Week 6 - Horror Narrative

In horror texts, a non-human villain often causes the narrative disruption: monster, zombie, vampire, werewolf etc. This disruption is characterised by violence and the resolution, therefore, will be the cessation of violence, usually with the destruction of the fiend. The binary opposition mobilised in the narrative is human:non-human.

“The monster, and the disorder it initiates and concretises, is always that which disrupts and challenges the definitions and categories of the ‘human’ and the ’natural’. Generally speaking, it is the monster’s body, which focuses the disruption. Either disfigured, or marked by a heterogeneity of human and animal features, or marked only by a ‘non-human’ gaze, the body is always in some way signalled as ‘other’, signalled, precisely, as monstrous” (Neale, 1980, p. 21)

Horror texts are ideal for articulating what is repressed, the Other, in the human psyche. Society necessitates the repression of certain instincts, what Freud characterised as the ‘id’. In the Victorian Gothic novel, for instance, we can see an expression of sexuality which was forbidden in ‘polite society’. Modern horror often deals with particularly male fears about gender roles.

“Whenever male bodies are represented as monstrous in the horror film they assume characteristics usually associated with the female body: they experience a blood cycle, change shape, bleed, give birth, become penetrable, are castrated.” (Creed, 1993. P. 118)

We can relate this to Neale’s description about how the narrative disruption is inscribed upon the monster’s body. Related to gender, we can deduce that the male body is defined as the norm and therefore opposed by the female body; women’s bodies represent the Other and are therefore a threat to masculinity. Carol Clover has linked together a number of killers, in the genre, by their sexual inadequacy starting with Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and including the Friday the Thirteenth series and Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

“In a male-dominated culture, where power, money, law, social institution are controlled by the past, present and future patriarchs, women as the Other assumes particular significance. The dominant images of women in our culture are entirely male-created and male-controlled. Women’s autonomy and independence are denied; onto women men project their own innate, repressed femininity in order to disown it as inferior” (Wood, 1985, p. 199)

Horror films often disown femininity by destroying it; in Dressed to Kill (1980) the opening sequence shows a sexually desperate wife first masturbating and then having sex with a stranger, twice.

“On leaving his place in the evening, she is suddenly attacked and killed in the elevator. The cause-and-effect relationship between (illicit) sex and death could hardly more clearly drawn.” (Clover, 1992, p. 34)

Sexually trangressive women, which in patriarchal terms means those who are active rather than passive, are punished for their behaviour. One of the more subversive of contemporary filmmakers, David Cronenberg, has inverted this view of the female body as monstrous.