An episode of the x-files, titled “Irresistible”, presents a conflict between the show’s fundamental preoccupation with the paranormal and real, actually existing horror. The episode, which revolves around a completely human serial killer, eschewing monsters and aliens entirely, ends on a voiceover from Mulder;
“It’s been said that the fear of the unknown is an irrational response to the excesses of the imagination. But our fear of the everyday, of the lurking stranger, and the sound of foot-falls on the stairs. The fear of violent death and the primitive impulse to survive, are as frightening as any x-file, as real as the acceptance that it could happen to you”
This episode is notable in that it attempts to draw a line between the fictional horror of the show and the real horror of the world, or at least does so more explicitly than the heavy symbolism employed elsewhere. It questions whether the aliens and monsters that reside in its mythology are more of a consolation to distract from the terror that plain old human beings are capable of perpetuating, and is something the show returns to at various points [and unfortunately undermines], asking whether Mulder, the ultimate believer, is holding onto his convictions that the paranormal exists as a comfort, a way to cope with his own demons and inadequacies. There is often a tension in the x-files here, between Mulder as valiant truth-seeker and Mulder as somewhat pathetic obsessive, lost in the search for an object that he has to believe is real against all reasonable doubt.
This tension is analogous to the tension of horror itself, something that can seem baffling if it’s avoided; why would someone seek out the horrifying? Could it be for instance, that when we find something chilling, when that sense of terror seeps out of the screen and the darkest corners of our imagination are sent into overdrive, we are simultaneously seeking the comfort of a threat that is contained, to some extent known, something that has parameters? Are horror films an escape from the real horrors we can’t face, a kind of consolation of understanding? On the other hand, it could be said that horror, and its replication, is a kind of excess, an attempt itself to explain the unexplainable, and that it is this which produces horror, the gaps in understanding. It is often said, and often true after all that the most effective horror eliminates context, and resolutely refuses to explain itself. It is often what we don’t see that scares us, the connections we make from outlines and hints at some kind of beyond.
So what purpose, aesthetically, and in fact politically, can horror serve. Is it a kind of salve, a constructed nightmare world of demons and apparitions we can use to occlude the incomprehensible horror of the unknowable, or can it in fact draw our attention to the unknowable itself? Something we can ascertain from both of these is that the kind of horror we seek in cinema is something quite different from the kind of fear we experience through being in the world, and a distinction can, or must be made here. It’s not enough to simply assume that horror can serve a distinct political purpose without interrogating its relation to real terror. Rather than a kind of strict embodiment, a mimetic translation of fear into a fictional setting, it’s fair to say that horror pulls on psychological threads and appeals to real or perceived threats in the popular consciousness. There is a process of translation between a social shock, or a moral panic, and the tropes that emerge in contemporary horror, but this still tells us nothing about what it does; we have a process by which popular fears are codified, but to what ends?
The Unknowable is Known
“What is hazily imagined can be imagined in its vagueness”
Theodor Adorno
To leave it here would be to regard Horror as some kind of salve on the fears that stalk our lives; there is a clarity to demonic possession that reality never gives us. It’s here I want to turn to Adorno and ask what he might be able to offer an aesthetic of horror, how it might relate to our current predicament. The problems Adorno might have with horror are abundantly clear given any familiarity with his work. Beyond its obvious incorporation into the culture industry, its formation at the hands of mechanical reproduction, Horror codifies and draws deep from the wells of its own traditions in a way that stands in stark contrast with Adorno’s doctrine of negation. If the only way to render effective politics and ethics within art is the “violence of the new” in which tradition is not simply rebelled against but completely erased, then horror, indebted as it is to the Gothic, grand guignol, tragedy and any number of past ideas, can be entirely discounted from the modern.
A thread I want to pull on, however, is this statement from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory;
“The ideal of blackness with regard to content is one of the deepest impulses of abstraction”
Adorno’s modernism then, is one in which content is actively erased, the process of abstraction here becomes an emptying of content, and it’s only through this form of erasure that a work attempts to surpass the commodification of its production. This aesthetic negativity is something that seems to actively contradict the codification of horror, in which a number of abstract notions, feeling and ideas find their home in established symbolism and a ritualised diorama of violence and pain. And yet I want to return to what I said earlier, that horror arises not purely from this codification, but from what it doesn’t contain; rather than simply seeing nosferatu and running for the hills, its more accurate to say our skin crawls imagining everything beyond the screen, beyond the costume or the shadows engulfing the monster itself. The strange impact of practical effects in horror is often brought up in this way, that the more you can tell it’s not real, the more real it appears.
This provides us with a kind of “gap” of content inherent within horror, something that, rather than making the unknown known, attempts a sketching out of the unknowable. Mark Fisher remarks on H.P Lovecraft that by describing the indescribable, his writing traffics in the unimaginable, and this is in part the way affective horror operates, through incoherent glimpses and inferences. The haunted house theme park ride works not simply because of the gaudy jump scares, but the gaps in between, everything that lies beyond horror’s literal representations. This is why the slasher movie villain is more effective the less fleshed out they are, why Ridley Scott’s Alien works so much better than later iterations, horror cannot be generated through straightforward, unblemished presentation, but in the aporia between the known and the unknowable of real horror; rather than simply occluding real horrors, effective fictional horror prises apart the gap in comprehension and allows something else to flood in.
Safety in Fear
This does not, of course, address the clearly reactionary undercurrents that can and are found in horror. The tropes in slasher films for instance of violence arising from sex, and the tendency often to demonise the freak, provide the outsider as something to be inherently afraid of. Lovecraft’s deep and enduring racism for example unavoidably reflects a particular tendency to seek the safety of the known in the fear of the unknown, a general impulse in horror to provide more of a solace to the inward looking white man than an engagement with the gaps in understanding, or fear itself. This suggests, more than an inherent problem within horror itself, a kind of precarious edge on which it rests. Horror as reactionary salve presents elements of reality that are in fact knowable as a black box, a foreign land that can never be understood, a “heart of darkness”. This is often the case in popular representations of voodoo and horror as a kind of exoticism, whereby another culture is uncomfortably translated as a nebulous threat to unsuspecting westerners [a recognisable non-horror-film example can be found in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom].
It shouldn’t be suggested however, that this is the beating heart of horror, an inescapable truth of our taste for monsters and demons in popular culture. While its possible to unfortunately transform the knowable into the unknowable simply because it is unknown, it is also possible to find in the safe parameters of fear horror provides a kind of staging of conflicts, a production of affect that unseats and unsettles rather than wrapping us in the warm glow of assurance. What this comes down to is whether the production of horror, functionally, rather than through intent, re-asserts or deconstructs the reality it threatens. Horror is something that crawls beneath the skin of reality, the smudge at the bottom of the painting we cannot directly acknowledge a la Holbein’s ambassadors, and yet fictionally it takes form. The question is not whether we should represent this smudge in direct form but whether, in the lurid scream-topography of horror, we can find in its blemishes and cracks the horror of the everyday itself, the dark world lurking beneath the suburbs and normality we cling to for safety.
This is not something horror itself can achieve; needless to say, the production of fear in the abstract cannot be reduced to a single tendency. It cannot, and should not, be tied into some unifying interpretation by which all horror can be judged. The production of fear instead can compel us to confront our own relationship to it, rather than taking comfort in the idea that we are justified, that reality and normality needs to be protected at all costs. Horror in basic form creates an affect, a sense of abjection reigned in through popular forms, but something that still cuts through to some kind of confrontation. It exists at the dividing line of solace and discomfort, and whether its menagerie of spooks and grotesqueries serve merely as a kind of warning signal against an ill-defined outside or as a gap opening into it is the knife edge on which every evocation of terror rests.
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