arises out of a worry that apparently bland facades—the handsome face, the suburban front door, the kindly landlady—might conceal monstrous interiors. The haunted house is in some ways a literalizing of the uncanny—a place of security and welcome becomes a place of terror and desolation. Some of the most successful ghost stories turn on this undecideability. An enormous reservoir of critical ink, for example, has been expended in analysing whether Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a supernatural tale of a haunted house, or a psychological tale whose narrator imagines ghosts as an aspect of her mental breakdown. (The answer, it seems to me, is that the story derives its uncanny power from the simultaneous existence of both interpretations.)

  Some other uncanny tales play on a creeping awareness that reality is unstable. As we have seen, horror often arises out of a blurring or transgressing of clear category distinctions. The uncanny tends to arise out of a sense of uncertainty as to whether we are encountering or experiencing something which is alive or dead, organic or inert, material or supernatural. It is the statue that moves, the portrait whose eyes follow you around the room, the doll that comes to life, the mirror that reflects back a different room, or a different face, the door that suddenly will not open, or that opens of its own accord, or that rattles as if being violently shaken from the outside when you know there’s no one there. It is the window that looks out onto an unexpectedly strange vista, or onto nothing at all.

  If the uncanny is a sudden glimpse into the possibility of the supernatural, then what is often called the weird arises out of a sense that the material world is degrees of magnitude larger and more complex than we could possibly have imagined, and that it contains and far exceeds any conception we might have of the supernatural. The weird often stresses the insignificance of humanity, as in this celebrated observation in the opening paragraph of H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’:

  The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

  The theorist Mark Fisher suggests that the weird arises from ‘a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience’. The human brain simply cannot comprehend all of the Real, and thus we have developed an extremely limited and finite comforting ‘reality’, rather like our ability only to see visible light, a tiny slice of the vast spectrum of waves, or the fact that our senses confine us to three dimensions when mathematicians and physicists tell us that there are many more. Following Lovecraft, and particularly his creation of the kraken-god Cthulhu, weird fiction has developed an obsession with transdimensional invertebrate life forms, with a particular emphasis on
the utterly inhuman morphology of cephalopods. Weird fiction loves its tentacular creatures, its octopodes and squid-monsters, who represent a monstrous alterity, an otherness, which is quite distinct from the fundamentally humanoid monsters we will encounter in Chapter 1, or the human-animal metamorphoses of Chapter 3. The weird, Fisher proposes, ‘is that which does not belong’. Does not belong, that is, within our very narrow perception and conception of reality. If the uncanny is unsettling because it allows us a momentary peep through a crack in the doors of perception, the weird blows those doors apart. An encounter with the weird is terrifying because it can completely remove the foundations on which we base reality.

  Popular Anxieties

  Horror is an embodied art form; but it is also, and at the same time, a cultural one. While, I have suggested, it has its origins inscribed into the very beginnings of the Western literary and cultural tradition, it comes down to us today primarily as a popular cultural form, in pulp fiction, in film, and increasingly in video games and online.