Neoformalism and the Horror Film

MA Film and The Moving Image

First Semester Essay

Keith Devereux

Student Number: 10154146

Film Theory Neoformalism and the Horror Film
Based on an early twentieth-century approach to literary criticism developed in

pre-Soviet Russia by a group known as the Russian Formalists, neoformalism is an

aesthetic approach originally proposed by the critic Kristin Thompson. Using an analysis

of the structure and composition of the text, and the way that it operates in cueing the

audiences response, neoformalism assumes an aesthetic dimension to artistic and literary

works. Neoformalism argues that form and content cannot be separated -that form is

meaning. Because neoformalism does not attempt to provide an explanation for the

authors motives, or the systemic dimensions of a film or literary work and its place in

society, it is an exploratory approach -a place to begin the analysis.

One Approach, Many Methods

The subheading to the introductory text of Kristin Thompsons review of the condition of

film theory, one approach, many methods describes how what Thompson calls

neoformalism might be applied to film. Thompson argues that there is no such thing as

film analysis without an approach (3). The neoformalist argument is that an analyst

should approach a text with a completely open mind, then develop an position from what

s/he reads from the film.

Neoformalism was an extension of the Russian Formalist approach, used from

about 1910-30 to describe literary texts. Largely abandoned due to state pressure, the

Formalists sought a non-prescriptive criticism that was part of a more general move

towards making literature more accessible to the masses. As such, they did not

distinguish between high art and low art, choosing instead to distinguish between

practical, everyday perception and specifically aesthetic, non-practical perception (Ibid.

8).
 The aim of the formalist method, or at least one of its aims, is not to
explain the work, but to call attention to it, to restore that orientation
towards form which is characteristic of a work of art.

(Shklovsky, quoted in Thompson 32)

As an approach, neoformalism encourages repeated viewing of films to distinguish the

foreground elements, those that make the film intriguing, rather than taking a film to fit an

already prescribed theory. As Thompson observes, to develop a theory and then find a

film to apply this to results in losing any sense of challenge (4), resulting in

cookie-cutter analysis where every film enacts the castration complex or the rule he

who has the look has the power (Ibid. 28). Indeed, as Todorov has suggested:

[P]sychoanalysis has replaced (and thereby made useless) the literature

of the fantastic. There is no need today to resort to the devil in order to
speak of an excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order
to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the
literature which is directly inspired by it, deal with these matters in
undisguised terms. (161)

For example, in his work on the study of genre, Stephen Neale defined horror as central

to the problematic of castration and that the horror film -centrally concerned with the fact

and the effects of difference- invariably involves itself in that problematic and invariably

mobilises specific castration anxieties (43). While the theme of difference is undisputed,

reducing all horror films to fears of castration would result in all horror films being

considered the same. Barbara Creed, in a feminist analysis of the horror film, reduces her

argument to abjection in relation to the border, the mother-child relationship and the

feminine body (8).

While presenting an interesting argument, Creed selects a range of films that fit to

her method whereas a neoformalist would look at a film and find the method that best fits

the text in question. An example of this is Clover, who considers the development of the

horror film from a socio-cultural standpoint and argues that in the first slasher films, such
as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Halloween (John Carpenter, 1979), the lone

survivor of the film -most often a teenage female Clover called the final girl- was saved

by pure luck or the intervention of a male authority figure. However, in later films, such

as Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (Tobe Hooper, 1986), the final girl took the fight to the

killer, reversing the earlier trend and often displaying more violence. While using

psychoanalysis in her argument, this is only one of the elements that is put forward, others

include motifs (for example, the knife) and the spectator, which a psychoanalytical

approach often ignores.

One of the key Formalists, Victor Shklovsky, considered the work to be the sum

of the devices of which it is comprised, thus abolishing the distinction between form and

content. Shklovsky differentiated between fabula (the fable) and syuzhet (plot) in terms

of the structuring of the text, and the Formalists considered the textual work as a complex

unity of component parts. In Formalist analysis the parts were analysed in relation to

each other and those that stood out from the others were considered foregrounded. Hence

by establishing a scientific critical method, specific critical theories for literature could

be applied to other fields, from which Thompson developed her theory of neoformalism

for film.

For Thompson, the Formalist school of thought provides a foundation on which

she builds her approach to the analysis of a particular film. Thompson does not

distinguish between different types of film, whether these are art films or mainstream

Hollywood, but chooses films that challenge or intrigue. As such, neoformalism does not

apply a pre-existing method, but may choose a range of methods for analysis, seeking

only to explain that realm and its relation to the world (9). As Thompson says, since

artistic conventions are constantly changing and there are infinite possible variations
within existing conventions at any given moment, we could hardly expect that one

approach could anticipate every possibility (Ibid. 5).

Shklovsky also introduced the idea of making strange, which Thompson

describes as defamiliarisation, which authors use to avoid passive and uncritical

reception of texts and place them in a new context. Hitchcock, perhaps one of the masters

of defamiliarisation, was quoted as saying, you turn the viewer in one direction and then

in another; you keep him as far as possible from whats actually going to happen (quoted

in Gerrig 390).

Among Clovers conclusions about the final girl, that she was a congenial double

for the adolescent male (51), the dominant group who make up the audience for most

horror films, was also, in relation to the much of the analysis conducted on horror films,

that filmmakers seem to know better than film critics (46).

Neoformalism makes two broad, complementary assumptions about how

aesthetic films are constructed: that films are artificial constructs, and that
they involve a specifically aesthetic, non-practical type of perception.
These assumptions help determine how the most specific and localised sorts
of analysis are carried out.

(Thompson 35)

Perhaps the single most important element that neoformalism considers, which other

avenues of criticism may ignore, are that films and literary texts are constructed. Even

films that may appear realist, and Thompson makes this point about Bicycle Thieves

(Vittorio de Sica, 1948), are carefully constructed aesthetic works, and the artists that

make them are rational agents, making choices they judge appropriate to an end they

have in view (35). Consequently, the artists behind films seek to defamiliarise

conventional devices of narrative, ideology, style and genre (36) and Thompson and

Bordwell (87-107) outline a range of stylistic and visual devices that filmmakers use to

achieve this goal.

 The audience is also an important element of neoformalist analysis. First of all,

the audience or spectator- views the work at a specific moment in time, films are never

viewed outside the context of history. This viewing in a specific situation means that a

spectators interpretation will depend on everyday experiences and encounters with other

at works, which Thompson calls backgrounds. Thompson defines three basic types of

background: the everyday world, other art works, and how films are used, and goes on to

say that those methods that privilege interpretation often have no way to treat

differently films of different periods and sources. (21-22).

As an example of how different audiences treat films at different times, we could

consider Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958). A contemporary critical audience, viewing the

film in the 1950s found the film revolting and outraged (Hutchings 8), yet the same film

viewed today, while still being a powerful work historically, with our knowledge of

horror films and their conventions Dracula is much less horrific.

While Thompson does not dismiss psychoanalytic readings of films,

neoformalism considers these to be not particularly concerned with the viewer but

treating the film as an isolated object. (28). Neoformalism is more interested in the

physiological processes involved with viewing films, or preconscious, conscious and

unconscious interpretation by the spectator, and that viewers respond actively to cues

within the film on the basis of automatic perceptual processes and on the basis of

experience (Ibid. 29).

Neoformalist Analysis: The Vampire Film

As a practical approach to neoformalist analysis, the notion of postmodernity can

be usefully deployed in the study of the vampire, a being that was once isolated and
without a sense of community yet has become a symbol of the disintegration of modern

society. The postmodern may be described as that which follows the modern; after

World War II; a phase of capitalism; a movement in the arts; a form of social theory; that

which cannot be avoided; undefinable (Denzin vii), and that living the postmodern

world creates a set of emotional experiences defined by resentment, anger, alienation,

anxiety, poverty, racism, and sexism; the cultural logics of late capitalism (Ibid. vii).

Lyotard and Althusser among others have also argued that postmodernism is

characterised by the fragmentation of society and the deconstruction of the hegemonic

order, that postmodernism is continually evolving, changing and opposing the modern

-yet in turn becomes modernity itself.

As an example of how the modern vampire portrays the fragmentation of society,

vampires were traditionally members of the aristocracy -Count Dracula, for example.

Latterly vampires have become associated with counter-culture or subcultures such as the

western (Near Dark), punk (The Lost Boys), the criminal underworld (From Dusk Till

Dawn, Innocent Blood) or the club culture (Vamp, Blade). A psychoanalytical or

socio-economic approach can tease out certain elements of the modern vampire myth, but

by applying neoformalism we may be able to define a trend in the structure and function

of these texts.

The origins of the postmodern vampire can be traced back to Fright Night (Tom

Holland, 1985), perhaps the last of the old school vampire films. Director Holland,

chose to stick to the established traditions and to play all the conventions fairly to my

audience (quoted in Flynn 265). The narrative also relies heavily on transtextuality,

knowledge of other texts such as television and literature, for both the motivation of the

characters and for the spectator. In the case of Fright Night, the characters and the

audience are assumed to have a knowledge of the conventions of the vampire film -that
vampires do not have a reflection in a mirror, they can be harmed by crosses, killed by

sunlight or cannot drink Holy water.

Maintaining the background knowledge of the vampire myth, and relying heavily

on transtextuality, The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987) was a departure from the

traditional and the first postmodern vampire film. Instead of... the wealthy, dignified

aristocrat of European extraction in a black dinner suit, these bloodsuckers dress in punk

fashions, drive motorcycles, and hibernate like actual bats (Flynn 278). Evoking the

classic American iconography of boy-rebels James Dean and Jim Morrison (Nixon,

quoted in Gordon 120), The Lost Boys positions the vampire as an oppressed sub-culture,

seeking only to resurrect a semblance of family life through the seduction of a

mother-figure by the head-vampire.

Neoformalist critics use terms such as defamiliarisation and roughened form to

explain the devices employed to reduce the legibility of texts. Defamiliarisation is used

to create a new perspective and to increase the difficulty and length of perception

because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged

(Thompson 10). This move away from reality emphasises the process of perception and

both The Lost Boys and Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987) use the family and

sub-culture motifs heavily.

Near Dark also jettisoned all of the gothic aspects -the teeth, the bats, holy water,

crosses, mirrors (Bigelow quoted in Flynn 282) and reinterprets the vampire as a thing

of violence (Silver 198) emphasising the strength, speed and ruthlessness of the

postmodern vampire. In this sense it is appropriating some of the characteristics of

cyborg villains such as the Terminator (indeed, it could be argued that a vampire is an

enhanced being, closer to cyborg than human) and moves away from the gothic and

Romantic mood of the traditional vampire. Near Dark is also one of the first films to
emphasise the vampire as the principle characters in the film, rather than the human,

encouraging the spectator to share their perspective of the world (Silver 205). As such,

Near Dark represented the vampire as both good (Mae and Caleb) and evil (Severn) a

trend which was continued with the release of Interview With The Vampire (Neil Jordan,

1994) in which human characters rarely featured.

The image change of the vampire continued with the release of Bram Stokers

Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui) in

1992. While Coppolas Dracula was a big-budget remake of Bram Stokers original text,

and contained little that was new for the development of the vampire, Buffy presented the

first of the postmodern slayers. Similar to the Frog brothers, the teen vampire killers

from The Lost Boys, Buffy (Kirsty Swanson) is the latest in a line of slayers, who are

recruited when the previous one is killed. Taught vampire-killing skills by her Watcher,

Merrick (Donald Sutherland), Buffy eventually faces and vanquishes the head vampire,

Lothos (Rutger Hauer). Unlike previous vampire killers, such as Abraham van Helsing in

Dracula or Peter Vincent in Fright Night, the postmodern slayer is the human equivalent

of the vampires themselves: often alone, or a part of a sub-culture, the slayer remains

apart from both vampire and human society.

Again, there is a heavy transtextual element to Buffy, although the character is

taught how to fight vampires by the Watcher, all of her knowledge is derived from film

and literature, a theme which is continued in From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez,

1997).

The Gekko brothers (Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney) are on the run when

one helps the other escape from jail. The two brothers kidnap a minister and his family

and force them to go to Mexico. There they are supposed to meet up with their protectors,

at a remote bar called the Tittie Twister, but all the patrons abruptly turn into vampires.
When the vampires emerge, the falseness of the movie is suddenly exposed: From Dusk

Till Dawn isnt really a gangster or vampire film at all -its a parody of other movies.

Borrowing an array of standard plot and character devices from seventies horror and

action movies, From Dusk Till Dawn is a parody of film violence.

As a final consideration of the postmodern vampire, Blade (Steven Norrington,

1998) also borrows heavily from the traditional vampire myth, as well as adding some

new elements. Blade (Wesley Snipes) is half-human, half-vampire created when his

pregnant mother was bitten by a vampire shortly before giving birth. The mix of human

and vampire blood resulted in a hybrid, a daywalker, who has all of the powers, and none

of the weaknesses, associated with the traditional vampire. He can withstand sunlight and

garlic, and he has the superhuman strength of vampires, but he still needs to drink human

blood if he fails to receive regular doses of a serum designed to help him. While trying to

destroy the new vampire leader, Deacon Frost, Blade meets Karen (NBushe Wright), a

haematologist who discovers that vampirism is a retro-virus and aids Blade in his

destruction of Frost.

For neoformalist analysis, the fabula of Blade is a simple one, with a clear linear

structure. The one flashback in the narrative occurs before the credit sequence, where we

see Blade being born as his mother is brought into the hospital. In the sequence after the

credits the timeline flashes forward to the present day and we meet the villain, Deacon

Frost and his associates in a rave club set up in a meat-packing factory. The story

proceeds smoothly, each syuzhet event leading to the next one, until the Blood God that

was Deacon Frost is vanquished. Although the story within the film is resolved, the film

avoids complete closure by presenting Blade in Moscow, about to do battle with more

vampires -suggesting that there may be further instalments, but also that the vampire
problem is not limited to the United States, the contemporary vampire is a global

citizen with a panoramic world view.

Blade introduced a rigid class structure into the vampire civilisation, vampires

being governed by natural-born elders intent on maintaining a peaceful co-existence with

humans. The vampire civilisation, living alongside the human one yet still feeding from

it, was first suggested in the book of Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice, 1979), and

in the films Vamp (Richard Wenk, 1985) and Fright Night Part 2 (Tommy Lee Wallace,

1988). In each of these instances the vampires used theatre or clubs to disguise their

activities, though Blade is the first to suggest that some humans know of their existence

and live in a loose partnership with the vampire (a theme continued intermittently in the

TV series of Buffy The Vampire Slayer).

Although Blade hates the part of himself thats a vampire, and spends much of the

story wanting to be human, he remains typical of the inwardly tortured superheroes found

in comics who shoulder their special powers as a necessary burden to fight injustice.

When Karen creates a vaccine to cure the retro-virus, she tells Blade that if it were to

work he would be completely human. After he defeats Frost, he realises his work is not

over and elects to stay a hybrid.

The narrative avoids the opportunity to reflect on the cultural undertones of blood

and infection, or of making any comments about sexually transmitted diseases as other

vampire films have done, most notably The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983). At its centre,

Blade is not a horror movie but an action film, and from this we can see how the vampire

film has converged with the action genre. Wesley Snipes, as Blade, is the archetypal

action hero whose built male body represents... the kind of deconstructive performativity

associated with postmodernism (Tasker 73). Blade contains all of the conventions

associated with the action film: a muscular hero, frenetic pace and a wise-cracking script
(one of the conventions of the action film is for the hero to drop amusing one-liners when

villains are killed).

Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to investigate how film reflects, reveals and even

plays on the straight, socially established interpretation of sexual difference which

controls image, erotic ways of looking and spectacle (746). Mulveys argument is that

there is a split between active/male and passive/female gaze in mainstream films, and

that man is a figure who looks while woman is to be looked at (Tasker 114-115).

The neoformalist critic can test this argument and incorporate it into the study of

film texts. Historically there have been male film stars who have been treated visually

and narratively in the way [Mulvey] claims is reserved for women (Thompson 185).

This is very clear in the action film, where the male body is fetishised, and can be seen in

Blade, where the camera is given every opportunity to linger over the body of Wesley

Snipes, emphasising the power of Blade as hero. Tasker also considers that the action

film has retained and embellished the figure of the hero-as-outsider, which is

representative of Blade as both a hybrid half-human, half-vampire, and as a black action

hero.

Conclusion
One important aspect that neoformalism addresses, which Thompson considers

traditional methods of analysis ignore, is that criticism should encourage other critics or

viewers to see the film in a different manner and it is a tool to help the spectator think for

themselves. In conclusion I have demonstrated, with a brief overview of the vampire

film, how a neoformalist one approach, many methods analysis of film texts can point

out additional cues and patterns as the potential objects of a more active understanding

(33). Using such themes as postmodernism and the gaze, I have shown how the vampire
film has changed with time to converge with other genres and perhaps become a genre in

its own right.

Bibliography

Bordwell, David, Convention, Construction and Cinematic Vision, in Bordwell,

David and Carroll, N. (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies,
(University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).

Clover, Carol, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film,
(BFI Publishing, 1992).

Creed, Barbara, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis,

(Routledge, 1933).

Denzin, Norman. Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and

Contemporary Cinema, (Sage Publications, 1991).

Flynn, John, Cinematic Vampires, (McFarland and Company, Inc., 1992).

Gerrig, Richard and Prentice, D, Notes on Audience Response, in Bordwell, David

and Carroll, N. (eds.), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, (University of
Wisconsin Press, 1996).

Gordon, Joan and Hollinger, V. (eds.), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in
Contemporary Culture, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

Hutchings, Peter, Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film, (Manchester
University Press, 1993).

Mulvey, Laura, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Mast, Gerald, Cohen,
M., and Braudy, L, Film Theory and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1992)

Nixon, Nicola, When Hollywood Sucks, or, Hungry Girls, Lost Boys and
Vampirism in the Age of Reagan, in Gordon, Joan and Hollinger, V. (eds.), Blood
Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

Rice, Anne, Interview With The Vampire (1979)

Silver, Alain and Ursini, James, The Vampire Film, (Limelight Editions, 1993).

Tasker, Yvonne, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema,
(Routledge, 1993).

Thompson, Kristin, Breaking the Glass Armour: Neoformalist Film Analysis,

(Princeton University Press, 1988).

Todorov, Tzvetan, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach To A Literary Genre,

trans. by Richard Howard, (Cornell University Press, 1973).
Films Cited

Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica, 1948)

Dracula (Terence Fisher, 1958)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

Halloween (John Carpenter, 1979)

The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983).

Fright Night (Tom Holland, 1985)

Vamp (Richard Wenk, 1985)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre II (Tobe Hooper, 1986)

The Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher, 1987)

Near Dark (Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

Fright Night Part 2 (Tommy Lee Wallace, 1988)

Bram Stokers Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Fran Rubel Kuzui, 1992)

Interview With The Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994)

From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez, 1997)

Blade (Steven Norrington, 1998)