Sleeping with the Lights On Page 3
‘Popular culture’ is a highly disputed term. Following the work of the so-called Frankfurt School of cultural studies, and most particularly of the philosopher Theodor Adorno in The Culture Industry and elsewhere, some commentators view popular culture as a medium through which hegemony enforces its values. It is entertainment which does the thinking for its audience, presenting them with cultural forms which he notoriously likened to pre-digested baby food. In a brilliant modern adaptation of Adorno, Curtis White understands contemporary popular culture as productive of a bland, conformist ‘middle mind’, incapable of critique and resisting spontaneity and authenticity. Influenced by the work of Stuart Hall and others, some British theorists of popular culture view it as, in John Storey’s words, ‘a site of struggle between the “resistance” of subordinate groups in society and the forces of “incorporation” operating in the interests of dominant groups in society’. Recently, and more blithely, in a specifically British context the historian Dominic Sandbrook understands popular culture as the authentic expression of the modern spirit of the nation.
Horror is a phobic cultural form. Some theories of horror see it as addressing ‘our deepest fears’, essentially static, part of a fundamentally unchanging ‘human condition’. But our fears are not fixed; they are mutable and contingent, a product of historical context. In his influential study, Sociophobics, the cultural anthropologist David L. Scruton writes: ‘Fearing is an event that takes place in a social setting; it is performed by social animals whose lives and experiences are dominated by culture.…Fearing is thus a dimension of human social life.’
As I have already argued, the origins of horror are inextricably a part of human civilization. But this does not mean that our fears are always the same. One of the most famous of all definitions of horror falls into the ‘our deepest fears’ category, and is often cited as axiomatic. In 1927, H. P. Lovecraft published ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, a critical essay which was the culmination of his deep, if idiosyncratic, engagement with his chosen literary form. Lovecraft begins with these famous words: ‘The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.’ This is an appealing formulation, and intuitively it makes a lot of sense. No one would deny that ‘fear of the unknown’ is potent, and an important part of the power of horror. Yet as a totalizing definition, it is clearly partial, and in some cases demonstrably wrong.
One of the characteristics of popular culture is its speed and suppleness (which some have dismissed as its ephemerality or disposability): the ways in which it is able to provide an instant response to events, developments, moods, crises. These responses are often inchoate, not thought through. Popular culture tends to identify, finger, and probe issues and anxieties, rather than provide coherent answers.
A good example of this would be to look at the year 1897. This was Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and might fairly be said to represent the high-water mark of the British Empire. Yet any reader of the popular fiction of the period would have seen that beneath the public assertiveness of British imperialism, the anxieties were showing. Colonial horror, in which British relations with its imperial Others became Gothicized in narratives of magic, monstrosity, and revenge, became enormously popular in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Some of its foremost proponents were writers whose imperial connections were very powerful.
Rudyard Kipling is perhaps the greatest of all writers of the British Empire. His story ‘The Mark of the Beast’ is the tale of a colonial administrator who violates a Hindu altar and is cursed with a form of lycanthropy. The story has as its epigraph a ‘Native Proverb’, ‘Your Gods and my Gods—do you or I know which are the stronger?’, and opens with a revealingly relativistic theological statement:
East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.
The vengeful ‘power of the Gods and Devils of Asia’, or of Africa, a discourse of uneasy Orientalism, pervades much British imperial fiction.
‘I am an Imperialist’, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to the Irish Times in 1912, ‘because I believe the whole to be greater than the part, and I would always willingly sacrifice any part if I thought it to the advantage of the whole.’ Doyle’s many public pronouncements on the British Empire, for example in his histories of the Boer War and the First World War, were on occasion downright jingoistic in tone and sentiment. And yet a recurring trope in Doyle’s fiction—from Sherlock Holmes stories such as The Sign of the Four or ‘The Speckled Band’ to Gothic tales such as ‘Uncle Jeremy’s Household’, ‘The Brazilian Cat’, or ‘The Brown Hand’—is that of the vengeful subjects or monsters of Empire who loom out of the darkness to torment the British.
These tales are fictional explorations of the common fin-de-siècle cultural anxiety of reverse colonization, which saw a series of continental, oriental, imperial, or interplanetary Others wreaking havoc upon British soil. Thus, to return to 1897, it is no accident that this imperial zenith also saw the publication of three of the defining works of reverse colonization: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Richard Marsh’s Egyptomaniac classic The Beetle, and (in serial form) H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. In all these works, the British Empire is shown as vulnerable not only to attack, but to an attack on its very heart, as these monstrous invaders head straight for the imperial metropolis of London. Works such as these, then, are not (or not primarily) comments on ‘our deepest fears’, or on fear of the unknown, but arise out of, and give form to, social and political anxieties of the 1890s.
For my own generation (I was born in 1967), the great anxiety was nuclear holocaust. Coming of age in the Reagan–Thatcher 1980s, we witnessed a number of historical events and cultural products all tending to increase our sense of awareness and terror: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Greenham Common, When the Wind Blows, Threads, ‘Protect and Survive’, War Games, Edge of Darkness, Terminator 2. This was an utterly new terror for humanity—the possibility, for the first time in human history, not of individual death or even of species extinction, but of total world annihilation. When Edward Teller and his team first tested the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, there was a real possibility that the explosion caused would set off a chain reaction which would ignite the entire earth’s atmosphere. They did it anyway. For many, the knowledge of nuclear Armageddon was existentially unbearable. Famously, on receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature on 10 December 1950, William Faulkner said: ‘our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: “When will I be blown up?”’ Stephen King, steeped in post-war American history and popular culture, made the same point in 1981:
We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth and that any Iron Curtain outlaw who tried to draw down on us in that great saloon of international politics would discover who the fastest gun in the West was…but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any other nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium-90 in our milk from nuclear testing.
The problem with nuclear anxieties was not that these fears were unknown, but that we knew exactly what to be afraid of. Any viewer of Threads (1984), which dealt with the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the British city of Sheffield, would have witnessed not only the initial megadeaths from the blast itself, but then the ravages of radiation sickness, nuclear winter, resource scarcity, and social breakdown. In 1985, the BBC repeated Threads the day after it broadcast its long-suppressed 1965 precursor, The War Game. Cumulatively, t
hese two nights were among the most terrifying experiences of my life.
As Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) shows, these nuclear anxieties have certainly not disappeared altogether. Indeed, one can detect them in displaced form in the post-millennial wave of zombie narratives, from 28 Days Later (2002) to The Walking Dead (first broadcast 2010), and much else besides. And yet, unlike the Baby Boomers and Generation Xers before them, contemporary Millennials do not seem to lie awake at night as I did, dreading the appearance of a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Aldermaston and Greenham Common are historical terms, if not meaningless ones.
But the bombs have not gone away; the world can still be destroyed many times over. It is fear—cultural anxiety—that has moved, taken new forms. Contemporary fears of global warming and ecological catastrophe have produced a post-millennial wave of ecohorrors, as we shall see in the Afterword, and a formidable body of scholarly and theoretical work has grown quickly in response.
For equally obvious reasons, the last years have seen the arrival of a new subgenre of digital horror. Levan Gabriadze’s startling Unfriended (2014), about a vengeful supernatural social media stalker, for example, speaks directly to a generation of viewers who have lived their entire lives online, and for whom digital social networks may be more vividly and urgently real than the lived experience of human communities. More than this, though, what is disturbing about Unfriended is its analysis of online life as an existential habit of being, or even a morbid addiction. For the characters of Unfriended, logging out of digital social networks is manifestly impossible, or even literally inconceivable. While, with its teens-in-peril narrative, the film structurally resembles 1980s slasher movies, and also clearly draws on the 1990s and early 2000s cycle of supernatural retribution films such as Ring (1998) or Final Destination (2000), the locus of the film’s anxiety is entirely contemporary: the impossibility of a meaningful life offline.
It falls upon each generation, then, to create its own monsters, or at least its own unique iterations of monstrosity. There is a good reason why vampires cast no reflections in the mirror. It is because what looks back at us is ourselves. We invest in monsters our own anxieties, but also sometimes our own desires, inarticulable in respectable social discourse. Monsters body forth our dreams and our nightmares, and they are the subject of my first chapter.
1
Monsters
‘Understand death?’ Stephen King writes, from the perspective of his child protagonist Mark Petrie in his vampire novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975). ‘Sure. That was when the monsters got you.’ Central to the power of horror is the spectacle of the monster. ‘Monster’ may, in fact, etymologically be connected to ‘spectacle’, or something very close: ‘demonstrate’, from the Latin monstrare, to show; ‘monster’, from monstrum, portent or atrocity (that which reveals), which can be traced back etymologically to monere, to warn. So, a monster can be simultaneously a spectacle, an atrocity (or violation), and a warning, an omen, or a punishment.
It makes sense, then, to begin our analysis of horror with some of its monsters. In this chapter we will be looking particularly at two of the most widely circulated types of monster, the vampire and the zombie. Why are we so fascinated by these figures? What do they mean?
The answer is that they mean many things, or have meant many things, across the centuries, as we shall see. Monstrosity is a physical category, describing the limit-points of the fleshly mutability we discussed in the Introduction. Historically, for example, it has been used to describe extreme deformity, from specimens of two-headed births to conjoined twins, lepers, or the hydrocephalic. But it is also a cultural, moral, or political category. ‘Monstrous’ births could be understood as omens. Here is the fourteenth-century Monk Thomas Burton of Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire, writing about one such ‘monster’, whose birth portended the arrival of the black death:
And shortly before this time, there was a certain human monster in England, divided from the navel upwards and both masculine and feminine, and joined in the lower part. When one part ate, drank, slept or spoke, the other could do something else if it wished. One died before the other, and the survivor held it in its arms for three days. They used to sing together very sweetly. They died, aged about 18, at Kingston upon Hull a short time before the pestilence began.
Typically, Burton’s ‘certain human monster’—a pair of conjoined twins—cuts across a number of stable conceptual categories: both two and one, male and female, and in the end both living and dead.
The fabulous monsters of bestiaries, from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (c.77–79 ad) onwards—the manticore, the gorgon, the gryphon, the basilisk, the chimaera—are generally made up of fanciful combinations of known animals. The manticore, for example, has the body of a lion and the head of a man, and sometimes the tail of a scorpion, while the chimaera is a lion with a goat’s head growing out of its back. Typically, these monsters were encountered in far-flung lands by travellers or military campaigners. Classically, monstrosity rarely inhabits the household—when it does arrive at home, it comes as a dread warning or portent, or as a punishment for sins. Monstrosity makes its home in exotic climes, far from centres of civilization and modernity: Skull Island, the Land that Time Forgot, Castle Dracula. This is what I meant when I said that monstrosity could be a political category. It can arise out of the body of thinking that Edward Said has called Orientalism—a tendency to understand the non-European as an inhuman Other, as bestial, cruel, sensuous. The logic of Orientalism has often been used as a justificatory mechanism for colonialism, conquest, and enslavement.
Contemporary modernity seems particularly obsessed by the monsters that consume us, that eat our flesh or drink our blood, to the extent that we might seem to be obsessed by our own consumption, or to welcome it. Social and individual behaviour is governed and regulated, we have seen, by powerful systems of taboos. In the Introduction, I argued that horror is an intrinsic feature of human civilization, and is intimately connected to the concept of taboo—to systems of regulation and proscription, interdict and abomination, which, it has been argued, are at the very root of human culture.
Taboo, Freud believed, is ‘the oldest human unwritten code of laws. It is generally supposed that taboo is older than gods and dates back to a period before any kind of religion existed.’ One of the strongest sets of taboos surrounds food, eating, and culinary practices, and so allegations of various forms of ‘unclean eating’ are often a way of marking out non-humanity. The most widespread of these food taboos is the taboo against cannibalism, and our bestiaries, romances, and mythologies provide a rich history of man-eating monsters, from Kronos devouring his children, to the Cyclops gorging on Odysseus’ men, to any number of ogres, giants, trolls, and corpse-eating ghouls.
It should not surprise us that the history of European colonial encounters has in part been written as a history of encounters with cannibals. As his name suggests, The Tempest’s Caliban, the aboriginal native of Prospero’s island, is one such cannibal. The word ‘cannibal’, in fact, derives from ‘Carib’, the people of the Antilles in what is now the West Indies—thus, the Caribbean Sea is, etymologically at least, the Sea of Cannibals. When early modern European explorers first encountered the Caribs in the sixteenth century, this is what they claimed to have encountered. However, even some contemporaries were sceptical. The great essayist Michel de Montaigne’s celebrated ‘On Cannibals’ reads today like an early example of cultural relativism, or even of postcolonial political writing:
I do not believe, from what I have been told about this people [the Caribs], that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits.…We are justified therefore in calling these people barbarians by reference to the laws of reason, but not in comparison with ourselves, who surpass them in every kind of barbarity.
Since the publication of William Arens’s The Man-Eating Myth in 1979, there has been a vigorous debate among anthropologists
, historians, and literary scholars as to whether, or to what degree, or under what circumstances, human societies have systematically practised cannibalism. A modern tradition of liberal, culturally relativistic anthropological thinking understands this systematic or ritualistic cannibalism as essentially a racist myth, a justifying projection of the colonial mind.
But the imagination of horror has seized on the possibilities of cannibalism. Nineteenth-century maritime and colonial horror, from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick to H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, is fascinated by cannibalism. Cannibal Holocaust and its ilk, the Italian cannibal movies of the ‘video nasty’ era which we looked at in the Introduction, are justifiably notorious for the outrageous viscerality of their images, but what is really troubling to me about these films is their racism, the casual cultural brutality with which they subhumanize Amazonian tribes. Scarcely less shocking, but rather more nuanced, the redneck and hillbilly cannibal families of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) or Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977) offer domestic American versions of the colonial cannibal Other, albeit that these films also have serious observations to make about the cultural marginalization and economic disenfranchisement of regional America, issues which remain current to this day.
Conversely, our most celebrated contemporary cannibal, Dr Hannibal Lecter, acts not out of a sense of cultural and economic disenfranchisement, but rather (like certain vampires) out of a sense of superiority. Thomas Harris’s Baltimore Renaissance Man is variously gourmand, psychiatrist, anatomist, artist, musician, orientalist, historian of high culture, patron of the arts, serial killer, cannibal, and demon. In Harris’s prequel novel, Hannibal Rising (2006), a policeman muses on the young Lecter: ‘What is he now? There’s not a word for it yet. For lack of a better word, we’ll call him a monster.’