Abstract
This chapter presents a theory I call “the sport model of horror”. By appealing to this model, I clarify the effectiveness of a number of horror’s quintessential plot, cinematic, and visual devices, and trace a logical trajectory of advances in horror’s scare value, one that ultimately tends towards increases in representations of indiscriminate violence (and arbitrary harm) within the genre. The chapter explores a number of peculiarities and important expansions concerning the model. A Neo-Santayanan doctrine of expression factors into these expansions, and supplies a novel framework by which to understand how horror films are themselves proper aesthetic objects despite the fact that it is an activity of the percipient that is the primary aesthetic object, according to this model.
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Notes
- 1.
See Bullough (1912) for the canonical statement of this notion.
- 2.
- 3.
E.g., Carriers (2006); Contagion (2011); 93 Days (2016).
- 4.
See also Cannibal Holocaust (1980) for a similar working of the camera into the plot.
- 5.
For an example of a film with exacting gore verisimilitude, in addition to such gore being particularly graphic and unshielded—what Julian Hanich (2010, 82) calls “direct horror”—see Martyrs (2008). Note, for a good example of advancement in verisimilitude, compare the depiction of a human body without skin in Martyrs (2008) to the depiction of a human body without skin in Hellraiser (1987).
- 6.
However, I do not deny that there are individual differences at play that determine how high the verisimilitude of the represented evils must be in order to initiate the viewer’s regression from imagining fictional suffering to thinking about factual suffering. My mother remembers being scared at the sight of the doll-like decapitated heads in The Possession of Joel Delaney (1972). On the other hand, my level of tolerance for representations of violence is significantly higher, and this I attribute in part to a long process of desensitization beginning with early formative acquaintances with cartoon violence and horror-comedy, both of which tend to prime one not to take fictional representations of evil seriously (i.e., treat them as within the realm of worldly possibility).
- 7.
Recall SB (224–225).
- 8.
See also Paranormal Activity (2007).
- 9.
Indeed, the fact that one of his film processing experiments leading up to the use of an optical printer involved literally applying sandpaper to film prior to recording (Merhige 2009) is evidence that that was, to some measure, Merhige’s intended effect. Further evidence in this regard is revealed in his following perspicacious remarks, which give some indication of how he interprets the look of the film: “…[I]magine that we had a culture, like 4,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago, that had the technology with cinema, to make movies. And that you’re looking into a sort of archaeological discovery of this world, that is now extinct, and was sort of a pre-predecessor to the world that we live in today.” (Ibid.)
- 10.
E.g., see Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974); Halloween (1978); Pieces (1982); Silent Madness (1984); Hannibal (2001); Saw (2004); Hostel (2005); Halloween (2007).
- 11.
There is a glut of examples of these two tropes; see, e.g., I Spit on Your Grave (2011) for an example of the former; see The Last House on the Left (1972) for an example of the latter.
- 12.
E.g., see Alien (1979); The Thing (1982); The Fourth Kind (2009); Dark Skies (2013); Life (2017); Annihilation (2018); Colour out of Space (2019).
- 13.
E.g., see The Gate (1986); The Unnameable (1988); Under the Shadow (2016).
- 14.
E.g., see Warlock (1989); AntiChrist (2009); The Witch (2015).
- 15.
Albeit, supernatural themes in films are quite often unsettled; they usually stand to dissolve into psychological explanations at every step. In many cases, horror films exploit the tenuous nature of supernatural (or, inversely, psychological) themes so as to create puzzlement and increase suspense (e.g., see The Tenant (1976); The Shining (1977); In the Mouth of Madness (1995); The Lighthouse (2019)).—See Carroll (1990, 144–145) for a good accounting of this feature of horror. But note that I take issue with his assumption that “…horror requires that at some point attempts at ordinary scientific explanations be abandoned in favor of a supernatural (or a sci-fi) explanation.” (1990, 145) Such an assumption is overly restrictive. It rules-out vast swaths of the genre as illegitimate (e.g., what I have termed “pure slashers”).
- 16.
See It Follows (2015) for a recent example of a film employing this tactic rather well.
- 17.
In this respect, I depart from Carroll (1990), who claims that horror always involves the theme of a breakdown in naturalistic explanation (145). Breakdowns in naturalistic explanation are not particularly believable, and typically reduce the scare-value of a film, all else being equal, as a result. A more persuasive horror film that turns on ostensibly “supernatural” tropes, in my view, would work to expand the horizon of natural possibility, or would aim to make plausible that what is normally considered a violation of natural law is actually the mark of a paradigm shift in our understanding of nature.
- 18.
E.g., see Candyman (1992), which exploits the superstition of catoptromancy, of which the (perhaps familiar) childhood legend of “Bloody Mary” is an instance, according to which if one repeats “Bloody Mary” three times in a row while looking into a mirror, her apparition will appear.
- 19.
E.g., see paranormal investigator horror films like 1408 (2007); Insidious (2010); The Conjuring (2013). See Event Horizon (1997) for a rather seamless blending of supernatural and scientific tropes.
- 20.
See The Witch (2015), Antichrist (2009), The Lighthouse (2019).
- 21.
See The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
- 22.
In this respect, horror obeys a logic loosely similar to that of what Martin Harries calls “destructive spectatorship”, something which’s twentieth century iteration, he thinks, “…had a particular investment in a formal logic that placed the spectator in a spot where that spectator had to contemplate her own destruction.” (2007, 9)
- 23.
The boxing phrase, strictly, need not be thought to have any aesthetic connotation. It is often simply used as a short-hand for the rule of not leaving your arm extended-out (as opposed to returning it to a guarding position) for too long after executing punches. Nevertheless, there is quite often a sort of narcissism that is explanatory and even manifest in some cases where this phrase tends to apply (I defer to the boxing reels).
- 24.
Note that I am not proposing that the sport-aesthetic value of a horror film can only be achieved subsequent of the viewing experience, but rather that nothing precludes it from being achieved in this way. For, one’s viewing experience may be punctuated by many moments of overcoming in the relevant sense, given that horror films often communicate aversive scenarios sequentially, and thus, may involve a number of “smaller battles”, some of which the viewer may win while viewing the film. This feature of my account might for some (e.g., Hanich 2010) be considered grounds for its rejection. To borrow Hanich’s phrasing, it “…begs the question of the temporal distribution of pleasure in frightening movies…” (2010, 10); that is, it might be considered implausible that we only enjoy horror films after their scary moments, and not during them. Hanich’s rollercoaster analogy is instructive here: “Do we enjoy the…speedy ride of the rollercoaster racing up and down the tracks? Or is it merely the joyful moment of relief after the frightening experience is over? I think both moments are pleasurable (albeit in different ways). These constant pleasurable ups and downs in emotions in a temporal form of art like film are precisely the reason why the rollercoaster is not only a convincing analogy but also recurs as a fitting metaphor in discourses about somatic types of movies…”(2010, 10)—recall the discussion of Sect. 3.1 on the use of comic relief. The plausibility of Hanich’s remarks here, I submit, depends on conflating the somatic profile of the emotion of fear with the emotion of fear proper, or, the bodily reverberations of fear with the fear itself. It is a truism that fear typically shares with a number of other emotions similar somatic expressions (e.g., increased heart rate). Emotions are not simply their somatic expressions, however—for one thing, because different types of emotions can involve similar somatic states—but also their characteristic cognitive profiles, which define what they are “about” (Roberts 2003, 151–157). In the moment when one enjoys the experience of a “rush” that was initially associated with the cognitive profile of fear during a film, one, in my view, instantaneously substitutes the emotion of fear with a distinct emotion (e.g., thrill), that “rides” what was initially the somatic expression of fear and, for lack of a better term, “interprets” it as enjoyable. I can remember experiencing a similar rush of bodily sensation as that of slight fear when I had my first kiss, but in that moment I was not experiencing fear, but some form of excitement, thrill, or jubilation (though I was perhaps experiencing fear in moments immediately prior). For, of course one may experience pleasure when one feels bodily sensations initialized by a bout of fear (spook, fright, terror, etc.). I am deeply sceptical, however, of the proposal that one can experience pleasure while simultaneously undergoing an episode of fear, and the notion that fear itself can be pleasurable strikes me as altogether incoherent, at least when one regards fear as not merely a somatic phenomenon, or even primarily a somatic phenomenon, but rather as cognitively loaded in the way described in Chap. 3.
- 25.
Recall Sect. 2.2.
- 26.
See also Alien (1979), which follows a similar narrative arc.
- 27.
Cf. CP (227) on the indispensability of the physical presence of the corpse for the feeling of triumph. Cf. Canetti (1979, 18): “The handy parts of the body, which the victor makes sure to keep, incorporate, and hang upon himself, always remind him of his increase in power.”
- 28.
Note that the film may function as a trophy at any point where the viewer overcomes any formidable aversive scenario it communicates. However, such small victories are just that, and taking too much pride in winning a single round, quarter, or period in a sports event can often amount to premature celebration. Nevertheless, the notion of small victories speaks, again, to the issue of the temporal distribution of pleasure during a horror film, and moreover, is consistent with the rollercoaster-like narrative arc that horror films often embody, the lulls in which may be used to engage in the relevant self-admiration and projection of aesthetic value.
- 29.
In the final analysis, however, once I observed holocaust footage late in the film, the film became on the whole aesthetically worthless. I do not want to appear sanctimonious here. For, I will concede, for instance, that the aberrant abstraction of elements from the film may prove to deliver aesthetic objects, and that the fictional representations of evil may be divested of their vital significance, under certain conditions already specified. Nevertheless, it is inescapable that spliced between these manifestly fictional representations is one sequence of factual horror. The film moves progressively from purely fictional representations of evil to factual representations of evil with a borderline (or rather, initially ambiguous) case—i.e., the duckling mutilation sequence—playing the intermediary step. The lesson to be drawn, in my view, is not that art-horror and true horror are on a continuum, or that the division between them is merely nominal or arbitrary, but rather that while one can often defuse the anti-aesthetic effect of perceived fictional horror, a single frame of true horror is like a noxious odour in a picturesque garden, a pollutant that spoils the aesthetic appreciation of that in which it resides. Whether this qualifies as a moralistic proclamation, I know not. It is moralistic to the extent that every moment lost gazing upon a thing which cannot be beautiful is wasted if a beautiful thing could have (practically speaking) been gazed upon instead (see Sects. 2.1 and 2.3).
- 30.
Nevertheless, there are important distinctions between the sport model and Santayana’s account of the sublime. One such difference is that when the sense of sublimity is spurred by the perception of evil, according to Santayana— note: this is what he calls “the Stoic sublime” as opposed to “the Epicurean sublime”, which “consists in liberation by equipoise” (SB 241)—it is a perception of “irreparable” evil: “The impossibility of action is the great condition of the sublime.” (SB 236) In contrast, the sort of glorification of the self-involved in sport-viewing horror is one that inheres in the consideration of an evil found to be avoidable.
- 31.
I do not put much weight on the fact here Santayana differentiates beauty from sublimity. For, both are aesthetic qualities; besides, a few pages later, he declares that “… [the sublime] is the supremely, the intoxicatingly beautiful.” (SB 243)
- 32.
See also ibid: “… [It is] that emotion of detachment and liberation in which the sublime really consists.”
- 33.
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Sopuck, F.A. (2021). Horror and Its Dark Visions. In: The Aesthetics of Horror Films. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84346-5_4
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