Horror Cinema

Horror Cinema

Exploring the The Peripheral Space

Different genres describe different things. The Western a place; the gangster film a type, musicals a bodily movement, melodrama a narrative mode, sci-fi a temporal world. The horror film suggests an induced state, a feeling the audience can expect in the viewing experience. Horror critic James Twitchell noticed that the root of the term horror comes from the Latin horrere, which means to bristle. ('Frankenstein and the Anatomy of Horror') A Western can insist on a few markers and it is undeniably a Western. Set it in the late 19th century, have horses, a homestead and a duel and you have undoubtedly a Western movie. But a horror set in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, and with ghosts might not horrify. It is what Linda Williams calls a body genre and its function is to elicit a response. Other genres do so as well (the comedy and the weepie) but the horror seems more than any other to insist on impacting on the viewer: to make the person scream and jump. It is also why horror film is regarded as a lowly genre, rarely winning academy awards, or festival acclaim. "Horror has been treated with disdain and contempt by most reviewers" The Aurum Film Encyclopedia of Horror notes. While introducing Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies, Dennis Etchison says, "the horror film occupies a position in popular culture roughly comparable to that of horror in literature. That is to say, it is generally ignored, sometimes acknowledged with bemused tolerance, and viewed with alarm when it irritates authority beyond a certain point..."

One's purpose isn't to defend horror as a genre but to look at how manifold a genre it happens to be, to see how it can incorporate quite a range of fears within its remit, while also showing social issues in numerous manifestations. Yet it also needs to keep in mind in some form its status as a genre that affects us bodily, while at the same time that affect at its most debased and manipulative shouldn't arrive merely at a mechanical shock. Horror films may have to earn their keep on the basis of the shocks they administer, on the amount of fear they can generate, but that indicates a level of abstract technical skill that while important shouldn't really be enough to keep the viewer in their seats for more than an hour and a half. It is as though the point of the horror film is to make the viewer susceptible, to create a state of disbelief perhaps far greater than the suspension generally expected of aesthetics, and thus partly why the genre is held in such low regard as it then manipulates the viewer from this position of susceptibility. However, it is one thing to have yet another scene of a young woman going skinny dipping, a young man reckoning he can venture alone into the woods without fear, or a group of teenagers thinking they can play with a Ouija board without consequence. It is another to generate anxiety greater than the trope.

The best horror films are interested less in the generic tropes than in the fears that underpin their use. It is true that Alien has a brilliant example of what commentators call a 'jump scare' (or what Robert Baird more formally calls a startle moment) when the body bursts out of John Hurt's stomach. Yet it seems too developed a sequence to pass for a typical moment of startle and works best perhaps meditatively; that it is connotatively fearful, conjuring up worries over childbirth, pancreatic cancer (which Hurt died of) and parasitical disease. We can view the scene technically and notice how Ridley Scott generates tension and realise he doesn't offer much more than a few increasingly fearful and in turn disgusted reaction shots. No music is used, no change of camera lenses adopted. Yet it remains one of the most horribly famous scenes in cinema history. It also more than any other film introduced the movie world to what became known as body horror, a sub-genre mastered by David Cronenberg, practised by numerous directors in the late seventies and early eighties, and capable of existing because of the developments in makeup work and special effects mastery. It allowed such figures to become almost stars in their own right: Dick Smith, Carlo Rambaldi (who did Alien), Tom Savini, Rob Bottin, Chris Walas and others. While we can admire the work of Rambaldi on Alien, the effects are only as good as the fear that underpins the special effect: the cultural fear that a great make-up artist can exploit. Mark Kermode reckons the moment "speaks to a timeless male fear of penetration and pregnancy, suggesting that Alien functions at a deeply Freudian level..." (Sight and Sound) This Freudian aspect was explored at length by Barbara Creed, using Freud, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan. She reckons "all human societies have a conception of the monstrous feminine, of what it is about a woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject." (Screen) It isn't just that virtuoso effects came into their own (though they did); it more importantly allowed cinema to explore in vivid detail what before could only be alluded to even if culturally central.

Vital to horror and its continuing success and perhaps ever greater presence, is that it represents such a primal response to the world. Philip Brophy may exaggerate when he says in the mid-eighties, "while we may have abolished God, Good and Evil as significant influences on our lives, we have so far failed to abolish Fear." (Screen) But he has a point nevertheless. To be scared of eternal damnation might seem a consequence of indoctrination but to fear your body turning against you, of being murdered in your home, or lost in nature and coming up against those who wish to do you harm, are comprehensible fears, even in certain instances statistically quite high ones. Horror films usually show people invading your home as murderous but the point is they are breaking into your house, and in the US there is a 7 percent chance of getting burgled, according to Insurance company The Zebra. Another claims "there are over 3,370 burglaries happening in the US every day. (Legal Jobs) There are no stats for eternal damnation.

Nevertheless, religion is an important component of many a horror film: "The God and the devil are warring for our mortal souls, and the heroic priests on screen are the only ones able to fight in that battle. If you grew up Catholic like me, these films are terrifying reminders of what could await us after death." Mary Beth McAndrews also says religious horror cinema, ...as most Western audiences know, is dominated by Catholic imagery, from crucifixes and vials of holy water to bibles with tattered pages and worn-down priests." (Film School Rejects) Catholically-inflected horrors are everywhere, including two of the most famous Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, as well as Communion and To the Devil a Daughter, The Conjuring and The Omen. Protestant horror is much rarer and would include The Day of Wrath (if we can call it a horror at all) and The Witch. Islamic horror is probably rarer still, though one could mention A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Djinn. Jewish horror is rare enough for the director of one, Keith Thomas (The Vigil), to say, "I think largely it's because, certainly the larger Jewish community, the more secular Jewish community, just isn't superstitious to a large part; I think that's a piece of it." Thomas adds. "And the other thing is Judaism doesn't have the sort of Hell and devil that Christianity does in terms of this idea of demons being sent by the devil as his emissaries into the world to harvest souls." (Cinemablend) Paganism though turns up pretty often: The Wicker Man, Children of the Corn, Kill List, and Midsommar.

While we don't wish to turn this article into a taxonomic theological list, it is useful to keep in mind how many horrors are religiously inflected and also how certain religions are better than others at capturing the terror of the superstitious. It isn't superstitious to worry about invaders in your house or your cells turning against your body, and people won't be regarded as irrational if they lock the door at night or to try to avoid lung cancer by giving up tobacco. Yet horror cinema doesn't seem to draw the distinctions many would be inclined to make in life between the statistically safeguarding and the superstitiously troublesome. This might rest partly on horror as a metaphorically-inclined genre. As Philip Brophy sees it, what we have in horror is "a morphology of the metaphor, an endless commentary on humanity in its aspirations, implications and complications." (Screen) Here, superstition and hyperbole meet: the irrational and the exaggerated become both forms of the unbelievable. While many a body horror does play on fears that our innards can turn against us, they often do so in cinema in a manner that we needn't fear from life. Alien, The Thing, The Fly and the more contemporaneous Titane and Possessor all exaggerate their case the better to generate terror. But we might wonder whether it is the exaggeration or the realisation that creates the horror; too close to overkill or too close to the mundane risks the risible or the indifferent. Speaking of The Brood, David Cronenberg said he believed the film was a much more realistic divorce film than Kramer Versus Kramer released around the same time because Cronenberg reckoned his film, with its physical manifestations of brooding thoughts in the form of grotesque tumours, was closer to how someone might actually be feeling going through a divorce. Cronenberg was going through one himself: "I felt that bad. It was that horrible, that damaging." (Cronenberg on Cronenberg) The film was indeed the morphology of the metaphor.

Yet one reason why horror is viewed as a debased form, as a type of film rarely given the respect even other genres like the Western and the musical often receive, is that it insists on the exploitation of its exaggeration: it isn't just a morphology of the metaphor but a manipulation of it for the cheapest of ends, for the easiest of shocks, the most predictable of generic tropes. What we want to explore then is how the horror film manages on occasion to elevate itself; that a great horror doesn't force the viewer into frightened submission; it insists on an uncanny transposition. It hyperbolises not because it wants to terrorise us but because it wishes to take the everyday, and ask what is needed to make us face that reality more lucidly, even if more fearfully. What we mean by this is very clearly not social critique. A good horror film doesn't just symptomise a moment; it isn't a metaphor for Vietnam, for consumerism, or Guantanamo Bay, though it might function as such. The problem there is that films equally good or bad can serve this role. The torture porn films of the mid-2000s (Saw, Hostel, Wolf Creek and others) were all symptomatically useful but perhaps only Wolf Creek understood an aspect of cruelty greater than the payoff that cruelty could serve. What matters isn't what the film says symptomatically but what the films do with the form they adopt.

Looking at six horror films and the sub-genres they work within, and manage to work their way out of, might allow us to understand that horror isn't in itself a debased genre but a genre capable of physiological metaphor, of a thought experiment as bodily reaction. Many films require no leap into the suspension of disbelief except for accepting a fiction on screen. Kramer Versus Kramer offers divorce in a manner that needn't insist on susceptible acceptance narratively; to believe that enormous tumours start growing out of people's bodies when they are incapable of resolving emotional issues does.

So let us start with Cronenberg but leave aside the lesser Brood for the greater Dead Ringers. The director brings together the relatively new body horror as it explores the work of gynaecological anomalies, women who have two cervixes, and the very established use of twins. Twin children is a more specific version of the double that Freud devotes much time and attention to in his essay on 'The Uncanny', and film has often utilised twins for their horror potential: De Palma's Sisters, Kubrick's The Shining, Twins of Evil, Good Night, Mummy etc. In Cronenberg's film, he gives us the Mantle twins, top surgeons who split their duties, with one brother the more conscientious, careful practitioner of his trade; the other, wining and dining and getting the clients. The director seeks a disgust and dismay potentially greater than in his earlier work because even though the film is less graphic than Scanners and Videodrome, it is in some ways more disquieting, an aspect of the horror genre at its most subtle that shouldn't be underestimated. If Alien proposes the horrors of birth through the monster that bursts out of Hurt's body, in a moment that brought a new level of graphic shock to the cinema, in Dead Ringers Cronenberg goes less for such shocking imagery and seeks instead disturbing images that haunt perception rather than astonish it. This may reside in our confused perception of the twins but it also rests on a mise en scene that insists on turning the operating room into an operating theatre. Cronenberg reckoned: "I had to confront the dreariness of the average operating room and all that bankrupt imagery at the very point I needed very potent imagery, a metaphor." (Cronenberg on Cronenberg) He came up with what he calls a 'college of cardinals' approach, with the surgeons in deep red, a crimson costume that shows diabolical power at work. Cronenberg ritualises procedure, turning what should be an antiseptic benign environment into one that contains threat in its mise en scene.

This isn't the same as saying Cronenberg symptomises an aspect of society, as we have noted in horror films that insistently comment on consumerism, the Iraq War and so on. It is why Cronenberg's use of metaphor is important: he needs to find in the material he offers the disquiet he seeks. That is often what is missing in symptomatic as opposed to metaphoric horror: the former allows us to view the film as an abstract message over a concrete terror. Cronenberg isn't 'attacking' the medical profession in Dead Ringers; he is musing over what medicalisation happens to be what the relationship is with our bodies that are often in the hands of professionals we are expected to trust. In the operating-room scenes he manages to suggest they are high priests and torturers, a modern equivalent of the Spanish inquisition, but this is where the hyperbole comes in. Clearly, Cronenberg isn't saying we shouldn't trust surgeons; it is more how vulnerable one might feel in the hands of medical science. In most instances, the operation will be successful and the surgeon disinterested. But what if it isn't and they aren't? How many people have this as an exaggerated (though not irrational) fear, one that may be statistically unlikely but isn't defying reason? Whether it is Harold Shipman, the UK GP who murdered numerous patients, or the American surgeon Christopher Dutsch, who was deemed to be deliberately harming the patients he was operating on, there are enough isolated instances to give one cause for worry. Cronenberg turns that into an ongoing sense of dismay.

In a scene in the operating theatre, an assistant says she isn't familiar with the equipment and Beverly tells her this is because it has just been made. The objects resemble Medieval instruments designed to extract confessions from the sinful, but here they are utilised for experimental gynaecological surgery. In another scene, an actress has been sleeping around in common, misogynistic parlance, and finds she is the last to know of it. Claire meets Beverly in a restaurant and is introduced for the first time to Elliot and realises that she must have slept with both of them. The film cuts between the three of them in single shots, and it is the most terrible of menages a trois, with Claire saying she has seen some creepy things in the movie business but nothing to match this. Cronenberg takes the sort of insecurities many may feel at the beginning of a relationship and muses over how much more so this might be if you are sleeping with twins and one of them happens to be psychotic, and both turn out to be your gynaecologist. It is one thing not quite to know who you are sleeping with but if you are having an affair with one person who turns out to be plural, that is troublesome indeed, especially if this person also happens to be someone using instruments on your insides. In one horrible scene, we witness another woman treated by the brothers. She is in a state of terror as one of them insists she has to accept a little bit of pain as he investigates her cervix, all the while taking his irritation out on this woman who has put her faith in the surgeon's hands.

Cronenberg wishes to use the horror genre to think experimentally, to find images for thoughts that won't just go away. "That's one of the things I wanted to look at. What makes gynaecology icky for people, is the formality of it. The clinical sterility, the fact that it's a stranger. The man is paying the gynaecologist let's say it is a man and allowing him to have intimate knowledge of her sexual organs, which are normally reserved for lovers and husbands." (Cronenberg on Cronenberg) Combining the uncanny doubling of twins, the terror of medical malpractice, and the intimacy of strangers invading one's body, Cronenberg insists on using the genre not to tell us something socio-politically, to reflect on a social problem allegorically or symptomatically, but to find suitable metaphoric import for subconscious fears. "Since practically all of us still think as savages do on this topic [of death and its return], it is no matter for surprise," Freud notes "that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface at any opportunity." ('The Uncanny') Freud was well aware that sophistication, education and scientific erudition might be all very well but they cannot counter a mind that incorporates within it a strong primitive element. If Cronenberg has always been a filmmaker who has straddled S/F and horror, it rests on his interest in the speculative over the suspicious, in the slimmest of possibilities becoming manifest over the ancient forces returning. Whether it is DNA technology (The Fly), the fear of media controlling our minds (Videodrome), viral terrors (Shivers and Rabid), or medical developments in Dead Ringers, Cronenberg accesses the primal but not the primitive. His works fear for our future and muse over our present.

Frequently horror cinema creates of course victims, and often a decent number of them to pass for a body count. Psycho's genius was for creating chiefly one, with Marion Crane's death halfway through Psycho a proper surprise that was replaced in the slasher movie by punctuated slaughter. The sub-genre insisted on the predictability of a musical, with interludes every fifteen minutes taking the form not of a burst into song but another teen cast into oblivion. Halloween may have been its masterpiece, but it bred a sadistic expectation that people don't go into a room to take a shower, do their homework or get changed they do so to get killed. These were innocents to the slaughter, but the film proposed they weren't that innocent. Halloween "triggered a barrage of criticism against what was perceived in the film as an implied message that 'pure girls don't die, but loose girls do.' This same criticism has been levelled at most Halloween clones..." (Psycho Movies). Though much has been made of the film's killer Mike Myers lacking motivation, the victims are in some way guilty. It is as if their nudity and their sexual activity in Halloween, as well as Friday the 13th, The Burning and various sequels and rip-offs, propose a culpability that is of more importance than the motivations of the murderer. We will say far more about the slasher film and guilt when looking more closely at Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill, but for the moment what interests us is the question of victimhood. Before turning to the wonderfully pagan work of The Wicker Man, we can say a few words however about the guilt that De Palma multiplies. If in most slasher films, the characters are young things having fun as their hormones rage, in Dressed to Kill, Kate (Angie Dickinson) is a woman in her forties with a teenage son whose husband is selfish in bed. She is looking for someone to offer her sexual satisfaction and finds it after a museum visit. De Palma expands this sequence chiefly for technical reasons we will go on to explore, but also to show the level of guilt manifest in the victim. The film may later explain the motivations of her murderer, but if critics have cared little for this expositional moment and made great play of the scene in the gallery and Kate's death afterwards in the lift, it may partly rest on Kate as one of the guiltiest of victims, the married woman who will pay a high price for her pleasure as she will leave her teenage son an orphan. (The husband is the boy's stepdad.) She is the motivated victim, if you like, someone who is clearly delineated as a character and someone who no doubt has years of frustrated sexual desire. As Pauline Kael put it: "This woman who looks, as they used to say, is 'made for love', is visibly aching for it." (Taking It All In) De Palma gives to the slasher film its fullest victim and most desiring of subjects.

In The Wicker Man, it is more the opposite; the central character will go to his death chiefly because of an absence of sexual desire. Here a God-fearing detective arrives on a small Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a girl. What he finds is a pagan community interested in free love and false idols and, though he eventually finds the missing girl, she has been merely the decoy for the victim he will become. The community must offer him up to the gods as part of their annual sacrifice and he fits all the requirements of the order: Howie (Edward Woodward) came of his own volition, has the authority of a king (or at least the law behind him), is a virgin, because of his religious beliefs, and is deemed a fool. There are plenty of ironies at work in Robin Hardy's film and not the least of them rests on a man who goes to his death quoting the Bible when he is being sacrificed for a Pagan cause. The locals aren't bothered if he sees himself being eternally saved by his lord as long he serves the community function as the necessary scapegoat. It would no doubt be his religious beliefs that have kept him from sexual activity and thus make him the perfect victim; that his faith has made him useful for the Islanders' beliefs and if he hadn't been so faithful to God he would have been of no use to the pagans. Howie is innocent but this makes him ideal, a perversity perhaps but only if we accept a narrow notion of theology or psychology.

The slasher film wants to find a reason why someone deserves to die and this is partly why Psycho is a model beyond its famous shower sequence, one that has been much copied in the sub-genre. It is also that Marion, remember is having an affair with a married man, and goes off with her boss's money as she hopes for a better life with her lover. If she hadn't had the affair or gone off with the cash, she wouldn't have been murdered at the Bates motel. The film is a lot more nuanced than that but this is centrally what the slasher film has taken morally from Hitchcock's work. Bad behaviour will be punished. The Wicker Man instead says that good behaviour will be punished. If much was made of Laurie's apparent virginity as she survived while other looser girls perished in Halloween, in The Wicker Man, the film proposes the more innocent, the better. In his important book on sacrifice and scapegoating, Rene Girard says that "the surrogate victim comes from inside the community, and the ritual victim must come from outside." (Violence and the Sacred) Howie will die with various animals from within the community these are the surrogate victims that can accompany the ritual victim, the outsider who has come into the milieu on his own terms and will die a horribly innocent man. Girard's purpose is to show early communities eschewing the psychological for the structural, to see that communities aren't seeking justice but functional effectiveness. "The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence. It prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself." (Violence and the Sacred) One of the brilliant provocations of Shirley Jackson's famous short story 'The Lottery' is that the victim is chosen from inside the community but is victimised purely based on ill luck. Everyone must each year draw a straw and the one with the shortest will be killed. The irony is different from that offered by The Wicker Man but the purpose is similar: that the victim is not guilty. The Wicker Man is a properly pagan film in its exploration of this problem as there will be no escape for Howie, no last-minute rescue from the powers that be that sent him to the island. He will die because he is useful, a gift from the gods perhaps, that have sent him as a sacrifice so that the crops will come good. If the film were to allow that escape, the logic of its own form would have been violated and a Judeo-Christian morality imposed.

Nevertheless, we must be clear that Girard isn't proposing that the structural logic he offers is exclusive to pagan communities; he sees it more or less as an anthropological constant, across cultures, and across time. "Durkheim rejected the idea common to Levy-Bruhli, Frazer and others that there is a fundamental opposition between primitive religion and other kinds of human thinking," Girard says. "He was the first to show that certain incongruous conjunctions [and] primitive classifications really play a disjunctive role, that they amount to an intellectual discrimination quite analogous to ours." (Diacritics) If we apply Girard in this instance that doesn't mean it wouldn't be applicable elsewhere in the genre. It is just that The Wicker Man is such a wonderful example of it in a manner almost consistent with a primitive community. Nevertheless, the film also works because it contains a contemporaneous aspect alongside its raw theme. The film was made in 1973 and draws on a hippie ethos that suggests a place both at odds with the contemporary and an exemplification of it. When Howie goes to visit the local laird, he sees dancing amongst the standing stones various nude young women, an image familiar in films like Red Psalm and The Long Goodbye where a hippie ethos had been absorbed or peripherally present in works of the early seventies. The film holds to Howie's point of view for a few shots thereafter as he passes through the grounds in a horse-drawn cart, and they are consistent with the opening shots of the film when he is first introduced to the island that he sees by plane. Here he looks like a man out of his time but not sure whether that is the distant past or the all too-contemporary. The music too combines the traditional with the modern moment quite easily, as hippie-oriented music often adopted folk sounds. In The Wicker Man, composer Paul Giovanni adapted a Robert Burns song, 'The Corn Rigs', that plays over the opening credits. Later, Giovanni sings in the hotel pub where Howie is staying and the atmosphere is both folksy and hippie-like simultaneously. The past meets the present and Howie is the conservative caught in between, old-fashioned in his morality and beliefs next to a paganism that is ancient and very modern as well.

The film makes clear that for a horror to work it needn't be preoccupied with moral assumptions; that just as the community in Girard's view has a structural logic, so also does the horror genre as practical form. For the makers of Halloween, it was ironic rather than moral that Laurie survives. Lexi Heinitz looks at the reason behind the virginity rule in the film: "they were trying to show that hormonal teenagers are often so distracted with trying to rebel and hook up that they are unaware of what's going on around them. Their priority isn't to avoid the killer it's to get laid. Laurie, on the other hand, is shy and more concerned with her schoolwork than with dating. Her focus is what allows her to survive." (Looper) The horror genre often needs oblivious characters and whether it is the morally upright Howie in The Wicker Man or the sexual antics of Laurie's schoolmates in Halloween, it is their inability to see the risks that kill them. In The Wicker Man, it is unequivocal that he dies because he is undeniably a virgin; it is debatable whether Laurie survives because she may or may not be. A lot of spilt ink has gone into the morality of the slasher film: we shouldn't pretend there will be many a frustrated male teen happy to see slack girls getting it in the neck, the heart and the scapula, while they themselves remain encased in their pubescent frustrations.

Chiefly, though, the horror film needs to fulfil its generic logic and this is where it can be as important to look at its structure as at its ethos. The Wicker Man would have been a much weaker film if Howie had saved the girl he was searching for and left the island; the film would have put its Girardian story in the background and been another thriller rather than horror. What we would have had was an odd group of islanders coming up against the will and ingenuity of a detective. Instead, the film gives us the collective will and ingenuity of a community ensnaring its sacrificial victim. The point of the detective in a thriller is usually to detect, even if many a noir has a fall guy who detects too late. But it would be a stretch to call the fall guy a victim usually, he has been implicated in the desire for sex, money or both that leads to his downfall as in Double Indemnity or Body Heat. But the horror film is a victimful genre. If Hitchcock could say that a good film needs a good villain, in the horror context a good horror film needs a good victim and often several of them the more gory and punctuated the horror happens to be. Yet if The Wicker Man is a wonderful example of the horror genre at its root, it rests on the complete innocence of its victim. He is a pure victim, which needn't mean morally pure though from a certain perspective he is, but pure in the Girardian sense that he is there to serve a structural function within the community and guilt has nothing to do with that function hence the purity of Jackson's Girardian short story, 'The Lottery', and its horror.

But then where does this leave the exorcism film, and its masterpiece, The Exorcist? The difference between The Omen and The Exorcist, the difference between a film about a child of the devil and one infused with the devil, rests on perceived culpability. Regan in The Exorcist is a victim who must be released from the devil's grip; in The Omen, the child is irredeemable. The victim in The Exorcist is the little girl; in The Omen the victims are those who suffer at the hands of the devil's offspring. What director William Friedkin does is play with an interesting notion of obliviousness. "I believe very strongly in God and the power of the human soul...I also believe that they are unknowable. But the film, The Exorcist, is primarily about the mystery of faith, the mystery of goodness, that mystery which is inexplicable but it's there." (FarOutMagazine) If we are right in thinking that a horror film often needs a good victim and a high degree of obliviousness, then The Exorcist is exemplary even if the victimhood and obliviousness needn't be shared by the same character. In The Wicker Man, it is, and this Paganistic work provocatively proposes that Howie doesn't deserve his fate; he is just the ideal figure of sacrifice. In The Exorcist, it is the mother who is oblivious; Regan (Linda Blair) the victim. Yet it is mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) who is a sophisticated and wealthy single mum, an actress that Friedkin is determined to show as the centre of an artistic, educated milieu that would seem to have no interest in God. Her obliviousness is her atheism and while Friedkin allows plenty of room for doubt (manifest in the priest Damien Karras), he wants the viewer to believe in God because he convinces us of the devil's presence, and Chris cannot deny the church's effectiveness, which means she believes by the end but so does the man of the cloth. Yet the doubting priest, thanks to fellow theologian Lankester Merrin, who carries out successfully the exorcism, at least has the means to counter evil spirits; his doubts needn't be ineffective against the devil while Chris's atheism leaves her unable to understand what is happening to her daughter. Karrer understands all too well: the devil exits Regan's soul and enters his own, and after it does so he then throws himself out of the window to his death.

All films of course rely on a degree of suspension of disbelief but the horror genre as we have noted perhaps demands more of it and wins that susceptibility with the effectiveness of its affect. In Kramer Versus Kramer we don't need to stretch our imagination very far to accept the break-up of a married couple but we do in Cronenberg's divorce film. Buying into the enormous growths that develop based on people's psychic state is a Cronenbergian conceit that he wants to convince us over with the aid of our disgust. The viewer accepts the premise because we accept the conclusion: the growths repel us. If we aren't at all convinced by those growths we aren't going to believe the notion that they are created by mental states. We needn't get into the specifics of the special effects, how good they were at the time; how convincing they might seem to the viewer now. That isn't quite the point it rests more on affectivity; on seeing that horror is usually a genre that wants to make our hairs stand on end, to bristle if we think again of horror's original meaning from the Latin. But then it is a question of what that insistent bristling is there to serve, and thus many might find The Wicker Man a film about the structure of faith, while The Exorcist is a film of faith. At the end of The Wicker Man, we haven't been convinced by pagan belief and indeed nor has Howie who is quoting chapter and verse as he goes to his death. The island's guru doesn't even have a problem with this; Howie can believe what he likes and maybe all the better that he believes in his God - he can have a martyr's demise. What matters for the islanders is that they have a martyr too. The viewer though doesn't have to believe either Howie's faith or the Islanders'; what matters is that the film makes us see that this is how the island community functions and that to continue functioning as it must, a scapegoat needs to be found.

In contrast, The Exorcist is interested in faith rather than its structure. It isn't just that Friedkin says he himself has faith, it is much more that the film insists that we too ought to do so. It is partly why Karras is such an important figure. He is the doubting priest who so comes to believe that by the end of the film he takes the devil's soul into his own body. In The Exorcist this faith is important and thus Friedkin works very hard in suspending our disbelief with the quality of the film's affective demand. Many will go into the film rather like Chris, having no assumption that there is a God unless the evidence counters their rational worldview. When people start to feel fearful and then shocked, they start to believe there must be a God and a devil and a fight over a young girl's soul. There may be non-horror films that ask us to believe too, like Ordet and Breaking the Waves, but the films don't demand that belief in what we might call an affective object correlative. T. S. Elliot reckoned, "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." ('Hamlet and his Problems') In cinema, generally, and horror more particularly, perhaps it is the sensation as readily as the emotion that is invoked. It is why our suspension of disbelief contains within it a greater susceptibility than in many other genres, and why numerous horror films like The Exorcist ask us to have faith during, at the very least, the viewing experience and often beyond. After reading the book on which the film is based, by William Peter Blatty, Dominican Father Richard Woods "encountered 23 cases of people who thought they were possessed by the devil after reading The Exorcist; he now fears another wave of hysteria from moviegoers. 'The movie is going to cause so many pastoral problems I wish they had never made it.'" (Time) Kramer versus Kramer maybe upped the divorce rate as well, but few would be inclined to claim that the film wanted to convince us of divorce.

If horror is often seen as a lowly genre then it is surely because it is one of the most assertive, determined to tell us what to think by insistently creating in the viewer a specific way to feel. In this sense, few filmmakers are more manipulative than Brian De Palma. His interest in horror was at a certain moment very evident even though he wouldn't be defined as a horror filmmaker as Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, George A. Romero and Wes Craven usually have been. His unequivocal horrors have been few but The Aurum Encyclopedia lists five from 1972 to 1980: Sisters, The Phantom of the Paradise, Carrie, The Fury and Dressed to Kill. De Palma's talent, such as it is (and some think it enormous), rests on an operatic sadism that he would take into the thriller (which Dressed to Kill resembles), the gangster film and film noir. But its roots can seem horror-oriented if we accept the importance of sensation over emotion in horror film.

If no genre has been labelled gratuitous more than horror it perhaps rests on the tension it generates out of a violence it insists upon, and we can see how this works in two scenes from Dressed to Kill. True, De Palma adopts similar devices in his non-horror films but this is where he might seem rare in a gangster or thriller but quite consistent with the horror. In the first scene, our initial leading character Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) goes to a gallery without any apparent clear purpose. As she looks at the paintings, she writes in her diary notes that have nothing to do with the art on the walls, writing of eggnog and turkey. Maybe she goes with an assignation in mind, though there is nothing to suggest anything like what happens on this occasion has happened before. De Palma perhaps wants no more than to utilise a space to explore the development of tension, and a gallery with its various rooms without doors, and seating without designation, can prove useful. (It is of course a homage to the museum scene in Vertigo; just as Kate's death a third of the way through is clearly a debt to Psycho.) While Kate is seated opposite a painting, a man with dark glasses comes and sits next to her, and starts it seems to take notes on the picture. Kate becomes aware of his presence and is awkward in it, as she appears torn between offence and curiosity, irritation and desire. Who is this man who sits next to her without asking, who shows no interest at all in this attractive woman, so well dressed in a cream-coloured skirt, blouse and coat? He leaves as abruptly as he had arrived and Kate looks forlorn, as if a long-term lover is leaving, and she drops a glove that the man is too indifferent, far away, or oblivious to pick up. We watch over several minutes while she passes through the museum half in chase; half in escape while the film captures the feelings of a woman too scared of an affair and too in need of sex to care.

How interested De Palma is in the logic of her character and the sensitivity of her feelings is moot; unequivocally what he wants to do is create a sequence of ambivalent terror that will eventually lead to her demise. It was as though De Palma by 1980 had seen plenty of scenes during the birth of the slasher film that manipulated audiences into trying to second guess the moment the blade will fall, and wanted to give it a proper mise-en-scene and a complex relationship with camera movement. During the museum sequence, the film constantly changes angle, lens length and perspective, offering Kate's point of view at one moment as the camera swish pans around the space, at another laterally tracking from one room to the next to indicate Kate's urgent need to find the man. When she leaves the building, the crane swoops in on her and then pans towards the waiting taxi. It is a shot that starts with the God's eye view Hitchcock often loved and within the same shot becomes her perspective as she sees the man opening the door of the cab. He has been waiting for her. Around twelve minutes later, in screen length, she will be dead, and the moment she goes to the gallery to the moment she is murdered in the lift (over twenty minutes of screen time) has been devoted to the inevitability of this outcome.

De Palma has elongated what we might call murderous time, the period of temporality given over to the likelihood of a killing. A film might play with this murderous time, showing what seems like a murderous moment is only a playful prank or a boyfriend returning. But the expectation is there. A typical example of murderous time by numbers is the killing of a hitchhiker in Friday the 13th. She gets into a jeep and in long-shot we can see the jeep but can't quite see the driver through the window. When the hitchhiker gets in, director Sean S. Cunningham offers no counter-shot, and this continues. Of course, we expect the driver to be a murderer, and sure enough, after the hitchhiker escapes through the woods, the killer catches up and slits her throat. The sequence takes up three minutes of screen time. De Palma muses over how extended this time can become and how evolved he can make the aesthetic decisions that accompany it. De Palma has more than most been accused of possessing an empty style and, defending him, Peet Geldeblom says De Palma has "arguably suffered most from the style-over-substance stigma" (Slant). Out of this, De Palma can be acclaimed or vilified, depending on perspective. If Dressed to Kill wishes to be a complex psychological thriller it seems thin in many places, poorly motivated and improbably narrated. The details of this would be for another piece but we might wonder why someone so apparently indifferent to art felt she needed to get to the gallery so urgently before going for lunch, and why Kate returns to the lover's empty apartment when she forgets her wedding ring when surely she wouldn't have a key. (And why would she have removed the wedding ring when the lover would have seen it in the gallery and known she was married?) But from the perspective of visual ingenuity within the context of murderous time, De Palma shows himself to be a master, insisting he offers far more variety and aesthetic nuance to a period of film time that is often tired and obvious. This ingenuity becomes especially noticeable in the lift scene where Kate is killed.

While she waits for the elevator, the camera moves from a medium shot of her waiting and continues travelling past her as it moves into a door at the end of the corridor, and we see as the door part opens a person with long blonde hair and dark glasses. There is no music and only the faintest of off-screen sounds before the film reverses the shot this time from what we can assume is a point-of-view as the killer sees her enter the elevator. Another filmmaker would likely have Kate killed then, but no, De Palma shows her going down in the lift and then back up once more to retrieve her wedding ring and the killer strikes just as the lift door opens again on the 7th floor. If the viewer pays attention to the story and the characters' motivations almost nothing makes sense, but attend to the form and you can see that De Palma is a very skilful engineer of horror's first principle as primary emotion: he knows that the point of horror is sensation and determines to elaborate on that without caring too much about the pertinence of solid reasoning. If the viewer is thinking over the improbability of its many moments then they haven't quite suspended disbelief in De Palman terms.

While we accept that Friedkin demanded a subtly different suspension from Hardy that The Exorcist expects us diegetically to believe in possession while Hardy doesn't necessarily make us believe diegetically in pagan belief De Palma appears to be asking for a more troublesome suspension of narrative logic altogether. Why is the prospective lover in the museum wearing dark glasses; he is in an art gallery to look at paintings and seems to be doing so studiously. Yet there he is in glasses that would surely hamper his appreciation of line and colour. De Palma would probably regard such a failing as the viewer's rather than his: that the viewer instead of enveloping themselves in the atmosphere is instead functioning as though in a detective thriller. But De Palma's film is a detective thriller, blending aspects of the horror film with those of enquiry, albeit like Hitchcock's Psycho bringing the police officer late into the proceedings, as he teases us with the idea that we have a leading lady until she is murdered and a detective enters the narrative. Nevertheless, if a film expects us to do some deductive work over the events within the story, then we might just extend that reasoning process beyond the demands of the director's intentions, and if Dressed to Kill is a brilliant failure (a fine horror film and an atrocious thriller), it rests on creating a very dense visual atmosphere within a plot that might have been better moving further into the surrealist.

Isn't this after all what De Palma suggests in ending his film on that all too common eighties trope, the dream sequence, and one indebted here to his own use of it four years earlier in Carrie? The film seems over; the killer has been caught and incarcerated, and the character (Liz) we have been following for much of the film's second section after Kate's death (and who witnessed Kate's demise), will stay with Kate's son, who earlier had come to her rescue. But then the film enters a dream sequence that shows the killer escaping from the psychiatric hospital, going to the son's home, and murdering Liz, who then wakes up. It is a slickly produced scene that might not announce itself as a dream sequence until the person wakes up, as usual, but it creates even by De Palma's standards such grandiosity that we are unlikely to take it as real. While much of the film has used green, cream and beige, the film now adopts a hazy, nocturnal blue, with sharp white lights, like stars, before returning to the film's general colours once we are back in the house and Liz is in the shower as it echoes the film's beginning. The dream sequence inevitably suggests the surreal but if we accept that De Palma's relationship with plot logic here is very weak then maybe he just needed to push it further into that irrationality throughout. If somebody watches the films with a deductive mind rather than seductively sucked into the director's complex visualisation and extension of murderous time, the film will exasperate. The horror can accept a higher suspension of disbelief, we have noticed, and even demands it. The detective thriller works differently and insists on logical relations. For all De Palma's debt to Hitchcock, he was always far less concerned with the inner logic of his films and De Palma is probably better described as the master of suspense. It was for Hitchcock only a secondary concern, and why he rarely ventured into horror and was frequently preoccupied with deductive principles.

Perhaps we have been unfair to the horror genre in this essay, partly by focusing on filmmakers who aren't closely associated with it. Craven, Carpenter, Romero, and Hooper are much more specifically aligned, and yet now we will move on to a filmmaker who made only one horror film and initially annoyed many of the genre's aficionados. When Kubrick released The Shining in 1980, one of those experts, and of course a key fictional horror practitioner, was Stephen King, whose book Kubrick had adopted and transformed. Looking at King's response to the film, Filippo Ulivieri offers various King remarks: "'technically the movie is flawless, and the acting is great,' he conceded, 'but it's not very scarey [sic].' To tell the truth, he found it 'totally empty and totally flat.'" ('King vs. Kubrick: The Origins of Evil') King accused Kubrick of looking like he'd never watched a horror movie before, but Ulivieri notes in his King/Kubrick piece that the director watched several, and especially praised Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. But it was as though Kubrick wasn't looking at the dead centre of genre, but its peripheral possibilities. It wasn't only that Polanski and Friedkin weren't generically horror filmmakers, they were both directors drawn to the genre's edges in the twin sense of the term. They wished to evoke an atmosphere more than create shocks, and wished to see the frame as peripherally available, one that would offer permeating anxiety over just delaying the jump scare. If we speak of the dead centre of the horror genre it rests on the devices that directors use to extract categorical responses from the viewer. These include startle effects, false endings, the already mentioned dream sequences and a character who turns out to be the opposite of what we thought. None of these need be simply manipulative but they frequently are if the jump scare is too frequent and often no more than a broom falling in a silent corridor, a door closed by the wind, or the ending that seems conclusive only for a character to come back to life so they can terrorise the heroine for another few minutes. But using them for their peripheral possibilities can give to the horror film a terror greater than its revelation. In Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist and The Shining, the horror is often less a horrific device than a determination to propose that the horrific is in the world lurking rather than in the narrative waiting to be expelled. One of the advantages of making the horror explicit is that the anxiety can be alleviated by the representation of that horror. Even if numerous horror films like Friday the 13th and The Nightmare on Elm Street want to terrorise with a false ending that proposes the horror hasn't gone away, the viewer's response is often to laugh after the shock, admiring the manipulation but hardly left with an ongoing sense of dread.

However, maybe what Kubrick saw in the horror film, or rather the few works he admired, was this capacity for the genre to peripheralise, for the edge of the frame to become a threat to be expected but not a requirement to be fulfilled. In Rosemary's Baby, there is a brilliant scene with Rosemary's husband Guy and the male neighbour. The film cuts from Rosemary in the kitchen looking in the direction of the sitting room, and all we see through the door frame is a waft of smoke. It is an empty frame making the most of the peripheral as we don't initially know where this smoke is coming from, even if the film will then cut to the husband and the neighbour on the couch together and thus shows us the source of the smoke. The film could have cut from Rosemary and the female neighbour in the kitchen without missing any dramatic import, but the skill of its horror rests on the use of the empty frame and Rosemary's gaze into it. There are numerous examples of this empty frame that is full of potential terror that need never quite be actualised in Polanski's work, as though in the type of horror Polanski practises he must generate a fear greater than its actualisation. He doesn't use the empty frame to fill it suddenly with a startle effect, but instead to show the banality that leaves the pervasive intact. Another example includes a moment when Guy is on the phone and we get an empty frame with the bed and the hallway, as the camera moves almost imperceptibly looking on. In The Exorcist, it is the all-but-empty street the priest walks down in New York before it starts to fill up with the details of poverty as kids jump on cars and an old man sits on a step reading a paper. Yet the shot never quite becomes realistic nor horror suspenseful. It manages to use realism to suggest that terror can lurk anywhere, and Friedkin needn't quickly offer a jump scare to remind the viewer they're watching a horror film. Later, when mum Chris is up in the attic the film follows her around this most horror generic of spaces (along with the basement) and sure enough the film does offer a startle effect as the house servant surprises her when he goes up the steps to the attic. Yet it seems unlikely the viewer will laugh with relief at this moment; more wonder what terrors might await us in an environment that is no longer banal. The terror of the attic will soon be a terror that covers the whole house and, even if we might wish Friedkin had resisted some of the more explicit moments that helped the film become famous, his purpose rests on making sure that horror doesn't become a punctuated series of scare set-pieces. It is a terror that can't be resolved by removing evil from our lives but by acknowledging its presence on the edge of the frame, and on the edge of a life even as bourgeois and cultured as Chris's.

Kubrick in The Shining opens up still further the peripheral spaces Polanski and Friedkin explore, seeing in the horror film an opportunity to leave in the background what in another work would become the explanatory foregrounded. A good way of understanding this is by comparison with Poltergeist. Both films are about places built on burial ground, but while Poltergeist makes it an important aspect of its story, even if the special effects overwhelm it, Kubrick leaves it as little more than an aside, a comment the manager makes when saying that the hotel was supposedly built on Indian burial ground and they had to repel a few Indian attacks as they were building it. It is just one of the many ways to comprehend Kubrick's film, as though he was wary of creating a meaning that could pinpoint the source of the film's dread. Poltergeist makes clear halfway through, that top real estate agent Steve Freeling's house has been built on a cemetery and it explains why there are problems with spirits in the dwelling. It gives meaning to the story, explains the plot and allows Freeling to get his family the hell out of there. But Kubrick can't get the hell of out of there because part of the hell is in the family, with the location not a problem the family needs to overcome or escape but a primal crisis that will find new manifestations. As Pip Chodorov says, The Shining "...is a film about isolation and the threat of an invisible evil", later adding "though there is no one final meaning that would tie this film together and allow us to completely understand it, the whole spider's web of meanings and relations, causes and effects set up in the film's very construction are pointers to Kubrick's philosophy, world view and conception of film. This particular Stephen King book is merely a vehicle for Kubrick to express them." (Senses of Cinema)

King expected an adaptation that would focus on the tropes of the horror genre, but instead, Kubrick focuses on his usual preoccupations and uses the horror genre to express, well, horror. King presumably saw them as synonymous and Kubrick as overlapping: that for the filmmaker, the genre was there to express a horror far greater than its generic capacity to reveal it. If Kubrick was so often fascinated by violence and power, by modes of control and the limits of the rational, it wasn't so that he could generically contain them but propose that they are but an aspect of an obviously much vaster whole. As he says, when speaking of 2001: "Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on these planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization a period that is no more than a grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass." (The Film Director as Superstar) Horror is but a component of the cosmos, and while the genre might want to contain it for pragmatic suspense, Kubrick insists that the periphery needn't only allow for the intrusion onto the screen of terror, but to give a sense of what is out there far beyond the frame. Numerous shots in the film don't seem to be couched in terms of their potential for terror but for the realisation that the film will not be able to contain such horror. The film's use of the zoom and the Steadicam capture this well. When the little boy is standing in front of the mirror early in the film, the camera zooms in on him as he speaks to his finger. Later, father Jack Torrance has his head flat down on his writing desk, and the camera moves in as he grunts and groans; half asleep; half possessed. As the boy trundles around the vast hotel on his tricycle, Kubrick's camera follows, but unlike Carpenter's use of the Panaglide in Halloween, it isn't a knowing device that expects a shock at any moment round the corner, but captures an unremitting and inexorable as opposed to punctuated sense of threat.

If Kubrick was watching work by Polanski and Friedkin it wouldn't have been because he wanted to see how they had mastered the genre but rather how they had subverted it, how they managed to take from it the expectations of a fright film but proposed that fright was too small a word for the permeation they sought. When Polanski was asked if he had sacrificed suspense or surprise by showing halfway through Repulsion that his heroine Carol was a sexual hysteric turned homicidal maniac, Polanski replied, "no, because I wasn't interested in surprising anyone. Repulsion was just a case study of the disintegration of a girl with mental illness." He wanted to establish "...a mood, not in having any surprises." (The Film Director as Superstar) When we think back to Linda Williams and her remarks on horror as a body genre, we notice how many horror directors seek the positivistic comprehension of this terror. They wish the audience to be terrified but also oddly pacified, as though the jump scare may activate the viewer to scream but that will also leave them subjugated in the viewing experience. "When you're making a movie like Hostel you want to pulverize the viewer," Eli Roth says. "The point is it's an endurance...it is just like going through a fun, scary haunted house." (Gizmodo) In Repulsion, Polanski's purpose is to make the banal menacing, to give to the objects of our everyday life a potential dread that will become evident if looked at from a position of sexual neurosis, alienation and loneliness. Early in the film, we see Carol (Catherine Deneuve) looking at food as if it were an act of violence done to her, and before that a woman in the beauty parlour in which she works comes across as an embalmed corpse. When Carol looks at a kettle she doesn't see its shape but her own, distorted face, while with the flat itself is given the most atrocious of wide angles. This is Carol's perspective and this is what Polanski must capture; any horror that becomes manifest from this mustn't be a generic demand but a psychically plausible account.

This doesn't mean it is a psychological film either, an Equus, an Ordinary People, A Woman Under the Influence, or A Family Life. It doesn't have to play fair to Freud or R.D. Laing, as in various ways these good and great films do. But it does insist the horror be tempered by a respect for the condition of an individual who lives their personal terror, one which remains unknown to others until something happens. "Very often people live among us", Polanski says, "...and we don't even realise something is wrong with them until the illness progresses so far that they do something noticeable like killing someone for instance." (The Film Director as Superstar) The difference between Repulsion and many a horror is that the latter is predicated on the killing while for Polanski it is predicated on the oddness. The sort of shocks Polanski may have been expected to deliver within the context of a fright movie, becomes instead the carefully delineated collapse of an individual's psyche.

If horror has often been deemed of little worth, that needn't be intrinsic to the form only likely given the genre expectation. As we have noted, one way of escaping this lowliness rests on an allegorical elevation, making the horror it shows stand in for the socially pertinent. But we have also insisted this isn't where the elevation ought to take place, if elevation is the word. This would be the genre's bad faith, with the films determined to earn their keep as horrors but giving the impression of greater social value by also commenting on society. This is where The Shining is really a film about Native American oppression and Poltergeist is a film critiquing Reaganism and an economy that will step over the dead in pursuit of profit. It isn't that they aren't about these things but that Poltergeist is so much more clearly reflecting the latter than The Shining Indian burial rights, would suggest Poltergeist is the better film. However, this is where we can return to our original point that horror comes from the word bristle and Williams' insistence that horror is a body genre. We might think that if the horror seeks its value from the politically abstract, this proposes that its main purpose isn't to invoke terror but to use the genre to reflect a societal preoccupation. Yet we've noted, too, that playing up the jump scares rarely makes for the best horror films either. This might be just the inversion of the allegorical problem. While the allegorical insists on abstraction, the jump scare demands intensification of affect. But what it might lack is the horror of horror, a tautological claim but one that rests on seeing horror at its most significant containing an awareness of affect as an incomprehensible element within the genre's representative necessity. While working on Rosemary's Baby, Polanski was reading a psychologist who was influencing him enormously and confirming his intuitions: "Professor RL Gregory's Eye and Brain, The Psychology of Seeing, lent scientific confirmation to many of the ideas I'd instinctively believed in since my film school days for instance, on the subject of perspective, size constancy, and optical illusions." (Polanski)

Thus horror can attend to a preoccupation greater than the socially abstract and the emotionally immediate. Speaking of genre, "Judith Williamson says it "...is a means through which an audience brings knowledge to a film: thrillers, westerns, horror film, comedies etc. provide frameworks in which the audience's capacity to recognise certain stock elements of plot, theme and image creates the potential for great subtlety of meaning where these conventions may be stretched, played with or subverted." (Deadline at Dawn) Yet this is exactly what Dressed to Kill does and while it shows great ingenuity in style, it produces numerous stupidities within its plotting and its characterisation. From a certain perspective it is close to a masterpiece if we accept that, as Williamson says, we recognise stock elements and see how De Palma plays with them. But for us, the best horror films don't play with convention; they further perspective in the manner Polanski describes. The films trace the feeling of horror to its roots and not just succumb to its generic demands, even if it finds, in the balance between the horrific and the generic, a necessary compromise that an industry so based on commerce can rarely ignore. Yet we should always remember that a horror film has its roots in a horror far greater than its own brief history, in a bristle that goes back thousands of years.

© Tony McKibbin