CARROL, N. - Philosophy Of Horror PDF

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR or PA R A D OX E S OF THE H E A RT N O Ë L C A R R O L L R O U T L ED G E • New Yo r k & Lo n d o n Published in 1990 by Routledge An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35 Street New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the...

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Published in 1990 by Routledge An imprint of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35 Street New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 1990 by Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Carroll, Noël (Noël E.) The philosophy of horror. Includes index. 1. Horror in literature. 2. Horror tales—History and criticism. 3. Horror films—History and criticism. I. Title. PN56.H6C37 1989 809’.916 89–10469 ISBN 0-415-90145-6 ISBN 0-415-90216-9 (pbk.) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Carroll, Noël The philosophy of horror. 1. Arts. Special subjects. Horror I. Title 704.9’4 ISBN 0-203-36189-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-37447-9 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-415-90145-6 (Print Edition) 0-415-90216-9 (pb)

Dedicated to Sally Banes

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1

ix

1

The Nature of Horror

12

The Definition of Horror

12

Fantastic Biologies and the Structures of Horrific Imagery 42 Summary and Conclusion 2

52

Metaphysics and Horror, or Relating to Fictions Fearing Fictions

60

Character-Identification? 3

Plotting Horror

88

97

Some Characteristic Horror Plots Horror and Suspense The Fantastic 4

Why Horror?

144 158

The Paradox of Horror Horror and Ideology Horror Today Notes

215

Index

251

128

206

159 195

97

59

Acknowledgments

Undoubtedly, my parents, Hughie and Evelyn Carroll, inadvertently gave birth to this treatise by telling me not to waste my time and money on horror books, magazines, comics, TV shows, and movies. In a final act of filial defiance, I, a middle-aged baby-boomer, have set out to prove to them that I was gainfully employed all along. My thinking about horror really began to assemble itself when Annette Michelson and I taught a course in horror and science fiction at New York University. Annette soldiered the science fiction half of the course, while the gooier parts of the terrain became my lot. Annette was, and has continued to be, very helpful in the development of my theory. She suggested casting my notions about horrific biologies in terms of fusion and fission, and, as well, she has continually pressed me, with regard to my skepticism about contemporary film theory, to take the paradox of fiction seriously. Though my solutions to her questions may not be what she expected, I hope they are at least intriguing. Early on, two philosophers—both of them horror addicts—abetted me in the conviction that pursuing this topic could be interesting. Judith Tormey and I spent an exhilarating drive to Mexico together, boring everyone else in the car while we swapped favorite monster stories. Jeff Blustein read my earliest attempts in horror theory with the analytical rigor and the enthusiasm only a fellow horror buff can appreciate. The late Monroe Beardsley also read my nascent efforts at horror theory. He wondered aloud how I could be interested in this stuff. But then he addressed my hypotheses with what could only be thought of as arcane counterexamples. Sheepishly, he explained his estimable expertise in the field by saying that he had had to squire his sons through the fifties horror movie cycle, and that he just happened to remember some of the films (in amazing detail, I would add). My interest in horror gradually turned into academic papers, delivered at the University of Southern California, the University of Warwick, the

ix

x / Acknowledgments

Museum of the Moving Image, LeMoyne College, Cornell University, New York University, and the University of Iowa. Each audience provided challenging comments—of special note are those of: Stanley Cavell, Ed Leites, Karen Hansen, Richard Koszarski, Johnny Buchsbaum, Stuart Liebman, Allan Casebier, Jim Manley, Bruce Wilshire, Susan Bordo, the late Irving Thalberg Jr., Stephen Melville, Mary Wiseman, Ken Olsen, Nick Sturgeon, Anthony Appiah, David Bathrick, Cynthia Baughman, Murray Smith, Dudley Andrew, Henry Jenkins, Kristin Thompson, Berenice Reynaud, and Julian Hochberg. Much of the initial writing of this book began during a sabbatical at Wesleyan University. Early discussions with Kent Bendall—one of the most precise and yet imaginatively open philosophers it has been my privilege to know—gave me important clues for solving what I call the paradox of fiction. Long talks with Chris Gauker, over several extremely pleasant dinners, helped me clarify my position. Ken Taylor and especially Philip Hallie, whose pioneering work on the philosophy of horror in his book The Paradox Cruelty served as an exemplar, listened to my theories with a critical attentiveness that was generous, and always supportive and instructive. Phil was even willing to go to a number of movies with me and to discuss them afterwards (something only someone who works on the genre of horror can realize is a gesture of unstinting companionship). Michael Denning, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse provided many useful suggestions about correspondences between my research and contemporary literary studies. Betsy Traube, transcending her aversion to my topic, made many pertinent recommendations about relevant anthropological literature. Khachig Tololyan who, among his many accomplishments, runs one of the world’s great clipping services, kept me constantly on top of my subject. And Jay Wallace, who read drafts of the first two chapters with immense care, supplied me with copious criticisms and suggestions. On more than one occasion, Jay showed me how I could modify my claims judiciously and still make my points. Both his unalloyed interest and his arguments have made significant differences in this book. It was wonderful to have been his colleague. Francis Dauer, Annette Barnes, John Fisher, Dale Jamieson, George Wilson, Arthur Danto, George Dickie, John Morreall, Richard Moran, Terry Irwin, Laurent Stern, Paul Guyer, Alex Sesonske, Daniel Banes, Jennefer Robinson, Susan Feagin, Gary Iseminger, Roy Gordon, and Myles Brand listened to, or read my hypotheses, and made comments which I found important to consider. Joe Margolis, across a number of conversations, showed me the need to make several distinctions I had ignored, as well as pointing me toward some authors of whose work I had been uninformed. Richard Shusterman, after reading my essay “The Nature of Horror,”

Acknowledgments / xi

alerted me to Peter Lemarque’s seminal and more advanced writings on the very type of theory of fictional objects that I was attempting to develop. Tony Pipolo and Amy Taubin, both of whom see and read everything, gave me “front-line” reports on every novel, film and video that I hoped to accommodate in my theory. If their sensibilities outstrip my formulas, I hope they can nevertheless see some of their sensitivities worked into my descriptions. David Bordwell, David Konstan, and Peter Kivy read the entire manuscript. Each made provocative criticisms and useful suggestions. David Bordwell showed me how I needed to clarify the distinction between my theory and reigning psychoanalytic models in the humanities today, as well as correcting some (there weren’t that many) of my film-historical errors. David Konstan made sentence-by-sentence remarks, many of which I have incorporated; those I have bypassed, I suspect, I have so done at my own peril. Peter Kivy not only copy-edited the manuscript, but made many penetrating philosophical comments about the content. However, above all, it is to Peter that I owe, due to his work in the philosophy of music, the insight of the applicability, in general, of the theory of the emotions to questions in the philosophy of art. Special thanks are due to William Germano who, it can be said, first had the thought that such a book could be written. In the course of a conversation on other matters, he indicated that he would “love” (his word) a proposal for a book on the philosophy of horror from me. I would not have thought of it otherwise. The rest is history (destiny?). I have dedicated this book to my wife, Sally Banes. She courageously accompanied me on my many forays to cinemas and theaters all over the world for the sake of my “research.” She patiently waited while I perused innumerable bookstalls any time we went to a grocery store, a pharmacy, or a department store outlet. Her own work on the fairy tale also afforded me an extremely useful complement to my theorizing about horror. Sally has read every draft of this project and provided endless comment: grammatical and logical; stylistic and conceptual. If such a book is a labor of love, it is also a labor of lovers. And I have been blessed with a lover willing to make my project her own. So many smart and talented people have told me so much. If there are flaws remaining in this text, it only shows that I’m a bad listener.

Introduction

Context For over a decade and a half, perhaps especially in the United States, horror has flourished as a major source of mass aesthetic stimulation. Indeed, it may even be the most long-lived, widely disseminated, and persistent genre of the post-Vietnam era. Horror novels seem available in virtually every supermarket and pharmacy, and new titles appear with unsettling rapidity. The onslaught of horror novels and anthologies, at present at least, is as unstoppable and as inescapable as the monsters they portray. One author in this genre, Stephen King, has become a household name, while others, like Peter Straub and Clive Barker, though somewhat less known, also command large followings. Popular movies, as well, have remained so obsessed with horror since the box office triumph of The Exorcist that it is difficult to visit your local multiplex theater without meeting at least one monster. The evidence of the immense output of horror movies in the last decade and a half is also readily confirmed by a quick estimate of the proportion of the space in the neighborhood video store that is turned over to horror rentals. Horror and music explicitly join forces in rock videos, notably Michael Jackson’s Thriller, though one must also remember that the iconography of horror supplies a pervasive coloration to much of MTV and the pop music industry. The Broadway musical smash of 1988, of course, was Phantom of the Opera, which had already seen success in London, and which inspired such unlikely fellow travelers as Carrie. On the dramatic side of theater, new versions of horror classics have appeared, such as Edward Gorey’s variations on Dracula, while TV has launched a number of horror or horror-related series such as Freddy’s Nightmares. Horror figures even in fine art, not only directly, in works by Francis Bacon, H.R.Giger, and Sibylle Ruppert, but artists. In short, horror has become a staple across contemporary art forms, 1

2 / Introduction

also in the form of allusions in the pastiches of a number of postmodern popular and otherwise, spawning vampires, trolls, gremlins, zombies, were wolves, demonically possessed children, space monsters of all sizes, ghosts, and other unnameable concoctions at a pace that has made the last decade or so seem like one long Halloween night. In 1982, Stephen King speculated—as many of us do at the end of every summer—that the present horror cycle looked as though it were coming to an end.1 But, as of the writing of this introduction, Freddy—in his fourth, lucrative reincarnation—is still terrorizing the scions of Elm Street, and a new collection by Clive Barker, entitled Cabal, has just arrived in the mail. At first, the present horror cycle gained momentum slowly. On the literary side, it was presaged by the appearance of Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967) and Fred Mustard Stewart’s The Mephisto Waltz (1969) which prepared the way for best-selling entries like Tom Tryon’s The Other (1971) and William Peter Blatty’s blockbuster The Exorcist (also 1971).2 The mass reading market that was secured, especially by The Exorcist, was then consolidated by the appearance of such books as Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972), Stephen King’s first published novel, Carrie (1973), Robert Marasco’s Burnt Offerings (1973), Jeffrey Konvitz’s The Sentinel (1974), and King’s Salem’s Lot (1975). Of course, horror literature—by masters such as Richard Matheson, Dennis Wheatley, John Wyndham, and Robert Bloch—was continuously available prior to the appearance of these books. But what seems to have happened in the first half of the seventies is that horror, so to speak, entered the mainstream. Its audience was no longer specialized, but widened, and horror novels became increasingly easy to come by. This, in turn, augmented the audience looking for horror entertainments and, by the late seventies and eighties, a phalanx of authors arose to satisfy that demand, including: Charles L.Grant, Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, Alan Ryan, Whitely Strieber, James Herbert, T.E.D.Klein, John Coyne, Anne Rice, Michael McDowell, Dean Koontz, John Saul and many others. As the reader will undoubtedly recognize immmediately, the novels listed above were all made into movies, often very successful movies. Most important in this respect, it almost goes without saying, was The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin and released in 1973. The success of this film, one speculates, not only acted as a stimulant to movie production but also made horror more attractive to publishers. For many who were horrified by the film, in consequence, sought out the novel, thereby acquiring a taste for horror literature. The relation between the horror film and horror literature has been quite intimate during the current horror cycle—both in the obvious sense that often horror films are adapted from horror novels, and in the sense that many of the writers in the genre were deeply influenced by earlier horror movie cycles—to which they refer not only in interviews but within the texts of their novels as well.3

Introduction / 3

Of course, the immense influence on the film industry of The Exorcist’s success is even more evident than its impact on the literary marketplace. As well as putting in place the recurring themes of possession and telekinesis, The Exorcist (the movie) was immediately followed by a slew of copycats, including Abby, Beyond the Door, La Endemoniada (a.k.a. Demon Witch Child), Exorcismo, and The Devil’s Rain. At first it looked as though the genre would dissipate in the flood of lackluster imitations. But in 1975, Jaws rocked the movie market, reassuring filmmakers that there was still gold left to be mined in horror. When the reaction to Jaws (and its derivatives) seemed to flag, along came Carrie and The Omen. And then, in 1977, Star Wars, although not a horror film, opened the door to outer space, thereby eventually admitting the likes of Alien. Each time the health of the genre seemed threatened, suddenly it would revive. The genre seems immensely resilient. This indicates that at present the fantasy genres, of which horror is a leading example, are continually worth trying when producers think about what to make next. The result has been a truly staggering number of horror titles. And, as well, we now have before us a generation of accomplished film directors many of whom are recognized specialists in the horror/fantasy film, including: Steven Spielberg, David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, David Lynch, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Philip Kaufman, Tobe Hooper, John McTiernan, Ridley Scott, and others. In emphasizing the large numbers of horror films produced in the last decade and a half, I do not mean to imply that horror films were not accessible in the sixties. However, such films were somewhat marginal; one had to stay on the lookout for the latest offerings of American International Pictures, William Castle, and Hammer Films. Roger Corman, though beloved of horror connoisseurs, was not a figure of wide repute; and latenight classics like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead enjoyed primarily an underground reputation. The series of blockbusters, starting with The Exorcist, changed the position of the horror film in the culture, and, I would submit, also encouraged the expansion of the publication and consumption of horror literature. Of course, the markets for horror literature and film did not spring from nowhere. The audience, one would imagine, comprised primarily babyboomers. These audiences, like a large number of the artists who came to specialize in horror, were the first post-war generation raised by TV. And one would hypothesize that their affection for horror, to a large extent, was nurtured and deepened by the endless reruns of the earlier horror and sci-fi cycles that provided the repertoire of the afternoon and late-night television of their youth. This generation has, in turn, raised the next on a diet of horror entertainments whose imagery suffuses the culture—from breakfast cereals and children’s toys to postmodern art—and which supply an impressive proportion of the literary, cinematic and even theatrical output of our society.

4 / Introduction

It is within this context that the time seems especially propitious to initiate an aesthetic inquiry into the nature of horror. The purpose of this book is to investigate the horror genre philosophically. But though this project is undeniably prompted and made urgent by the ubiquitousness of horror today, insofar as its task is philosophical it will attempt to come to terms with general features of the genre as manifested throughout its history. A Brief Overview of the Horror Genre The object of this treatise is the horror genre. However, before developing my theory of that genre, it will be helpful to provide a rough historical sketch of the phenomenon I intend to discuss. Following the lead of many commentators on horror, I will presume that horror is, first and foremost, a modern genre, one that begins to appear in the eighteenth century.4 The immediate source of the horror genre was the English Gothic novel, the German Schauer-roman, and French roman noir. The general, though perhaps arguable, consensus is that the inaugural Gothic novel of relevance to the horror genre was Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1765. This novel carried on the resistance to neo-classical taste initiated by the preceding generation of graveyard poets.5 The rubric Gothic encompasses a lot of territory. Following the fourfold classificatory scheme suggested by Montague Summers, we can see that it subsumes the historical gothic, the natural or explained gothic, the supernatural gothic and the equivocal gothic. 6 The historical gothic represents a tale set in the imagined past without the suggestion of supernatural events, while the natural gothic introduces what appear to be supernatural phenomena only to explain them away. Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) is a classic of this category. The equivocal gothic, such as Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntley: or, the Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799), renders the s...