/Thresholds/

Horror, as I’ve established previously, rests on a knife edge. It attempts to address an object it cannot, evokes a beyond it cannot access, and insodoing emerges from a schism. In what way, however, is it reasonable to think an aesthetic experience unmasks some kind of knowledge? If the theatre of horror plays out an imagined confrontation with a repressed truth, what can it tell us about its own fiction?

This line of questioning implies, if anything, an interrogation of perception, of our capacity to access the object of horror itself, what I previously addressed as “real” horror. The distinction here is one that is more difficult to describe than it is to feel. We know, where horror (and, curiously, comedy) is concerned, that deeply queasy sense of when a line has been crossed, where the playing out of a fiction has become indistinguishable with actual suffering and abjection. At some point, someone who is not strictly fictional has been hurt, and this point at which horror moves from abstract threat to real suffering is a sometimes indistinct and always discomforting transition from one horror to another. Horror in a theatrical sense concerns characters and props that exist only in a suspended frame of unreality. However much we believe something about it, we only believe it because we know it isn’t real; it is in a very true sense the artifice of horror that we seek. The “other side” of this affective façade is the horror that we don’t, even cannot, talk about at the dinner table, of personal and collective experiences of trauma, suffering and dejection. The question remains then, how do we reconcile this theatrical performance of suffering with its inaccessible, inconceivable referent?

The Anticipation of Abjection

The “real” of horror as I’ve discussed it resembles with no minor coincidence the real of Lacanian psychoanalysis. To Lacan, the real is something cut off from and in tension with the symbolic order of language. When we enter the structures of language, the real becomes inaccessible, at least from a direct standpoint; it remains, as Lacan liked to say, “impossible”. The key point to note about psychoanalysis is the way it makes a distinction between reality as it is experienced and the real as such. To think we are accessing the real directly then becomes a kind of deception, and we can only do so as some form of anticipation, through the indirect referents of language and its signifiers.

Real horror refers to something which exists, like the unconscious, as a negation. Julia Kristeva refers to abjection as a kind of expulsion, linking it to the foundational lack that Lacan places at the heart of the subject.

“The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being.”

The abjection of a kind of confrontation with the truth of absence could be used to capture the horrifying, that feeling in which we encounter something that induces what seems at least like a kind of ontological revulsion; the fear of the inaccessible other then, the ultimate example being death, becomes a fear itself of our own primal failure, not just of our finitude and mortality but of the absence that structures our desires. Horror becomes something that induces a sense, not merely of fear, but of inadequacy, a complete lack of agency and even existence.

So horror, fictional or otherwise, continues to stand on a precipice, and insodoing, it invokes its own physical reaction, forever being on the verge of expulsion. This is why Kristeva places abjection under the rubric of jouissance; “One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it. Violently and painfully.” The seemingly comic example then of the haunted house seems apt here, as here we find something that is the height of knowing artifice, and yet seeks, through multiple tricks of the trade, to induce a physical jolt, induce a brief confrontation with our own fragility. It seems a million miles away from a sombre confrontation with the true horrors of the world, but this is surely the point. It’s already been remarked upon many times that horror provides a kind of safe re-enactment of fear and anxiety, but even at its most ostensibly stupid and artificial, it seeks to peel away a sense of certainty and solidity of our surroundings, even if only for a moment. The jump scare works like an electric shock, we have no real say in what our body tells us in this regard.

Horror operates by a certain physical absolution. I can’t control how scared I am of something any less than I can control a stomach ache after a bad lasagne, and neither is this the result of any kind of imparted knowledge. Our skin burns on contact with fire whether we know how it works or not. And yet while horror even at its most banal subsists on this kind of impossible confrontation with the inaccessible, it also rests on the ever-persisting anticipation of this confrontation. This is where the aesthetic experience of horror cannot cross the line into literal suffering, and any films that even provide too realistic or extreme a depiction of suffering in this regard retain a kind of stomach-churning taboo. There is something profoundly distasteful in presenting too realistic or, more aptly direct representation of abjection to an audience. While it throws us into a confrontation with what we cannot confront, it must also strike a pact with us, one in which we all agree on what is about to happen.

This pact, one that all fiction to some extent signs, and that is apparent in the outlines of its forms and structures, is one that horror must also attack. Horror strains towards the real even as it rejects it, pushing and pulling to see what it can get away with. This kind of constant trickery, the setup of anticipation and subversion, can be seen at its most direct in Thomas Ligotti’s fiction, which always revolves around a somewhat familiar “reveal” in which the emptiness of whatever lies behind everyone and everything in the story is laid bare. The most interesting example is possibly Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story. While the title gives us some idea of what to expect, the perspective shift from a discussion of horror genre conventions to the narrator emerging from the text directly, almost as if a shop mannequin were to suddenly turn towards us; this plays fast and loose with a sense of reality within and without the text. The horror of that story is one which eats away at a foundation, lays bear a kind of absence behind the formula initially set out, a mere front for.. something else. The aesthetic experience of horror, and its relationship to the real then, is not as comfortable as a straightforward playground of neuroses in which we can frolic to our heart’s content; if it is to function there must be a moment of doubt. For a brief second, you have to believe it.

The Overflowing of the Real

The real is akin to a repressed trauma in the Lacanian subject, it operates according to the logic of trauma in that it is too much in its absence, it cannot be directly accessed and has to be approached in veiled form, for Lacan often the signifier of the phallus. Horror plays a dangerous game with this trauma, trying to invoke the underlying, unterlagen of fear and anxiety but thereby risking a kind of pornographic spectacle if it strays too far into literality. Real horror, as the real in psychoanalysis, must be veiled in the manner of a masked play, evoking and pointing towards something while never simply describing it.

There are plenty of examples of aesthetic horror misjudging this tension and plunging into a profoundly discomforting sensationalism. The trauma of horror is masked for the performance necessarily, because we seek not to be legitimately traumatised, but a certain kind of thrill. The encounter with the real in this instance must remain at a level of abstraction, indirectness that never evokes the strictly mechanical. Jason Okundaye recently wrote about the phenomena of what has been questionably dubbed “racial horror”, horror that draws in its conjuring of aesthetic experience on imagery of the suffering of black people, and arises perhaps from a misunderstanding of the power of Jordan Peele’s Get Out as a horror film that addresses the specific horrors of racism. Writing on the recent amazon series Them, he observes;

“Where [Jordan] Peele’s work does grapple with racism, in Get Out, it is done so intelligently: attempting to reveal incisive but less visible truths about middle-class liberal racism, that racists can be “Good people. Nice people. Your parents, probably”, as Lanre Bakare wrote on its release. Them, however, forfeits the opportunity to make any sophisticated or penetrating appraisal of racism in the US beyond affirming its existence. Instead it is an exercise in gratuitous racial violence, both in the infliction of racial terror against the Emory family, and on the Black audience who are left without respite from visceral and degrading scenes.”

What this suggests is that Them, in ramping up the levels of shocking imagery, torture and degradation, has misjudged the delicate knife edge of horror, instead aiming at a kind of direct traumatization of its audience. This is the lie of what we can call “trauma porn”, that it presents some kind of direct unveiling as opposed to producing the sense of trauma in the guise of the practical joke. Horror can never lift the curtain on trauma any more than pornography can lift the curtain on sex, both are predicated on the production of affect, a phantasmagoria of desires rather than the grand realisation of truths. This is why I’ve made reference to the haunted house, often dismissed as the most superficial and baseline level of “horror entertainment” but one which, in existing on the same plane as the practical joke, captures a kind of primal desire in horror, that of the feeling, of being made to feel something that we can’t directly control. We laugh, cry and cower in fear despite our best efforts, and the shock of a clearly artificial diorama evokes whatever truth is to be found in horror. Once again, we find horror at the intersection of the said and the not said, in evocation and inference, the theatre of the real.

Violent Abandon

This brings us back to the Jouissance of abjection referred to by Kristeva. This kind of basic production of affect in horror is what we anticipate about it, but it is something we do not consciously invoke when it happens, but something we, as she puts it “joy” in. It is the physical impact of the rollercoaster, the breathlessness of laughing. Even the creeping sensation of threat evoked in a ghost story works only because it evokes in us a kind of real paranoia. A component of horror, one that its tempting to say is a universal predicate of it as cultural phenomenon, is the rejection of agency. In survival horror games, the player control and agency usually taken as an inherent aim of video game design is counterintuitively whittled away; Silent Hill 2‘s horror works precisely because you, the character, move in an often painfully slow fashion, that an intuited threat, when encountered, must be avoided with a kind of awkward lumbering gait. At every turn agency is constricted, you can’t see properly, you fight with the panache of someone desperately flailing at shadows, even the logic of events and encounters are disjointed and refuse to conform to our wishes.

In Silent Hill, the unconscious of the protagonist haunts, constricts and mutilates them, and you witness all other characters in some way become enslaved to something about themselves they cannot directly control. The manifestations that we find in the underworld, of the desire for punishment, or the inability to escape trauma, are uniformly mangled, twisted, vaguely formed terrors. The power of Silent Hill’s horror lies in the protagonist’s, and hence the players inability to quite understand what they’re looking at, what it implies, where it comes from. Just like James Sunderland, we, the player, are encountering things that evoke something, but we’re not quite sure what. The aspect of player control here is essential, in order then to take it away; the faceless things we encounter seem always restricted, tied up, caged in some way, as the player is hampered and straightjacketed in tight spaces and heavy fog.

Silent Hill gestures in many respects towards psychoanalysis; the characters are periodically thrust into a kind of mirror world in which indistinct, strange forms loom out at them, outlines of familiar things, sex, constriction, violence and smothering but never clear enough for the protagonist to make sense of them. All that is familiar becomes defamiliarized and fragments of something are twisted into something else. If we find in horror an encounter with the real in any respect, it is precisely in this dreamwork, the patching together of bits and pieces, indistinct at the moment of apprehension but disturbingly familiar. Horror, like pornography and comedy, must render itself a fantasy precisely in order to reference its real.

The Reality Principle

…we cannot conceive of the reality principle, by virtue of its ascendency, as having the last word.”

Lacan, Tuche and Automaton, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis

For Freud, the pleasure principle, that part of our psyche which seeks gratification, is underpinned by unconscious drives, Eros exists in tension with Thanatos, desire with self-destructive compulsions, and so the analyst must go “beyond the pleasure principle”, beyond eros, to talk about desire. The focus by Freud in developing a theory of drives was precisely compulsive repetition. While the idea of a death drive might raise an eyebrow or two if we assume it’s meant in no more than literal terms, for Freud it seems to be an extension of the psychoanalyst’s encounter with impulse, the idea that we are often captured by an aspect of our psychology that we cannot be directly aware of, driven towards particular behaviours and tics. The question that Freud attempts to answer in Beyond the Pleasure Principle isn’t so different from one Deleuze & Guattari would eventually ask in different terms; why do we seek our own destruction, why do we so often find ourselves repeatedly engaging in self-terminating behaviour?

Many have taken this notoriously tricky and ambiguous aspect of Freud and run with it, notably for instance Marcuse in Eros and Civilization who weds Freud’s framing of a kind of constant interplay of Eros and Thanatos with a more Marxist tack, importantly bringing into focus another aspect, central to Freud’s Civilization and it’s Discontents, of the Reality Principle. The Reality Principle can be simplified in a sense to the deferral of gratification. It exists in tension with the irrationality of desire, a triumph of reason over the animus of our impulses. The reality principle resists pleasure and gratification, and Freud links this notably with the advancement of civilization, suggesting that civilization emerges through the imposition of the reality principle on the barbarism of untrammelled drives and desires. This is the source of “discontents”, an unending tension and conflict between the delaying and satisfying of gratification, in which the drives of Eros and Thanatos must be beaten back and reigned in.

Lacan takes these ideas, juggles them and turns them upside down. For Lacan, the reality principle, as an ordering structure that can delay gratification, requires at every turn the support of fantasy. Whereas in its early formulation, its easy to read into the Reality principle a kind of transition from the phantasies of children into the measured “common sense” of adulthood in which we “learn to control our emotions”, Lacan, and this is where he proves useful to any analysis of ideology, suggests that the reality principle should never be trusted. The “principle” element of the equation comes into focus here, for it has always suggested in psychoanalysis that it is not a reality as such, that rather than a direct perception of the order of the real, the rationality of the reality principle is something we construct in some way or another. Indeed as suggested with Lacan we can go one step further than the unreality of reality, to say that reality requires fantasy to maintain itself, that every delayed gratification and ordering structure relies on the fantasy of the imaginary. Indeed, he suggests in Tuche and Automaton that;

“the reality system, however far it is developed, leaves an essential part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle.”

What is meant by this is not, as Lacan makes clear immediately afterwards, that “life is but a dream”, that we are condemned to a life entirely disconnected from reality perception. Rather, it is that however far we attempt to structure the drives according to a principle of reality, the real itself will always remain on some level subservient to the pleasure principle, the inscrutable joy of desire. Rather than discarding reality as such, Lacan suggests, as hinted above, that it is itself a veiling, something split apart from the domain of its referent. We can refer to it, and it can in some respect be approached through the domain of signifiers, but only in the sense that we can make out the form of a statue beneath the cloth draped across it. Like the unconscious itself, the real is made true by its absence, it is a structuring lack.

Horror is Fantasy

What this suggests about the fiction of horror, or what it can say about its own fiction, is that it relies on fantasy to work as an experience. Without the structuring fantasy, horror becomes a lie to itself, and the pretence of confronting us with the true horrors of the world becomes the unsettling spectacle of suffering being revelled in.

A core recent example that comes to mind is the video game sequel The Last of Us 2, a cultural artefact that arrived amid a great deal of “authority” in which its creators spoke at length about the importance of its exploration of violence, and the extent to which it isn’t supposed to be “enjoyable”. Yet the Last of Us 2 effectively picks up where other games left off, providing you with an arsenal of techniques and weapons so dispatch antagonists who remain fundamentally unimportant collections of code in an accessible and, yes enjoyable manner. The meticulously rendered and animated hyper-violence of the game works against its attempt to “say something” in the strongest terms, and rather than the grand unveiling of the machinic underbelly of video game violence, we find an experience in which we are confronted with multiple bloody frames of constructed suffering intercut with rather typical gameplay loops of stealth and assassination. The question hangs around the experience; What does this “say” about violence? Similarly to the discussion of trauma porn, what benefit does an attempt to create meticulously “realistic” and extended sequences of torture and suffering have beyond simply confirming to us that it happens, it exists, something many of us might say we are already all too aware of.

The Last of Us 2 is not what it claims to be, a revolutionary exploration of the horror of real violence in contrast with the cartoon violence of video games. Rather, it is a fantasy of this, a fantasy in which we can act out the perpetration of its in-game violence and revel in its discomfort, perhaps even patting ourselves on the back for having received the message while having noted how smooth and well constructed the gameplay was. The attempt to escape fantasy then ends in fantasy, because while it can draw lines and connections to its real, horror is a fantasy. Aesthetic experience finds its own truth in what it says about its lie. Adorno’s statement in Minima Moralia comes to mind that “In psychoanalysis nothing is true but the exaggerations.” Horror’s relationship to its real lies precisely in the construction of its fantasy, the indistinct forms and outlines, the grotesque and dreamlike stitching together of monsters within monsters. Horror, in this sense, is found less in the breaking through of some underlying truth, but the imperfect mimicry of the mannequin. Horror skirts boundaries, plays with them, but to work it must always anticipate rather than punctuate. Horror acts its own demise, unclearly, it only reveals the strings controlling the puppets as long as we act out the refusal to see them, and thereby provokes not real trauma but a kind of thrill.

We could counterintuitively suggest that in horror we seek not despair, but joy, an affirmation of something for and in us. Horror persists not in the directness of suffering and violence, but the sense that we are being controlled in a place of relative safety. It is the intoxicating feeling of possession.