Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  A few highly successful horror novels—and their artistically accomplished and profitable film adaptations—kicked off a horror boom that lasted into the 1980s, most notably Ira Levin’s 1967 novel Rosemary’s Baby, adapted by Roman Polanski in 1968, and William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel The Exorcist, adapted by William Friedkin in 1973. The popularity of these works and a few others, coupled with the eruption of Stephen King onto the American horror scene in 1974, paved the way for a massive output of films and novels (D’Ammassa 2006, Hantke 2016). Horror, as Joshi observes, “suddenly became a blockbuster genre” (2007, xix). In horror film history, the 1970s are best known for the emergence of the so-called “new horror film” (Hutchings 2004, Platts 2014a), a particularly bleak and politically involved subgenre inaugurated by Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and epitomized by such shocking pictures as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1974) and Last House on the Left (Craven 1972), which depict hapless, flawed protagonists at the homicidal mercy of depraved killers. In the midst of cinematic despair and borderline nihilism, however, the author Anne Rice introduced a romantic spin on a horror archetype with stories of godlike vampires struggling to embrace their predatory nature, most famously in the 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire. Rice’s novel anticipated the paranormal romances so popular in the 1990s and 2000s—romantic stories featuring (usually) female protagonists falling in love with well-behaved but titillatingly dangerous monsters, typically vampires. L. J. Smith’s Night World series (1996–1998) and Vampire Diaries series (1991–2011), as well as Stephenie Meyer’s startlingly derivative mega-bestseller Twilight series (2005–2008), feature female protagonists facing tough choices in the mating domain—prototypically, having to choose between attractive vampire and/or werewolf males (Clasen 2012a). The horror element is muted in paranormal romance, used chiefly as a source of Byronic frisson in the depiction of alluring, fanged, and/or furry gentlemen.

  The late-1970s also saw the rise of the slasher film (Nowell 2011a). John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), made on a tiny budget and depicting young people stalked and murdered by a masked maniac in a quiet, suburban neighborhood, became a massive hit and was followed by a wave of derivative films such as Friday the 13th (Cunningham 1980) (and its ten or so sequels) that also featured a masked killer and youthful victims (Rockoff 2002). These films found a large audience, particularly among teenagers (Nowell 2011a), but the cycle wound down a few years into the 1980s as the market became saturated and audiences habituated to this particular formula. Meanwhile, literary horror was experiencing a golden age of its own (Hantke 2016). American publishing firms churned out horror paperbacks with gleaming black covers and often lurid content. Established horror writers such as Stephen King and Peter Straub were joined by talented newcomers like Robert R. McCammon, Dean Koontz, and F. Paul Wilson, as well as by ephemeral hacks. The release of now-classic horror anthologies such as Dark Forces (McCauley 1980) and Prime Evil (Winter 1988) indicated that literary horror had reached critical mass and warranted high-profile, high-quality showcase publications. The horror film fan magazine Fangoria hit the streets in 1979; nine years later, the literary horror magazine Cemetery Dance was established. Both publications emerged in the midst of the American horror boom, and both are still running. As another indication of the financial viability and cultural salience of literary horror in America, a group of horror writers decided in 1985 to found the Horror Writers Association, an organization established to promote the interests of horror writers (Wiater 1996). The association continues to this day to award the prestigious Bram Stoker Awards for superior achievement in horror. In the early 1990s, however, the market for horror became saturated and book publications as well as film releases wound down (D’Ammassa 2006, Winter 1998).

  The horror genre waxes and wanes in popularity, but because it is uniquely suited for satisfying evolved desires, it is never on the wane for long. Many of the best American horror writers continued to produce quality work through the 1990s. Several new writers, including an increasing number of female horror writers (Jancovich 1994, 37–42), managed to break into a literary market now somewhat biased against the genre. Moreover, the 1990s gave rise to a new breed of self-conscious, playful slasher film, most notably with the release of Scream (Craven) in 1996 (Wee 2005). This cycle of postmodern slasher films is ongoing, with such films as Cabin in the Woods (Goddard 2012) and It Follows (Mitchell 2014) finding new ways of playing with genre conventions while horrifying audiences. The postmodern slasher film assumes familiarity with genre conventions on the part of the audience and pokes fun at those conventions while retaining the slasher film’s focus on frightening scenarios of conspecific predation. The Final Girls (Strauss-Schulson 2015), for example, depicts a group of youths who are sucked into an eighties-style slasher film called Camp Bloodbath (see Figure 5.2). In this film-within-the-film, a group of fun-loving summer camp counselors are preyed on by a shady, masked, machete-wielding maniac. Fortunately for the 21st-century-kids, they are able to use their knowledge of slasher film conventions to survive, more or less—don’t have sex, stick with the Final Girl, and so on. Meanwhile, filmmakers kept looking for new ways of terrifying media-savvy, seen-it-all audiences. One such way was the found-footage horror film, a type of film that purported to be documentary and was filmed using hand-held cameras and with minimal use of nondiegetic music. The Blair Witch Project(Sánchez and Myrick 1999) brought the subgenre to prominence, and subsequent films such as Paranormal Activity (Peli 2009) refined the formula, cleverly turning budgetary constraints into a forte by capitalizing on a home-video authenticity aesthetic. Horror films had claimed to be “based on real events” for decades—Psycho and The Texas Chain saw Massacre were both allegedly inspired by the crimes of mass murderer Ed Gein—but now a new wave of horror films looked like something a neighbor’s kid might have shot on a cheap camcorder. The authentic-looking, unstylized horror scenarios depicted in these films were effective because they mimicked the visual aesthetic of amateur filmmaking and the style of emergency news reporting familiar to—and trusted as mimetic by—contemporary audiences (Heller-Nicholas 2014).

  Figure 5.2: Horror evolves to keep audiences interested. When the market for slasher films had become saturated, a new breed of genre-savvy, ironic slashers revived the subgenre. In The Final Girls (Strauss-Schulson 2015), a group of 21st-century kids are sucked into an eighties-style slasher film—depicted is slasher expert Duncan’s attempt to grab a selfie with the slasher villain in the background. Postmodern slashers give a new spin on old formulas, thus ensuring audience engagement.

  The 2000s also saw the controversial eruption of so-called “torture porn” horror films into the mainstream (Jones 2013). Nonsupernatural horror films depicting gore and dismemberment in nauseating detail and vividness were nothing new; exploitation films and splatter films had been around for decades (Arnzen 1994). But well-produced torture porn flicks such as Eli Roth’s 2005 film Hostel, which depicts a trio of hedonistic American backpackers kidnapped in Eastern Europe and sold to wealthy patrons as recreational prey, shocked some critics and audiences with its unflinching depiction of bodily assault and extreme physical suffering. Nonetheless, the film achieved mainstream distribution. To horror fans who felt they’d seen it all, torture porn delivered new levels of visual spectacle and visceral revulsion. Another major horror trend of the 2000s was zombies. Zombies hit cinema blockbuster payload, made it big on the small screen, and even enjoyed some literary success with bestseller novels such as Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006). Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s series of graphic novels The Walking Dead (2003–) was made into the hugely popular television series The Walking Dead (Darabont 2010–)—the “most watched show in cable television history” (Platts 2014b, 294)—and even inspired an eponymous video game (Vanaman et al. 2012) which allowed the players to become protagonists in a zombie-infected universe. This postapocalyptic zombiecentric franchise became a massively lucrative transmedia phenomenon, showcasin
g the continued power of the zombie—an utterly unrealistic horror monster—to engage psychological defense mechanisms that evolved to protect us from predation and contagion (Clasen 2012d).

  Horror video games have become increasingly popular and are encroaching on film as the dominant medium for the genre, presumably because games foster immersion more effectively than traditional noninteractive narrative media. Horror video games give players actual agency in worlds teeming with danger, which makes the medium particularly well-suited for providing horror-happy gamers with high-intensity emotional stimulation (Perron 2009). Horror finds its purest digital expression in the subgenre known as survival horror, a type of game that pits a highly vulnerable, unarmed player against dangerous computer-controlled agents in usually labyrinthine virtual worlds. The term was introduced with the Japanese horror game Resident Evil in 1996 (Mikami), but the form predates the term, going back at least to the 1982 game Haunted House (Andreasen) for the Atari 2600 console (Fahs 2009). In this game, the player has to navigate the dark interior of a haunted house in pursuit of an urn and avoid contact with a spider, a bat, and a ghost—not unlike later games like Slender: The Eight Pages (Hadley 2012), which puts the player in a dark wood, equipped with a flashlight, in pursuit of eight pieces of paper, and pursued by a malicious agent which gets closer each time the player finds a piece of paper. These horror games target the evolved fear of predation and the evolved fear of isolation by transporting the player into a hostile and deserted world—deserted but for the monsters (Clasen and Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2016). Other horror games, such as the 2015 bestseller Until Dawn, have richer narratives and much more advanced gameplay, and still others such as Left 4 Dead (Booth 2008) combine the thrill of fear with the thrill of shooting up bad guys with automatic weapons (see Figure 5.3), but they revolve around the same primal situation: Situating the player as haunted prey in a threatening and unknown game world. As consoles and personal computers have increased in processing power, and game designers have honed their craft, horror video games have become evermore immersive and effective, accomplished in terms of graphic realism, narrative complexity, and immersive gameplay. Virtual reality headsets for home use—head-mounted displays streaming visual and auditory feeds and responding to head movement with an instantaneous adjustment of in-game perspective—are now readily available and provide an extremely effective illusion of player presence in a virtual world of horror. Such technology allows players to feel that they’re actively living the horror, rather than being passive—if emotionally invested—observers. Similarly, the increasingly popular haunted attractions, or haunts, revisited in the last part of this book, offer consumers the experience of becoming the protagonist in a horror story unfolding in real time and space, often targeting multiple senses with disturbing sights, sounds, odors, and even bodily contact with actors impersonating zombies or chainsaw killers. The thirst for horror runs deep in human nature, and the diffusion of horror across media platforms and into various cultural domains makes it easier than ever before for people to slake that peculiar thirst.

  Figure 5.3: Shooting up zombies in the action horror video game Left 4 Dead (Booth 2008). Horror video games allow players to interact with the virtual world, producing high levels of immersion and emotional engagement. Survival horror games usually pit the defenseless player against terrible monsters in dark and unknown surroundings, whereas action horror games allow players to fight back.

  As this brief and selective overview of the history of American horror suggests, horror changes over time—in response to cultural change, technological change, changes in production conditions (for example in censorship practice and industry structure), and as the result of a novelty-habituation dialectic rooted in human psychology (Grodal 2009). New subgenres and conventions emerge in response to audience habituation: When a dominant kind of horror loses its ability to disturb audiences, creative and commercial artists will attempt to come up with fresh ways of meeting the genre’s affective aim. Horror changes, then, but not arbitrarily and endlessly. As I argued in previous chapters, the genre varies within a possibility space constrained by human biology. Consider the Japanese horror films that became popular with American audiences in the late 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with Ringu (Nakata) from 1998 (Balmain 2008). The stories told by these films are easily decipherable for Western audiences because the films follow the formal conventions of classical Hollywood cinema: They are edited for continuity and follow Hollywood conventions of cinematography, sound, and mise-en-scène. Moreover, they feature horror elements familiar to Western audiences such as evil ghosts and curses. All the same, the films had a peculiar exotic and unsettling quality to most American audiences. The mythologies were unfamiliar, the language undecipherable to most, and the pacing slightly different from homegrown films—these films were easy to decode but hard to predict, all the more effectively terrifying American viewers. Thus, the films sit within the possibility space of effective horror, but slightly adjacent to traditional Hollywood horror films. All effective horror, in whatever medium and from whatever culture, works by targeting universal psychological mechanisms. In the following chapters, I look more closely at a selection of well-known horror works and offer interpretative critiques that consider the ways in which those works managed to resonate with a large number of people.

  CHAPTER 6

  Vampire Apocalypse

  I Am Legend (1954)

  Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (henceforth IAL), first published in 1954, is set in Los Angeles in the near future (1975–1979) and depicts Robert Neville’s struggles to survive and make sense of a total outbreak of vampirism (Matheson 2006). Except for Neville, everybody seems to have been infected with a strange germ that eventually turns them into predatory vampires. Neville, who lost his daughter and wife to the germ but who is himself immune to it, fills his days with fortifying his house against the nocturnal vampire attacks, getting drunk, and killing comatose infected individuals as well as undead vampires. After several years on his own, Neville comes across a fellow survivor, Ruth. She turns out to be infected with the vampire germ and is a spy sent out by a small society of individuals who are keeping the infection subdued with a drug. Ruth’s people are terrified of Neville, who has killed countless of their peers, and eventually capture Neville and sentence him to death for his crimes against the new humanity. Ruth takes pity on Neville and smuggles him suicide pills so he won’t have to face public execution. The novel ends with Neville’s death upon his realization that in the new society, he is the antagonist, the terrifying legend.

  Richard Matheson, born in 1926, produced a staggering amount of fiction—novels, short stories, and screenplays—up until his death in 2013. Although Matheson wrote all kinds of speculative fiction, he is famous mainly for his horror fiction and he inspired generations of horror writers. The horror critic Douglas E. Winter said that Matheson was “perhaps the most influential writer of horror fiction of his generation” (1990, 37), and that’s a writing generation that includes such luminaries as Psycho-author Robert Bloch, horror/fantasy/science fiction-writer Ray Bradbury, and Twilight Zone-creator Rod Serling. Matheson is widely admired for his ability to create psychologically complex and realistic characters; for blowing the Gothic dust off horror and setting his stories in recognizable, contemporary small-town USA (Jancovich 1996, Murphy 2009); and for his minimalist style—Matheson has been called “the Hemingway of horror” (Publishers Weekly 2002). Of all Matheson’s famous stories, IAL remains his best known work. In 2012, the Horror Writers Association gave the special Bram Stoker Vampire Novel of the Century Award to IAL. The novel has been adapted for the big screen three times: As The Last Man on Earth in 1964 (Ragona and Salkow), as The Omega Man in 1971 (Sagal), and as I Am Legend in 2007 (Lawrence). It has directly and indirectly inspired countless other media products, including George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), which appropriated Matheson’s idea of a monster apocalypse. As of 2011, the novel had been pu
blished in at least sixty-four editions and fourteen international translations (Browning 2011), including translations into Chinese, Russian, and Korean.

  The novel’s continued and cross-cultural success suggests that it taps powerfully into human motives and anxieties that transcend the time and place of its production (Clasen 2010b). IAL may be, as Bernice Murphy asserts, “very much a novel of its time” (2009, 29), but the story’s lasting power to engage readers comes from the way Matheson taps into basic human anxieties in his depiction of a man’s struggles not only to survive and to find fellow survivors after the apocalypse, but to find meaning in an antagonistic world. The need for meaning and purpose is a human universal, a byproduct of the evolution of high intelligence which gives us self-awareness and reveals to us the world in all its complexity (Wilson 1998). Why are we here? What is the meaning of events, the world, of existence? Historically, religions and ideologies have given people meaning and purpose, but to many people in the modern world, disenchanted of divine purpose and totalizing ideologies, the lack and hence need of meaning becomes acute. Matheson took an old horror archetype, the vampire, and rationalized it for a modern audience, using the figure not just for thrills and kicks, but to say something true and important about the human condition. The vampire apocalypse robs Neville of those structures that give his life meaning—family, friends, a job—and the novel gets its peculiar power from its evocative depiction of Neville’s descent into despair; his conditional acceptance of a semihuman, mechanical existence; and eventually the peace with which he meets his death as he realizes that there can be no belonging for him, no place in the new vampire society, only as a posthumous legend.

  Literary critics have largely ignored the way that IAL resonates with evolved dispositions, reading it instead as a parable of racial prejudice (Murphy 2009, Patterson 2005), repressed homosexuality (Khader 2013), misogyny (Murphy 2009), masculinity in crisis (Jancovich 1996), and the Passion of Christ (Ng 2015). Many critics have registered the novel’s 1950s ambience and pointed to its engagement with themes that seem specific to mid-century America. Mark Jancovich identifies conformity, and a profound ambivalence toward conformity, as a chief concern in 1950s American horror fiction (1996). Neville certainly is an outsider, literally the last man alive, and eventually completely excluded even from the new vampire society. The themes of conformity and alienation may have had peculiar resonance in the 1950s, but their roots go straight into human nature and the human need to be part of meaningful social networks. Bernice Murphy argues that Matheson’s story embodies specifically suburban Cold War anxieties (2009, 29). Neville’s house—his shelter, fortified against attack from the forces of evil—is a suggestive parallel to the suburban bomb shelters constructed in the fifties in anticipation of Soviet nuclear aggression. Likewise, Andrew Hock Soon Ng says that the “novel’s chief concern is the looming fear of nuclear conflict and its aftermath” (2015, 92). It is an overstatement, but the novel does tap into a fear of apocalyptic doom that was particularly salient in the Cold War. The vampire outbreak is apocalyptic in scale, and the novel vaguely links the outbreak of vampirism to bombings and radiation (Matheson 2006, 45).