On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (34 page)

There are monsters in Lynch films, some metaphorical (e.g., Frank Booth in
Blue Velvet
) and some misunderstood (e.g., John Merrick in
The Elephant Man
), but I’ve been trying to suggest a more abstract concept of
monstrous throughout this chapter, one that Lynch illustrates well in his work. The angst that Heidegger claimed to have
no specific object
(unlike fear) and the cosmic fear that Lovecraft tried to articulate seem to me to be obscure but palpable expressions of a dispersed, diffused monster. The mundane and ordinary things of the world have been infused with an alienating, monstrous quality. Perhaps the most obvious and patent example of this immanent, not imminent, threat can be found in the short films of the Brothers Quay.

Stephen and Timothy Quay are identical twins and filmmakers, born in America but living in England; their films include
Street of Crocodiles
(1986),
The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer
(1984),
In Absentia
(2000), and
The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes
(2005). They seem to have taken the uncanny aesthetic, which one finds in directors like Lynch, and pushed it to degrees of abstraction hitherto unexplored. In many cases, characters and stories are completely gone, but through the genius of the Quays’ animation sensibility the audience is often angst-ridden and uneasy at the repetitive twitching of a hair or a spoon or a calligraphy quill or some other mundane object. In an interview the Quays said, “What happens in the shadow, in the grey regions, also interests us—all that is elusive and fugitive, all that can be said in those beautiful half tones, or in whispers, in deep shade.”
²⁴

Leaving aside these more subtle examples of uncanny horror, we need to acknowledge the mainstream film explorations of vulnerability, particularly the recent genres “splatter-punk” and “torture porn.” One might take the recent celebrations of torture in horror films, and the box-office popularity of such horror, as suggestive evidence for a Freudian understanding of the genre. We seem to have mysterious tastes and predilections inside us, which get satisfied only by indulgence in the grisly and macabre. Freud may have given us a new language for understanding this taste for the grotesque, but the taste itself is very old.

In Plato’s
Republic
the human attraction to the grotesque is taken to be more evidence that the psyche houses a multifaceted set of desires and powers, sometimes working in confederation and sometimes at odds. “There is a story,” Socrates explains,

which I remember to have heard, and in which I put faith. The story is, that Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from the Piraeus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also
a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight.
²⁵

Serial killers have probably always existed, and maybe they’ve always been fascinating and entertaining to those of us at a safe distance, but it seems fair to acknowledge a new grand-scale media celebration of such killers. Of course, public fascination and hysteria reached fever pitch with nineteenth-century monsters like Jack the Ripper, the famous slasher of Whitechapel, and the alluring mystery of Jack the Ripper was, and is, matched by the alluring grotesqueness of his disemboweling techniques.
²⁶
These days we have extensive media coverage of, and corresponding public appetite for, real serial killers, such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, and Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leath-erface, and Michael Myers.
²⁷
Are we drawn to these gruesome stories and images, as Plato’s Leontius was drawn to the executed corpses piled up near the port of Piraeus? Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and eat their innocent victims?

After the relatively high-brow cinematic forays into gothic horror in the 1990s, such as
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Interview with a Vampire
, and
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
, the first decade of the twenty-first century settled into a new focus on “torture porn” and “splatter-punk” horror, usually stressing the monstrous serial killer as the central protagonist. Recent examples include
Dawn of the Dead
(1978, 2004),
Turistas
(2006),
Hostel
(2005),
Hostel II
(2007),
The Devil’s Rejects
(2005), and
Saw
(2004) and its many sequels. These films usually involve extended graphic depictions of sadism and cannibalism.

Some critics, including the creator of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, Joss Whedon, have claimed that torture porn debases, by taking something away from, the people who view it.
²⁸
Stephen King defended the genre, particularly
Hostel:
“Sure it makes you uncomfortable, but good art should make you uncomfortable.”
²⁹
“You screw, you die” is the message of slasher films, according to the conservative critic E. Michael Jones.
³⁰
“The moral of all horror films” is that “sexual sin leads to death.” The narrative of earlier slasher and later torture porn films is numbingly predictable: eroti-cally charged young folks experiment with sexuality, libido rises, and sexual ecstasy is replaced with a violent climax of blood and death. Contrary to Freudian repression theory, Jones suggests that horror films are playing
out a different subtext, a deep morality tale just below the surface of the filmmaker’s and the audience’s conscious awareness.
³¹
“All monster stories,” Jones explains, “beginning with
Frankenstein
, the first of the genre, are in effect protests against the Enlightenment’s desacralization of man.” By which he appears to mean that modern scientific secular ideology has reduced humans to animals (or even machines), and sexuality has become just another animal function without sacred status (in marriage). Horror narratives, according to Jones, remind us of our betrayal of morality and reinforce a timeless ethic (more keenly felt before the Enlightenment) of sexual moderation: “If you violate sexual morals, you will be punished by death, and the city will be destroyed; tampering with sexual morals is a threat to civilization.” In Jones’s conservative account, horror gives us a virtual tour of the consequences of “leftist” sexual liberation.
³²

The monsters from the sequel
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
(Warner Bros.). Image courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.

Though from a very different perspective, some liberal monsterologists also see civilization hanging in the balance. But now the danger comes not from too little self-control but from too much. Too much repression can cause neurotic individuals and societies, so horror films come to the rescue to release the pent-up pressures. The director of
Hostel
, Eli Roth, has defended his sadistic films on what appear to be Freudian grounds.
Interviewed frequently in the media, Roth argues that horror films tend to crop up more when the country is undergoing severe social stresses; the Vietnam era produced the original
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left
, and others, and the post-9/11 and Iraq war era also corresponds with an influx of violent horror films. (In contrast, according to Roth, the Clinton era produced fewer such films.) Political correlations aside, Roth argues that human fear and anxiety are held in check during our day-today functioning, but sometimes we need to exorcise these troubling emotions. Horror films allow us the opportunity to scream and release anxiety in a cathartic manner;
³³
according to Roth, they have a therapeutic effect. “There are soldiers in Iraq,” Roth explains, “that write me and tell me that
Hostel
is one of the most popular movies in the military.”

They love it. I wrote back and asked, “Why on earth would you watch
Hostel
after what you see in a day?” And he wrote back and said that he was out during the day with his friends and they saw somebody’s face get blown off, and then they watched the movie that night with about 400 people and they were all screaming. But when they’re on the battlefield, you have to be a machine. You can’t react emotionally. You have to tactically respond to a situation. And these guys are going out every day seeing this horrible stuff, and they’re not allowed to be scared. But it all gets stored up, and it’s got to come out. And when they watch
Hostel
, it’s basically saying, for the next 90 minutes, not only are you allowed to be scared, you’re encouraged to be scared because it’s okay to be terrified.
³⁴

Roth does not explicitly invoke Freud in his explanation, but that is only because the theory of the repressed and released Id has now attained the paradigm status of common sense. But if torture porn encourages a purging of anxieties, it certainly adds new, previously unimaginable images of vulnerability to the audience’s experience. When they encounter a grisly corpse, the father warns his son in Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel
The Road
(2006), “Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever.”
³⁵
It remains to be seen whether or not the fears and anxieties that torture porn takes out of viewers by catharsis is superseded by the new fears it puts in.
³⁶

A compelling alternative to this theory of horror, the catharsis of dangerous inner drives, is the idea that slasher and monster films are just subspecies of the traditional morality tale. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss argued that myths, whether ancient or cinematic, have very similar sociocultural functions. The purpose of the mythic narrative is to make the world intelligible, to use magical means to resolve the contradictions of life. Perhaps this general point can be applied to the horror genre.
In many myths, heroes overcome monsters as a mechanism by which we resolve our anxieties about injustices in the world. Our daily experience is filled with bad guys who are winning and prospering while good guys are losing and suffering. Our films are cultural narratives that bring in justice where it otherwise seems fugitive. On this account, horror movies must end with a profound reckoning for the monsters, otherwise the “restoration of justice” thesis cannot hold. Of course, many horror films do indeed end with a final triumph of good over evil and may stand as evidence for this thesis. In addition, the popularity of first-person shooter video games such as Halo, wherein the gamer can fight monsters directly and blast virtual justice into place, seems to be evidence for a very satisfying moral application of aggression. Nefarious aliens and zombies populate a whole genre of “survival horror” video games, such as Resident Evil, and draw a large market of young men who want to punish monsters themselves. Why leave the meting out of justice to Hollywood stars when you can do it yourself?

Although much more could be said about the relationship between horror monsters and human vulnerability, I wish to briefly describe one other significant trend. The monsters of horror are ostensibly external agents of menace, but positioning them in the context of philosophical pessimism and Freudian psychology has, I hope, rendered their subjective inner dimension apparent. Freud explains the logic of
projection
in a way that explicitly connects the inner and outer monsters. “Phobias,” he explains, “have the character of a projection in that they replace an internal instinctual danger by an external perceptual one. The advantage of this is that the subject can protect himself against an external danger by fleeing from it and avoiding the perception of it, whereas it is useless to flee from dangers that arise from within.”
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In twentieth- and twenty-first-century horror we have a relatively new aesthetic focus on the subjective revulsion and terror of the flesh—in short, the terror of all things biological. After Darwin we have a radically different theoretical picture of nature, and when we combine this with our age of time-lapse photography, electron microscopy, and penetrating nature documentaries, we have a new and chilling sense of biological suffering.
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Reflect for a moment on the
Rhizocephala
or “root-headed” barnacle that lives its life feeding inside crabs and other crustaceans. This complex organism attaches itself to the shell of the crab, bores a hole through the shell, and deposits a tiny seed of itself into the crab’s body, whereupon the
outside attachment falls off the host’s shell and the seed begins to grow inside. Next the seed begins to spread throughout the crab in a series of complex root systems, often infiltrating, like a creeping vine, every limb of the crab. This root system castrates its host (thus precluding the crab’s continuation of the gene line), stops the crab’s molting cycle, and keeps it alive, all the while feeding off it, for years. Or consider the tarantula hawk, a giant wasp (
Pepsis
) that hunts tarantulas as a food supply for its larvae. The wasp paralyzes a tarantula with its powerful sting, then bites off its legs for easier transport and carries it back to a burrow, where it lays an egg on the spider’s paralyzed body. When the wasp larva hatches, it feeds slowly on the still living tarantula, even carefully avoiding at first the consumption of working vital organs to guarantee extended freshness. Not even the most inventive Hollywood writers can spin tales this fantastic, yet it is the bread and butter of biology.