Literature Review : Can fear provide rehabilitation?

Horror films as a design for understanding and recovering from modern trauma I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. David Cronenberg. Horror film as any possible rehabilitation immediately presents an ambiguity; for many people horror films are grotesque and a potential cause of trauma rather than the source of any understanding or working through of societal issues. The nature of horror dictates that it involves the audience to be shocked, appalled but ultimately attracted to the story. This contradiction is dealt with by Noel Carroll; ..even if horror only caused fear, we might feel justified in demanding an explanation of what could motivate people to seek out the genre. But where fear is compounded with repulsion, the ante is, in a manner of speaking, raised In short, there appears to be something paradoxical about the horror genre. It obviously attracts consumers; but it seems to do so by means of the expressly repulsive. (p10). Tudor picks up on the same paradox; as Brophy (1986: 5) suggests in an illuminating if sweeping generalization, the Gratification of the contemporary Horror film is based upon tension, fear, anxiety, sadism and masochism - a disposition that is overall both tasteless and morbid. The pleasure of the text is, in fact, getting the shit scared out of you - and loving it; an exchange mediated by adrenalin. What normal person is going to engage in preoccupations like that? (p24) Whilst both Carroll and Tudor agree in this premise, they reach in their examinations of why horror? differing conclusions; Carroll prefers to use human nature in his explanation. He uses the fascination/curiosity aspect of our innate outlook to understand the predilection for viewing the horror film. Tudor, on the other hand, and more interestingly for this discussion, seeks a wider view; If we really are to understand horrors appeal, and hence its social and cultural significance, we need to set aside the traditionally loaded ways in which why horror? has been asked. For the question should not be why horror? at all. It should be, rather, why do these people like this horror in this place at this particular time? And what exactly are the consequences of their constructing their everyday sense of fearfulness and anxiety, their landscapes of fear, out of such distinctive cultural materials? (p30-31) Here Tudor is opening a wider debate about what horror is rather than simply why it exists. He also suggests the cultural, geographical and historicized implications of the genre which are crucial to any debate on whether the genre can play a dynamic role in both reflecting, representing and challenging societal issues. In the context of genre, Jancovich uses Tudors work to lay out a consensual approach to categorising horror. Although genre debate may not seem specifically relevant to this discussion, it throws up interesting questions about how the audience relates to the material, the intentions of the filmmaker and whether these intentions are significant. Jancovich notes; Instead of asking what a horror film is, Tudor therefore sets out to analyse what films

have been understood as horror films, and the relationships between these films both within a given period and overtime. (p24) If there were to be any consensual agreement over a specific genre, how would this be measured or identified? Jancovich points out different audiences may hold deeply contradictory conceptions, and that these contradictions may be central to the issues of genre and genre distinctions (p25) Having said this there are clearly marked cues that audiences recognise in decoding a film to a genre, if not placed by the filmmaker then certainly alluded to by distributors, PR, and marketing of a film. Could the cues audiences pick up on in fact be elements of a formula that horror follows? Criticism of horror film as formula follows from mass-culture theory that assumes popular genre film to involve a built-in reaction; films dictated their audiences responses, and in the process, these audiences were thought to be passive, not to think for themselves, and to defer to authority. Rather than remaining as individuals with their own thoughts and feelings, mass culture taught people to conform, to become like everyone else, part of an undifferentiated mass that was organized and controlled by centres of power. (Jancovich. p20) In critiquing this position, Jancovich argues that mass-culture theory leaves little room for analysis of the horror genre; he states that horror can be viewed not simply as formulaic narratives against which directors defined their authorial personality, but rather as a resource on which the director drew - something that was therefore at least as enabling as it was constraining (p21) In looking at horror from a structuralist point of view using tools laid down by Levi-Strauss (see Structural Anthropology, Allen Lane, 1968) the genre has much more to offer than simply doomed to repeat the same narrative. By searching for the deep structure and structural oppositions within a film, it is released; as a specific speech act, whose meaning was dependent on those structuring oppositions but was also actively engaged in an attempt to find a resolution to these oppositions. As such, Jancovich argues genre does not dictate a formulaic narrative structure to its films and therefore no definitive model of the genre can exist. In the essay The American Nightmare, Robin Wood picks up on the structuralist theme of the oppositional dialectic with the contrast of the norm and the other. Wood critiques modern society claiming it to be repressive of our natural impulses and oppressive when repression fails. In order to fit into our pre-destined roles in a capitalist, patriarchal society, we are controlled in a way that resembles mass-culture theory however unlike this theory, Wood sees horror film as a break from the norm in representing the other. Otherness reflecting that which is repressed in ourselves; the concept of otherness can be theorized in many ways and on many levels. Its psychoanalytic significance resides in the fact that it functions not simply as something external to the culture or to the self, but also as what is repressed (though never destroyed) in the self and projected outward in order to be hated and disowned. (p6) the projection on to the other of what is repressed within the self in order that it can be discredited, disowned, and if possible annihilated. It is repression, in other words, that makes impossible the healthy alternative - the full recognition and acceptance of the others autonomy and right to exist. (p7) Wood identifies otherness as being other people, women, the proletariat, other cultures, ethnic groups within the culture, alternative ideologies and political systems, deviations from sexual

norms and children. He also gives examples of horror films where these specific groups are distinctly categorised as the other in linking otherness with the monster of horror film. It is this linkage that sets horror film apart from other genres in being able to access the normal/other divide; One could, I think, approach any of the genres from the same starting point; it is the horror film that responds in the most clear-cut and direct way, because central to it is the actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/the Other, in the figure of the Monster. One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression. (p11) The reference here to nightmares is significant because it represents a strand that is reflected elsewhere in understanding the importance the horror film plays. Wood points out that the analogy between films and dreams is not just one concerning the audience, sitting in darkness, immersed in a fantasy experience but also for the filmmaker; Dreams - the embodiment of repressed desires, tensions, fears that our conscious mind rejects - become possible when the censor that guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep, though even then the desires can only emerge in disguise, as fantasies that are innocent or apparently meaningless for the filmmakers as well as for the audience, full awareness stops at the level of plot, action, and character, in which the most dangerous and subversive implications can disguise themselves and escape detection Dreams are also escapes, from the unresolved tensions of our lives into fantasies. Yet the fantasies are not meaningless; they can represent attempts to resolve those tensions in more radical ways than our consciousness can countenance. (p14) In connecting dreams to films, Wood establishes the horror film as the genre of nightmare; Popular films, then, respond to interpretation as at once the personal dreams of their makers and the collective dreams of their audiences, the fusion made possible by the shared structures of common ideology. It becomes easy, if this is granted, to offer a simple definition of horror films; they are our collective nightmares. The conditions under which a dream becomes a nightmare are that the repressed wish is, from the point of view of consciousness, so terrible that it must be repudiated as loathsome, and that it is so strong and powerful as to constitute a serious threat. (p14) Bellin in analysing the monster within film replicates this approach however notes the power of the dreamlike state to which one is lured as potentially able to allow filmmakers and audience to unconsciously repeat and reproduce prejudice; I believe that the move to unmoor fantasy films from their social contexts - to dismiss (or laud) them as pure, innocent diversions - is fundamental to these films social power; any social production that can so readily be denied as a social production can perform (or in the denial has performed) injurious social work. (p5) Precisely because fantasy films can activate audience prejudices while preventing audiences from recognizing or more precisely, taking responsibility for such prejudices, they are ideal agents of social alienation: their seeming purity permits their pollution. (p13) Bellin fails to address the other side of the argument that the dream state can allow one to confront, to be an agent of change, as Wood puts it; This is why seemingly innocuous genre movies can be far more radical and fundamentally undermining than works of conscious social criticism, which must always concern themselves with the possibility of reforming aspects of a social system whose

basic rightness must not be challenged (p14) Bellin does make an interesting connection in the dynamic of the discourse between society and art which is highly relevant to this debate; the real of the dominant social imagination does not exist before film, to which it then gives birth; the dominant social imagination is itself constituted, in part, through artistic conventions and productions, including those of film. Thus, to say that fantasy films are social constructs is not solely to say that they are constructed by their social contexts. It is, at the same time, to say that they are constructive of their social contexts: that they both produce and reproduce social discourse and practice. Such an assertion moves one beyond the static and outmoded notion that art reflects cultural systems, passively, to a dynamic view of art and cultural systems reciprocally and actively shaping and determining one another if these films function as mass-cultural rituals that give image to historically determinate anxieties, wishes, and needs, they simultaneously function by stimulating, endorsing, and broadcasting the very anxieties, wishes, and needs to which they give image. (p9) By this notion then, horror film can reflect the repressed through the image of the other, the monster, and gift him a sympathy derived from the audiences own sense of repression. The reflection in the mirror then, once established, has the power to change the object from which it derives. Lowenstein picks up Woods psychoanalytic approach to address horror films and theories of traumas. He uses the allegorical moment as a device within horror movies that challenge the conventional notions of gender, class and historicism. Lowenstein argues this moment is a cohesion between the Freudian concepts of mourning and melancholia or working-through and acting-out as a means to engage traumatic history and social division. For Lowenstein; the modern horror film may well be the genre of our time that registers most brutally the legacies of historical trauma (p10). Like Wood also, Lowenstein contrasts horror film with national/art cinema and similarly concludes that the liminal quality of horror film allows it to transition counterculture into mainstream audiences and therefore is not as bound to the conventional as more high-brow cinema. The horror film in some respects through these articles appears somewhat like the Monster. The perennial Other that reflects our fears, our traumas and the broken edges of our society. It is common to attack the Monster as it threatens the normality of the world we live in and yet we constantly strive to seek it out. As our shadow, the Monster is a dark reflection of ourselves and as we change, the Monster evolves to replicate us; Despite [their] haunting permanence, the beings or natural phenomena that people of all lands and ages have termed monstra possess no fixed, secure, inherent attributes which can attract or justify such a denomination. If we were to look for one single element of constancy within the every-changing borders of monstrosity, this would almost certainly be the relativity of the monster as a humanly constructed concept, that ar powerfully interlocked with the perennial dialectic of otherness with respect to norm. And, as norms are culturally determined, monsters too become inevitably culturespecific products. (Bellin p6 quotes Ismene Lada-Richards (Foul monster or good saviour? Reflections on ritual monsters Levante 1998 p46).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Noel Carroll, Why Horror?, The Philosophy of Horror Or Paradoxes of The Heart (Routledge 1990) Andrew Tudor, Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre, Cultural Studies 11 (3) (1997) Robin Wood, The American Nightmare, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia Univ. Press 1986) Mark Jancovich, Introduction and Theorizing Horror, The Horror Film Reader (Routledge 2002) J.S. Bellin, Framing Monsters; Fantasy Film and Social Alienation (Southern Illinois Univ. Press 2005) Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation; Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia Univ. Press 2005) V. Sobchack (ed) The Persistence of History; Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (Routledge 1996) Birkenstein, Froula & Randall (ed) Reframing 9/11; Popular Culture and the War on Terror (Continuum 2010) M. Canini (ed) The Domination of Fear (Editions Rodopi B.V. 2010) Susan Sontag Regarding The Torture Of Others (New York Times Magazine, May 23 2004) <http://www.melaniecrean.com /interactivity2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/sontag_torture.pdf> John Sudworth, Zombie craze continues to infect popular culture (BBC News website October 23 2011) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15418899>