Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  She hadn’t said a word about what was going to happen to them after they got down, when the party was over . . . It was Danny this and Danny that and Jack I’m so scared. Oh yes, she was scared of a lot of closet boogeymen and jumping shadows, plenty scared. But there was no lack of real ones, either. When they got down to Sidewinder they would arrive with sixty dollars and the clothes they stood up in . . . There would be no job, not even part-time or seasonal, except maybe shoveling out driveways for three dollars a shot. The picture of John Torrance, thirty years old, who had once published in Esquire and who had harbored dreams—not at all unreasonable dreams, he felt—of becoming a major American writer during the next decade, with a shovel from the Sidewinder Western Auto on his shoulder, ringing doorbells . . . (294)

  That “picture” scares Jack more badly than any supernatural agent in the hotel (294). The real boogeyman, for Jack, is this vision of himself in a degrading, low-status job, emasculated and pitiable. His fear of that boogeyman is strong enough that it overrides his concern for his family. Jack’s train of thought is followed by an impulse to kill Wendy, an elaborate, murderous fantasy. Then Jack notices that Danny is having a nightmare. “The bitter shock of his emotions was broken. He got out of bed, and went across to the boy feeling sick and ashamed of himself. It was Danny he had to think of, not Wendy, not himself . . . And no matter what shape he wrestled the facts into, he knew in his heart that Danny must be taken out [of the Overlook]” (296). At this point in the novel, Jack is still torn between conflicting motives, but it becomes increasingly unpleasant for the reader to be in his head as he gradually suppresses his affiliative dispositions in favor of selfish dominance behavior and murderous aggression.

  Jack’s disturbing psychological development is powerfully signaled by the use of a shift in his perspective as he twice recollects a childhood episode of his father’s brutal, drunken beating of his mother. King represents Jack’s first recollection of the “irrational” (248) beating in grisly detail, describing the seven “whumps” (247) that issue when Jack’s father smashes his cane into Jack’s mother’s head, whumps that split her scalp, send her glasses flying into the gravy on her plate, and put her in the hospital for three days. Jack remembers the incident with horror and revulsion, but when he revisits the episode much later in the novel, as his descent into homicidal insanity is much further along, he can “see how necessary that [beating] had been, how his father had only been feigning drunkenness, how his wits had been sharp and alive all along, watching for the slightest sign of disrespect . . . now, twenty years later, he could finally appreciate Daddy’s wisdom” (422). Jack’s change in perspective suggests that the scales have tipped, that he is now more evil than he is good, that the forces of darkness are winning. He is now embracing violent domination as a legitimate route to status and fulfillment.

  In King’s conception, the forces of darkness, or evil, may be characterized as supernatural forces, but they are ultimately rooted in human nature, as selfish motives that conflict with motives for parental care and interpersonal love. King never tells us exactly what the supernatural forces of the Overlook want or how they came to be, but he does characterize the hotel’s ghosts as abusive, power-hungry, status-seeking, aggressively dominant forces that supply Jack with alcohol to bring out those same forces in him. There is a suggestion that the hotel is evil simply because bad people have done bad things there: “drugs, vice, robbery, murder” (179). The woman in room 217, Mrs. Massey, went to the Overlook to pursue an extramarital affair with a paid lover who abandoned her, resulting in her ignoble suicide in the bathtub. Previous to that, mobsters staying in the hotel had liquidated another gangster and his two bodyguards with “heavy-gauge shotguns at close range,” removing his testicles before they fled the scene (180). In a key scene Jack is surrounded by ghosts in the hotel bar, including the hotel’s previous owner, Horace Derwent, a millionaire playboy deeply involved in organized crime, including bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, and the weapons trade. Derwent finds great pleasure in taunting and degrading a friend and erstwhile lover, Roger, making him act like a dog for the entertainment of the other ghosts. “Derwent was now holding a tiny triangular sandwich over Roger’s head and urging him, to the general merriment of the onlookers, to do a somersault . . . Roger suddenly leaped, tucking his head under, and tried to roll in mid-air. His leap was too low and too exhausted; he landed awkwardly on his back, rapping his head smartly on the tiles. A hollow groan drifted out of the dogmask. Derwent led the applause. ‘Try again, doggy! Try again!’ ” (385–386). The public degradation of a friend may seem like a trivial pastime for a supernatural force of evil, but the scene does suggest that evil is at base human, that it is a product of human behavior, more specifically the behavior fostered by the ethos of organized crime, an ethos built around pure dominance and power hierarchies. Social dominance is universally integral to the notion of evil because dominance by definition is in tension with the prosocial motives necessary for collaborative action and social cohesion (Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2016). Humans, like other primates, have evolved dispositions for dominance, but unlike other primates, they tend to demonize those dispositions and privilege prosociality and egalitarianism (Carroll et al. 2012). Jack can get power and respect by collaborating with the hotel’s forces, but those forces are antithetical to family sentiment, to compassion and mutual love—those forces are, in King’s perspective, evil. Thus, King taps into evolved folk morality by setting up a zero-sum game between dominance-seeking forces and affiliative, prosocial dispositions.

  By the end of the novel, when he attempts to murder his son with a mallet, Jack has wholly submitted to evil. The three dark forces that haunt Jack—his own destructive dispositions, the legacy of his father, and the evil of the Overlook—have come together in this mallet-wielding monster. Jack is, viewed from Danny’s perspective, “the controlling force of the Overlook, in the shape of his father” (468). Supernatural and psychological evil have the same antisocial motives, and those motives are violent domination and aggression. Hence the hotel’s forces are able to lure Jack (and not Wendy, or Danny) with their promise of a position of power, prestige, and responsibility in the Overlook’s cast of ghostly characters—here, then, is his “last and best chance: to become a member of the Overlook’s staff, and possibly to rise . . . all the way to the position of manager, in time” (422). By now, all that stands between Jack and his final achievement of status and power are his wife and son.

  Five-year-old Danny finds himself threatened by the supernatural forces of the Overlook. A child preyed upon by hostile forces is horrible enough, but King compounds the horror of that scenario by pitting the child protagonist’s own father against him, and he makes the horror viscerally present by providing access to Danny’s emotions and reactions. King lets us know very early in the novel that Danny is in danger. His precognitive visions warn him against the Overlook. He has visions—basic horror scenarios—of being alone, in dark and unknown surroundings, preyed upon by a dangerous agent. In the novel’s perhaps most memorable and terrifying scene (Herron 1982, 66), Danny goes to investigate room 217 despite Hallorann’s warnings that the room is particularly haunted. He is driven by curiosity and, King suggests, spurred on by the hotel. As Danny enters room 217, we are in his mind, empathizing with him, sharing his perspective and his trepidation. This shared perspective with a sympathetic, vulnerable character gives the scene its evocative, mesmerizing power. King filters the description of the abomination in room 217 through Danny’s mind, tinging the depiction with Danny’s terror. He evokes a primal confrontation that pits a live, hyperactive consciousness—Danny’s—against the horror of blank nothingness in human form, the undead woman in the bathtub.

  The undead woman is described to evoke a strong fear-and-disgust response in the reader. Danny has entered the bathroom and pulls aside the shower curtain to see what it is hiding: “The woman in the tub had been dead for a long time. She was bloated and purple . . . H
er eyes were fixed on Danny’s, glassy and huge, like marbles. She was grinning, her lips pulled back in a grimace . . . Her hands were frozen on the knurled porcelain sides of the tub like crab claws” (239). That situation is nasty in its own right. A pathogen-riddled corpse evokes a powerful disgust response in humans (Curtis, Aunger, and Rabie 2004), and even holding this image in one’s mind is unpleasant. It gets worse when the corpse begins to move. “Still grinning, her huge marble eyes fixed on him, she was sitting up. Her dead palms made squittering noises on the porcelain . . . She was not breathing. She was a corpse, and dead long years” (239). A decomposing corpse with agency, with malicious intent and the capacity to move, is a horrifying concept to a prey species vulnerable to infection. It violates a basic human intuition about dead organisms—they’re not supposed to have intent and locomotion—and is highly dangerous. The reader’s horror and revulsion are compounded by King’s description of Danny’s reaction to this monster. “Danny shrieked. But the sound never escaped his lips; turning inward and inward, it fell down in his darkness like a stone in a well. He took a single blundering step backward . . . and at the same moment his urine broke, spilling effortlessly out of him . . . Danny turned and ran” (239).

  TS is efficient as a horror story because it puts the reader into the minds of realistically depicted characters who are faced with highly hazardous situations. But more than eliciting strong emotional responses in the reader, the novel offers the psychological and social insight that readers have come to expect from King’s novels. In its depiction of Jack’s struggle and eventual failure to suppress his own weaknesses and destructive impulses, the novel offers a moral vision of evil as essentially antisocial and an aspect of human nature—an aspect of human nature which may be natural, but which is not inevitable. Only Jack, after all, succumbs to the siren call of evil. Hallorann, Danny’s surrogate father, resists it, as do Wendy and Danny. TS remains one of the most popular horror novels of all time because it so effectively evokes and explores biologically salient conflicts and fears, and because it offers a compellingly hard-nosed but ultimately optimistic perspective on those conflicts and fears. In the novel’s epilogue, King has Hallorann offer Danny the following advice: “The world’s a hard place, Danny. It don’t care. It don’t hate you and me, but it don’t love us, either . . . The world don’t love you, but your momma does and so do I . . . see that you get on. That’s your job in this hard world, to keep your love alive and see that you get on, no matter what” (497). Like other accomplished tragedies, TS “engage[s]‌ painful emotions but leave[s] us feeling that we have a deeper and more adequate understanding of the forces that drive human experience” (Carroll 2012a, 59). Specifically, TS leaves us feeling that we have a better understanding of the dark forces in this world—most pertinently, the aggressive, destructive, dominance-seeking impulses in human nature, impulses powerful enough to override affiliative, prosocial impulses in particular circumstances. That is the psychological truth forcibly conveyed in TS.

  CHAPTER 11

  Hack n’ Slash

  Halloween (1978)

  On Halloween night, six-year-old Michael Myers inexplicably murders his teenage sister with a kitchen knife. He is committed to a mental institution. Fifteen years later, Myers escapes the institution and returns on Halloween night to his home town—quiet, suburban Haddonfield, Illinois. Myers, wearing a creepy mask and a mechanic’s uniform, begins stalking three local teenagers—Laurie, Annie, and Lynda. Laurie spots him lurking in the distance on several occasions and expresses her concern, but her carefree friends laugh at her anxiety. Meanwhile, Myers’s psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, has followed Myers to Haddonfield and tries unsuccessfully to warn local law enforcement about the danger posed by Myers’s “pure evil.” Myers, in the meantime, kills Annie, then Lynda’s boyfriend, and finally Lynda. He attacks Laurie, who fights back while protecting the two children that she’s babysitting. Loomis arrives in the nick of time and empties a revolver into Myers, who falls from a second-story balcony. When Laurie and Loomis look for Myers on the ground, he has disappeared (Carpenter 1978).

  Halloween was a surprise box office hit. It was cheaply made, featuring predominantly unknown actors and an uncomplicated plot. The film was independently produced and shot in only twenty-one days by the young filmmaker John Carpenter, who directed, cowrote, and scored the film (Rockoff). While Halloween was clearly influenced by earlier films such as Psycho (Hitchcock 1960), Black Christmas (Clark 1974), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1974), which also depicted young protagonists killed by psychopaths, Carpenter’s film kicked off the slasher film craze, spawning a staggering number of derivative films—sequels, knock-offs, and eventually remakes. Halloween became a signal example of the slasher film, a film type “characterized by a distinct story-structure that concerned a shadowy blade-wielding maniac stalking and killing a group of fun-loving young people in an everyday non-urban setting” (Nowell 2011a, 54). This film type would prove extremely attractive to film producers looking to turn a buck, and went on to become the “most high-profile [cinematic] production trend” of the 1980s (Nowell 2011b, 137). Slasher films could be made quickly and cheaply, and they were eagerly consumed by a huge teenage cinema audience. The so-called first wave of teen slasher films, which began with Halloween and continued into the early 1980s, saw the release of more than a dozen similar films within a couple of years.

  Why were teenagers attracted to slasher films? What was the appeal of looking at “fun-loving” teens being slashed to death by some “blade-wielding” creep? Critics have looked to the Zeitgeist in their search for answers. Kendall Phillips argues that teenaged audiences in the late 1970s and early 1980s were feeling subconscious guilt over their own fun-loving, hedonistic lifestyles and turned to slasher films in an attempt to assuage that guilt by witnessing fictional counterparts getting their just deserts at the hands of a monstrous enforcer of conservative morality (2005, 140). Others have argued that audience members—consisting, supposedly, predominantly of males—were perniciously identifying with the slasher killer, finding misogynist pleasure in his mutilations of female characters. The prominent film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel engaged in a public campaign against what they called “women in danger films” (Kendrick 2014), which included slashers and rape-revenge films, claiming that many such films encouraged the audience to identify with a misogynist killer. They exempted Halloween from their crusade, however, because they felt that it displayed real “artistry” (Ebert 1981, 56) and, more importantly, did not invite viewers to sympathize with the killer. So most critics agree that early slasher films encode a conservative backlash against the liberal values and sexual liberation advocated by the counterculture (Dika 1987, Hutchings 2004, Phillips 2005). Robin Wood called slasher films “depressingly conservative” (Wood 1987, 82). Mark Jancovich cites several critics to the effect that slashers “act to contain [female sexuality] by presenting the sexually active women who are killed as merely ‘getting what they deserve’ ” (Jancovich 1994, 29). Yet these interpretations don’t get at the heart of slasher films like Halloween. There is no evidence to support that American teenagers felt guilt over their hedonistic lifestyle, or that slasher films assuaged such guilt if it did exist. Slasher film audiences were not, in fact, predominantly male—they consisted of at least 50 percent females, according to Vera Dika (1987, 87), and many such films, Halloween included, were marketed explicitly to female teenagers (Nowell 2011a, b). Most slasher films did not wallow in depictions of mutilations of female characters—research has documented that the victims in slasher films are, in fact, fairly evenly distributed across the sexes (Dika 1987, 89–90, Nowell 2011a, 251–252, Weaver et al. 2015). Early slasher films did tap into culturally salient anxieties, including anxieties over large-scale shifts in the American sociopolitical landscape such as a partial shift from family- and community-oriented values toward a more egocentric ethos, as well as a perceived decay of suburban middle-class life (Gill 2002). Hall
oween thus depicts teens left to fend for themselves, with no help from adult authorities, in a suddenly dangerous world—but that scenario resonates beyond its cultural moment.

  Halloween’s emotional and imaginative power has its wellspring in human nature. The central premise of the film—the threat of being killed by another human—reflects an evolutionarily ancient hazard, one that has left traces deep in our constitution. Conspecific predation has been a constant danger of social life for millions of years (Buss 2005, Duntley 2005), and Halloween effectively evokes that danger in a contemporary setting (Clasen and Platts in press). The film gets its power from depicting, and aligning audiences with, likeable and peaceful characters in quiet, well-ordered, and safe suburbia, which is suddenly infested with a homicidal agent who is simultaneously subhuman and superhuman. Those characters that are too busy pursuing hedonistic pleasure and carefree social interaction to notice the infiltration of danger are killed. The one vigilant character, Laurie Strode, registers the threat and saves not just herself, but also the children in her care. Some critics have suggested that Laurie Strode, the genre-typical “Final Girl” (Clover 1992), is spared because she alone, among the female characters, does not violate a sexually conservative and patriarchal ideology (Phillips 2005, 139). Carpenter himself has repeatedly contested this interpretation (Boulenger 2001, 99). The proximal narrative motivation for her survival is that Laurie Strode is the only character who detects and responds adequately to the danger. In one scene, Laurie is walking with her friend Annie and sees Myers standing on a pavement, observing her, and then slipping behind a bush. Annie fails to see Myers but goes to investigate and finds nothing. She dismisses Laurie’s anxiety, saying “you’re wacko, now you’re seeing men behind bushes.” In another scene, Laurie is in a classroom, taking notes and looking slightly bored as the teacher is droning away in the background. She looks out the window and spots Myers standing immobile across the street. The teacher then distracts her by asking her a question, to which Laurie promptly delivers an intelligent answer. Not only is she vigilant, she is bright and conscientious—the focal point for our sympathy. Other characters are less keenly observant, and Halloween’s most suspenseful scenes involve protagonists acting or interacting with no clue that Myers is lurking nearby. A scene shows Annie talking on the phone with her back to a glass door. We notice the sudden, ghostly appearance of Myers behind the door (Figure 11.1), but Annie doesn’t register him. She keeps chatting frivolously into the phone. We know that she’s in acute danger, and we know that she doesn’t know. This asymmetric narration—alerting the audience to danger ahead of the characters—is crucial in fostering audience engagement. As Dika notes (1990), slasher film audiences frequently attempt to interact with the screen—yelling warnings to characters, berating them for ill-advised behaviors (“don’t go in there!”), and so on. Awareness of danger, then, is a chief thematic concern in this film. Pennington observes that “[u]‌sually in slasher movies, ignorance of lurking danger diminishes a character’s chances for survival” (2009, 59), and he is right to point to this pattern as a genre convention, but the convention is rooted in real-world patterns of predator-prey relations. Ignorance of lurking danger reliably diminishes actual organisms’ chances for survival, and Halloween is structured around this basic biological fact. Laurie alone among her peers is sufficiently vigilant to survive, and sufficiently altruistic to deserve our full sympathy. Late in the film, when Myers enters her house on his killing spree, she gets the children in her care to safety before worrying about herself. The moral economy of the film allows her to survive because she responds prudently to danger and because she cares for and about others, in contrast to her self-involved peers who happily hand over their babysitting duties to Laurie to pursue sex with their boyfriends.