Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  These critics fail to acknowledge that the figure of the vampire gains its power—its resonance—primarily as an unnatural predator, and only secondarily as a metaphor. Patterson (2005) and Murphy (2009), for example, claim that IAL is a story of racial antagonism, that the vampires signify African Americans. Khader thinks the story is about Neville’s repressed homosexuality, and that the vampires signify queers (2013). Khader is compelled to wheel out the Freudian deus ex machina of symbolic displacement to build his case: Blood is not blood, it’s semen; a house is not a house, it’s a closet, and so on. The strategy is epistemologically suspect and undermines Khader’s argument. Patterson and Murphy base their interpretations largely on the connotative potentials of the adjective “black.” But then, blackness or darkness need not ipso facto be invested with racial significance; they have been symbolically associated with evil probably since our hominin ancestors’ lack of night vision and increased vulnerability at night coincided with the emergence of symbolic thought. Matheson has Neville use the word “black” to describe the vampires to suggest his perception of them as evil, but he also describes them as “white-faced” (10). The peculiar urge to reduce vampires to subtext and metaphor that have such narrowly topical social referents makes us overlook the vampire’s literal, visceral presence as a dangerous, predatory, counterintuitive, and contagious agent. It is a monster well-engineered to capture and hold our attention, given our evolutionary history as a prey species susceptible to lethal infection (Clasen 2012a). Matheson’s vampires are themselves victims of disease, but they are still dangerously strong and predatory. In one scene early in the novel, Neville is attacked by a vampire outside his house. Neville “felt the cold, powerful hands clamp on his throat and smelled the fetid breath clouding over his face. The . . . white-fanged mouth went darting down at Robert Neville’s throat” (34). The raw power of this scene comes from the vivid description of a predatory attack on our protagonist—it’s a dangerous monster attacking Neville, not a metaphor.

  The vampires are crucial to IAL. Matheson tapped into a rich literary and cinematic heritage when he adapted the vampire as the primary vehicle of horror in IAL, but his rationalized vampires are conceptually different from the kind of supernatural fictional vampires that were popular when Matheson was writing. Undead bloodsuckers, of course, had figured prominently in folklore and folk superstition for millennia when they made their transition from folk belief to popular fiction at the end of the eighteenth century (Barber 2010). The most famous vampire novel of all time, Dracula (Stoker 1997 [1897]), brought together vampire folklore and ideas from earlier vampire literature and added a healthy dose of imagination in its influential depiction of Count Dracula and his progeny (Clasen 2012a). In contrast to Stoker’s supernatural creature of evil, Matheson’s vampires are the result of a communicable disease. The root of the vampire epidemic is a “bacillus” which is “a facultative saprophyte . . . Inside the [victim’s body] it is anaerobic and sets up a symbiosis with the system. The vampire feeds it fresh blood, the bacteria provides the energy so the vampire can get more fresh blood.” This is how Matheson has Neville explain the efficacy of staking the vampire: “When air enters [the body] the situation changes instantaneously. The germ becomes aerobic and, instead of being symbiotic, it becomes virulently parasitic . . . It eats the host” (2006, 134). This is a far cry from Stoker’s demonic monster. Matheson’s reinterpretation of the vampire as a natural threat, a nonsupernatural monster, serves two distinct purposes. First, it reflects the cumulative success of natural science as a global explanatory paradigm and a large-scale “shift in emphasis” in 1950s American horror away from Gothic conventions to a “preoccupation with the modern world,” including a rationalization of monsters (Jancovich 1996, 2). Second, the rationalization of the vampire subserves Matheson’s thematic focus on the search for meaning in a secular world. Neville is an atheist, desperately looking for a reason to carry on when all meaning seems lost; had Matheson’s vampires been supernatural, they would have subverted the secular cosmos of the novel.

  IAL is structured to foster reader empathy with Neville. The scholar Louise Nuttall has trawled through online reader reviews of the novel and finds that readers consistently report experiencing a good deal of empathy with Neville (2015). The novel is told using a third-person perspective; it is focalized with Neville through whose eyes we see story events. We peer into his mind, we register his emotions and reactions, we follow his reasoning and see things the way he sees them. We never know more than he does; in fact, we know a good deal less. Indeed, crucial story information is strategically withheld by Matheson as a means of building and sustaining suspense. We only gradually learn about Neville’s backstory, about his life before the vampire apocalypse, about the first days of the outbreak, and about the traumatic loss of his family. To further sustain reader empathy, Matheson provides vivid and detailed descriptions of Neville’s emotional and physiological states. In the following exemplary passage, Neville has been out to visit his wife’s grave. As it happens, his watch has stopped, he has lost track of time, he is away from the safety of his house, and vampires are chasing him. One undead has lacerated his cheek and he is trying to escape in his car. “Robert Neville’s heart was pounding so heavily now it seemed as if it would drive through his chest walls. Breath shuddered in him and his flesh felt numb and cold. He could feel the trickle of blood on his cheek, but no pain. Hastily he wiped it off with one shaking hand” (33–34). Matheson makes it easy for the reader to mirror Neville’s state.

  Robert Neville’s situation is almost unbearable. He’s the last man on earth, utterly alone and under constant assault from the vampires—caught simultaneously in the desert of isolation and the jungle of predation (Clasen 2010b). In the beginning of the story, especially, Matheson lingers on Neville’s feeling of deep, devastating loneliness. When Neville visits his wife’s grave, he wishes he could believe in an afterlife, die, and join her. But he doesn’t believe, and she is dead while he is alive, “heart beating senselessly, veins running without point, bones and muscles and tissue all alive and functioning with no purpose at all” (26). Matheson suggests that there is no point in being alive alone, that life in solitude is a “barren, cheerless trial” (85). By foregrounding the pain of Neville’s isolation, Matheson is depicting and evoking a powerful, basic human motive, the motive for meaningful social connection. Humans evolved to be hypersocial, to actively crave sociality. Being isolated makes us sick (Cacioppo and Patrick 2008). As recent research has documented, our brains evolved to be as big as they are because we need big brains to successfully navigate the kinds of complex social environments that humans naturally create—a good deal of neocortical expansion, in other words, was directly driven by social selection pressures (Gazzaniga 2008). In our evolutionary past, humans grouped together for cooperation in fending off predators and foraging for food. Group life posed new cognitive challenges (keeping track of alliances and social exchanges, for example), which selected for brain expansion and the evolution of cognitive mechanisms necessary for life in complex groups (Dunbar and Shultz 2007). The flip side of our gregarious nature is the pain of social exclusion and the horror of total isolation. Because the horror of total isolation is such a basic human motive, all normally-developed humans can relate to it, just as we intuitively understand the pain of starvation and the urgency of sexual desire. Matheson makes this horror vividly present to the reader; he invites us to take Neville’s perspective and share his pain and frustration. We are encouraged to root for Neville when he finally, about halfway through the story, comes across another uninfected, living being—a dog.

  When Neville sees the dog, he has not spoken to another human being in ten months. He tries to win the dog’s affections. The dog, terrified, runs away; Neville tries to find it. “At last he stumbled home, his face a mask of hopeless dejection. To come across a living being, after all this time to find a companion, and then to lose it. Even if it was only a dog. Only a dog? To
Robert Neville that dog was the peak of a planet’s evolution” (84). The dog sequence is significant because it demonstrates to the reader the depth of Neville’s thirst for companionship. It also allows us to follow Neville’s further descent into despair when the dog eventually dies of the infection. “The dog looked up at him with its dulled, sick eyes and then its tongue faltered out and licked roughly and moistly across the palm of Neville’s hand. Something broke in Neville’s throat. He sat there silently while tears ran slowly down his cheeks. In a week the dog was dead” (100). The functions of the dog sequence, which takes up a good chunk of the short novel (more than 10 percent of its pages), are to deepen our sympathy for Neville in his plight and to implicitly suggest a causal factor in Neville’s gradual dehumanization.

  Neville lives through the vampire apocalypse in constant search of meaning. He finds some meaning by experimentally pursuing the cause of vampirism (conducting experiments on vampires, reading up on physiology, looking at vampire blood in a microscope), but still he repeatedly asks himself why he goes on—always there is “the hope that someday he would find someone like himself” (91). When the dog dies, hope dies with it. “In a world of monotonous horror there could be no salvation in wild dreaming” (101). Neville immerses himself in his scientific investigation, leading a life “based on day-to-day survival marked by neither heights of joy nor depths of despair” (110). It is a semi-mechanical life, fueled only by Neville’s scientific curiosity. After years of living this life, Neville sees Ruth, one of the new vampires disguised to appear uninfected. She runs away from him, frightened. Neville chases her and catches her, asking her what she’s afraid of. In one of a few instances where the point-of-view is external to Neville, we are told that he “didn’t realize that his voice was devoid of warmth, that it was the harsh, sterile voice of a man who had lost all touch with humanity” (114). Neville’s solitary existence has dehumanized him. Matheson is again affirming that true meaning—the key to a full life—lies in sociality, in bonding (romantic or otherwise). As Neville is searching for physiology books in a dusty, abandoned library, he imagines a maiden librarian setting the place in order before the apocalypse. “To die, he thought, never knowing the fierce joy and attendant comfort of a loved one’s embrace. To sink into that hideous coma, to sink then into death and, perhaps, return to sterile, awful wanderings. All without knowing what it was to love and be loved. That was a tragedy more terrible than becoming a vampire” (68).

  In the end, Neville is captured by the new vampires and scheduled for public execution. To the new vampires, Neville is the villain, the antagonist, and he accepts that. He is the last of his kind, not only utterly alienated but, in the eyes of the new vampires, “anathema and black terror to be destroyed” (161). The world is “theirs and no longer his” (153). But the reader is not invited to suddenly throw all empathy and sympathy for Neville to the wind, as some critics have suggested. Patterson, for instance, portrays Neville as a racist white male whose conservative battle is “doomed to failure” (2005, 26). Yet the new vampire society is represented as brutal and unattractive. When “dark-suited” vampires arrive at Neville’s house at night and begin butchering the undead vampires congregated there, Neville is taken aback by their methodical violence. “Is this the new society? . . . Did they have to do it like this, with such a black and brutal slaughtering? . . . They were more like gangsters than men forced into a situation. There were looks of vicious triumph on their faces” (149). In contrast, Neville chooses suicide in the end, rather than public execution: “So long as the end did not come with violence, so long as it did not have to be a butchery before their eyes . . . ” (161). He urges Ruth not to let the new society, in which she is a ranking officer, get “too brutal. Too heartless” (159). Neville is flawed, certainly, but he is the protagonist and his humane values are contrasted to the values of the new society. He is no monster. As Matheson himself said in an interview, “Neville was not a monster to me. He was trying to survive, no more” (Brown and Scoleri 2001). I imagine most readers share Matheson’s perspective.

  The tragic ending of the novel has a curiously uplifting, awe-inspiring quality. There is a shift in stylistic register in the last chapter, from the tough-minded, no-nonsense style of the preceding chapters to a “somber” (Ng 2015, 106), grandiose tone, one that imbues Neville’s death with honorable significance. We have followed Neville’s descent from hunted, frustrated prey in search of meaning to a dehumanized, semi-mechanical survivor—but now, in the end, in death, he is elevated to larger-than-life stature, an awe-inspiring figure. The end is inevitable because Neville’s search for meaning has hit a brick wall. There can be no fitting-in, no purpose for him, except as a posthumous story, a legend. But at least he goes down with his values intact, re-humanized as he is in the very end. The ending is bleak, but also satisfying: Neville lost the struggle for survival, he failed to find anybody with whom to connect—but he fought to the end, and at least his legacy lives on.

  Matheson appropriated and adapted the ancient figure of the vampire in IAL partly for the inherent fascination of the figure, but more pertinently to use it as a dramatic catalyst in his exploration of one man’s psychological development in response to an intensely hostile world robbed of meaning. IAL registers several widespread anxieties characteristic of the American 1950s, such as a fear of conformity (symbolized in the brainless vampires crowding together in suburbia, preying on the outsider); and, more abstractly, a fear of the consequences of apocalyptic war (symbolized in the narrative premise as well as in the vague talk of bombings and mutated mosquitoes spreading the vampire germ). But the themes of the novel transcend the context of its production and initial reception—they are universally engaging because they are rooted in universal human dispositions, namely the fear of death, the horror of isolation, and the need for meaning. IAL, then, is a compelling meditation on a man’s search for meaning in an indifferent, even hostile universe. A sensitive reader absorbed by Matheson’s novel comes away with an emotionally rich experience and a deeper understanding of basic human motives and the psychological consequences of their suppression.

  CHAPTER 7

  Trust No One

  Rosemary’s Baby (1967)

  An attractive young couple, Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse, get their dream home in the old Bramford apartment building in Manhattan. Rosemary is eager to have children, but Guy wants to wait. He is a moderately successful actor with big ambitions for himself. Rosemary’s friend Hutch, an elderly bachelor, warns them against the Bramford, which has an unsavory history—cannibals and witches have lived there, including Adrian Marcato, who in the 1890s claimed to have summoned Satan himself in the building. The Woodhouses disregard Hutch’s warnings and are soon befriended by their new elderly neighbors, the colorful, childless Castevets. Rosemary finds them nosy and meddlesome, but Guy is intrigued by Roman Castevet and his stories of the theater world. Guy soon gets his big acting break when he is offered a big role that was held by a rival actor, who mysteriously and suddenly has gone blind. Guy then promises Rosemary a baby. Rosemary, drunk, falls asleep, dreaming that she is carried into the Castevets’ apartment and taken forcefully by a demonic Guy while a coven of witches watch. She becomes pregnant, but her pregnancy is difficult and painful. Rosemary wastes away and becomes secluded from her friends because of the constant pain, but her doctor, Abe Sapirstein—recommended by the Castevets—reassures her. Rosemary becomes suspicious of Sapirstein. Hutch calls, says he has important information and sets up a meeting with Rosemary. Before they can meet, he falls into a coma, mysteriously and suddenly. Hutch manages to send Rosemary a book on witchcraft when he becomes lucid just before his death. Rosemary surmises that Roman Castevet is the son of Adrian Marcato and that the Castevets are Satanists. They have made a deal with her husband, who gets worldly success in exchange for their baby—the baby is to be used in a sacrificial ritual. Rosemary goes to another doctor with her suspicions, but figuring that she is psychotic, the doct
or calls Sapirstein. Rosemary is subdued and drugged, gives birth, and is told that the baby was stillborn. However, she discovers that the baby is held in the Castevets’ apartment. When she goes to claim it, she discovers the truth: She was impregnated by Satan himself, and her son, Andy, may be the Antichrist—pure evil, in other words. She wants to kill the demon child, but is then overwhelmed by affection for the infant despite his horns, tail, and strange yellow eyes (Levin 1997a).