I just finished Christopher Moore’s amazing book A Dirty Job and I got to thinking about the horror genre. One of the thoughts that ended up developing was how the book managed to both make me laugh and at times descend into horror territory. I won’t say that it’s a scary book. I can’t really think of any times where I was really feeling the glacial drift of ice slowly filling my veins. However, there were parts that could certainly be said to be uncomfortable. Still, the thing that got me was just how well the two seemingly opposed aspects fit together. This got me thinking about the 80’s again (though that isn’t all that hard to do.). What struck me was that many horror films in the 80’s managed to pull of being genuinely scary while being humorous. And I’m not talking about the camp-tastic Army of Darkness either. I’m talking about genuine frightfests like Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and to a lesser degree In the Mouth of Madness. These films, while certainly not comedies, brought forward material that managed to provide us with a giggle, even an uneasy one. But why mix such diametrically opposed tones into a single work? Could it be that maybe they are more alike than they seem and that they may even complement each other?
The obvious and I suppose you could say calculating reason to include humor in a horror story is to disarm your viewer or reader. Often horror is like an arms race. You bring out a scare. The next one has to be bigger, otherwise, the emotional impact will lessen and then stagnate then the reader or viewer will totally lose engagement. So the ante has to be constantly upped to keep the audience enthralled and frightened at what will come next. However, if you frighten the audience then disarm them, the next jolt will seem as powerful as the first since they won’t expect it. They will go from a low anxiety state immediately to a high anxiety state and the shift will be very jarring. This isn’t as easy as throwing in a joke or a clown in the middle of a scene though sometimes the characters can lampshade the events of the story and try to crack a wry remark. It’s risky but if done right it has the potential to give the audience a moment of levity before rubbing salt in the wounds again. So this tactic is used in conjunction with scares to keep the audience afraid. The risk of course is that the addition of humor in an otherwise straight-faced horror film can call attention to itself like a beacon and draw the audience out of the world of the story. But this is not the only reason horror and humor cooperate.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an absolutely terrifying film in my opinion. It’s a demented odyssey into realms of twisted human psychology. But it maintains a perverse sense of humor that is just as entertaining as the scares. So how and why? How do we not end up taken out of the film? The answer to that I think is that the humor and the horror grow organically from the situation. The humor is not forced into the situation but is a direct result of it. The main psychopaths are funny themselves. But they aren’t funny in the way that a genuine comic relief would be funny. Instead they are funny as a result of their absurdity. While they are undoubtedly insane and dangerous, their instability and exaggerated personalities allow for the very stuff that humor and horror are made of: exaggeration. And that is why I think that, when done well, humor and horror may actually be great partners.
“The divine is no less paradoxical than the vicious,” said Eric in The Crow and there is a lot of truth to that. Both humor and horror develop when the universe drinks too many whiskey sours and ends up flopping on its ass. Both take what is expected, what our lives have so far told us is possible and to be expected, and subverts it to the point where we can either react with mirth or terror. For example, the dead coming back to life can be played for laughs since the idea is so absurd as to be unthinkable or we can play it as horrifying since it takes something that shouldn’t happen then slaps you right in the face with it. It all depends on what aspect the creator wants to emphasize. But by recognizing that both horror and humor are both a result of roughly the same process, the creator opens up new avenues to explore the idea. How far can you push until the horrible becomes laughable or the humorous horrendous? What does that say about the subject or our reactions to it? How can it just switch emotional textures? We also have to consider that both laughter and horror can be used as defense mechanisms. Sometimes something can be so horrible that the only way to respond to it is with laughter. Like when people suddenly laugh at a funeral. The more accepted or predictable response to something frightening are the typical physiological reactions we usually associate with fright. But both are ways of reacting to uncomfortable stimuli therefore, playing with both reactions can be very powerful for the audience especially since it can potentially lead to cognitive dissonance where they are no longer sure what they should be feeling. This ties nicely into the feeling of being trapped in a dream or rather a nightmare. Without any rules or land marks, the audience is totally at the mercy of the story. This takes the horror and elevates it to the level of a subconscious assault where the audience may be uncomfortable and not even know why. And the unknown is always scarier than anything any author or director can com up with. Thus, using humor in horror is a way of snaking into the audience using a method they may not be aware of and thus have no defense against. As an audience, we no longer can say what is safe and what is dangerous. Is there any safe place at all? Can anything in this insane world of the story be trusted? The humor here only heightens our apprehensions so that the world of the story becomes one massive dangerous labyrinth.
To wrap up before I go on for too long again, humor and horror, seemingly of the good twin evil twin dichotomy may not be so at odds as they seem. Both play with what we expect and subvert our expectations. Because of this, both can be deployed in the service of creating more tension and unease in the audience. When done well, the audience is stripped of a sense of knowing what will or what ought to play out. This thus a fantastic way of keeping the audience of balance and constantly wondering where you’ll take them.
Dawn of the Dead, Zombi, The House by the Cemetery, Brain-Dead (or Dead Alive in the US), Suspiria, The Last House on the Left, The Thing, Videodrome, The Fly. These are all films that I enjoy. And they are all films that pack in the gore, violence, dismemberment, and evisceration. I do not consider myself a gorehound but there is no denying that watching a zombie get its head cut off, especially if it’s by Tom Savini, is particularly gratifying. But the main question that these films pose is where do we draw the line with violence, gore, and sex. All of these films had almost all of these elements in spades and there are many books that are just as, if not even more, brutal than some of these films. So the question is, where do we draw the line? Is there a line?
When it comes to writing a horror story, there is usually an element of physical danger. Not always. Sometimes it is a purely psychological threat of madness but most of the time we get some form of physical threat. I believe I can say with some level of certainty that feelings of fear and horror are inextricably tied to the body and our sense of bodily integrity. A good example is Roman Polanski’s Repulsion which is a psychological horror film that we could say is mostly about the main character’s mental break down. There is a bit of violence in it but the main source of horror is the protagonist’s increasingly loose grasp on reality. But if we break down the protagonist’s problem, we find that at its root, is the fear of sexuality. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the main character develops a fear of heights after his partner falls from a great height. In the fantastic Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (seriously, check this movie out) we are treated to a romp through a dreamscape where everything seems to be metaphorical which is why this could be considered a psychological horror. But there is still the issue of the titular character’s coming of age which is of course tied to the body again. So the use of violence and gore can be justified in general. Our sense of self is deeply tied to our sense of body and when it is harmed, we react strongly from instincts that are in place to keep us alive. But the films I presented at the start of this post do more than vaguely hint at bodily violation. They dive in up to the elbows! So how can those films be justified?
The films at the top of the post do gore and they do it well and almost to excess. But what they do equally well is story and character. We care about the characters or at the very least, we want to know where the story will take us next. The gore is integral to telling the story since the story is about the body and the body’s destruction. David Cronenberg’s masterful remake of The Fly has as its subject the slow, painful transformation of a scientist into a man-fly hybrid. The Last House on the Left by Wes Craven is truly brutal in the depiction of the abduction and systematic torture of two young girls by a group of sadistic lunatics and what their parents do when they discover that the group of people who’ve sought shelter in their house are responsible for the rape and murder of their daughter. While the violence and sadism of the film are shocking, one can’t say that it is too much because it is no worse than what happens in real life. To deny the film as a cheap shock-fest is to turn a blind eye to the reality that we are embedded in. The Thing and Videodrome, while science fiction and extremely gooey, once again take body and its violation as its main theme though there are additional themes layer on top. The Thing deals with paranoia and, on a deeper level, is about the fear of contagion. Keep in mind that this film was made back when AIDS was becoming a real threat and people were terrified of this new and seemingly omnipresent infection. Videodrome deals with the question of where television and reality intersect. At what point does reality actually become subservient to illusion? How better to explore this than by looking at the body? Since the body is sort of the first thing we can say that we recognize and is the beginning of and filter through which we collect information about the reality, what happens when it is warped and remolded by fiction? How can we tell what is real anymore when the body becomes contorted by illusion? In these and many other stories, the body is the subject or the body plays a central role. In that case, there must be blood. We must be reminded that we are viscera machines. Soft, squishy, and vulnerable. But the gore serves the story. It is there as a mandatory condition. To sanitize it is to remove the story’s reason for being which is to explore our physicality and everything that goes along with it. But there is another type of entertainment that isn’t interested in these questions but just wants to slap us in the face with a bucket of giblets.
Back when I was doing a philosophy course in undergraduate, during my brief stint as a philosophy major, I wrote a paper about the ethics of modern horror films, comparing the use of gore in the films with earlier and equally graphic films. In the end, I concluded that many of these modern films go beyond good taste and presented gore in a less than ethical way. If only I had considered the implications that would have for grind house and splatter punk genres. Luckily, I’ve thought more about this issue since then and have reformulated my conclusion. I’ve also lightened up a bit and got off my high horse. Now, I all I can say is that if you enjoy it fine. While great entertainment may carry a deeper message about the human condition, sometimes fun is just fun. Planet Horror and Crank and Crank 2 were both violent, gory, and filled with sex. Both hearkened back to an era of film making that emphasized stupid fun over substance. These films knew what they were and didn’t try to be anything else. Compare The Toxic Avenger with something like Transformers. The former realizes that its premise is ridiculous and runs with it like a sugar-crazed bird with a gummy worm in its beak. The latter plays it way too straight, not realizing that we went to the movie to watch giant robots beat the living motherboard out of each other. I don’t really need much more beyond that. If you at least make the robots interesting or likable, like our much beloved Toxie, we won’t mind the absurdity. Now, The Toxic Avenger had some of the most outlandish gore out there. People were beaten stupid with their own severed arm! But if you went into it with the right mindset, you’d have a damn good time. Of course, these films had gore akin to a Saturday morning cartoon. It was so excessive that you couldn’t take it seriously. But then there are films like Hostel that require a bit of a different approach.
In a film like Hostel, the gore and brutality is played straight. You are not supposed to laugh. You are supposed to be uncomfortable and sickened. We as an audience are not supposed to enjoy what we see. But as we watch the simulated torture we become voyeurs to sick and twisted behaviors that, since they are already committed to film, cannot be altered. And we can’t claim ignorance either. We know going into a film like Saw or Hostel what is on the menu. Most of the characters in those films are not going to make it. They are squishy cannon fodder. We know that they will suffer painful, protracted deaths. But we still go and we still watch. I’d argue that these films do in fact push beyond certain boundaries. I don’t know if I could successfully argue otherwise when these films are doing everything in their power to push beyond the boundaries. But is it too much? In terms of censorship, I can’t say yes since I oppose censorship. But are they too much in that they shouldn’t have been made? Again, I can’t say I’d support that either. Movies aren’t always nice. They may show things that are deeply unsettling for no other reason than to provoke a reaction. Can I blame them? When trying to provoke a reaction, sometimes the cheap tricks are the best tricks. We are of course sickened and shocked by gore and violence and for different reasons. We are shocked by gore because we are not supposed to have an intimate, face-to-face relationship with the things inside our bodies. Our organs and blood are not to be seen and when we see on screen or read in a book that the intestines have come out to say hello, we react with a deep feeling of wrongness. Violence shocks us because we are empathetic creatures. We have a tendency to feel or at least understand what others are experiencing. So to see someone get stabbed or read about it, we take some of that into ourselves and experience a bit of that pain. But there is a bit more to the story of the modern “torture porn” flick.
One of the deeply embedded facets of human nature is the propensity to violence. We can run with the humanism thing all we want but in the end, we are animals like other animals and we have gotten to this point today because we were better at killing and destroying than anything else on the planet. That is not the only reason we have been so successful. Intelligence, farming, and tight-knit groups that cooperated helped a lot. But we can’t say that weapons and a taste for blood didn’t help. But how often do you kill someone or something these days? I think the last time I killed something was zapping a fruit fly. But young men are still full of primordial fury! This is why there are so many cases of aggression coming from teenagers and men in their early 20’s. It’s that urge to clobber something resurfacing in an environment that doesn’t allow for such behavior. These films allow people to experience something brutal without getting their hands dirty. Though of course, this suggests that some people, instead of identifying with the victims, are identifying with the torturers. This is a frightening thought but not surprising. We all have the capacity to do horrible things and these films allow for those who are more inclined to that sort of behavior to experience a vicarious thrill. And so far, I haven’t heard of a case where someone kills a person then blames it on Hostel. This reminds me of A Clockwork Orange, the novel, not Stanley Kubrick’s stunning adaptation. At the end of the original text, our faithful narrator Alex grows out of his violent behavior and decides that he wants to act like an adult. So if the thought that these movies creating a horde of testosterone leaking psychopaths is weighing heavy on your mind, don’t let it. Especially because my next point puts it into a bit of context.
In these days, manhood isn’t what it used to be even though we are still relying on software or hardware that is ancient. We still feel the need in many cases to earn the distinction of manhood. There are still many cultures around the world that have initiations in which young men become adults.
But we don’t have any such rituals in this culture. But with these films, we’ve found something like battle-testing ourselves. We challenge our friends to sit through these films and not throw up or run out screaming. In these films, we’ve found a proving ground to separate the men from the boys as the saying goes. Think about the demographic these films are marketed to. Young males who will go to other young males and dare them to sit through it. “Dude, I saw the sickest movie. A guy totally pulled another guy’s pancreas out through his ear!” They will talk about it and dare each other to sit through it. Since we can’t go into battle and retrieve an enemy’s head, we now come back with a ticket stub.
So where do we draw the line? As a writer, especially a writer of horror, this becomes a crucial question. My stories so far, don’t feature a lot of blood or overt violence. But that isn’t to say they won’t and I have some stories I’m planning that deal directly with themes of bodily violation. How does one balance the need to portray gore without going to the limits of excess? Or perhaps that is a false concern? Maybe the limits are not there. Take for instance, Salo by Pierre Paolo Passolini. It pushed every boundary imaginable. It is a film that I have not been able to watch through twice due to how unpleasant it is. But it was a good film. It dealt with the wretched excess that would be the logical conclusion of the fascist regime in Italy in World War 2. Morbid and perverse, it presents the fictionalization of an era’s ghouls who hid behind the mask of authority. So maybe it isn’t the question of how much is too much but what it is being used for. Is it to provide immature laughs, allow someone to experience deeply repressed urges, or reveal something about human nature? The amount of gore and violence is thus taken out of the issue of taste and propriety and put in the area of intention. What is the effect you’re trying to create in the reader or viewer? Shocks? Scares? Gross-out reflections on the vulnerability of the human body? I think this is why there is no line, only a sliding scale that you have to place yourself.
If, like me, you love horror films, then there are two documentaries available on youtube that discuss, in length, some of the great films and how they came about. Both documentaries focus on the incredible period of the 1980’s when horror was absolutely everywhere and was routinely raking in the money. I’d consider it the second true renaissance of horror. The first being the Universal monster movie era that spanned from approximately 1920 to late 1960 but that saw its best output between 1923 and 1943, starting with the film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I’d also include the Hammer Horror films coming out of England as being part of this first horror renaissance though it came a bit later, in the mid 50’s. Nevertheless, the Hammer Horror series continued on with the themes and monsters of the previous Universal monster series while introducing new elements to their horror. We could go back to the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and place the marker of horror renaissance there, after all, they did make remarkable film during the German Expressionist period that were deeply affecting, but for now I’m relegating the selection to movements that were specific to horror. For instance, Metropolis is part of the German Expressionist movement but is not horror.
So, without further ado, I’ll introduce the two players. The first is the documentary Decade of Horror. It’s cut into three parts, 1.3, 2.3, and 3.3. It has interviews with John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London, Joe Dante, director of The Howling and Gremlins, and Stuart Gordon, director of From Beyond and Re-Animator, among others.
The second is a personal favorite of mine that first aired on IFC as part of their Halloween special programming. It is The American Nightmare: The History of Horror’s Golden Age. It includes interviews with John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, and others as they discuss their films and horror in general. This is probably one of the best explorations of horror I’ve ever seen and has academics discussing the impact horror has had on them and society and how society impacted the horror that was produced.
Enjoy these great looks into the minds of some very talented people.
Nothing like a good decapitation to start the day out right in a zombie infested post-apocalyptic world. And judging by how zombies have utterly taken over everything in culture, I’d say we’re already in the zombie apocalypse. It seems like every book, videogame, movie, and television set are overrun with the undead. Not to mention sex shops. (Slightly NSFW: Why God? Why?)
A heart warming story about zombies learning to recycle.
Who remembers the Night of the Living Dead and the absurdly fun Return of the Living Dead? Even if you haven’t seen it, you know about it. It’s part of our collective cultural consciousness. You probably also know about Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, and all the other dead films George A. Romero has been making. Then there is 28 Days Later, its sequel 28 Weeks Later, and so on. We’ve got the Resident Evil series of games and movies. These are just the most obvious examples of zombie films. Now we have books about how to defend yourself from zombies (Max Brooks’s Zombie Survival Guide) and Marvel has decided that it would be fun to see what our favorite superheroes would do if they were zombies. We’ve seen a gradual ramping up of the amount of zombie content in just about everything. You can’t throw a stick without hitting something zombie related. Even our roads are fair game.
We can’t stop here, this is zombie country.
So what is going on? Why are there just so many bloody zombies? And rotten zombies? And fast and slow zombies? And every other zombie you could conceive of? We can go the boring route and just say that everyone is just hopping on the bandwagon and booking it to profit town (which probably is partially to blame) but is there more to this? I think there is because people are buying this stuff. If they weren’t, there would be no incentive to create this kind of content. So it may be that the real question is why do we love zombies so much all of a sudden?
There have been many who theorized about why we love the undead and love media in which the undead come back to gnaw on us. Death is the final frontier. After that line has been crossed, there is no undoing what has been done. All wrongs done in life transfer into death. This is probably why there are many cultures that put a stone over the dead. Imagine a wraith returning to get a little payback on someone who’s done them wrong. There are many such myths across the world of the dead coming back such as the draugr of Viking mythology. As bad as that is, imagine a giant skeleton coming for you. This myth comes to us from Japan and is called the odokuro. Everyone is afraid that the dead will make a return world tour at some point and so we devise practices to appease them and dissuade them from coming back to visit. So, the dead come to represent all of our misdeeds and wrongs. They are our bad behavior incarnate. More generally, they are our limitations and weaknesses. Who do you think put those skeletons in the closet? You did. And with zombies, they come out to get you. The zombie can therefore be our deep-seated fear of all that we’ve done or failed to do. They are the mythical wraith come back to exact revenge on the sinful living. This shared fear helps to make zombies so popular. We don’t want the dead to come back, we are afraid of this antagonism between what is alive and what is dead. This also explains why in so much zombie fiction and film, one of the main characters gets infected and turned into a zombie and out other protagonists have to kill him or her. This is also why it is so affecting. Our other protagonists have failed to protect this person and now have to take responsibility for their failure.
But there is a literal fear of death itself. A lot of it goes back to our fear, not specifically of the body, but of all the things that can go wrong with it. This is a fear that has traveled across centuries with us. The dead remind us of our mortality and they also show what happens when the wonderful machinery of the body gets shut down. We are instinctively repulsed by decay, sickness, and death. Sit around a hospital waiting room for a while with broken bones, coughing, sneezing, and all manner of bodily fluids leaking and I don’t think you’ll be having a big dinner later. When we see what can happen to others, I think we tend to wonder if that can that happen to us. Not only that, we wonder, can I catch that from this other person? The zombie is the absolute embodiment of this fear of both contagion and death. When a zombie comes along, oozing bleeding, moaning, zombie lore dictates that the shambling mess is going to try to bite you. If your horoscope that day says that Jupiter and Neptune are at odds and have conspired to send a hoard of undead cannibals after you, you know that once the inevitable happens, you’ll join their ranks. You will be infected. Even the act of infection though is redolent of ancient fears that go back to when we weren’t on the top of the food chain. We can deal with getting shot, stabbed, blown up. Our media is filled with representations of this kind of cruelty. But being eaten is somehow even worse. It isn’t a fast process. You get shot in the right place, you’re gone in a flash. But imagine being eaten alive. Imagine the feeling of jaws clamping onto your flesh and ripping it from you bones. The thought is perversely horrible. And it goes back to when there was a threat that you could get mauled by something much more powerful and deadly than you. Now why would you want to experience this? Probably for the same reason you experience any adrenaline pumping experience: the distinct, visceral feeling of being alive. It’s almost like exercising a muscle. We still want to experience that rush because it gives us access to other parts of ourselves that we don’t normally encounter. I discuss reasons for loving horror in an earlier post though so I won’t dwell on it here. The preceding reasons go into very broad, almost universal fears that predispose us to enjoy this particular sub-genre of film and they do partially explain why we can’t get enough of them but I think there is a more specific reason for our love of this gory genre.
Better than the jogging dead
Zombies seem to resurrect when we go through some kind of turmoil. Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968, the year before the infamous summer of ’69. The hippy movement was strong and we were embroiled in a very unpopular war. Spring forward to 1985 when the classic Return of the Living Dead came out. At the same time, Reagan was president and we were in the middle of a repressive moral cultural movement. Now, flash forward to September 11, 2001. I don’t think I need to go into what happened. The year after, in 2002, we got the smash hit 28 Days Later. It was a hit. And since then, we’ve been inundated with zombies. We’ve had a remake of Dawn of the Dead by Zack Snyder. We had George A. Romero come out with Diary of the Dead and Survival of the Dead. We’ve had the hugely popular Shaun of the Dead. We’ve seen the world get in on the zombie love with Rec from Spain and The Hoard from France. I could keep writing and writing. The point is that zombies have made quite a nice living in the post-9/11 landscape and I have some theories as to why they’ve done so well.
After 9/11, an avalanche of changes hit the world. We were all terrified of the threat of terrorism that could strike everywhere and anywhere. There was no place you could feel secure. We suffered invasive increases in security and domestic spying turned the world into a sick mirroring of Orwell’s 1984. War was killing thousands and driving the country into bankruptcy. Then the housing bubble burst and people were finding themselves homeless and without a job as the economy tanked. Meanwhile, the rich continued to live in peace, secured by their massive stocks of money. For the rest of us, the world was no longer certain. And it wasn’t just us. It was everywhere. Riots shook Greece, Italy, and Britain as they floundered. There was nothing to be trusted. Establishments we thought were secured began to crack and no one came to save us. Sound familiar? It should. This is the plot of every zombie apocalypse story I’ve ever heard. It’s often the case that life imitates art imitates life, creating a feedback loop. Entertainment is also the place where we can exorcise our demons and after this decade, it was time to break out the crowbars and shotguns. Zombie fiction, film, and games allow us to deal with the traumas we’ve suffered. We can see characters trapped in a world that no longer offers any safe place. Danger comes from everywhere and when your time is up, you get to join a legion of the walking wounded. We put the pain and suffering on the screen or on the page and it helps to draw it out of us. And it also allows for the possibility of vicarious revenge on forces that are far beyond us.
The senseless war that dragged on and on, the dead economy, foreclosures and banks still standing colossal. It felt like living in the valley of the giants. Or in this case, watching the dead stalk towards you. It’s something you can’t reason with. It is driven by something you can’t understand and the only thing you can be sure of is that it means to hurt you and those dear to you. This is sort of how many of us felt as our world collapsed around us. The zombie embodies this strange, threatening Other. The zombie, like whatever forces were busy this decade, is unassailable with our present conception of how things ought to be. But with a zombie, unlike burst bubbles and wars waged on dubious premises, you can blow its damn head off. And don’t we all love that moment? You know the one. At some point, things have to get gooey for the zombie. Arms and legs get blown or chopped off. Heads get vaporized. The thrill is even more extreme in games where you get to pull the trigger. Through these representations of zombie violence, we get to take back a little feeling of control. Every crowbar to the skull makes us feel like we’ve gotten back at the things that have stolen our faith in a reasonable world.
In the end, the zombie stands tall and ugly as one of our archetypes of fear. It is iconic to the point of becoming a cliche at this point and, as some are saying, it may be time to retire their rotten hulks to the crypts. But this isn’t the last we’ve heard of them and I can expect that, even if they go away for a while, they’ll be back when we’re at our most frustrated and wounded. Remember, they always come back.