AMERICAN NIGHTMARE:

Essays on the Horror Film

Andrew Britton
Richard Lippe
Tony Williams
Robin Wood

Published by Festival of Festivals, Toronto.

Copyright (c) Robin Wood, Richard Lippe &
Festival of Festivals. 1979

All rights reserved.

 CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

On the set of Murders In The Rue Morgue frontispiece

Return Of The Repressed, World Q(Gods And Monsters,
and the essay on Murnau's No~/eralll, originally appeared Introduction Robin Wood page 7
in Film Comment; Andrew Britton's articles on Jaws and
The Exorcist originally appeared in Movie. These are 2 Der Erlkonig: Robin Wood page 29
reprinted by permission of the editors, to whom we The Ambiguities of Horror
express our gratitude.
•3 The Devil, Probably: Andrew Britton page 34
We want to thank John Anderson of Dabara Films for his The Symbolism of Evil
valuable advice and help in arranging screenings.
4 The Dark Mirror: Robin Wood page 43
We also wish to thank Martine Becu for all the hard
work she has put into the production of this book.
Murnau's Nosferatu

Robin Wood & Richard Lippe 5 The Exorcist Andrew Britton page 50

6 Jaws Andrew Britton page 54

7 Sisters Robin Wood page 59

Stills courtesy of Universal Pictures, Ontario Film
Institute, and Gary Williams. 8 Full Circle: page 65
Richard Lippe
A Circle of Deception
Edited by Robin Wood & Richard Lippe.
9 Assault on Precinct 13: Tony Williams page 67
The Mechanics of Repression
Designed by Richard Lippe & Martine Becu.
'10 World of Gods & Monsters: Robin Wood page 75
The Films of Larry Cohen

11 The Horror of Martin Richard Lippe page 87

12 Apocalypse Now: Robin Wood page 91

Notes on the Living Dead

13 Index

Cover: John Amplas in Martin

 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
AMERICAN HORROR FILM
Part I : Repression, the Other, the Monster
Part II : Return of the Repressed
Part III: The Reactionary Wing
I. REPRESSION, THE OTHER, THE MONSTER
The most significant development - in
film criticism, and in progressive ideas
generally - of the last few decades has
clearly been the increasing confluence of
Marx and Freud, or more precisely of the tra-
ditions of thought arising from them: the
recognition that social revolution and sexual
revolution are inseparably linked and necess-
ary to each other. From Marx we derive our
awareness of the dominant ideology - the
ideology of bourgeois capitalism - as an
insidious all-pervasive force capable of con-
cealment behind the most protean disguises,
and the necessity of expo~ing its operation
whenever and wherever possible. It is psy-
choanalytic theory that has provided (without.
Freud's awareness of the full revolutionary
potential of what he was unleashing) the
most effective means of examining the ways
in which that ideology is transmitted and per-
petuated, centrally through the institu-
tionalization of the patriarchal nuclear
family. The battle for liberation, the battle
against oppression (whether economic, legal
or ideological), gains enormous extra signifi-
cance through the addition of that term
'patriarchal', since patriarchy long precedes
and far e.xt:eeds what we call capitalism. It is
here, through the medium of psychoanalytic
theory, that Feminism and Gay Liberation
join forces with Marxism in their progress
towards a common aim, the overthrow of
patriarchal capitalist ideology and the struc-
tures and institutions that sustain it and are
sustained by it.
Psychoanalytic theory, like Marxism, now
provides various models, inflecting basic pre-
mises in significantly different ways. It is not
certain that the Lacanian model promoted by
(among others) Screen magazine is the most
-~ ~: -· I
7
satisfactory (see Andrew Britton's article,
'The Ideology of Screen: in Movie 26). On
the evidence so far it seems certainly not the
most potentially effective. leading either to
paralysis or to a new academicism perhaps
more sterile than the old, and driving its stu-
dents into monastic cells rather than the
streets. I want to indicate briefly a possible
alternative model, developed out of Freud by
Marcuse and given definitive formulation in
a recent book by Gad Horowitz, Repression,
(University of Toronto Press): a model that
enables us to connect theory closely with the
ways we actually think and feel and conduct
our lives - those daily practicalities from
which the theorizing of Screen seems often so
remote. The book's sub-title is 'Basic and
Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic
Theory: Freud, Reich, Marcuse'. It is the
crucial distinction between basic and surplus
repression that is so useful in relation to
direct political militancy and so suggestive in
relation to the reading of our cultural artifacts
(among them our horror films), and through
them, our culture itself. Horowitz has
devoted a dense, often difficult and closely
argued book to the subject; in the space at my
disposal I can offer only a bald and simplified
account.
Basic repression is universal, necessary
and inescapable. lt is what makes possible
our development from an uncoordinated
animal capable oflittle beyond screaming and
convulsions into a human being; it is bound
up with the ability to accept the postpone-
ment of gratification, with the development
of our thought and memory processes, of our
capacity for self-control, of our recognition of
and consideration for other people. Surplus
repression, on the other hand, is specific to a
 particular culture and is the process whereby
people are conditioned from earliest infancy
to take on predetermined roles within that
culture. In terms of our own culture, then:
basic repression makes us distinctively
human, capable of directing our own lives
and co-existing with others; surplus repres-
sion makes us (if it works) into monogamous
heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalists
('bourgeois' even if we are born into the
proletariat, for we are talking here of
ideological norms rather than material
status). /fit works: if it doesn't, the result is
either a neurotic or a revolutionary (or both),
and if revolutionaries account for a very
small proportion of the population, neurotics
account for a very large one. Hardly surpris-
ing. All known existing societies are to some
degree surplus-repressive, but the degree
varies enormously, from the trivial to the
overwhelming. Freud saw long ago that our
own civilization had reached a point where
the burden of repression was becoming all-
but-insupportable, an insight Horowitz
(following Marcuse) brilliantly relates to
Marx's theory of alienated labour: the most
immediately obvious characteristics of life in
our culture are frustration, dissatisfaction,
anxiety, greed, possessiveness, jealousy,
neuroticism: no more than what psy-
choanalytic theory shows to be the logical
product of patriarchal capitalism. What needs
to be stressed is that the kind of challenges
now being made to the system - and the
kind of perceptions and recognitions that
structure those challenges and give them
impetus - become possible (become in the
literal sense thinkable) only in the circums-
tances of the system's imminent disintegra-
tion. While the system retained sufficient
conviction, credibility and show of coherence
to suppress them, it did so. The struggle for
liberation is not utopian, but a practical
necessity.
Given that our culture offers an extreme
example of surplus repressiveness, one can
ask -~p~L_e){_llCtl.y~_in1heinterests of a"flenated ..
labour and t~___patria.r~hal family, is
repressed. One needs here-both to -dis-
tmguish between the concepts of repression
and oppression, and to suggest the continuity
between them. In psychoanalytic terms, what
is repressedis ~nscTo-us
-m.Tna (except through analysis or, if one can
penetrate their disguises, in dreams). We
may also not be conscious of ways in which
we are oppressed, but it is much easier to
become so: we are oppressed by something
'out there'. Qne might .p.erhaps.define.repres-
sion as fully. internalized oppression (while
reminding_ 0\Ir~t::lves thai all the grot~ndwork
·9r repression is laid in infancy), thereby sug-
gesting both the difference and the connec-
tion. A specific example may make this
clearer: our social structure demands the
repression of the bisexuality that psy-
choanalysis shows to be the natural heritage
of every human individual, and the oppres-
sion of homosexuals: obviously, the two
phenomena are not identical, but equally
obviously they are closely connected. What
_escapes repression has to be dealt with by
oppression.
.~h_a_hjhen, is repressed in our culture?
first, sexuaCenergy.itself, together with its
possible successful sublimation into non-sex-
ual creativity - sexuality being the source of
creative energy in general. The""'ioeal'.inhabi-
tant of oiii culture will be the individual
whose sexuality is sufficiently fulfilled by the
monogamous heterosexual union necessary
for the repfouuctibn of future ideal inhabi-
tants, and whose sublimated sexuality
(creativity) is sufficiently fulfilled in the
totally non-creative and non-fulfilling labour
(whether in factory or office) to which our
society dooms the overwhelming majority of
its members. The 'ideal', in oth{}r wm'ds;is as
close as.. J2Q$sible to an automaton in whom
. both sexual-and energy
Tntelfecill<tJ has been
reduceatoTrnTrtinium:·otherwise, the 'ideal'
is-a--contractiction.Tri--terms and a logical
impossibility, hence the necessary frustration,
anxiety and neuroticism of our culture.
Secondly, bisexuality - which should be
understood both literally (in terms of possi-
ble sexual orientation and practice) and in a '
more general sense. Bisexuality represents I
the most obvious andairecraffront to the
principle or··monogamy i:l_nd .it!'> SUQPOrtive
romantic myth of 'the_one right person'; the
homosexual impulse-In both men and
woinen represents the most obvious threat to
the 'norm' ofsexuality as reproductive and
restricted bY the 'ideal' of family. But more
generally we confront here the whole edifice
of clear-cut sexual differentiation that
bourgeois-capitalist ideology erects on the
flimsy and dubious foundations of biological
difference: the social norms of masculinity
anc!.f~!:!J.jniri{ty, the social definitions of man-
liness and womanliness, the whole vast
appiuaiiis-ofoppresslve male/female myths,
the systematic repression from infancy ('blue
for a boy ... ') of the man's 'femininity' and
the woman's masculinity', in the interests of
forming human beings for specific predeter-
mined social roles.
Thirdly, the particularly severe repression
of female sexuality/creativity; the attribution
to the female of passivity, her preparation for
her subordinate and dependent role in our
culture. Clearly, a crucial aspect of the
repression of bisexuality is the denial to
women of drives culturally associated with
masculinity: activeness, aggression, self-
assertion, organizational power, creativity
itself.
Fourthly - and fundamentally - the
repression of the sexuality of children, taking
different forms from infancy, through
'latency' and puberty, and into adolescence
- the process moving, indeed, from repres-
sion to oppression, from the denial of the
infant's nature as sexual being to the veto on
the expression of sexuality before marriage.
None of these forms of repression is
necessary for the existence of civilisation in
some form (i.e., none is 'basic') - for the
development of our human-ness. Indeed,
they impose limitations and restrictions on
that development, stunting human potential.
All are the outcome of the requirements of
the particular, surplus-repressive, civilisation
in which we live.
Closely linked to the concept of repression
- indeed, truly inseparable from it - is
another concept necessary to an understand-
ing of ideology on which psychoanalysis
throws much light, the concept of 'the
Other': that which bourgeois ideology caiill01
recognize or accept but must deal with (as
Barthes suggests in Mythologies) in one of
two ways: either by rejecting and if possible
annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and
assimilating it, converting it as far as possible
into a replica of itself. Th_e concegt_Q[ O!ller-
ness can .be theorized -in many ways and on
many levels. Its psychoanalytic slgt1ificance
resides in the fact that it functions not simply
as something external to tt1e__C.I.liture orJ<;>the
self, buf lil~o aswha1 Is repressed (but never
9
destroyed) in the self and projected outwards
in order to be hated and disowned. A par-
ticularly vivid example - and one that
throws iTg-ht-ona-great many classical
Westerns - is the relationship of the Puritan
settlers to the Indians in the early days of
America. The Puritans rejected any percep-
tion that the-Jridlansbadaculture, a civilisa-
tion, of their own; they perceived them not
merely as savage but, literally, as devils or
the spawn of the Devil; and, since the Devil
and sexuality are inextricably linked in the
Puritan consciousness, theY perceived them
as sexually promiscuous, cr_eatures of
unbridled libido. The connecTion between
this view of the Indian and Puritan repression
is obvious: a classic and extreme case of the
projection on to the Other of what is
repressed within the Self, in order that it can
be discredited, disowned~ and if possible
annihilated. It is repression, in other words;
that makes impossible the healthy alterna-1
tive: the full recognition and acceptance of
the Other's autonomy and right to exist.
Some versions then, of the figure of the
Other as it operates within our culture, of its
relation to repression and oppression, and of
how it is characteristically dealt with:
1. Quite simply, other people. It is logical
and probable that under capitalism all human
relations will be characterized by power,
dominance, possessiveness, manipulation:
the extension into relationships of the pro-
perty-principle. Given the subordinate and
dependent position of women, this is
especially true of the culture's central rela-
tionship, the male/female, and explains why
marriage as we have it is characteristically a
kind of mutual imperialism/colonization, an
exchange of different forms of possession
and dependence, both economic and emo-
tional. In theory, relations between people of
the same sex stand more chance of evading
this contamination, but in practice most gay
and lesbian relationships tend to rely on
heterosexual models. The 'otherness', the
autonomy, of the partner, her/his right to
freedom and independence of being, is per-
ceived as a threat to the possession/depen-
dence principle and denied.
2. Woman. In a male-dominated culture,
where power, money, law, social institutions
are controlled by past, present and future
patriarchs, woman as the Other assumes par-
 ticular significance. The dominant images of
women in our culture are entirely male-cre-
ated and male-controlled. Woman's
autonomy and i11g~pendence are denied; on
"to women men project their own innate,
repressed femininity in order to disown it as
inferior (to be called 'unmanly' - i.e., like a
woman - is the supreme insult).
3. The proletariat - in so far as it still has
any autonomous existence, escaping its col-
onization by bourgeois ideology. It remains,
at least, a conveniently available object for
projection: the bourgeois obsession with
cleanliness, which psychoanalysis shows to
be closely associated, as outward symptom,
with sexual repression, and bourgeois sexual
i. repression itself, find their inverse reflec-
.: tions in the myths of working-class squalor
and sexuality.
4. Other cultures. If they are sufficiently
remote, no problem: they can be
simultaneously deprived of their true
character and exoticized (e.g. Polynesian
cultures as embodied by Dorothy Lamour).
If they are inconveniently close, we already
have the example of the American Indian:
the procedure is very precisely represented in
Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk, with its
double vision of the Indians as 'sons of
Belial' fit only for extermination, or the
Christianized, domesticated, servile and
(hopefully) comic Blueback.
5. Ethnic groups within the culture.
7. Deviations from ideological sexual
norms - notably bisexuality and homosex-
uality. One of the clearest instances of the
operation of the repression/projection
mechanism: homophobia (the irrational
hatred and fear of homosexuals) is only
explicable as the outcome of the unsuccessful
repression of bisexual tendencies: what is
hated in others is what is rejected (but none-
theless continues to exist) within the self.
8. Children. When we have worked our
way illrougfiatl the other liberation move-
ments, we may discover that children are the
most oppressed section of the population
(unfortunately, we cannot expect ,o liberate
our children until we have successfully liber-
ated ourselves) ..Most clearly of all, the
'otherness' of children (see Freudian theo-
ries of infantile sexuality) is. Jhat which is
repressed within ourselves, its expression
therefore hated in others: what the previous
generation repressed in us, and what we, in
turn, repress ·in our children, seeking to
mould them into replicas of ourselves, per-
petuators of a discredited tradition.
All this may seem to have taken us rather
far from our immediate subject. In fact, I
have been laying the foundations, stone by
stone, for a theory of the American horror
film which (without being exhaustive)
should provide us with a means of approach-
ing the films seriously and responsibly. One
could, I think, approach any of the genres
monsters representing a generalized sexual
threat would be interminable; also, th41
generalized concept of 'otherness' offered b~
the first item on my list cannot be repre-
sented by specific films.
Female sexuality. Earlier examples are the
panther-woman of Island of Lost Souls and
the heroine of Cat People (the association of
women with cats runs right through
and beyond the Hollywood cinema, cutting
across periods and genres from Bringing up
Baby to Alien); but the definitive Feminist
horror film is clearly De Palma's Sisters (co-
scripted by the director and Louisa Rose)
among the most complete and rigorous
analyses of the oppression of women under
patriarchal culture in the whole popular
cinema.
The proletariat. I would claim here Whale's
Frankenstein, partly on the strength of its per-
vasive class references, more on the strength
of Karloff's costume: Frankenstein could
have dressed his creature in top hat, white tie
and tails, but in fact chose labourer's clothes.
Less disputable, in recent years we have The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with its monstrous
family of retired, but still practising,
slaughterhouse workers; the underprivileged
devil-worshippers of Race with the Devil; and
the revolutionary army of Assault on Precinct
.
1~
be claimed as implicitly (on certain levels)
identifying their monsters with repressed
homosexuality. Recent, less arguable, ins-
tances are Dr. Frank 'n' Furter of The
Rocky Horror Picture Show (he, not his crea-
tion, is clearly the film's real monster) and,
more impressively, the bisexual god of Larry
Cohen's Demon.
Children. Since Rosemary "s Baby children
have figured prominently in horror films as
the monster or its medium: The Exorcist, The
Omen, etc. Cohen's two It's Alive films again
offer perhaps the most interesting and
impressive example. There is also the
'Michael of Halloween's remarkable opening.
· This offers us no more than a beginning,
from which one might proceed to interpret
specific horror films in detail as well as
further exploring the genre's social signifi-
cance, the insights it offers into our culture. I
shall add here simply that these notions of
repression and the Other afford us not
merely a means of access but a rudimentary
categorization of horror films in social/politi-
cal terms, distinguishing the progressive
from the reactionary; the criterion being the
way in which the monster is presented and
defined.

Other cultures. In the 30's the monster ******

Again, an easily available projection-object
(myths of black sexuality, 'animality', etc.).
Acceptable in either of two ways: either they
keep to their ghettoes and don't trouble us
with their 'otherness', or they behave as we
do and become replicas of the good
bourgeois, their otherness reduced to the one
unfortunate difference of colour. We are
more likely to invite a Pakistani to dinner if
he dresses in a business suit.
6. Alternative ideologies or political
systems. The exemplary case is of course
Marxism, the strategy that of parody. Still
almost totally repressed within our pre-
university education system (despite the key
importance of Marx - whatever way you
look at it - in the development of twentieth
century thought), Marxism exists generally
in our culture only in the form of bourgeois
myth that renders it indistinguishable from
Stalinism (rather like confusing the teachings
of Christ with the Spanish Inquisition).
10
from the same starting-point; it is the horror
film that responds in the most CTear~cutand
direct way; because central to it is the actual
.clramatization of the dual concept the
repressed/the other, in the figure of the
Monster. One might say that thefri.i_e.sl.ibject
of the horror genre is the struggle for recog-
nition of all that our civilis11tion rei)resses or
oppresses: its re-emergence dramatized, as in
our nightmlir~s, asan object ofhorror, a mat-
ter for terror, the 'happy enqjpg' (when it
exists) typically signifylngthe restoration of
repression. I tfiink mYanalysisof what is
repressed, combined with my account of the
Other as it functions within our culture, will
be found to offer a comprehensive survey of
horror film monsters from German Expres-
sionism on. It is possible to produce
'monstrous' embodiments of virtually every
item in the list. Let me preface this by saying
that the general sexual content of the horror
film has long been recognized, and the list of
was almost invariably foreign; the rebellious
animal-humans of Island of Lost Souls
(though created by the white man's science)
on one level clearly signify a 'savage', unsuc-
cessfully colonized culture. Recently, one
horror film, The Manitou, identified the
monster with the American Indian (Prophecy
plays tantalizingly with this possibility - also
linking it to urban blacks - before opting for
the altogether safer and less interesting
explanation of industrial pollution).
Ethnic Groups. The Possession of Joel
Delaney links diabolic possession with Puerto
Ricans; blacks (and a leader clad as an
Indian) are prominent, again, in Assault on
Precinct 13 's monstrous army.
Alternative ideologies. The 50's science-fic-
tion cycle of invasion movies are generally
regarded as being concerned with the Com-
munist threat.
Homosexuality and bisexuality. Both Mur-
nau's Nosferatuand Whale's Frankenstein can
II
 11. RETURN OF THE REPRESSED
I want first to offer a series of general pro-
positions about the American horror film,
then attempt to define the particular nature
of its evolution in the Sixties and Seventies.
I Popularity and disreputability.
The horror film has consistently been one
of the most popular and, at the same time,
the most disreputable of Hollywood genres.
The popularity itself has a peculiar charac-
teristic that sets the horror film apart from
other genres: it is restricted to aficionados
and complemented by total rejection, people
tending to go to horror films either
obsessively or not at all. They are dismissed
with contempt by the majority of reviewer-
critics, or simply ignored. (The situation has
changed somewhat since Psycho. which
conferred on the horror film something of
the dignity that Stagecoach conferred on the
Western, but the disdain still largely con-
tinues. I have read no serious or illuminating
accounts of, for example, Raw Meat, It's
Alive, or The Hills Have Eyes .. ) The
popularity, however, also continues. Most
horror fil · the -t
don tare those with overt intellectual pr~­
sions, obvious! "d" · It" work od
o!_it:it 1'o De!!!Qn) and Exorcist ll Another
psycologJcally mterestmg aspect of this
popularity is that many people who go
regularly to horror films profess to ridicule
them and go in order to laugh - which is not
true, generally speaking, of the Western or
the gangster movie.
2. Dreams and Nightmares.
The analogy frequently invoked between
films and dreams is usually concerned with
the experience of the audience. The spectator
sits in darkness, and the sort of involvement
the entertainment film invites necessitates a
certain switching-off of consciousness, a los-j
ing of oneself in a fantasy-experience. But
the analogy is also useful from the point of
view of the filmmakers. Dreams - the
embodiment of repressed desires, tensions,
fears that our conscious mind rejects -
become possible when the "censor" that
guards our subconscious relaxes in sleep,
though even then the desires can only
# . .1
13
Assault on the home (Ni ht of the Livin Dead
emerge in disguise, as fantasies that are
"innocent" or apparently meaningless.
One of the functions of the concept of
"entertainment" - by definition, that which
we don't take seriously, or think about much
("It's only entertainment") - is to act as a
kind of partial sleep of consciousness. For the
filmmakers as well as for the audience, full
awareness stops at the level of plot, action,
and character, in which the most dangerous
and subversive implications can disguise
themselves and escape detection. This is why
seemingly innocuous genre movies can be far
more radical and fundamentally undermining
than works of conscious social criticism,
which must always concern themselves with
the possibility of reforming aspects of a social
system whose basic rightness must not be
challenged. The old tenq(.!ncy to.dismiss the
Hollywood cine.ma as escapist always defined
escape inereiy-riega"t'ively-as escape"from, but
escape TO"glcany· musT also be ·escape to.
. Drearr1s are.. itfso._escapes, from the
unresolved tensions of our lives into fan-
tasies. Yet the fantasies are not meaningless;
they can represent attempts to resolve those
tensions in more radical ways than our con-
sciousness can countenance.
Popular films, then, respond to interpreta-
tion as at once the personal dreams of their
makers and the collective dreams of their
audiences - the fusion made possible by the
shared structures of a common ideology. It
becomes easy, if this is granted, to offer a
simple definition of horror films: they are our
s:oJiec!J.\'.t: ni_g_h !IJ!<lre~. The conditions under
which a dream becomes a nightmare are (a)
that the repressed wish is, from the point of
view of consciousness, so terrible that it must
be repudiated as loathsome, and (b) that it is
so strong and powerful as to constitute a
serious threat. The disreputability noted
above - the general agreement that horror
films are not to be taken seriously - works
clearly for the genre viewed from this posi-
tion. The censor (in both the common and
the Freudian sense) is lulled into sleep and
relaxes vigilance.
3. The Surrealists. It is worth noting
here that one group of intellectuals did take
American horror movies very seriously
indeed: the writers, painters, and filmmakers
of the Surrealist movement. Luis Bunuel
numbers The Beast with Five Fingers among
his favorite films and paid homage to it in The
Exterminating Angel; and Georges Franju, an
heir of the Surrealists, numbers The Fly
among his. The association is highly signifi-
cant, given the commitment of the Sur-
realists to Freud, the unconscious, dreams,
and the overthrow of repression.
4. Basic Formula. At this stage it is necess-
ary to offer a simple and obvious basic for-
mula for the horror film: normality is
threatened by the Monster. I use "nor-
mality" here in a strictly non-evaluative
sense. to mean simply "conformity to the
dominant social norms"~ one must firmly
resist the common tendency to treat the word
as if it were more or less synonymous with
"health".
The very simplicity of this formula has a
number of advantages:
a. It covers the entire range of horror
films, being applicable whether the Monster
is a vampire, a giant gorilla, an extrater-
restrial invader, an amorphous gooey mass,
or a child possessed by the Devil, and this
makes it possible to connect the most
seemingly heterogeneous movies.
b. It suggests the possibility of extension
to other genres: substitute for "Monster" the
term "Indians," for example, and one has a
formula for a large number of classical
Westerns.
c. Although so simple, the formula pro- 1
vides three variables: normality, thei
Monster, and, crucially, the relationship bet-'
ween the two. The definition of normality in
horror films is in general boringly constant:
the heterosexual monogamous couple, the;
family, and the social institutions (police,/
church, armed forces) that support andl
defend them. The Monster is, of course,\
much more protean, changing from period to\
period as society's basic fears clothe them-
selves in fashionable or immediately accessi-
ble garments- rather as dreams use material
from recent memory to express conflicts or
desires that may go back to early childhood.
It is the third variable, the relationship
between normality and the Monster, that
~onstitutes the essential subject of the horror
frilm. It, too, changes and develops, the
development taking the form of a long pro-
cess of clarification or revelation. The rela-
tionship has one privileged form: the figure
of the doppelganger, alter ego, or double, a
I
figure that has recurred constantly in
Western culture, especially during the past
hundred years. The locus classicus is Steven-
son's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where nor-
mality and Monster are two aspects of the
same person. The figure recurs throughout
two major sources of the American horror
film, German Expressionist cinema (the two
Marias of Metropolis, the presentation of pro-
tagonist and vampire as mirror reflections in
Nosferatu, the very title of F. W. Murnau's
lost Jekyll-and-Hyde film Der Januskopj),
and the tales of Poe. Variants can be traced in
such oppositions as Ahab/the white whale in
Moby Dick and Ethan/Scar in The Searchers.
The Westerns of Anthony Mann are rich in
doubles, often contained within families or
family patterns~ Man of the West, a film that
relates very suggestively to the horror genre,
represents the fullest elaboration.
I shall limit myself for the moment to one
example from the horror film, choosing it
partly because· it is so central, partly because
the motif is there less obvious, partially dis-
guised, partly because it points forward to
Larry Cohen and It's A live: the relationship of
Monster to creator in the Frankenstein films.
Their identity is made explicit in Son of
Frankenstein. the most intelligent of the
Universal series, near the start of which the
title figure (Basil Rathbone) complains bit-
terly that everyone believes "Frankenstein"
to be the name of the monster. (We discover
subsequently that the town has also come to
be called Frankenstein, the symbiosis of
Monster and creator spreading over the
entire environment.) But we should be
alerted to the relationship's true significance
from the moment in the James Whale origi-
nal where Frankenstein's decision to create
his monster is juxtaposed very precisely with
1
his decision to become engaged. The dop-
pelganger motif reveals the Monster as nor-
mality's shadow.
5. Ambivalence. The principle of ambiva-
lence is most eloquently elaborated in A. P.
Rossiter'sAngel with Horns,among the most
brilliant of all books on Shakespeare.
Rossiter first expounds it with reference to
Richard III. Richard, the "angel with horns,"
both horrifies us with his evil and delights us
with his intellect, his art, his audacity~ while
our moral sense is appalled by his outrages,
another part of us gleefully identifies with
14
him. The application of this to the horror film
is clear. Few horror films have totally unsym-
pathetic Monsters (The Thing is a significant
exception); in many (notably the Franken-
stein films) the Monster is clearly the emo-
tional centre, and much more human than
the cardboard representatives of normality.
The Frankenstein monster suffers, weeps,
responds to music, longs to relate to people;
Henry and Elizabeth merely declaim
histrionically. Even in Son of Frankenstein -
the film in which the restructured monster is
explicitly designated evil and superhuman -
the monster's emotional commitment to
Ygor and grief over his death carries far
greater weight than any of the other relation-
ships in the film.
But the principle goes far beyond the
Monster's being sympathetic. Ambivalence
extends to our attitude to normality. Central
to the effect and fascination of horror films is
their fulfillment of our nightmare wish to
smash the norms that oppress us and which
our moral conditioning teaches us to revere.
The overwhelming commercial success of
The Omen cannot possibly be explained in
terms of a simple, unequivocal horror at the-
devil's progress.
6. Freudian Theses. Finally, one can
simply state the two elementary (and closely
interconnected) Freudian theses that struc-
ture this article: that in a society built on
monogamy and family there will be an enor-
mous surplus of sexual energy that will have
to be repressed; and that what is repressed
must always strive to return.
Before considering how the horror film
has developed in the past decade, I want to
test the validity of the above ideas by apply-
ing them to a classical horror film. I have
chosen Robert Florey's Murders in the Rue
Morgue (1932) - because it is a highly dis-
tinguished example, and generally neglected;
because its images suggest Surrealism as
much as Expressionism; and because it
occupies a particularly interesting place in the
genre's evolution, linking two of the most
famous, though most disparate, horror films
ever made. On the one hand it looks back
very clearly to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: the
Expressionist sets and lighting, with Karl
Freund as cinematographer; the fairground
that provides the starting point for the action;
15
the figure of the diabolical doctor, who shows
off his exhibit and later sends it to kidnap the
heroine; the flight over the rooftops. On the
other hand it looks forward, equally clearly,
to King Kong: instead of Caligari's sleep-
walker, a gorilla, which falls in love with the
heroine, abducts her at night and is shot
down from a roof. It is as important to notice
the basic motifs that recur obstinately
throughout the evolution of the horror film
in Western culture as it is to be aware of the
detailed particularities of individual films.
Murders in the Rue Morgue responds well to
the application of my formula.
a. Normality. The film is quite obsessive
about its heterosexual couples. At the open-
ing, we have two couples responding to the
various spectacles of the fairground; there is
a scene in the middle where numerous
carefree couples disport themselves pictures-
quely amid nature. Crucial to the film,
however, is Pierre's love-speech to Camille
on her balcony, with its exaggerated
emphasis on purity: she is both a "flower"
and a "star"; she is told not to be curious
about what goes on in the houses of the city
around them ("Better not to know"); she is
also prevented from obtaining knowledge of
the nature of Pierre's activities in the morgue
(a "horrid old place"). Even the usual gay
stereotype, Pierre's plump and effeminate
friend, fits very well into the pattern. He is
provided with a girl friend, to recuperate him
into the heterosexual coupling of normality.
His relationship with Pierre (they share an
apartment, he wears an apron, cooks the din-
ner, and fusses) is a parody of bourgeois
marriage, the incongruity underlining the
relationship's repressive sexlessness. And he
underlines the attempts at separating "pure"
normality from the pervasive contamination
of outside forces by complaining that Pierre
"brings the morgue into their home."
b. The Monster. Murders in the Rue
Morgue has a divided Monster, a
phenomenon not uncommon in the horror
film. On The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari the
Monster is both Caligari and Cesar; in Island
of Lost Souls both Dr. Moreau and his
creatures.) Here the division is tripartite: Dr.
Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), his servant-assistant,
and Erik, "the beast with a human soul."
The servant's role is small, but important
because of his appearance: half-human, half-
 animal, he bridges the gap between Mirakle
and Erik. Scientist and ape are linked,
however, in another way: Mirakle himself
lusts after Camille, and Erik (the animal
extension of himself) represents the instru-
ment for the satisfaction of that lust.
Together, they combine the two great,
apparently contradictory, dreads of American
culture as expressed in its cinema: intellec-
tuality and eroticism.
c. Relationship. The film's superficial pro-
ject is to insist that purity-normality can be
separated from contaminating eroticism-
degradation; its deeper project is to
demonstrate the impossibility of such a
separation. In the opening sequence, the cou-
ples view a series of fairground acts as specta-
cles (the separation of stage from audience
seeming to guarantee safety): an erotic dance
by "Arabian'' girls, a Wild Red Indian show,
and finally Erik the ape. The association of
the three is suggestive of the link between
the horror film and the Western- the link of
Horror, Indians, and released libido. In each
case the separation of show and audience is
shown to be precarious: Pierre's sidekick asks
his girl if she "could learn to do that dance"
for him; two spectators adopt the name
"apache" to apply to the savages of Paris; the
audience enters the third booth between the
legs of an enormous painted ape, where its
phallus would be. Dr. Mirakle's introduction
uses evolutionary theory to deny separation:
Erik is "the darkness at the dawn of Man."
His subsequent experiments are carried out
to prove that Erik's blood can be "mixed
with the blood of man" - and as the experi-
ments all involve women, the sexual con-
notations are plain.
Though not obvious, the "double" motif
subtly structures the film. It comes nearest to
explicitness in the effeminate friend's
remark that Pierre is becoming fanatical,
"like that Dr. Mirakle." But Pierre and
Mirakle are paralleled repeatedly, both in the
construction of the scenario and through the
mise-en-scene. At the end of the balcony love
scene Florey cuts from the 'lovers' kiss to
Mirakle and Erik watching from their car-
riage. Later, the juxtaposition is reversed, the
camera panning from Mirakle-Erik lurking in
the shadows to Pierre-Camille embracing on
the balcony; it is as if the Monster were wait-
ing to be released by the kiss. Mirakle sends
16
Camille a bonnet; she assumes it is from
Pierre. After Pierre leaves her at night, there
is a knock at her door. She assumes it is
Pierre come back and opens; it is Mirakle.
Bearing in mind that Mirakle and Erik are not
really distinct from one another, one must
see Pierre and this composite Monster
paralleled throughout as rival mates for
Camille, like Jonathan and Nosferatu, or like
David Ladd and the underworld man of Raw
Meat. (The motif's recurrence across
different periods and different continents
testifies to its importance). At the climax,
Pierre and Erik confront each other like mir-
ror images on the rooftop, and Erik is shot
down by Pierre: the hero's drive is to destroy
the doppelganger who embodies his
repressed self.
Murders in the Rue Morgue is fascinating
for its unresolved self-contradiction. In the
fairground, Mirakle is denounced as a
heretic, in the name of the Biblical/Christian
tradition of God's creation of man; the whole
notion of purity/normality clearly associates
with this - explicitly, in the very prominent,
carefully lit crucifix above Camille's bed. Yet
Mirakle's Darwinian theories are also
obviously meant to be correct. Erik and
humanity are not separable; the ape exists in
all of us; the "morgue" cannot be excluded
from the "home."
The horror film since the Sixties has been
dominated by five recurrent motifs. The list
of examples offered in each case begins with
what I take to be the decisive source-film of
each trend - not necessarily the first, but the
film that, because of its distinction or
popularity, can be thought of as responsible
for the ensuing cycle. I have included a few
British films that seem to me American-
derived (Raw Meat, arguably the finest Bri-
tish horror film, was directed by an
American, Gary Sherman); they lie outside
the main British tradition represented by
Hammer Productions, a tradition very
intelligently treated in David Pirie's book A
Heritage of Horror. The lists are not, of
course, meant to be exhaustive.
a. T Monster as human psychotic or
schizop~nic: ~syc o; om1c1 iiCl\epiilsion,
Sisters, Schizo.
b. The revenge of Nature: The Birds;
Frogs, Night of the Lepus, Day of the Animals,
Squirm.
c. Satanism, diabolic possession, the Anti-
christ: Rosemary's Baby; The Exorcist, The
Omen, The Possession of Joel Delaney, The
Car, God Told Me To (Demon), and Race With
the Devil, which, along with High Plains
Drifter, interestingly connects this motif with
the Western.
d. The Terrible Child (often closely con-
nected to the above). To the first three films
in (c) add: Night of the Living Dead, Hands of
the Ripper, It's Alive, Cathy's Curse; also,
although here the "children" are older, Car-
rie and The Fury.
e. Cannibalism: Night of the Living Dead;
Raw Meat, Frightmare, The Texas Chainsaw
M{lSS1lC.L£.. The Hills Have Eyes.
These apparently heterogeneous motif~
are drawn deeper together by a single unify4/
ing master-figure: the Family. The connec-
tion is most tenuous and intermittent in what!
has proved, on the whole, the least interest-
ing and productive of these concurrent
cycles, the "revenge of Nature" films; but
even there, in the more distinguished exam-
ples (outstandingly, of course, The Birds, but
also in Squirm), the attacks are linked to, or
seem triggered off by, familial or sexual ten-
sions .. Elsewhere, the connection of the
Family to Horror has become over-
whelmingly consistent: the psychotic/
schizophrenic, the Antichrist and the child-
monster- are all shown as products of the
family, whether the family itself is regarded
as guilty (the "psychotic" films) or innocent
(The Omen).
The "cannibalism" motif functions in two
ways. Occasionally members of a family
devour each other (Night of the Living Dead,
and P~Mrs. Bates is a metaphorll:aJ
canni~al w~o s;~ll~ up ~son). More fre-
quent y, Ca ll1 a ISm is the family's meansof
s@aining or nounsbini itself (1 he --reJ:as
Chamsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes).
Pete Walker's revoltingly gruesome and ugly
British horror film Frightmaredeserves a note
here, its central figure being a sweet and gen-
tle old mother who has the one unfortunate
flaw that she can't survive without eating
human flesh, a craving guiltily indulged by
her devoted husband.
17
If we see the evolution of the horror film
in terms of an inexorable "return of the
repressed," we will not be surprised by this
final emergence of the genre's real signifi-
cance - together with a sense that it is cur-
rently the most important of all American
genres and perhaps the most progressive,
even in its overt nihilism - in a period of
extreme cultural crisis and disintegration,
which alone offers the possibility of radical
change and rebuilding. To do justice to the
lengthy process of that emergence would
involve a dual investigation too complex for
the framework of this article: into the evolu-
tion of the horror film, and into the changing
treatment of the family in the Hollywood
cinema. I shall content myself.here with a few
further propositions.
I. The family (or marital) comedy in
which the Thirties and Forties are so rich,
turns sour (Father of the Bride, The Long Long
Trailer) in the Fifties and peters out; the
family horror film starts (not, of course,
without precedents) with Psycho in 1960, and
gains impetus with Rosemary's Baby and
Night of the Living Dead toward the end of the
decade.
2. As the horror film enters into its
apocalyptic phase, so does the Western. The
Wild Bunch appeared in 1969, the year after
Rosemary's Baby. And High Plains Drifter
(1973) fused their basic elements in a
Western in which the Hero from the Wilder-
ness turns out to be the Devil (or his emiss-
ary) and burns the town (American civilisa-
tion) to the ground after revealing it as fun-
damentally corrupt and renaming it Hell.
3. The family comedies that seemed so
innocent and celebratory in the Thirties and
Forties appear much less so in retrospect
from the Seventies. In my book Personal
Views I pointed to the remarkable anticipa-
tion in Meet Me in St. Louis of the Terrible
Child of the Seventies horror film, especially
in the two scenes (Halloween, and the
destruction of the snow people) in which
Margaret O'Brien symbolically kills parent-
figures. What is symbolic in 1944 becomes
literal in Night of the Living Dead, where a lit-
tle girl kills and devours her parents -just as
the implications of another anticipatory
family film of the early Forties, Shadow of a
Doubt, becomes literally enacted in It's A live
(the monster as product of the family).
 4. The process whereby horror becomes
associated with its true milieu, the family, is
reflected in its steady geographical progress
toward America.
a. In the Thirties, horror is always foreign.
The films are set in Paris (Murders in the Rue
Morgue), Middle Europe (Frankenstein, Dra-
cula) or on uncharted islands (/stand of Lost
Souls, King Kong); it is always external to
Americans, who may be attacked by it
physically but remain (superficially, that is)
uncontaminated by it morally. The designa-
tion of horror as foreign stands even when
the "normal" characters are Europeans. In
Murders in the Rue Morgue, for example, the
young couples, though nominally French, are
to all intents and purposes nice clean-living
Americans (with American accents); the
foreignness of the horror characters is
strongly underlined, both by Lugosi's accent
and by the fact that nobody knows where he
comes from. The foreignness of horror in the
Thirties can be interpreted in two ways:
simply, as a means of disavowal (horror
exists, but is un-American), and, more
interestingly and unconsciously, as a means
of locating horror as a "country of the
mind," as a psychological state: the films set
on uncharted (and usually nameless) islands
lend themselves particularly to interpretation
of this kind.
b. The Val Lewton films of the Forties are
in some ways outside the mainstream
development of the horror film. They seem
to have had little direct influence on its
evolution (certain occasional haunted-house
movies like The Uninvited and The Haunting
may owe something to them), though they
strikingly anticipate, by at least two decades,
some of the features of the modern horror
film. Cat People is centred on the repression
of female sexuality, in a period where the
Monster is almost invariably male and
phallic. (Other rare exceptions are the
panther-woman of Island of Lost Souls and,
presumably, Dracula's Daughter, which I
have not seen.) The Seventh Victim has strong
undertones of sibling envy and sexual
jealousy (the structure and editing of the last
scene suggesting that Jacqueline's suicide is
willed by her "nice" husband and sister
rather than by the "evil" devil-worshippers),
as well as containing striking anticipations of
18
Psycho and Rosemary's Baby; it is also set
firmly in America, with no attempt to disown
evil as foreign.
Above all, I Walked With A Zombie
explicitly locates horror at the heart of the
family, identifying it with sexual repressive-
ness in the cause of preserving family unity.
The Seventh Victim apart, horror is still associ-
ated with foreignness; Irena in Cat People is
from Serbia, Zombie is set in the West Indies,
The Leopard Man in Mexico, etc. Yet the best
of the series are concerned with the under-
mining of such distinctions - with the idea
that no one escapes contamination. Accor-
dingly, the concept of the Monster becomes
diffused through the film (closely linked to
the celebrated Lewton emphasis on
atmosphere, rather than overt shock), no
longer identified with a single figure.
Zombie, on·e of the finest of all American
horror films, carries this furthest. It is built
on an elaborate set of apparently clear-cut
structural oppositions - Canada- West
Indies, white-black, light-darkness, life-
death, science-black magic, Christianity-
Voodoo, conscious-unconscious, etc. - and
it proceeds systematically to blur all of them.
Jessica is both living and dead; Mrs. Rand
mixes medicine, Christianity, and voodoo;
the figurehead is both St. Sebastian and a
black slave; the black-white opposition is
poetically undercut in a complex patterning
of dresses and voodoo patches; the motiva-
tion of all the characters is called into ques-
tion; the messenger-zombie Carrefour can't
be kept out of the white domain.
c. The Fifties science fiction cycles project
horror onto either extraterrestrial invaders or
mutations from the insect world, but they are
usually set in America; even when they are
not (The Thing), the human characters are
American. The films, apparently simple,
prove on inspection often very difficult to
''read." The basic narrative-patterns of the
horror film repeat themselves obstinately and
continue to carry their traditional meanings,
but they are encrusted with layers of more·
transient, topical material. Them! for exam-
ple, seems to offer three layers of meaning.
Explicitly, it sets out to cope with the fear of
nuclear energy and atomic experiment: the
giant ants are mutants produced by the impersonal professional efficiency to ensure
radioactive aftermath of a bomb explosion; that the "kicks" inherent in its scenario are
they are eventually destroyed under the gui- not dulled. (I would add here that my
dance of a humane and benevolent science description above of Massacre as "raw,
embodied in the comfortingly paternal figure unpolished" refers to the overall effect of the
of Edmund Gwenn. The fear of Communist film, as it seems to be generally experienced.
infiltration also seems present, in the Its mise-en-scene is, without question, every-
emphasis on the ants as a subversive subter- where more intelligent, more inventive,
ranean army and on their elaborate com- more cinematically educated and sophisti-
munications system. Yet the film continues cated, than that of The Omen. Hooper's
to respond convincingly to the application of cinematic intelligence, indeed, becomes
my basic formula and its Freudian implica- more apparent on every viewing, as one gets
tions. The ants rise up from underground over the initial traumatizing impact and
(the unconscious); they kill by holding their learns to respect the pervasive felicities of
victims and injecting into them huge camera placement and movement.
(excessive) quantities of formic acid (the In obvious ways The Omen is old-
release of repressed phallic energy); and both fashioned, traditional, reactionary: the
the opening and final climax of the film are "goodness" of the family unit isn't ques-
centered on the destruction (respectively tioned, "horror" is disowned by having the
actual and potential) of family groups. devil-child a product of the Old World,
unwittingly adopted into the American
family, the devil-child and his independent-
Since Psycho, the Hollywood cinema has
female guardian (loosely interpretable in
implicitly recognized Horror as both
American and familial. I want to conclude "mythic" terms as representing child libera-
tion and women's liberation) are regarded as
this section by briefly examining two key
works of recent years that offer particularly purely evil (oh for a cinematic Blake to
reverse all the terms).
illuminating and suggestive contrasts and
comparisons: The Omen and The Texas Yet the film remains of great interest. It
is about the end of the world, but the
Chainsaw Massacre.
One can partly define the nature of each "world" the film envisages ending is very
particularly defined within it: the bourgeois
by means of a chart of oppositions:
capitalist patriarchal Establishment. Here
"normality" is not merely threatened by the
The Omen monster, but totally annihilated: the state,
the church, the family. The principle of
big budget low budget ambivalence must once again be invoked:
glossy pro- raw, with a film so shrewdly calculated for box-of-
duction values unpolished fice response, it is legitimate to ask what
stars unknown actors general satisfaction it offers its audience.
bourgeois non bourgeois Superficially, the satisfaction of finding
entertainment "exploitation" traditional values reaffirmed (even if "our"
Good Taste Bad Taste world is ending, it was still the good, right,
"good" family "bad" family true one); more deeply, and far more power-
the Monster the Monster fully, under cover of this, the satisfaction of
imported from indigenously the ruthless logic with which the premise is
Europe American carried through - the supreme satisfaction
child destroys parent-figures (masquerading as the final horror) being the
parents destroy "children'· revelation, as the camera cranes down in the
traditional traditional last shot, that the Devil has been adopted by
·;alues reaffirmed values negated the President and First Lady of the United
States. The translation of the film into
Blakean terms is not in fact that difficult: the
I don't wish to make any claims for The devil-child is its implicit hero, whose
Omen as a work of art: the most one could systematic destruction of the bourgeois
say is that it achieves a sufficient level of Establishment the audience follows with a
19
secret relish. The Omen would make no sense
in a society that was not prepared to enjoy
and surreptitiously condone the working out
of its own destruction.
As Andrew Britton pointed out to me, The
Omen and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(together with numerous other recent horror
films) have one premise disturbingly in com-
mon: the annihilation is inevitable, humanity
is now completely powerless, there is nothing
anyone can do to arrest the process.
(Ideology, that is, can encompass despair,
but not the imagining of constructive radical
alternatives). The Omen invokes ancient
prophecy and shows it inexorably fulfilling
itself despite all efforts at intervention; we
infer near the opening of Massacre that the
Age of Aquarius whose advent was so
recently celebrated in Hair has already
passed, giving way to the Age of Saturn and
universal malevolence. Uncontrol is
emphasized throughout the film: not only
have the five young victims no control over
their destiny, their slaughterers (variously
psychotic and degenerate) keep losing con-
trol of themselves and each other.
This is partly (in conjunction with the
film's relentless and unremitting intensity)
what gives Massacre to such a degree
(beyond any other film in my experience) the
authentic quality of nightmare. I have had
since childhood a recurring nightmare whose
pattern seems to be shared by a very large
number of people within our culture: I am
running away from some vaguely terrible
oppressors who are going to do dreadful
things to me; I run to a house or a car, etc.,
for help; I discover its occupants to be pre-
cisely the people I am fleeing. This pattern is
repeated twice in Massacre, where Sally
"escapes" from Leatherface first to his own
home, then to the service station run by his
father.
The application of my formula to
Massacre produces interesting results: the
pattern is still there, as is the significant rela-
tionship between the terms, but the defini-
tions of "normality" and "monster" have
become partly reversed. Here "normality" is
clearly represented by the quasi-liberated,
permissive young (though still forming two
couples and a brother/sister family unit,,
hence reproducing the patterns of the past);
20
the monster is the family, one of the great
composite monsters of the American cinema,
incorporating four characters and three
generations, and imagined with an intensity
and audacity that far transcend the connota-
tions of the term "exploitation movie." It
has a number of important aspects:
1. The image of the "Terrible House"
stems from a long tradition in American (and
Western capitalist) culture (for a fuller treat-
ment of this, see Andrew Britton's
magisterial account of Mandingo in Movie
22). Traditionally, it represents an extension
or "objectification" of the personalities of
the inhabitants. Massacre offers two comple-
mentary "terrible houses": the once impos-
ing, now totally decayed house of Franklyn's
and Sally's parents (where we keep expecting
something appalling to happen), and the
more modest, outwardly spruce, inwardly
macabre villa of the monstrous family
wherein every item of decor is an expression
of the characters' degeneracy. The borderline
between home and slaughterhouse (between
1work and leisure) has disappeared - the
slaughterhouse has invaded the home,
humanity has_begu1Lli_ter~J.Jx_to ''p~~y upon
iTSelf, like monsters of the deep:" Finally,
wna~ouse~' (whether in Poe's
FalroftheHouseofOsh.er,in Psycho, in Man-
dingo, or"here) signifies is the deadweight of
the past crushing the life of the younger
generation, the future - an idea beautifully
realized in the shot that starts on the
ominous grey, decayed Franklyn house and
tilts down to show Kirk and Pam, dwarfed in
long-shot, playing and laughing as they run to
the swimming-hole, and to their doom.
2. The contrast between the two houses
underlines the distinction the film makes bet-
ween the affluent young and the psychotic
family, representatives of an exploited and
degraded proletariat. Sally's father used to
send his cattle to the slaughterhouse of which
the family are products.
3. The all-male family (the grandmother
exists only as a decomposing corpse) also
derives from a long American tradition, with
notable antecedents in Ford's Westerns (the
Clan tons of My Darling Clementine, the Cleg-
gses of Wagonmaster) and in Man of the West.
The absence of Woman (conceived of as a
civilizing, humanizing influence) deprives
the family or its social sense and social mean-
ing while leaving its strength of primitive
loyalties largely untouched. In Massacre,
Woman becomes the ultimate object of the
characters' animus (and, I think, the film's,
since the sadistic torments visited on Sally go
far beyond what is necessary to the narra-
tive).
4. The release of sexuality in the horror
film is always presented as perverted,
monstrous, and excessive (whether it takes
the form of vampires, giant ants, or Mrs.
Bates), both the perversion and the excess \
being the logical outcome of repression. ,l
Nowhere is this carried further than in
Massacre. Here sexuality is totally perverted
from its functions, into sadism, violence, and
cannibalism. It is striking that there is no sug-
gestion anywhere that Sally is the object of an
overtly sexual threat: she is to be tormented,
killed, dismembered, eaten, but not raped.
Ultimately, the most terrifying thing about
the film is its total negativity; the repressed
energies - represented most unforgettably
by Leatherface and his continuously whirring
phallic chainsaw - are presented as
irredeemably debased and distorted. It is no
accident that the four most intense horror
films of the Seventies at "exploitation" level
(Night of the Living Dead, Raw Meat, and T1iJ
Hills Have Eyes are the other three) are al~
centered on cannibalism, and on the specifie:;
notion of present and future (the young~
generation) being devoured by the past. Can~
n i balism represents the u lti rna te in.
possessiveness, hence the logical end g8
human relations under capitalism. The_J
implication is that "liberation" and "per-
missiveness," as defined within our culture,
are at once inadequate and too late - too fee-
ble, too unaware, too undirected to withstand
the legacy of long repression.
5. This connects closely with the recur-
rence of the "double" motif in Massacre.
The young people are, on the whole,
uncharacterized and undifferentiated (the
film's energies are mainly with its monsters
- as usual in the horror film, the charac-
teristic here surviving the reversal of defini-
tions), but in their midst is Franklyn, who is
as grotesque, and almost as psychotic, as his
nemesis Leatherface. (The film's refusal to
sentimentalize the fact that he is crippled may
21
remind one of the blind beggars of Bunuel).
Franklyn associates himself with the
slaughterers by imitating the actions of
Leatherface's brother the hitchhiker: won-
dering whether he, too, could slice open his
own hand, and toying with the idea of
actually doing so. (Kirk remarks, "You're as
crazy as he is"). Insofar as the other young
people are characterized, it is in terms of a
pervasive petty malice. Just before Kirk
enters the house to meet his death, he teases
Pam by dropping into her hand a human
tooth he has found on the doorstep; later,
Jerry torments Franklyn to the verge of
hysteria by playing on his fears that the
hitchhiker will pursue and kill him. Franklyn
resents being neglected by the others, Sally
resents being burdened with him on her
vacation. The monstrous cruelties of the
slaughterhouse family have their more pallid
reflection within "normality." (The reflec-
tion pattern here is more fully worked out in
The Hills Have Eyes, with its stranded "nor-
mal" family besieged by its dark mirror-
image, the terrible shadow-family from the
hills, who want to kill the men, rape the
women, and eat the baby.)
6. Despite the family's monstrousness, a
degree of ambivalence is still present in the
response they evoke. Partly, this is rooted in
.our sense of them as a family. They are held
together - and torn apart - by bonds and
tensions with which we are all familiar -
with which, indeed, we are likely to have
grown up. We cannot cleanly dissociate our-
. selves from them. Then there is the sense
that they are victims, too - of the
slaughterhouse environment, of capitalism
- our victims, in fact. Finally, they manifest
a degraded but impressive creativity. The
news reporter at the start describes the tab-
leau of decomposing corpses in the graveyard
(presumably the work of the hitchhiker, and
perhaps a homage to his grandparents: a
female corpse is posed in the lap of a male
corpse in a hideous parody of domesticity) as
"a grisly work of art." The phrase, apt for the
film itself, also describes the art-works
among which the family live, some of which
achieve a kind of hideous aesthetic beauty:
the light-bulb held up by a human hand, the
sofa constructed out of human and animal
bones, surmounted by ornamental skulls, the
 hanging lamp over the dining-table that
appears to be a shrunken human head. The
film's monsters do not lack that charac-
teristically human quality, an aesthetic sense,
however perverted its form; also, they waste
nothing, a lesson we are all taught as
children.
7. Central to the film - and centred on
its monstrous family - is the sense of grotes-
que comedy, which in no way diminishes
(rather intensifies) its nightmare horror:
Leatherface chasing Sally with the chainsaw,
unable to stop and turn, skidding, wheeling,
like an animated character in a cartoon; the
father's response to Leatherface 's devasta-
tions, which by that time include four mur-
ders and the prolonged terrorization of the
heroine ("Look what your brother did to that
door"); Leatherface dressed up in jacket and
tie and fresh black wig for formal dinner with
Grandpa; the macabre farce of Grandpa's
repeated failures to kill Sally with the ham-
mer. The film's sense of fundamental horror
is closely allied to a sense of the fundamen-
tally absurd. The family, after all, only carry,
to its logical conclusion the basic (though
unstated) tenet of capitalism, that people
have the right to live off other people. In
twentieth century art, the sense of the absurd
is always closely linked to total despair
(Beckett, Ionesco ... ). The fusion of
nightmare and absurdity is carried even
further in Death Trap, a film that confirms
that the creative impulse in Hooper's work is
centred in his monsters (here, the grotesque
and pathetic Neville Brand) and is essentially
nihilistic.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, unlike The
Omen, achieves the force of authentic art,
profoundly disturbing, intensely personal,
yet at the same time far more than personal,
as the general response it has evoked
demonstrates. As a "collective nightmare" it
brings to a focus a spirit of negativity, an
undifferentiated lust for destruction, that
seems to lie not far below the surface of the
modern collective consciousness. Watching it
recently with a large, half-stoned youth
audience who cheered and applauded every
one of Leatherface's outrages against their
representatives on the screen, was a terrify-
ing experience. It must not be seen as an iso-
lated phenomenon: it expresses, with unique
22
force and intensity, at least one important III. THE REACTIONARY WING
aspect of what the horror film has come to
signify, the sense of a civilization condewn-
ing itself, through its popular culture, to
ultimate disintegration, and ambivalently l suggested earlier that the theory of
(with the simultaneous horror/wish-fulfill- repression offers us a means towards a politi-
ment of nightmare) celebrating the fact. We cal categorization of horror movies. Such a
must not, of course, see that as the last word. categorization, however, can never be rigid
or clear-cut. While I have stressed the genre's
This article owes a considerable debt to the progressive or radical elements, its potential
work of Tony Williams. Tony has been writing for the subversion of bourgeois patriarchal
an M.A. thesis on the horror film under my norms, it is obvious enough that this poten-
supervision, and in the last two years we have tial is never free from ambiguity. The genre
exchanged so many ideas that it would no longer carries within itself the capability of reaction-
be possible to sort out whose was which. ary inflection, and perhaps no horror film is
entirely immune from its operations. It need
not surprise us that there is a powerful reac-
****** tionary tradition to be acknowledged - so
powerful it may at times appear the dominant
one. Its characteristics are, in extreme cases,
very strongly marked.
Before noting them, however, it is impor-
tant to make one major distinction, between
the reactionary horror film and the 'apocalyp-
tic' horror film. The latter expresses,
obviously, despair and negativity, yet its very
negation can be claimed as progressive: the
'apocalypse', even when presented in
metaphysical terms (the end of the world), is
generally reinterpretable in social/political
ones (the end of the highly specific world of
patriarchal capitalism). The majority of the
most distinguished American horror films
(especially in the 70's) are concerned with
this particular apocalypse; they are
progressive in so far as their negativity is not
recuperable into the dominant ideology, but
constitutes (on the contrary) the recognition
of that ideology's disintegration, its
untenability, as all it has repressed explodes
and blows it apart. The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, Sisters, Demon are all apocalyptic in
this sense; so are Romero's two 'Living
Dead' movies. (Having said that, it must be
added that important distinctions remain to
be made between these works).
Some of the characteristics, then, that
have contributed to the genre's reactionary
wing:
I. The designation of the monster as
simply evil. In so far as horror films are typical
manifestations of our culture, the dominam
designation of the monster must necessarily
be 'evil': whaj)§ r~pressed (in the individual,
Leatherface
23
rin the..c.l.llt.ureJ must always return as a threat,
'perceived by the consciousness as ugly, terri-
ble, obscene. Horror films, it might be said,
are progressive precisely to the degree that
:they refuse to be satisfied with this simple
!designation - to the degree that, whether
explicitly or implicitly, consciously or
unconsciously, they modify, question,
challenge, seek to invert it. All monsters are
by definition destructive, but their destruc-
tiveness is capable of being variously ex-
plained, excused and justified. To identify
what is repressed with 'evil incarnate' (a
metaphysical, rather than a social, definition)
is automatically to suggest that there is
nothing to be done but strive to keep it
repressed. Films in which the 'monster' is
identified as the devil clearly occupy a pri-
vileged place in this group; though even the
devil can be presented with varying degrees
of (deliberate or inadvertent) sympathy and
fascination - The Omen should not simply be
bracketed with The Sentinel for consignment
to merited oblivion.
2. The presence of Christianity (in so far
as it is given weight or presented as a positive
force) is in general a portent of reaction.
(This is a comment less on Christianity itself
than on what it signifies within the Holly-
wood cinema and the dominant ideology).
The Exorcist is an instructive instance - its
validity is in direct proportion to its failure
convincingly to impose its theology.
3. The presentation of the monster as
totally non-human. The 'progressiveness' of
the horror film depends partly on the
monster's capacity to arouse sympathy; one
can feel little for a mass of viscous black
slime. The political (McCarthyite) level of
50's science fiction films - the myth of
Communism as total dehumanization -
accounts for the prevalence of this kind of
monster in that period.
4. The confusion (in terms of what the
film wishes to regard as 'monstrous') of
repressed sexuality with sexuality itself. The
distinction is not always clear-cut; perhaps it
never can be, in a culture whose attitudes to
sexuality remain largely negative and where a
fear of sex is implanted from infancy. One
can, however, isolate a few extreme exam-
ples where the sense of horror is motivated
by sexual disgust.
A very common generic pattern plays on
the ambiguity of the monster as the 'return
of the repressed' and the monster as punish-
ment for sexual promiscuity (or, in the more
extreme puritanical cases, for any sexual,
expression whatever: two teenagers kiss;i
enter, immediately, the Blob). Both the Jaw~
films (their sources in both SO's McCarthyite
science fiction and all those beach party/
monster movies that disappeared with the B
feature) are obvious recent examples,
Spielberg's film being somewhat more com-
plex, less blatant, than Szwarc's, though the
difference is chiefly one of ideological
sophistication.
I want to examine briefly here some
examples of the 'reactionary' horror film in
the 70's, of widely differing distinction but
considerable interest in clarifying these ten-
dencies.
David Cronen berg's Shivers (formerly The
Parasite Murders) is, indeed, of very special
interest here, as it is a film single-mindedly
about sexual liberation, a prospect it views
with unmitigated horror. The entire film is
premised on and motivated by sexual disgust.
The release of sexuality is linked inseparably
with the spreading of venereal disease, the
scientist responsible for the experiments hav-
ing seen fit (for reasons never made clear) to
include a VD component in his aphrodisiac
parasite. The parasites themselves are
modelled very obviously on phalluses, but
with strong excremental overtones (their col-
our) and continual associations with blood;
the point is underlined when one enters the
Barbara Steele character through her vagina.
If the film presents sexuality in general as the
object of loathing, it has a very special
animus reserved for female sexuality (a
theme repeated, if scarcely developed, in
Cronen berg's subsequent Rabid). The
parasites are spread initially by a young girl
(the original subject of the scientist's experi-
ments), the film's Pandora whose released
eroticism precipitates general cataclysm;
throughout, sexually aroused preying women
are presented with a particular intensity of
horror and disgust. Shivers systematically
chronicles the breaking of every sexual-social
taboo - promiscuity, lesbianism, homosex-
uality, age difference, finally incest - but
each step is presented as merely one more
addition to the accumulation of horrors. At
the same ti~e;-ihe film shows absolutely no
24
feeling for traditional relationships (or for
human beings, for that matter): with its
unremitting ugliness and crudity, it is very
rare in its achievement of total negation. '
The Brood, again, is thematically central to
the concept of the horror film proposed here
(its subject being the transmission of
neurosis through the family structure) and
the precise antithesis of the genre's
progressive potential. It carries over all the
major structural components of its two pre--
decessors (as an auteur, Cronenberg is
nothing if not consistent): the figure of the
Scientist (here psychotherapist) who,
attempting to promote social progress, pre-
cipitates disaster; the expression of
unqualified horror at the idea of releasing
what has been repressed; the projection of
horror and evil on to women and their sex-
uality, the ultimate dread being of women
usurping the active, aggressive role that.
patriarchal ideology assigns to the male. The
film is remarkable for its literal enactment, at
its climax, of the Freudian perception that,
under patriarchy, the child becomes the
woman's penis-substitute - Samantha
Eggar's latest offspring representing,
unmistakeably, a monstrous phallus. The
film is laboriously explicit about its meaning:
the terrible children are the p\lysical embodi-
ments of the woman's rage. But that rage is
never seen as the logical product of woman's
situation within patriarchal culture; it is
blamed entirely on the woman~s mother (the
father being culpable only in his weakness
and ineffectuality). The film is useful for
offering an extremely instructive comparison
with Sisters on the one hand and It's Alive on
the other.
In turning from Cronenberg's films to
Halloween I do not want to suggest that I am
bracketing them together. John Carpenter's
films reveal in many ways an engaging artistic
personality: they communicate, at the very
least, a delight in skill and craftsmanship, a
pleasure in play with the medium, that is one
of the essential expressions of true creativity.
Yet the film-buff innocence that accounts for
much of the charm of Dark Star can go on to
combine (in Assault on Precinct 13) Rio Bravo
and Night of the Living Dead without any
apparent awareness of the ideological conse-
quences of converting Hawks' fascists (or
Romero's ghouls, for that matter) into an
The h
army of revolutionaries. The film buff is very
much to the fore again in Halloween, cover-
ing the film's confusions, its lack of real
thinking, with a formal/stylistic inventiveness
that is initially irresistible. If nothing in the
film is new, everything testifies to Car-
penter's powers of assimilation (as opposed
to mere imitation): as a resourceful amalgam
of Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The
Exorcist and Black Christmas, Halloween is
cunning in the extreme.
The confusions, however, are present at
its very foundation, in the conception of the
monster. The opening is quite stunning both
in its virtuosity and its resonances. The long
killer's-point-of-view tracking-shot with
which the film begins, establishes the basis
for the first murder as sexual repression: the
girl is killed because she arouses in the
voyeur-murderer feelings he has
simultaneously to deny and enact in the form
of violent assault. The second shot reveals
the murderer as the victim's bewildered six-
year-old brother. Crammed into those first
two shots (in which Psycho unites with the
Hallowe'en sequence of Meet Me In St. Louis)
are the implications for the definitive family
horror film: the child-monster, product of
the nuclear family and the small-town
environment; the sexual repression of
children; the incest taboo that denies sexual
feeling precisely where the proximities of
family life most encourage it. Not only are
those implications not realized in the suc-
ceeding film, their trace is obscured and all
but obliterated. The film identifies the killer
with 'the Bogeyman', as the embodiment of
an eternal and unchanging evil which, by
definition, can't be understood; and with the
Devil (' ... those eyes ... the De vii's eyes'), by
none other than his own psychoanalyst
(Donald Pleasence) - surely the most
extreme instance of Hollywood's perversion
of psychoanalysis into an instrument of
repression.
The film proceeds to lay itself wide open
to the reading Jonathan Rosenbaum offered
in Take One: the killer's victims are all sex-
ually promiscuous, the one survivor a virgin;
the monster becomes (in the tradition of all
those beach-party monster movies of the late
50's-early 60's) simply the instrument of
Puritan vengeance and repression rather than
26
the embodiment of what Puritanism
repressed.
Halloween is more interesting than that -
if only because more confused. The basic
premise of the action is that Laurie is the
killer's real quarry throughout (the other
girls merely distractions en route), because
she is for him the reincarnation of the si[.ter
he murdered as a child (he first sees her in
relation to a little boy who resembles hiw as
he was then, and becomes fixated on her
from that moment). This compulsion to re-
enact the childhood crime keeps Michael tied
at least to the possibility of psychoanalytical
explanation, thereby suggesting that Donald
Pleasence may be wrong. If we accept that,
then one tantalizing unresolved detail
becomes crucial: the question of how Michael
learnt to drive a car. There are only two possi-
ble explanations: either he is the devil,
possessed of supernatural powers; or he has·
not spent the .last nine years (as Pleasence
would have us believe) sitting staring blackly
at a wall meditating further horrors. (It is to
Carpenter's credit that the issue is raised in
the dialogue, not glossed over as an unfortu-
nate plot necessity we aren't supposed to
notice; but he appears to use it merely as
another tease, a bit of meaningless mystifica-
tion). The possibility this opens up is that of
reading the whole film against the Pleasence
character: Michael's 'evil' is what his analyst
has been projecting on to him for the past
nine years. Unfortunately, this remains
merely a possibility in the material that Car-
penter chose not to take up: it does not con-
stitute a legitimate (let alone a coherent)
reading of the actual fiilm. Carpenter's inter-
views (see, for example, the quotation that
opens Tony Williams' essay in this booklet)
suggest that he strongly resists examining the
connotative level of his own work; it remains
to be seen how long this very talented film-
maker can preserve this false innocence.
At first glance, Alien seems little more
than Ha1loween-i~-outer-space: more expen-
sive, less personal, but made with similar
professional skill and flair for manipulating
its audiences. Yet it has several distinctive
features that give it a limited interest in its
own right: it clearly wants to be taken, on a
fairly simple level, as a 'progressive' movie,
notably in its depiction of women. What it
offers on this level amounts in fact to no
more than a 'pop' feminism that reduces the
whole involved question of sexual difference
and thousands of years of patriarchal oppres-
sion to the bright suggestion that a woman
can do anything a man can do (almost). This
masks (not very effectively) its fundamen-
tally reactionary nature.
Besides its resemblance to Halloween in
general narrative pattern and suspense
strategies (Where is the monster hiding? -
who will be killed next? - when? - how?
etc ... .), A lien has more precise parallels with
The Thing. There is the enclosed space, cut
off from outside help; the definition of the
monster as both non- and super-human; the
fact that it feeds on human beings; its
apparent indestructibility. Most clearly of all,
the relationship of Ash, the robot science
officer, to the alien is very close to that of
Professor Carrington to the Thing; in both
films, science regards the alien as a superior
form of life to which human life must
therefore be subordinate; in both films,
science is initially responsible for bringing the
monster into the community and thereby
endangering the latter's existence.
What strikingly distinguishes Alien from
both Halloween and The Thing (and virtually
every other horror movie) is the apparently
total absence of sexuality. Although there are
two women among the space-ship's crew of
seven, there is no 'love-interest', not even
any sexual banter - in fact, with the charac-
ters restricted exclusively to the use of sur-
names, no recognition anywhere of sexual
difference (unless we see Parker's ironic
resentment of Ripley's domineeringness as
motivated partly by the fact that she is a
woman; but he reacts like that to all displays
of authority in the film, and his actual phrase
for her is 'son-of-a-bitch'). Only at the end of
the film, after all the men have been killed, is
female sexuality allowed to become a pre-
sence (as Ripley undresses, not knowing that
the alien is still alive and in the compart-
ment). The film constructs a new 'normality'
in which sexual differentiation ceases to have
effective existence - on condition that sex-
uality be obliterated altogether.
The term 'son-of-a-bitch' is applied (by
Ripley herself) to one other character in the
film: the alien. The cinematic confrontation
of its two 'sons of bitches' is the film's logical
culmination. Its resolution of ideological con-
27
tradictions is clear in the presentation of
Ripley herself: she is a 'safe threat', set
against the real threat of the alien. On the one
hand, she is the film's myth of the 'emanci-
pated woman': 'masculine', aggressive, self-
assertive, she takes over the ship after the
deaths of Kane and Dallas, rebelling against
and dethroning both 'Mother' (the com-
puter) and father \Ash, the robot). On the
other hand, the film is careful to supply her
with 'feminine', quasi-maternal charac-
teristics (her care for Jones, the cat) and
gives her, vis-a-vis the alien, the most reac-
tionary position of the entire crew (it is she
who is opposed to letting it on board, even to
save Kane's life). She is, of course, in the
film's terms, quite right; but that merely con-
firms the ideologically reactionary nature of
the film, in its attitude to the Other.
If male and female are superficially and
trendily united in Ripley, they are completely
fused in L'le alien (whose most striking
characteristil is its ability to transform itself).
The sexuality so rigorously repressed in the
film returns grotesquely and terrifyingly in its
monster (the more extreme the repression,
the more excessive the monster). At first
associated with femaleness (it begins as an
egg in a vast womb), it attaches itself to the
most 'feminine' of the crew's males (John
Hurt, most famous for his portrayal of Quen-
tin Crisp) and enters him through the mouth
las a preliminary to being 'born' out of his
stomach. The alien's phallic identity is
:strongly marked (the long reptilian neck);
but so is its large, expandable mouth, armed
with tiers of sharp metallic teeth. As a com-
posite image of archetypal sexual dreads it
could scarcely be bettered: the monstrous
phallus combined with vagina dentata.
Throughout the film, the alien and the cat are
repeatedly paralleled or juxtaposed, an
association that may remind us of the
panther/domestic cat opposition in Cat Peo-
ple (the cats even have the same surname,
the John Paul Jones of Tourneur's movie
reduced here to a mere 'Jones' or 'Jonesey').
The film creates its image of the emancipated
woman only to subject her to massive ter-
rorization (the use of flashing lights
throughout A lien's climactic scenes strikingly
recalls the finale of Looking for Mr. Goodbar)
and enlist her in the battle for patriarchal
repression. Having destroyed the alien,
Ripley can become completely 'feminine' -
soft and passive, her domesticated pussy
safely asleep.
It is not surprising, though disturbing and
sad, that at present it is the reactionary horror
film that dominates the genre. This is entirely
in keeping with the overall movement of
Hollywood in the past five years. Vietnam,
Nixon and Watergate produced a crisis in
ideological confidence which the Carter
administration has temporarily resolved~
The Monster as evil incarnate
Rocky, Star Wars, Heaven Can Wait (all over-
whelming popular successes) are but the
echoes of a national sigh of relief. Sisters,
Demon, Night of the Living Dead, The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre, in their various ways
reflect ideological disintegration and lay bare
Der Erlkonig:
the possibility of social revolution;
Halloween and A lien, while deliberately
The Ambiguities of
evoking maximum terror and panic, Horror
variously seal it over again.
Robin Wood
The inclusion, in an anthology on the
American horror film, of an essay on a musi-
cal setting by Schubert of a poem by Goethe
requires explanation but not apology. One of
the aims of this book and the retrospective it
accompanies is to stress the centrality of the
horror film to our culture; and 'our culture'
means more than 'North America, now'.
There is always of course a cultural moment,
a here-and-now with its own detailed
specifics; but that here-and-now grows out
of, and to a great extent continues to incor-
porate, a history to which it is as impossible
to assign a beginning as it is a predictable end
, (no one, hopefully not even Godard himself,
seriously believes in the practicality of a
cultural 'return to zero'). To relate the basic
structures of the American horror film to a
literary/musical composition from another
age and place is not to confuse two obviously
disparate cultural 'moments' (the Germany
that produced Goethe and Schubert with the
America that produced Hooper and Romero)
but to insist on continuities within the
development of Western patriarchal civiliza-
tiun: we shall find the step from Der
Erlkonig to, say, Curse of the Cat People and
The Exorcist a surprisingly easy one to make.
The inclusion of this essay signifies a further,
related, intention: the desire to rescue the
horror film from the 'film buffs', that species
who collect movies the way others collect
stamps or butterflies, thereby depriving them
of their contextual significance. An interest
28
in one art form should presuppose an interest
in art generally and its functions within our
culture.
Why Schubert's setting, rather than
simply the poem itself? First, because that is
how I know it, and I cannot separate the two;
second, because it is in that form that it will
be most widely familiar~ third, because
Schubert's magnificent realization both
intensifies the poem's force and very pre-
cisely underlines implications on which I wish
to dwell.
The Plot
The story of Goethe's poem is itself but
one example from a tradition of horror/fairy
tales that goes right back through patriarchal
history (which is to say, the known history of
mankind). A man is riding home 'through
night and wind', carrying his small son in his
arms. The child believes he sees and hears
the Erl-king; the father explains the vision
away in terms of natural phenomena. The
Erl-king tries to lure the child to him, with
various temptations, and eventually
threatens force. The father reaches the house
and apparent safety, but the child is dead in
his arms.
The Dominant Reading
Superficially, we have a simple, traditional
tale enacting the Normality/Monster opposi-
tion quite straightforwardly, the terms vir-
tually synonymous with Good/Evil: the
good, protective father; the security of home~
the innocent child; the evil Erl-king/Devil/
Bogeyman first insidiously luring, then
tyrannically seizing, the helpless boy. This
is how I understood the song when I first
encountered it about twenty-five years ago; it
is probably how most people 'read' it; it is
also how most singers interpret it (e.g., the
justly celebrating renderings by Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau use every means of vocal
signification to underling the Erl-king's evil,
the sinister nature of his seductiveness). It is
also, in a sense, the 'correct' reading,
endorsed by both poet and composer: Goethe
stresses the child's terror of the Erl-king, his
pain when seized, the Erl-king's selfish
cruelty; Schubert achieves that magnificent
and unforgettable stroke at the conclusion,
29
moving to an apparent resolution in the
major on the penultimate line (the seemingly
safe arrival home), the headlong, galloping
accompaniment slowing to a standstill,
before the abrupt, devastating revelation of
the child's death. No irony beyond the
obvious one seems intended.
The dominant discourse (the joint dis-
course of poet and composer within, and
determined by, patriarchal ideology) permits
one alternative reading that already begins
the process of opening out the song: the Erl-
king can be read as a figment of the child's
imagination rather than an actual super-
natural being, the boy literally scaring him-
self to death. Such a reading immediately and
inevitably raises a crucial question: in this
case, what forces have produced this 'fig-
ment'?
Psychoanalysis
Even the simplest answer to that question
presupposes a use of psychoanalysis, in
however primitive and rudimentary a form
(the 'psychological insights' familiar from
even pre-Freudian literary criticism). Today,
twentieth century developments fused with a
radical political position transform an
apparently simple song into a complex of
shifting ambiguities whose signifying poten-
tial this account will certainly not exhaust.
The very simplicity and baldness of the text
(both Goethe's and Schubert's), its lack of
psychological elaboration, its reduction of its
characters to archetypes, its spare precision
of action combined with reticence about
motivation; make possible a multiplicity of
inter-related readings.
Psychoanalysis must start by rigorously
rejecting the supernatural: gods, demons,
monsters, bogeymen, become manifesta-
tions of inner forces. To define the Erl-king
as 'the repressed' leads directly to the ques-
tion, 'Whose repressed? The Father's?, The
Child's? Both?' By way of partial, tentative
answer, one may recall that certain theories
of dream maintain that all the characters (and
other elements) of a dream embody
different, conflicting aspects of the self. We
all contain within us our own child, father
and Erl-king, loosely corresponding to the
Freudian ego, superego and id. A systematic
examination of some of the song's consti-
30
tuent elements will help clarify its rich sug. the song proceeds, in doubt from the begin- unresolved, tied to endless repetition.
gestiveness. ning, finally capitulating towards the end.
The Child
Schubert's setting of the father's words to me
suggests uncertainty and a desire to deny The child's age is not mentioned, but the
The Setting - the Journey - the House phase of his psychic development is very pre-
what is feared may be there (but responses to
Goethe establishes the setting succinctly music are notoriously subjective). All three cisely defined: the Erl-king is still a potent
as 'night and wind'; Schubert responds with a interpretations work very well but carry reality for him (he hasn't reached 'the
minor key accompaniment that evokes both somewhat different inflections. In psy- house'), but he has learnt to regard him
the galloping of the horse and a generalized choanalytic terms, it is a matter of degrees of (both rightly and wrongly) as an object of ter-
ominous tumult. Darkness and turbulenc~ repression, of how completely all that the Erl- ror. If the Erl-king represents what is
combine as a powerful representation of the king represents has been repressed in the repressed in the father, he also represents
disturbed unconscious within which the father. What is unambiguously clear, on the what is in process of being repressed in the
repressed forces lurk. Otherwise, the land- other hand, is the father's determination to son, whose true innocence is being converted
scape is evoked only by a few stray details ('a deny and suppress his child's knowledge of into the false, desexualized innocence recog-
streak of mist', 'the wind rustling in dry the Erl-king. nized by patriarchal culture. The dual func-
leaves', 'the old grey willow') that, with their We may note that Goethe himself tion should not be found confusing: what is
connotations of decay, desolation, sterility generalizes the figure: he is from the outset the history of patriarchy but the history of the
and colourlessness contrast strongly with the not 'a father', but 'the father', the patriarch: transmission of repression? If the relation-
'pretty flowers', 'river bank', 'golden robe', the heterosexual male, the ideologically ship father/Erl-king emphasizes the
m~nster's negative aspects, the relationship
games and company promised by the Erl- dominant figure of our culture, whose con-
king. tinuing dominance depends upon the mainte- chiid/Erl-king (despite the boy's terror)
The goal of this frantic journey through nance and transmission of repression. The emphasizes the positive: the Erl-king as the
realm of imagination, eroticism and play.
night, wind and wilderness is the House: in Erl-king - the figure in the darkness - is
dreams, frequently a symbol for the per- also. a father and, as king, the supreme What the child justifiably fears is the Erl-
king's tyrannical possessiveness, his aspect
sonality, in this context also a symbol of patnarch:~the clearest psychoanalytic reading
security and order - security above all from would be m terms of what I have described as of monstrous father; what is attractive is the
lure of sensuality and relaxation. When the
the Erl-king, whom the house would finally the privileged instance of the Normality/
exclude and deny. The house can be read Monster relationship, the doppelganger. Erl-king speaks and only then (and
progressively, as the song continues) does
both as an extension of the' father (what Father and Erl-king take their place in a chain
culture regards as the 'mature', finished, that passes through and connects all the piano accompaniment relax and escape
that reiterated hammering, modulating into
ordered personality) and as an image for the patriarchal societies, and whose links include
order within which the father will enclose the the traditional Good Father/Ogre of fairy the major. Yet the child's responses invaria-
bly return the music to the minor key, panic,
child: in Lacanian terms (were the journey tales, Jonathan/Nosferatu, Dr. Jekyll/Mr.
successfully completed), the child's entry Hyde, the police detective/revolutionary god and obsession: he is already under his
father's domination, and the Erl-king can
into the Symbolic, at once the surrender to of Demon... The father's protectiveness ('He
and acquisition of patriarchal law (itself a clasps him safe and holds him warm') finds only win him by killing him.
kind of death). its sinister echo in the Erl-king's desire to The Erl-king
poss~ss .- possession finding its logical The theory of repression helps to explain
culmmatwn m death, since only the inani- the often-noted phenomenon that in the
The Father mate can be totally possessed. According to
:-vorks of our culture 'evil' is always more
Even on the most superficial level, the this reading, it is the father who creates the mteresting than 'good'. Audiences go to hor-
father's role is characterized by ambiguities. desol~tion of the landscape by repressing the ror movies to see, not Frankenstein but the
It is not clear whether: (a) he is actually Erl-kmg: the ambivalence with which the monster, not Dr. Jekyll but Mr. Hyde, not a
unaware of the Erl-king and really believes monster is viewed, the inextricable fusion of nice young girl but a child spouting filth
the child is hallucinating or imagining (his positive and negative connotations, arises (both literal and metaphorical) over
suddenly revealed fear at the end can be read from. the .complexity of the doppelganger authority-figures when 'diabolically'
as fear for the terrified child rather than fear relatwnsh1p, the 'double' simultaneously possessed. The restoration of 'normality' and
ofthe Erl-king); (b) he recognizes his advers- reflection and opposite. The hammering destruction of the monster at the end of hor-
ary but struggles to protect his child from the repeated chords of Schubert's accompani- ror movies has always produced at least as
knowledge, deliberately (if with the best ment (bare octaves or harsh dissonances) are much resentment as relief: certainly, films
intentions, like so many parents) deceiving quite amazingly evocative in connection with that forego such reassurance (The Omen It's
him and denying his perceptions; or (c) he the father, suggesting tremendous energy A live, Halloween, etc.) have not forfeited the
gradually comes to share the child's vision as perverted towards repression instead of genre's popularity. The reasons for this
creativity, violent, insistent, obsessive, fascination are complex: the monster is the
31
source of true energy; it represents the break-
ing of taboos, the transgression against
patriarchal authority that a part of everyone
responds to; it is also, by its very nature, the
most complex and ambivalently viewed com-
ponent of the 'horror' syndrome.
The Erl-king of Goethe and Schubert is a
remarkably rich creation (given the succinct-
ness of the work - a song lasting scarcely
more than four minutes). The folk-lore
figure itself carries multiple and contradictory
connotations which poet and composer
emphasize rather than suppress. The Oxford
Dictionary defines him as 'Bearded golden-
crowned giant of Teutonic folk-lore who
lures little children to the land of death'; the
German name means 'alder-king', carrying
suggestions of a fertility god (Goethe has the
father explain away his son's vision of the
Erl-king's daughter as a willow-tree); this in
turn is a mis-translation of the original
Danish el/er-konge, 'king of the elves', a title
with somewhat different connotations of a
less terrible and destructive world of magic
(the desire of Oberon for the changeling-boy
in A Midsummer Night's Dream is clearly
related). All these aspects are palpably pre-
sent in the song: the Erl-king is ambiguously
destroyer and saviour, terrible father and
playmate, Death and Life: the menace that
Schubert underlines in his setting of the
king's last line ('If you won't come willingly,
I'll use force') doesn't obliterate the irresisti-
ble lilt of the dance-melody that expresses his
attempts at seduction. (The rhythmic com-
plexity of the song, it should be noted, is
largely Schubert's: Goethe's poem is firmly
metrical, in regular stanzas, the composer
supplying both the minor-major modulation
and the corresponding transformation of
rhythm that add so much force to the Erl-
king's positive connotations).
The song opposes two forms of energy:
the strife of repression, the relaxation of play
and dance. The Erl-king's invitation is plainly
sexual, and involves the offer of both himself
and his daughters: it carries implications of
child sexuality, bisexuality (since the boy is
expected to find both offers attractive) and
pedophilia. The Erl-king's negative connota-
tions (the desire to possess through viola-
tion) are clearly attached to this last; they are
32
also what make him a sinister reflection of
the father. There is no reason to suppose that
pedophilia (literally, simply the love of
children, though in common usage the term
always carries connotations of erotic attrac-
tion) need necessarily be one-sided and
exploitive, but in our culture it is likely to be,
because the patriarchal family system associ-
ates it closely with repression and because of
the false innocence imposed on children. The
current prosecution of Body Politic
(Toronto's gay newspaper) for publishing an
innocuous (if somewhat sentimental and
question-begging) article on the subject
testifies to our society's hysterical fear of the
whole issue (and of course the related issue
of child sexuality). The phenomenon
remains wrapped in mystery and danger
(anything that can't be discussed becomes
dangerous by virtue of that suppression), but
it seems clear that the dread it arouses is
closely bound up with the repression of
parent/child eroticism: the Erl-king's desire
to violate is the reverse side of the father's
protectiveness and denial of the other's exis-
tence.
One may find already implicit in Der Erk-
konig what is perhaps the central question of
the horror film today: the question of the
extent to which it is possible to conceive of
and create a 'positive' monster. The
repressed cannot be released with impunity.
If it didn't constitute a threat it wouldn't have
been repressed in the first place; and to
repress a drive is to some degree to distort
and pervert it. Any attempt to create a posi-
tive monster must steer a perilous and
perhaps impossible course between the Scylla
of sentimentality and the Charybdis of Fasc-
ism: dangers one might represent by (among
recent distinguished examples) Romero's
Martin and Badham's Dracula respectively. It
is a problem that reaches out far beyond the
horror genre and the cinema: its resolution is
central to the future of our civilization.
Robin Wood
The Monster as Romantic Hero (Bad ham's Dracula)

The Devil,
Probably:
The Symbolism of
Evil
"as one between desire and shame sus-
pended... "
- Shelley, The Triumph of Life
The logic which determines the centrality
of the devil in the contemporary popular
cinema is amply demonstrated elsewhere in
this book. Clearly, the concept of evil has
always been crucial to the horror film, but its
appearance in this form allows us to focus
with a particular clarity the genre's relation to
the Gothic tradition of romanticism, and
more particularly a number of cultural prob-
lems and contradictions which that tradition
has been consistently unable to resolve. The
development of the Gothic seems to me to
involve a particular inflection of preoccupa-
tions which are far more generally charac-
teristic of the Romantic movement - (a) the
relation between the subject and object of
perception, and the role of the perceiver in
the definition of his/her reality; (b) the
nature of, and the value to be ascribed to,
fundamental, socially proscribed or inhibited
human energies. The two questions are,
obviously, interrelated; as soon as one con-
ceives of perception in terms of the per-
ceiver's activity, one comes up at once
against the problem of the nature of that
activity, and of its determinants. Equally
obviously, the Gothic raises and explores,
before psychoanalysis, the familiar Freudian
concepts - desire, the social origins of sex-
ual repression, the unconscious, the death
drive. My purpose here is to examine, in a
number of major works, an insistent ten-
34
dency within Gothic romanticism to associate
the return of repressed sexuality with the
devil; and to suggest that the repetitiveness
of the association - the apparent
impossibility of transcending it - can be
taken to demonstrate both the real
progressiveness of the Gothic and its final
intractability. I shall approach the modern
horror movie by way of Blake, Hawthorne
and Melville (and, of course, Freud); and I
wish to begin by considering two of Blake's
lyrics. They're to be found side by side in tht
notebook of 1791-2 (the so-called 'Rossetti
Manuscript'): the first was subsequently
included, as "The Garden of Love", in
Songs of Experience (1794).
I went to the garden of love,
And I saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And Thou shalt not writ over the door;
So I turned to the garden of love
That so many sweet flowers bore,
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be
And priests in black gowns were
walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my
joys and desires.
The second poem follows at once:
I saw a chapel all of gold
That none did dare to enter in;
And many weeping stood without,
Weeping, mourning, worshipping.
I saw a serpent rise between
The white pillars of the door;
And he forced and forced and forced -
Down the golden hinges tore;
And along the pavement sweet,
Set with pearls and rubies bright,
All his shining length he drew,
Till upon the altar white
Vomiting his poison out
On the bread and on the wine.
So I turned into a sty
And laid me down among the swine.
The nature and significance of the chapel
in the first poem don't, while we consider the
poem on its own, present a problem: the
chapel embodies the spirit of a Christianity
defined by the repression of "energy" - that
energy which is "eternal delight", and which
is characteristically lo'cated, for Blake, in
childhood ("Where I used to play ... ").
Indeed, "A Little Girl Los_t", the final poem
in Experience makes the connection between
play and infantile sexuality explicit, and takes
as theme its prohibition by a father whose
Medusa-like gaze (he is associated with a
look which petrifies and with "hoary hair"
the "blossoms" of which recall, inversely,
those of the garden in which his daughter and
her lover have played) is assimilated by the
poem to "the Holy Book". On a first reading,
we might suppose that the second chapel
announces its function with equal lucidity: its
connotations seem fairly obviously positive
- the simple antithesis of those of the sty
which replaces it, in the final couplet, after
the serpent's intrusion. We might go on to
say that the clarity of the symbolism is
strikingly enforced by the sentence-structure:
the first sentence (which is also the first
stanza) gives us the chapel and an implied
sense of its spiritual value ("all of gold");
the second, bridging three stanzas, the
monstrous act of desecration by the
archetypal Christian emblem of evil; and
the third the breakdown and degradation
which follow from it. "It (is) clear", remark
the editors of the Longman's edition, "that
the 'chapel of gold' is the temple of innocent
love, defiled by the repression described in
the previous poem. Love is perverted into
something monstrous, and the sight revolts
the poet" (The Poems of William Blake, ed.
Stevenson and Erdman, Longman 1972).
It is clear to me, on the contrary, that the
meaning of the chapel of gold is far from
clear; and that as soon as we try to divine
from the poem any actually realized signifi-
cance for it, we come across insuperable
difficulties. We can't, for example, dis-
tinguish it as sharply from the chapel of the
previous poem as the editors want to suggest.
The doors of the first chapel are shut, and the
legend over the door - associated witl;l death
in what follows - refers us implicitly to
Dante's Inferno: the assimilation of institu-
tional Christianity to Hell and death won't
35
surprise the reader of the Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, in which the affirmation of
"energy" is placed in the mouth of the devil.
The doors of the second chapel are also bar-
red to those outside, though this time not by
a physical impediment but by fear - and a
fear, moreover, which isn't in any way
specified. Is it the fear produced by a sense of
moral unworthiness - of being unfit to enjoy
the splendours within? Or is it the kind of
fear experienced by the little girl lost in the
face of "a loving look like the Holy Book",
the fear engendered by an actual or antici-
pated "Thou shalt not"? The ambiguity isn't
resolved in the following couplet: is the
anguish of the excluded congregation
attributable to 'grief for sin' or to the pain
and desperation which might follow from an
arbitrary and oppressive exclusion? Indeed,
the reiterated "weeping", and the
immediately following "mourning", make
the precise sense of "worshipping" prac-
tically indecipherable: how, exactly, are we to
read it in relation to the emphasis on grief?
What kind of supplication is involved? Does
it suggest 'Forgive me, I have sinned'? Or
'Relent in your harshness and cruelty'? Or
are we to infer a critical consciousness of the
morbidity which necessarily attaches to wor-
ship in a context defined by fear, guilt and
sorrow?
The first stanza, in fact, seems to be
unreadable - it's impossible to say what it
means; and the particular way in which
Blake undertakes, in the last three stanzas, to
demonstrate the chapel's 'positive value',
only goes to confirm the ambiguities to which
I've pointed. For the 'positive value' isn't in
any way substantiated: it is simply asserted in
the elaborate insistence on "white", "gold",
"sweet" and a general material splendour the
spiritual implications of which we are left to
infer. This merely verbal iteration may
deceive us into believing that the chapel has
been convincingly characterised in a way
which Blake has failed to achieve: for it is
only that the words "white" and "golden",
in connection with a chapel, evoke a number
of conventional associations of 'purity' and
'sanctity', and the poem falls back on them.
Blake's equivocation here is profoundly
revealing: on the one hand, the chapel's posi-
tive function is wholly unrealised, and on the
other it fails to register the distinctness from
 the chapel in "The Garden of Love" which
the intention seems to require.
We are struck at once, when we have
taken note of this, by the remarkable
difference in the role of the narrator in the
two poems. In "The Garden of Love", the
narrator's activity is limited to, and doesn't
survive, the motion of turning away, in the
second stanza, from the chapel to the garden~
that apart, he does no more than transcribe a
vision in relation to which he is passive, and
in which the only freedom that remains to
him is that of not looking. Indeed, the
progress of the poem enforces the
inescapability of the fact from which, at first,
he attempts to avert himself: the contagion of
"Thou shalt not" is unavoidable, and we feel
that it has already contaminated the narrator
- the tone of the poem implies neither the
capacity for, nor the possibility of, resistance.
Similarly, while we're left in no doubt as to
what the significance of the narrator's
experience is, it doesn't issue - as it does in
the second poem - in action; and the coroll-
ary of this is the narrator's impotence. The
priests are "binding with briars my joys and
desires", and he can only watch helplessly
and resignedly as they do so. What the narra-
tor sees is something that is being done to
himself, yet the metaphor - and the dream-
vision convention - displaces the experience
onto an inanimate nature which cannot resist
in itself and which is wholly inaccessible to
the narrator's intervention. The experience is
'subjective', and yet 'out there' in such a way
that nothing can be done about it.
Turning back to the second poem, we see
at once that the serpent is doing what the nar-
rator, in "The Garden of Love", can't do~
and the three-sentence structure which
seemed at first to reinforce the clarity and
simplicity of the allegory suddenly takes on a
richer and more complex meaning. The first
and last sentence define the conditions of
statis which precede and follow from the ser-
pent's appearance: the second, bridging three
stanzas, gives us the serpent itself, its
dynamic energy enacted in the transgression
of the poem's formal divisions. Thus while
the characteristics of the chapel are vaguely
left to be inferred from a conventionally
appropriate vocabulary, the serpent is dra-
matised, the discrepancy being nowhere
more apparent than in the line in which the
36
serpent appropriates the imagery of dazzling
visual brilliance which has been used to pre-
sent the chapel. In "All his shining length he
drew", "shining'' is brought marvellously to
life in the pattern of stressed long-vowels
which enact the serpent's impulsive progress;
and we note, by comparison, the inertness of
"the white pillars of the door", in which
"white" certainly doesn't function dra-
matically.
In another draft of the poem, Blake
changed "shining" to "slimy". The emenda-
tion does more than make the disgust
explicit: it's already explicit enough in the
enjambement - the poem's most brilliant
dramatic effect - at the transition from the
third to the fourth stanza, and the juxtaposi-
tion of "white" and "vomiting" that Blake
gets by it. What "shining" most radically and
damagingly implies is not only the insubstan-
tiality of the poem's dualism - chapel and
serpent suddenly partake of a common reality
- but also the fact that that reality is more
vividly and concretely present in the serpent
than in the object it desecrates. The chapel
simply isn't there in the poem, and its
absence makes the disgust curiously
excessive in relation to its ostensible motive.
It isn't the violation of the chapel that Blake
is disgusted by; and the intensity of the
loathing goes clearly enough with the inten-
sity of imaginative identification. As soon as
the serpent appears, the observing 'I' and the
accompanying tone of objective statement
are displaced, and we find instead a startlingly
sensuous collaboration of the language with
the imagined event. The monosyllabic harsh-
ness of the final couplet is only readable as a
reaction (identical, paradoxically enough in
an artist who might seem to be Swift's anti-
thesis; to Gulliver's recoil from the Yahoos)
against that identification: disgust here is
inseparable from self-disgust and self-
punishment.
The reading together of the two poems
produces an impression of stalemate. The
negative commentary, in "The Garden of
Love'', on the priests' repression of energy is
contingent on the narrator's impotence and
on the metaphorical transposition of energy
into "play" or passive, non-animal sensuous
forms ("sweet flowers"). The poignant cry
of protest positively requires the sublimation .
of "energy" and a sense of the invincibl~
potency of the agents of repression. In the
second poem, where the sexual nature of the
repressed makes itself felt, "energy" is
irnagined as evil, and the positive connota-
tions of Christianity, however feebly and
unconvincingly, return. Despair turns, now,
not on the denial of energy, but on the recog-
nition of its nature, and the impossibility
(registered iin the ambiguous tone of iden-
tification and disavowal) either of dissociat-
ing oneself from it or of conceiving it as any-
thing other than innately and necessarily
destructive.
Indeed, the two lyrics give ample evidence
of the incorrigible persistence, in Blake's own
verse, of the very contradiction which,
elsewhere, he sets out to diagnose in Milton.
In The Marriage of Heaven and' Hell, the voice
of the devil, denouncing the dualism of soul
and body, and the debasement of energy
which follows from it, affirms the sanctity of
desire in the teeth of a Christian tradition
which identifies energy with evil. "The
history of this (tradition) is written in
Paradise Lost": and the passage moves
towards the famous dictum that Milton was
"of the Devil's party without knowing it".
The Marriage, as its title implies, aims at
dialectical synthesis; but the magnificent
audacity of the intention, and the liberating
vigour and passion of the achievement,
shouldn't distract us from the perception that
the aim is illusory - that the very concept of
dialectical synthesis is a chimera. The best
that Blake can achieve is a momentary rever-
sal of terms, whereby the devil becomes the
spokesman of a 'true' Christianity and
announces that "Jesus was all virtue". Jesus
is now defined in terms of "impulse" rather
than as Milton's "governor (or reason)"~ but
the association of Jesus and "impulse" gives
the latter a connotation which the most insis-
tent redefinition can't obliterate. The Chris-
tian dualism presents an insurmountable
obstacle to dialectics, and the cultural load of
the language constantly insists on reimposing
itself. The attempt to marry heaven and hell,
to celebrate the holiness of energy within a
language which remains Christian, is de-
feated by everything which that language has
come to embody; and when we look for an
ambiguously convinced affirmation of sexual
energy in Blake, we look in vain. It seems to
me significant that Leavis, attempting, in his
37
analysis of" The Sick Rose:· to establish the
flower as an embodiment of "the warm
security of love "(The LivingPrinciple, Chatto
1975, p. 89-93), resorts to an interpellated
quotation from Donne ("She's all States,
and all Princes, I, Nothing else is") the rele-
vance of which is neither argued nor
demonstrated, but which works to introduce,
by sleight of hand, the suggestions of mutual
sexual love which the rose clearly doesn't
have. The rose implies not mutuality or
reciprocity, or interdependence, but a per-
fectly enclosed singleness - a oneness of
being which excludes any of the senses of
sexuality as a relationship. It is the "invisible
worm" which introduces eroticism; and we
might add that the worm is created with a
dynamism and tactile vividness which makes
it the reverse of "invisible". The worm is the
serpent, and while the positive significance of
the rose is made present in a way which
demonstrates, by contrast, the unreality of
the golden chapel, it can't be read as a
positiveness about any form of human sex-
uality - unless, perhaps, the auto-erotic.
Blake, of course, isn't of the Gothic tradi-
tion in the sense in which Hawthorne or
Melville are; but the poems I've discussed
provide us with an admirable instance of the
problems which the Gothic confronts, and
with a sense of their general historical perti-
nence. I've already recorded the conviction,
in accounts of The Exorcist and Meet Me in St.
Louis, that we must look to the nineteenth
century American literary tradition (the only
one, apart from the German, in which the
Gothic isn't marginalised), for the progeni-
tors of the American horror movie~ and that
it's possible to trace a line of descent from
Milton's devils (Satan and Comus), through
the Faustian hubris of the protagonists of the
American Gothic (Melville being, in this
respect, very consciously 'Miltonic') to the
representatives of the devil so characteristiC1
of the contemporary cinema. The link is pro-
vided by Puritanism and its aftermath. The
peculiar intensity of Puritanism in America
consists in the fact that the eternal struggle of
Good and Evil was, for the first settlers, not
merely a matter of metaphysical conviction
but, with an unparalleled immediacy, a con-
dition of concrete life and practice. The
spiritual dualisms assumed a tangible
material form in every fact of their
 experience, and the material presence of evil
conditioned material remedies and struggles.
The American Gothic is inconceivable with~
out the specific historical conditions in which
Good and Evil could be experienced in this
way: even as it strives to question, transcend
or resolve the dualism and - hence its
progressivenes - the structures of social
confidence and experience with which the
dualism is involved, the Gothic tends con-
tinually to regress to the very terms against
which it struggles.
If we accept John Jones' hypothesis, in his
admirable book on Keats . (John Keats's
Dream of Truth, Chatto), that a great deal of
Romantic art is characterised by the attempt
to negotiate the cultural opposition between
the subjective and the objective, to resolve
the Cartesian dualism of the ego and its
objects with the concept of 'feeling' (Byron's
"To me high mountains are a feeling" is
exemplary), then we can say that the Gothic
at once inserts an impediment to the more
familiar Wordsworthian exaltation. "The
ennobling interchange from within and from
without" has, as its corollary, the desperation
of the Ancient Mariner before a universe
which has become simply a colony of his
imagination. The ecstatic sense of oneness
with the object in the activity of perception
becomes, for Coleridge (and later, at the
masthead of the Pequod, for Ishmael), the
horror of the loss of the material - a horror
which can take the contradictory forms either
of the imagination's inability to grasp the real
(the Dejection ode) or of an appa:llh1g confu-
sion in which the imagination engulfs reality
altogether, and imposes itself, uncontrolla-
bly, from without (the Mariner). The residue
is the sterile isolation of an ego striving, in
the first case, to grasp and realise its world;
and subjected, in the second, to the tyranny
of its own projected energies, whose material
embodiment testifies again, in its different
way, to the elusiveness of the romantic syn-
thesis.
From the start, then, the Gothic poses the
problem of perception in an especially acute
form: what is the relationship between the
moral/metaphysical order of the world (if
there be such) and the perceiver's articula-
tion of it? The question is raised as a ques-
tion, in The Ancient Mariner, by crime or
rather, by the sense of having committed
38
crime - by a transgression which dissolves
the habitual grounds of certainty; and the
American Gothic, with its peculiarly intimate
relation to Puritanism, is incessantly preoc-
cupied with a related issue - is evil a principle
in nature or a means of interpreting it? Con-
sider, for example, the following (it is the
final paragraph of Chapter Five of The
Scarlet Letter:
"The vulgar, who, in those dreary old
times, were always contributing a grotesque
horror to what interested their imaginations,
had a story about the scarlet letter which we
might readily work up into a terrific legend.
They averred, that the symbol was not mere
scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but
was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be
seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester
Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And
we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom
so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth
in the rumor than our modern incredulity
may be inclined to admit".
Immediately prior to this, Hawthorne has
raised the analogous question from Hester's
point of view: has the scarlet letter "endowed
her with a new sense... a sympathetic
knowledge of the hidden sin in other
hearts"? Or are her suspicions of the most
apparently respectable citizens prompted by
"the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who
would fain have persuaded the struggling
woman, as yet only half his victim, that the
outward guise of purity was but a lie"? Or are
these 'perceptions' produced by an imagina-
tion corrupted by "the strange and solitary
anguish of her life" within the community
that oppresses her? Hawthorne concludes:
"0 Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal sym-
bol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in
youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?
- Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest
results of sin. Be it accepted as proof that all
was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own
frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester
Prynne yet struggled to believe that no
fellow-mortal was guilty like herself".
Hawthorne equivocates: and no"thing that
follows finally settles the equivocation, which
isn't to be taken either as duplicity or as a
'modernist' strategy to render the narrative
world problematic. The novel hesitates bet-
ween two systems of explanation; between
what one might call an ideological analysis of
puritanism, which locates the origins of per-
ception in a specifically characterised histori-
cal society, and in which the conflict of desire
and law is a matter to be particularised and
located; and a tendency to reiterate the
metaphysical terms of Puritanism as a condi-
tion of existence, even when any commit-
ment to the associated social forms has
become untenable. It is precisely this hesita-
tion which allows Hawthorne to raise,
explicitly, ·the most radical questions -
which produces the problem of interpretation
as, in effect, the novel's substantial theme.
Consider, for example, the extraordinary dis-
cussion of the oppression of women in
Chapter 15 (p. 184 in the Penguin edition): is
women's struggle to attain "a fair and suita-
ble position" in society a struggle against a
history of social oppression, and the "long
hereditary habit which has become like
nature" produced by it, or is it a struggle
against "the ethereal essence, wherein (a
woman) has her truest life"? It is the
possibility of proposing the first interpreta-
tion which generates the principle of ambiva-
lence in the novel: for even while the second
reading, which automatically defines Hester
in terms of absolute moral/spiritual
transgression, doesn't negate or reject the
first, it does acquire from it a connotation of
superb hubris which makes of Hester, even if
she is, after all, monstrous, the tragic
heroine.
The Scarlet Letter, then, allows us to iso-
late the limitations of the concept of ambiva-
lence, the operation of which, in a number of
distinguished horror movies, has been
demonstrated by Robin Wood. It is the
symptom of a cultural deadlock: and while
the American Gothic has always been con-
cerned with the dramatisation of that dead-
lock, its very language and conventions
incessantly reimpose it. To say this isn't to
countenance some banal conviction of the
one-way determination of 'works' by 'genres'
(the kind of banality involved in, say,
Screen's account of 'realism'); but it is to
insist that genres are historical forms which
structure and negotiate reality in ways which
can't be separated from the pressures,
possibilities and requirements of their
historical moment. There comes a point
when one must ask whether the continued
use of the conventions doesn't impose unac-
39
ceptable limitations on the possibilities of
analysis - whether, in fact, the conventions
haven't come to entail in themselves a sort of
misrecognition which the most progressive
modifications can't resolve without moving
outside them altogether. The Gothic of
Hawthorne's novel enacts a hesitation, which
can be very precisely located historically, in
the face of the problem of evil: it is possible
that Hester Prynne has transgressed an
absolute spiritual law, and is in league with
the devil; and it is possible that she has
transgressed a law which is the product of
intolerably oppressive historical conditions of
which she is also a product (she isn't sure
herself whether or not she is evil). The great-
ness of Hawthorne's novel consists in the
fact that it raises the doubt; but it can only do
so, and in such a way that it almost endorses
the radical reading, because the doubt is
there. The ambivalence with which Hester is
viewed embodies at once an historical uncer-
tainty and a commitment to her in spite of it
- the kind of commitment which takes the
form, while doubt remains, of Huck Finn's
"Alright, I'll go to hell". This remains a radi-
cal commitment as long as it is possible to
believe (a) that there is and isn't a hell to go
to; (b) if there is, individual hubris is mag-
nificent; (c) if there isn't, the transgressing
protagonist has demonstrated the inadequacy
of the laws transgressed. The ambivalence of
the horror movie relates, on the contrary, to
the monster qua monster: it defines an
attitude of regret to an inevitable and
foregone conclusion, inevitable because the
vapidity and sterility of a particular set of
norms is the only other available option. We
rarely find in the horror movie, as we do in
the American literary Gothic, the possibility
that the transgressor may embody a positive
critique of the norms; and we don't because
(a) the social pressures inhibiting the sugges-
tion of such a possibility operate, in Holly-
wood, with infinitely greater stringency and
(b) the hesitation registered by the Gothic is
so fragile. The transition from Hester Prynne
to Regan in The Exorcist is governed by both
factors. It is perfectly legitimate to elucidate
Regan's possession by the devil as I've tried
to do elsewhere in this book, but the film
actively opposes any such process. The
Gothic no longer registers a hesitation at the
surface of the text, but produces an esoteric
 sub-text which is directly at odds with the
offered significance. Metaphor, in this ins-
tance, engenders and is engendered by
rnisrecognition: the return of the repressed
isn't cleanly distinguishable from the return
of repression, the very image which dram-
tises the one enforcing the other. The great
American horror movies - I Walked With a
Zombie, Psycho, The Birds, Sisters (to which
one might add, on a slightly lower level of
achievement, Curse of the Cat People, Son of
Frankenstein, Cohen's It's Alive and its sequel
and Romero's Living Dead films) -seem to
me to be characterised not so much by
ambivalence - a phenomenon discernible in
such eminently mediocre and objectionable
works as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre -as
by the use of the monster as the focus, or the
catalyst, for the critical analysis of everything
that 'normality' represents: though even here
the films can't move beyond a despairing
capitulation to an order which has been
implicitly rejected (with the ambiguous
exceptions of The Birds and Dawn of the Dead,
which postpone the issue). But it is precisely
here that discriminations arise - discrimina-
tions which turn less on ambivalence as such
(it seems to me a neutral phenomenon) than
on the way it is articulated. Psycho is the
classic instance of an actually realised and
presented enactment of the continuity bet-
ween the 'normal' and the 'monstrous', and
it is almost able to move beyond both catego-
ries: not quite, because, as in all horror
movies, nothing seems to survive their
obliteration; almost, because the film is con-
cerned less with either the norms or the aber-
rations as such, but with the institutions,
values and experiences which define them
and give them their continuity. The cynical,
sadistic opportunism of Hooper's film (its
'unpleasantness' in the bad rather than the
good sense) is directly attributable to the fact
that its monstrous family infinitely exceeds
any dramatic significance that could possibly
be ascribed to it. It is simply indulged, as it
were, for its own sake: as a metaphor for an
oppressed working-class it is risible (the
metaphor is merely obscurantist); and while
Marion Crane, in Psycho, isn't established
with much greater psychological precision
than the 'normal' characters in Massacre, our
attitude towards her is quite distinct. The
response which Robin Wood deprecates in
The Devil, Certainly (Damien: Omen ll)
41
the audience with which he saw Hooper's
film is wholly comprehensible - it is the
response the film incites; for its concentrated
negativity has the effect of transforming its
supposed representatives of the ultimate
degeneracy of the family into types of
exhilarating, anarchistic energy. If Norman
Bates' atrocities are never 'exciting', it is
because of the relationship the film has
demonstrated between, on the one hand,
Marion and Norman, and on the other, both
of them and us: the effect is to establish quite
clearly that Norman doesn't - and can't -
imply any positive significance whatever. The
'ambivalence' we feel towards Norman and
the covert identification with the family
which Hooper's film attempts so insidiously
to construct are diametrically opposed
phenomena. Hitchcock's film may end in
negativity and despair, but Hooper is simply
fiddling while Rome burns; and it shouldn't
detract from our sense of the nastiness of the
offence because he is fiddling, in Orwell's
phrase, "with his face towards the flames".
'Ambivalence' towards the 'monster' in
Hooper's way seems to me as dangerous, in
fact, as the opposite tendency to designate it
as 'absolute evil', and for the same reason:
both tendencies focus with particular clarity
the impossibility, within the Gothic, of con-
ceiving of the transformation of energies. It's
a failure which, significantly enough, is fully
adumbrated in the case of Melville, who, in
The Confidence Man' (1859), takes the
American Gothic to the impasse which still
confronts it. The theme of Melville's novel is
that, for the society he depicts, salvation is
damnation: the Confidence Man is Christ,
and his being so entails his being also the
devil. The novel ends with his extinction of
the light of the Old and the New Testament:
"The next moment, the waning light
expired, and with it the waning flames of the
horned altar, and the waning halo round the
robed man's brow; while in the darkness
which ensued, the cosmopolitan kindly led
the old man away. Something further may
follow from this masquerade".
The "something further" is, of course, as
Melville implicitly acknowledges, unimagina-
ble and unspecifiable: the devil as saviour
can't but embody negativity. In The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, the devil becomes Christ;
in The Confidence Man, Christ becomes the
 devil; and the two works embody the
opposed limits of the dialectical possibilities
which that language makes available. The
perilous flimsiness and inadequacy of Melvi-
lle's synthesis is acted out in his last work,
Billy Budd (1891), in which, having con-
cluded that 'order' and its annihilation repre-
sent the only options, he undertakes to
demonstrate the tragic necessity of repres-
sion and of a return of the repressed. Captain
Vere is most directly characterised for us in
the remark which, quoted in the aftermath of
Billy's execution, has clearly the significance
of a moral code: " 'with mankind', he would
say, 'forms, measured forms, are everything;
and this is the import couched in the story of
Orpheus with his lyre spellbinding the wild
denizens of the woods' ". That a general
political implication is intended is also made
explicit- Vere "once applied (this principle)
to the disruption of forms going on across the
Channel (the French Revolution) and the
consequences thereof" - and it's of the
essence of the use of Orpheus that
"measured forms" should imply at once
both civil stability (the building of Thebes)
and sexual restraint (the binding of 'nature').
The efficacy of each, for Vere, is that it
involves the other; and that involvement
entails the clear sense that sublimation
The continuity between the 'normal' and the 'monstrous' (Psycho)
(social life in general) is impossible without
repression. The two concepts are, of course
theoretically distinct; and the price of thei;
conflation is an accompanying 'tragic sense
of life' - a dualism of Nature and Culture
which assumes that the existence of society is
simply a matter of controlling the instincts
and that it is unnecessary (or impossible) t~
distinguish between the forms and conditions
of different social structures. Melville is left
in relation to Claggart, with contradiction and
ambivalence: on the one hand, Claggart is
insistently, the serpent-devil, the product of
a malign principle in Nature; on the other, he
is Vere's counterpart, the product and agent
of repressive social forms.
Clearly, no contemporary horror movie
could endorse Vere 's tragic stoicism: the
modern Gothic can mourn or celebrate the
disintegration of 'order', acquiesce in its
restoration, or trap itself (as in Romero's
Martin) in an endless formalistic confronta-
tion with the inadequacies of the genre's
language. Melville's "something further", I
think, both anticipates such a deadlock, and
infers that the way beyond it can't involve the
terms and oppositions within which he him-
self has worked.
- Andrew Britton
The Dark Mirror:
Murnau's Nosferatu
It is difficult to talk other than tentatively
about the work of F. W. Murnau. He
directed twenty-two films, of which a number
are apparently lost. Of the remainder, all but
a few exist only in prints in inaccessible
archives. But three of the films still in inter-
mittent circulation seem to me among the
cinema's great achievements- which is why
it is necessary to make some attempt at dis-
cussing Murnau despite the handicaps.
Nosferatu, Sunrise, and Tabu are not
merely remarkable individually. One senses
between them a fascinatingly complex rela-
tionship of likeness and opposition. The
three are widely separated in time and space:
Murnau shot Nosjeratu, his tenth film, in
Germany in 1922, Sunrise in Hollywood in
1927, Tabu in the Pacific islands in 1930 (it
was his last film). Oddly, it is Nosferatu and
Tabu, the furthest separated in time, that
reveal at once the deepest affinities and the
strongest contrasts.
What, in simple terms, have these three
obviously very different films in common?
Sunrise and Tabu are easy to relate in that
both are singlemindedly concerned with the
couple, with the sense of the marriage rela-
tionship as having prime and central signifi-
cance in human life. Beyond this, both films
share what one might call the Romantic
attitude to nature - a life close to nature,
based on "natural" simplicities, being
upheld against the corruption and artificiality
of the City (Sunrise) and of white civilization
(Tabu) - though nature in both films is
shown to have a dark, terrible aspect beneath
43
its surface appearance of sunshine and
health. But Nosjeratu is an early version of
Dracula, antedating Tod Browning and
Terence Fisher; its most striking, and
apparently central, figure is the vampire
Count; the film is for the most part a fairly
straight retelling of Bram Stoker's familiar
narrative that for most people nowadays, at
first viewing anyway, seems to live (if at all)
by virtue of certain arresting images and
compositions, of which the shot of Nosferatu
against sky and rigging from the hold of the
ship, may stand as an example. What has
such a horror-fantasy to do with universal
concepts like "nature" and "the couple"?
The answer is, in Murnau's hands, every-
thing.
The introductory caption might alert us to
what is essential in the film: it mentions the
Bremen plague, then tells us that "at its
origin and its climax were the innocent
figures of Jonathan Harker and his young
wife Nina." I am going to argue that in
Nosjeratu we have one of the cinema's finest
and most powerfully suggestive embodi-
ments of what I call the "Descent myth" -
one of those universal myths that seem fun-
damental to human experience. Reduced to
its simplest essentials, the Descent myth
shows characters existing in a state of inno-
cence who by a process of (often literal) des-
cent are led to discover a terrible underlying
reality of whose existence they had scarcely
dreamed. They either are destroyed by the
experience or emerge from it sadder and
wiser.
The myth is perhaps fundamental to all
civilized existence, suggesting the darker
depths beneath our civilized appearances; it
also has an odd and ambiguous connection
with the Garden of Eden myth. The classic
Greek rendering is the myth of Persephone,
where it is linked to nature and the seasons,
with the Orpheus myth as a variant. But the
main lines of the myth recur repeatedly in
Western culture and probably in all cultures.
In English literature one of its supreme
embodiments (as my reference above will
have suggested) is The Ancient Mariner; but
its presence is at least equally striking in Con-
rad's Heart of Darkness. In the cinema it can
be seen as activating much of Hitchcock's
work: Psycho is one of the great Descent
films. Recent Bergman, especially Persona
 and Face to Face, can be explored in relation
to such a myth. It is common in fairy tales
and horror films; its outlines can be dis-
cerned, in an emasculated form, lurking in
the backgound of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; its
01ost powerful recent embodiment is in Gary
Sherman's Death Line (or Raw Meat, as the
01utilated American release version was
retitled).
The vampire myth and Bram Stoker's
development of it easily coalesce with the
Descent myth. Indeed, it could be argued
that almost everything I am seeking to
demonstrate in No.'iferatu is inherent in vam-
pire mythology. Yet this in no way diminishes
the film's stature. Through the power and
suggestiveness of his imagery, Murnau really
does justice to the rich potentialities of
01aterial that (with the notable exception of
Dreyer's Vampyr) has generally been merely
debased and exploited. It is the quality of the
director's response to his material that mat-
ters, and I am not concerned with the precise
degree to which Murnau was conscious of the
implications his film can be seen to have.
IVosferatu remains itself a myth, with fi-
~ures who are more archetypes than psy
;hologically rounded characters; M urn au
doesn't himself seek to explain the myth, but
to embody it in images. What I am forced for
the sake of clarity to spell out is, in the film, a
matter of suggestive resonances arising from
the intensity with which Murnau feels his
material, rather than clear-cut allegory.
When Persephone was carried off by
Pluto, the god of the underworld, she was
gathering flowers in the spring meadows.
Nosferatu begins with Jonathan gathering
flowers for his wife - whom we first see
leaning over a flower-filled window-box to
play with a kitten. Murnau very simply estab-
lishes an innocent, almost over-sweet, idyllic
relationship - though even at the outset a
distinction is suggested between the two
characters: the young man seeming compla-
cent and over-confident, while a look of sad-
ness and tenderness comes over Nina's face
as he gives her the flowers. Jonathan is sent
to negotiate a property sale, and early in the
film we are shown the house in question, a
great derelict building evoking decay and
desolation. It is immediately opposite
Jonathan and Nina's house - like a mirror,
but a mirror in which there is as yet no clearly
45
defined reflection; its position is made much
of, visually, in the film's climactic sequences.
Nature is the real subject of Nosjeratu.
The "nature" suggested by Nina's flowers -
the daytime nature of sunlight and harmony
- is referred to at several points as the film
progresses: in the shots of horses moving
across a hillside in early morning sunshine, in
the shots of the sea sparkling in the sun.
Behind this, as it were, is the night-time
nature, the terrible underworld into which
Jonathan descends and whose forces he
releases. Nosferatu is consistently associated
with nature throughout the film. His castle,
on its first appearance, is like a natural con-
tinuation of the rock, an outcrop. He is iden-
tified with the jackal prowling the woods at
night - the jackal that startles and unsettles
the horses - during the scene at the inn
where the landlord warns Jonathan against
continuing his journey. Nosferatu's first
appearance suggests a nocturnal animal
emerging from its lair (the cave-like vault).
His movements are not those of a human
being; he seems to move silently, with a
skulking, sidling motion. His ears are long
and pointed, and have hair growing on them;
his hands and fingernails are like talons or
claws; his teeth are fangs.
This "nature" motif is taken up more
explicitly elsewhere in the film, notably in
Professor von Helsing's lecture. The caption
tells us that "Professor von Helsing was giv-
ing a course on the secrets of nature and their
strange correspondences to human life." The
lecture we watch is concerned with the Venus
· fly-trap and a carnivorous polyp. After it we
see Renfield, Nosferatu's agent in the city,
catching and eating flies in his madman's
cell; and slightly later he fascinatedly watches
spiders devouring their victims in a web. In
the sequences of his escape and pursuit Ren-
field seems to revert to an animal level,
swinging down from rooftops like an ape,
crouching behind a rotting tree stump, hop-
ping like a frog or toad. These scenes suggest
the continuity between the nature the film
depicts and human nature - between the
exotic Venus Flytrap, the commonplace
spider, and Renfield, and by implication bet-
ween Nosferatu and ourselves.
The film postulates, then, a duality in
nature. Below the surface of sunlight,
flowers, and innocence, a terrible under-
nature, precariously repressed, awaits its
chance to surge up and take over. Horses
(traditionally the friend of man) belong to
the daytime nature; and this gives par-
ticularly macabre overtones to the sinister
hooded horses that draw the vampire's
coach. The transition from the horses that
draw Jonathan's coach from the inn to the
vampire's horses underlines the symbolism
of the crossing of bridges: ''And when he had
crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to
meet him.''
Repression imagery dominates the film.
Nosferatu emerges from his cave-vault as
from under the ground, like a horribly per-
verted version of D. H. Lawrence's snake
driven down into its dark hole. When
Jonathan descends into the crypts to find
Nosferatu's coffin he passes under a huge
oppressive overhang of rock that also forms
part of the castle's structure. The arch is a
visual leitmotif in the film. Murnau uses it
particularly to characterize the vampire as a
repressed force who is always emerging from
under arches or arch-shapes that seem to be
trying unsuccessfully to press down upon
him, often forming a background of dark-
ness. That the image is again inherent in
vampire mythology is suggested by its recur-
rence in most vampire films; the traditional
setting of Gothic castle inevitably includes
arches in association with the other tradi-
tional elements of vaults, crypt, coffin, etc.
But Murnau's compositions with arches have
such striking pictorial force that few will
question the validity of finding a more than
incidental (though not necessarily fully con-
scious) significance in them.
The arch is used also to link Nosferatu
with Jonathan. There is an arch over the bed
in which Jonathan sleeps in the inn - the
first effectual appearance of the image, as he
nears the vampire's domain. At their first
meeting, Nosferatu emerges from one arch,
Jonathan from another, as if he were walking
out to meet his reflection. The scene ends
with Nosferatu leading the young man down
into the darkness of his arched vault - a per-
fect "descent" image, and one that in its con-
text calls to mind the descent of Cocteau 's
Orpheus into the underworld via mirrors
(i.e., a descent into himse{/). At the end of
the dinner scene, where Nosferatu is roused
by the blood from Jonathan's cut finger, the
46
arch-structure is very like that from which he 5ucking the man's blood as distracted by a ways evoking power, sweeping across the
first emerged, an alternate patterning of light greater, more necessary pull. screen so that, instead of being neatly framed
and darkness. When Jonathan wakes up the Andre Bazin's opinion that "in neither and "fixed," it seems to burst into and out of
next morning, at sunrise, contemptuously !.Wosferatu nor Sunrise does editing play a the image; or with the camera on deck behind
dismissing the marks on his neck as of no sig.l0ecisive part" is even more perverse than his the prow as it pushes ahead through the
nificance, he is still beneath an arch-structure rejection of the view that "the plasticity of waves. At first the ship is guided and con-
formed by the decor and shadows. He walks l.{urnau's images has an affinity with a cer- trolled by normal human means, normal
out into the open through an arched doorway itain kind of expressionism." The elaborate human consciousness, with Nosferatu hid-
in long-shot, and then under a dark arch that 'ntercutting of Jonathan's and Nosferatu's
1
den away in the hold in his coffins, an
oppressively fills the entire foreground of the .journeys, and Nina's ambiguous expectation, unknown presence (the repression motif
image, to write a letter to Nina under the 1is crucial to the film's meaning. Jonathan tra- again). Earlier, the supernaturally opening
arches of a small pavilion. In the letter he ·vels by land, the vampire by sea; Nina, await- door - no catch and no lock - into
again dismisses the marks on his throat and ling her husband, looks out to sea all the time, Jonathan's chamber resembled a coffin lid,
his bad dreams; the Nosferatu-arches com. [rom a seashore dotted with crosses that with the vampire exactly fitting the door
ment on his confidence. Jonathan's move-~1ssociate her with Christian redemption and space like a body in a coffin; the resemblance
ment under a series of arch-shapes here is oeath. The hero and his released double links the film's main repression images, the
later· "mirrored" in Nosferatu's nocturnal reach the city simultaneously, Nosferatu door having the characteristic arch-shape.
visit to his bedroom to suck his blood. 1currying surreptitiously through the Gradually, on the ship, the vampire rises up
The richness of the film's suggestivity can 1hadows with his coffin as Jonathan rides in. and takes over, undermining and destroying
be seen as the product of a synthesis of a Above all, there is the disturbingly weird the whole crew, until the ship has become an
number of traditional or cultural elements tjncident of Nina's sleepwalking along a extension of his power, supernaturally pro-
fused within the particular sensibility of Mur- i~arapet, arms outstretched to the darkness. pelled by his mysterious energies. The
nau: the repressive arches of Gothic fiction ilhe calls out as she collapses, "He's coming, culminating image here is the one I have
and cinema; vampire mythology; the "des- !must go to meet him." But Murnau has cut already alluded to: Nosferatu, filmed from
cent" myth; the notion of the double or Ito this (and the editing seems here to be con- the hold, seeming immensely tall from so low
Doppelgiinger which Lotte Eisner sees as a l,istent in all extant versions of the film), not an angle, moving around the deck against a
central motif of Expressionist cinema ("the lfrom Jonathan's ride, but from Nosferatu's background of sky and rigging. It's an
haunted screen") but which has obvious .~exorable progress by ship. unforgettable power-image.
antecedents in nineteenth-century literature ' Jonathan can't destroy Nosferatu -can't The sea and its associations are very
(Poe's "William Wilson," Wilde's Dorian even attempt to destroy him. Even when the important in these scenes. The sea should be
Gray). Of Murnau 's lost German films, the '!vampire is lying helpless in his coffin during a barrier, a protection; our sense of security is
one that most particularly arouses curiosity !the daytime, all Jonathan can do is recoil in undermined by the images of the boat bear-
(the more so in that it stars the remarkable ~orror. Significantly, it seems to be ing Nosferatu sweeping irresistibly across it.
Conrad Veidt) is Der Januskopf, a version of :Jonathan's impotence that gives Nosferatu The sea is traditionally associated with purity,
Dr. 'Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that antedates ithe power and freedom to leave his environ- or purification (viz. late Shakespeare), and
Nosferatu by two years. ment, shut away from civilization in inac- the suggestion of Nosferatu's power spread-
The linking image of the arch is not the lcessible forests and wilds, to rise and spread ing across it intensifies our sense of con-
only way in which a parallel is established bet- like a pestilence over the civilized world. tamination. The inexorability of his progress
ween Jonathan and Nosferatu. I have already Only after Nosferatu has been released in this is conveyed in another unforgettable shot -
suggested that the house opposite, which way can Jonathan summon up his forces for and one Murnau was to use again with similar
Jonathan looks at with such fear, is a mirror wursuit and combat - though in fact he effect in Tabu - in which the ship glides in
awaiting a reflection - a gap that will never does provide any effective opposition from the side of the frame completely to fill
ultimately be filled by the vampire as he to the vampire. Near the end of the film, an image previously occupied by quiet river
stares across beseechingly at Nina. Nosferatu when Nina makes Jonathan look at the house and quay and sleeping town. Our sense of
becomes a kind of demonic alternative hus- opposite and begins to tell him, "Every Nosferatu's power is intensified by the fact
band for Nina, whom she must accept with night, in front of me ... ," he can again do that the ship is deserted, and is moving with-
ambiguous desire and revulsion. The nothing but recoil helplessly and collapse on out human agency; and by the fact that it is
explanatory caption to the contrary, it is not the bed. He seems not to want to know what still full-rigged as it slides toward the quay.
Jonathan who "hears" Nina in the scene of Nina sees clearly. He enters the town like fate, like a doom.
telepathic communication when she inter- In the scenes of his progress his identity as
rupts Nosferatu's nocturnal visit to his prey. a force of nature, or the underworld of
Jonathan makes no response whatever; it is From the moment of Nosferatu's release, nature, is again implied and strengthened.
the vampire who hears Nina, looks up, and ilfurnau emphasizes the growth of his power. There are the rats with which he is repeatedly
moves away, not so much prevented from fhe ship is consistently photographed in associated, swarming out from the black
47
 coffin interiors in which they have been
breeding in darkness, then out from the hold
when the ship is in the city; there is also the
plague, with which the rats are connected.
The exact nature of the plague is left
ambiguous; it is spread by the rats, yet the
vampire's marks are on the victims' necks, as
if N osferatu had visited each personally. The
ambiguity is essential to the film's symbol-
ism, allowing us to view the plague as the
eruption both of universal natural forces and
of repressed energies in the individual. In this
context the thrice-recurring image of the rats
swarming out from their coffined darkness is
powerfully evocative.
The plague is a means of universalizing
the whole idea of the film. Nosferatu is not
only in Jonathan, in the marriage, he is in
civilization itself. And at about this point
Murnau begins to put more emphasis on the
animal-like Renfield, who was present in the
midst of society from the start, an extension
of his "Master." We see the impotence of
society to combat the forces that have been
released, in the scenes of the hysterical pur-
suit of Renfield, where the baffled pursuers
vent their fury on a scarecrow.
Nosferatu's real opponent is not Jonathan
but Nina. The film endows her, as it does the
vampire, with a super-human force. Just as
Nosferatu telepathically controls Renfield at
long distance, so Nina is able telepathically to
save Jonathan, at the moment when the
vampire may destroy him. In the last scenes
of the film the sexual overtones inherent in
the vampire myth (and exploited throughout
the recent British Dracula cycle) become
explicit. The window from which Nosferatu
watches, like a sinister reflection in a mirror,
is opposite the couple's bedroom. It is Nina
the vampire wants, from the moment he sees
her miniature; and the intercutting of
Jonathan's and Nosferatu's journeys -
intercut also (as we have seen) with Nina's
ambiguous expectations - suggests that the
struggle is essentially for her. Nina embodies
the film's most apparent positive values, the
civilized human existence for which human
nature, in the form of Nosferatu, has been
repressed. Her sacrifice of herself is
ambiguously motivated. From her window
she watches the procession of coffins down
the street, and gives herself to remove the
plague from the world. But the film also
48
makes clear that she is giving herself to save
Jonathan: at her moment of decision, she is
stitching a sampler that says, "Jell Iiebe
Dich. " Her sacrifice thus carries Christian
overtones more complex and powerful than
the hold- up- the-cross-and -splash- him -with.
holy-water tactics of most vampire films.
But one must beware of emphasizing this
at the expense of the sexual meaning of the
last scenes. One is tempted toward a straight
psychoanalytical interpretation: Nosferatu is
the symbol of neurosis resulting from
repressed sexuality (repressed nature); when
the neurosis is revealed to the light of day it is
exorcised, but the process of its emergence
and recognition has been so terrible that posi-
tive life (Nina) is destroyed with it. The real
energies displayed in the film belong to the
vampire. Or another way of looking at it: if
one accepts my implication that Jonathan and
Nosferatu are really the same character, then
Nina must accept in her husband what he
himself ca·n 't confront or control. At the
same time, there is in the images and the act-
ing a suggestion that Nina secretly and
ashamedly desires the vampire. It is worth
repeating at this point that the film, in the
form of myth rather than psychological
drama, is by no means restricted to a single
allegorical interpretation. Evil (if one can call
Nosferatu simply evil) is destroyed; but good
is destroyed with it. The ultimate effect, for
all the uplift of the final shot of the vampire's
shattered castle in the sunlight, is of a tragic
pessimism.
Yet this is still to make the ending too
simple. I haven't taken into account the ver}
striking change in Murnau's presentation of
the vampire in the closing sequences. After
building up his monster into a figure of terri-
ble power, Murnau finally presents him as
essentially pathetic, helpless, a victim. When
he at last appears in the position of a reflec-
tion, at the opposite window, he seems sud-
denly a pitiful old man at Nina's mercy. The
image arouses powerfully ambivalent feel-
ings toward the repressed animal nature
Nosferatu represents, and the film's most
disturbing final effect arises from this. Our
sense that the greatest energies in the film
are Nosferatu's intensifies the poignance of
his helplessness and his destruction; and we
cannot entirely evade the feeling that
Nosferatu is, in a way, an important part of
ourselves. Our attitude to Nina, to Christian
sacrifice, to the centuries of "Christian"
repression that have made such sacrifice
necessary, undergoes subtle modification.
I threw out earlier a comparison with
o. H. Lawrence's "Snake." Both the parallel
and the difference are very striking. In Law-
rence's poem the snake, like Nosferatu,
comes out of a dark hole to become a symbol
of all that civilized society disowns and
rejects; and the poet, driven by what he calls
the "voice of his education," drives it back
into the subterranean darkness by casting a
tog at it. But to Lawrence the snake, though
venomous, is essentially beautiful and pure;
he calls it a "god", a "king uncrowned in the
underworld, now due to be crowned again,"
"one of the lords of life"; he is ashamed of
the "pettiness" provoked by his "accursed
human education," a pettiness he feels he
must now "expiate." If one must simply
choose, it is perhaps more realistic to see all
that civilization has repressed through the
centuries emerging as a Nosferatu rather
~an Lawrence's pure and uncorrupted
snake. But few will deny, I hope, that Law-
rence's image and the vital positive faith it
exemplifies have their validity too - are
given it, indeed, by the convincing presence
in Lawrence's own work of just those
energies the snake symbolizes. To depict our
repressed animal natures, our sensuality,
solely as a Nosferatu, while opposing to him
the somewhat bloodless Nina, cannot but
strike us as unhealthy.
The unhealthiness is not only Murnau's;
it derives in large measure from the film's
background in German Expressionism. If
one takes The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari as
the Expressionist film par excellence, then
one will see that even as early as Nosferatu
the Expressionist tendencies were already
becoming modified and muted in Murnau's
work. The chief distinguishing feature of
Expressionist style (from which its name
derives) is the deformation or distortion of
reality for the sake of direct expressive effect.
Little in Nosferatu corresponds precisely to
such a description; there is nothing in it like
the fantastic, twisted, hallucinatory decors of
Caligari. On the contrary, one is continually
struck by the context of reality given to the
horror-fantasy by the use of real locations
(doubtless, as Raymond Durgnat has sug-
49
gested, one of the things that so attracts
Georges Franju to Murnau 's film): the wild
mountains, the forests, the sea; even the city
scenes were largely shot in the streets of
Hamburg. Normally, one would stress the
film's surprising freedom from Expressionist
mannerisms. Nevertheless, Expressionist
influence pervades the film. The first shot of
the vampire's castle jutting up from the rock,
the strange geometrical patterning of arch-
forms out of which Nosferatu emerges to
meet Jonathan, the use of "unnatural"
camera angles as in the shot from the hold of
the ship, the trick effects, the huge shadow as
Nosferatu ascends the stairs to Nina's room,
the shadow of his fingers clenching into a fist
upon her heart - these are only the more
obvious manifestations of the Expressionist
manner.
But Expressionism in the German cinema
was more than a style; it was an atmosphere
and an ethos. Among its salient charac-
teristics were an oppressive sense of doom or
fate, and an obsessive association of sen-
suality with evil. By identifying its "Doom"
figure with repressed sensuality Nosferatu
makes perfect sense of the co-existence of
these characteristics; if it is partly limited by
the movement that produced it, it can also be
seen as the fulfillment of that movement.
And for the film to make sense it is obvious
that Nina must be what she is, pallid, emaci-
ated, seeming drained of blood even from the
outset, her face at times almost a death 's
head, in the last scenes agonized and exalted
like Christ on the cross. She is the inevitable
sorollary of the repressed Nosferatu.
Such tendencies are still present in
Sunrise, again associated with the stylistic
characteristics of Expressionism: the h-ero's
wife strikes one as quite sexless, while sen-
suality (in the person of the Woman from the
City) is willfully destructive and evil. Only in
Tabu - under the complex influences of
America, Robert Flaherty, and the Pacific
Islands - was Murnau able to achieve a
healthier, more positive and integrated
attitude toward the body. Significantly, only
fleeting traces of Expressionist style remain
in that film; and I doubt if one would call
them that if one were not alerted by
knowledge of Murnau's background.
Robin Wood (1970)

The Exorcist
In an attempt, here necessarily selective,
to account for the current diabolism cycle in
American movies, and its dominant form -
the devil as a child whose 'innocence' is
stressed - the following phenomena seem
significant.
1. William Peter Blatty's novel 'The Exor-
cist' is preceded by a page of epigraphs - a
passage from the story of the man called
Legion in St. Luke's Gospel; a transcript of
an FBI wiretap of a conversation between two
Mafiosi about torture; a Jesuit priest's
eyewitness account of Communist atrocities;
and three words which Mr. Blatty deems able
to speak for themselves - Dachau, Ausch-'"
witz, Buchenwald. These heterogeneous
texts are all reduced to one essence - the
Devil is lord of this world ('there's no other
explanation,' the priest remarks.). Political
threats to Christian/ capitalist democracy
(Communism) and products of it (the Cosa
Nostra) become indistinguishably, with Naz-
ism, the powers of darkness, a cosmic force
of evil which is, by definition, archetypal
(that is, outside historical determination)
and, implicitly, beyond control. Everything in
the film of The Exorcist, from the use of
sound in the Iraq sequence to the very move-
ment of the narrative (Chris's scepticism -
'You're telling me I should take my daughter
to a witch-doctor?' -broken down to 'I want
a priest, not a psychiatrist') is designed to
overwhelm the audience with superstition
and a conviction of its helplessness. The new
50
power of the Devil suggests a society con-
vinced of its own corruption, but unable or
unwilling to conceive of an alternative; and
the recent tendency to produce mass rituals
of self-condemnation, punishment and
catharsis has resulted in two structures in
which the crisis-point is variously objectified
as 'natural' disaster and 'super-natural' inva-
sion (the horror of the latter recurs cons-
tantly in American culture). The horror
movie increasingly forgoes the disaster
movie's insistence on the final restoration of
ideological confidence, but The Exorcist, in its
allegiance to the purifying/sublimating rites
of Catholicism, retains it. One notes, for
example, the dedication to 'The Story Behind
The Exorcist': 'To William Peter Blatty, for
instilling in his novel, his film and in us, the
feeling that everything would finally be
alright.' The price of confidence, here, is its
perfunctoriness, and, psychoanalytically, its
meaninglessness (Regan 'forgets'). Indeed,
one might hazard that part of the pleasure of
The Exorcist (and of its importance as a
symptom) lies in the undermining of social
confidence by inducing a state of anxiety
which cannot be satisfactorily allayed.
2. The emergence of Women's Lib. and
Gay Lib. as threats to patriarchal family and
its associated sexual 'norms'. The fear of
homosexuality, in the context of clerical
celibacy, is strong in Blatty's novel, and
Karras' final cry to the Devil of 'Take me!' is
actually inspired by Regan's first explicit
accusation that he is gay - a detail which the
film suppresses. Connections between social
disintegration, sexual liberation and 'retribu-
tion for sin' emerge here (consider the
emphasis on the shark-as-Satan in the novel
of 'Jaws'), with connotations, again, of
inevitability (Christian prophecy in The Omen;
the 'age of Saturn' - of familial cannibalism
- written in the stars in The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre).
3. The Women's Lib. movement has
fostered in America a Children's Lib move-
ment (see Shulamith Firestone's Dialectic of
Sex ) . Implicit in the image of the '} vii-child
is the problem of what happens tv the con-
cept of 'innocence' if the Freudian theory of
infantile sexuality is true, and Regan suggests
a delayed cultural acknowledgement of, and
revulsion from, that obscene suggestion. The
accession of sexuality and self-definition
where purity and dependence have been
endows the child's transformation from
angel into demon with an impeccable logic
(which De Palma's Carrie submits to
analysis). One can trace, notably in the work
of Hitchcock, the association of the Devil
with the return, through a child, of the sex-
uality repressed in the American home, right
back into classical Hollywood: Uncle Charlie
in Shadow of a Doubt and Norman Bates in
Psycho are both ancestors of Regan and Car-
rie.
4. The recurrent suggestion in white
American culture that America's destiny,
simultaneously fulfilment and annihilation,
is inevitably apocalyptic. One might note the
obsessive (and insistently sexual) image of
the 'vortex' in Edgar Allan Poe ('The
inevitable catastrophe is at hand'), and the
extraordinary moment in Herman Melville's
'Clare!' (crucially, post-Civil War) when
America, having been compared to a
whorehouse and an arsenal ('the slumberous
combustibles, bound to explode'), is shown
its future in the image of the beast emerging
from the sea in the Book of Revelations.
Damien in The Omen is traced to the same
text.
The Devil in The Exorcist is given a very
specific form - that of the Pazuzu, a minor
Mesopotamian deity with none of the con-
notations of the Christian Satan (I am
indebted to Tony Williams for this informa-
tion). Such a choice instantly imposes the
Christian dualism on a non-dualistic culture,
universalises a particular sense of evil; but
the determining factor here is the Pazuzu's
physical appearance. The horror in the film is
that a little girl should be possessed by a devil
whose penis is a serpent. Regan-as-devil
becomes the phallic, castrating woman (she
seizes the psychiatrist, who invokes her, by
the testicles), and is endowed with a parody-
perversion of 'masculine' characteristics
- bass voice, violence, sexual aggressive-
ness, unladylike language. Immediately, an
Oedipal theme emerges. The early scenes
establish Regan's suppressed resentment of
her mother ('You'll be sorry!) and of the pre-
sence of Burke Dennings, whom she is con-
vinced her mother is going to marry ('I heard
differently'). She subsequently turns into a
boy, commits the Oedipal crime and becomes
the man of the house, the contest being re-
51
enacted, during the exorcism, as the battle
with God the Father.
The main body of the film rests on the
opposition between Regan's potency and
Karras' impotence, the opposition being
rooted in our sense of the similarity of their
predicament. Crucial here are the two
mother-child relationships, and the series of
narrative/thematic parallels between Regan
and Karras in the middle stretch of the film,
juxtaposing the first tokens of Regan's
possession with the conflict in Karras bet-
ween resentment of his mother (the punch-
bag scene, which immediately precedes the
party where Regan pisses on the carpet) and
the guilt to which it gives rise (the nightmare,
which immediately follows the violent trem-
bling of Regan's bed, and which locates the
devil imagery of the Iraq scenes - black dog,
Pazuzu medallion - in Karras'
unconscious). The oppression of child by
mother, suppressed in the Chris/Regan
scenes, becomes explicit in the scenes with
Karras; yet conversely, it is Regan who
makes explicit what Karras wants to do,
simultaneously asserting her sexuality,
revenging herself on home and family, and,
as devil, refusing guilt for both. Karras' 'pas-
sion' ('Take me!') allows him both to affirm
his loyalty to the Father (God, Merrin) and
to avenge himself on his mother (whom he
has previously 'seen' for a moment on
Regan's bed) by beating up Regan as she sits
triumphant above Merrin's corpse.
If the film allows the repressed to find
expression, and gratification, in an absolutely
objectified form (possession by the devil), it
moves inexorably towards the punishment
(renewed repression) of that gratification.
The movement is inseparable from the pre-
sentation of the female characters and from
the formulation of the central conflict in
terms of castration. The opening scenes in
Iraq juxtapose watchful, mysterious,
threatening women in black (the last of
them, hideously disfigured, almost knocks
Merrin down in her carriage) with blinded
men, the reading of blindness as castration
being reinforced by the stress on Merrin 's
extreme physical debility. The impulse to
degrade women is already there in the specta-
cle of Ellen Burstyn 's collapse into despera-
tion, but its full force is reserved for the
treatment of Linda Blair/Regan.
 The symbolic premise of the action, estab-
lished on Regan's first appearance, is that
rejection of ideological construction as 'a
woman' is diabolical. The story of the man
riding a beautiful grey horse ('I think it was a
gelding'), and the ensuing request for a horse
of her own, already poses castration as the
necessary consequence of Regan's liberation;
and the Ouija board sequence, with its amaz-
ing verbal innuendo ('I think you need two
people, honey.' /'No you don't - I do it all
the time.') fixes the association of pleasure-
in-sexual-awakening with the devilish. It is
vital that the film can only conceive Regan's
sexuality as 'masculine' (culturally defined)
and 'unnatural' (because masculine in the
wrong place). Having acquired the phallus,
Regan must be castrated again; yet whereas
the scene of her possession is heavily loaded
sexually (the terrified cries of 'It's burning!
He's trying to kill me!' replaced, at the
climax, by 'Fuck me! Fuck me!'), sexuality is
withdrawn from the various assaults on
Regan by men, all of which become attempts
to cure her. The crux of the eroticism
becomes Regan's levitation/erection and its
subversion by the two male priests ('The
power of Christ compels you!', endlessly
reiterated), the moment of castration figured
in the strip of flesh torn from Regan's leg as
she descends. The representatives of
patriarchal religion replace Regan in the
family as female child 'in the Name of the
Father'. Male dominance is reasserted, but
with a necessary ambiguity: both priests
(Father and Son) are killed, the reconstituted
family is conspicuously without a father, and
the emphasis on male emasculation (by
women) cannot be fully recuperated. Thus it
is not a real but a symbolic authority which is
reconfirmed: the Name of the Father as the
Law (God) and the family as patriarchal unit
survive the absence of their representatives.
Indeed, the repressiveness of the film con-
sists of allowing a taboo to be broken in order
to reimpose it. We are allowed Regan's sub-
version of ideology, but in a form so
inherently monstrous as to preconclude that
the restoration of that ideology (read as 'nor-
mality') is necessary.
Throughout the film, Regan fulfils the
function which Norman Brown ('Life
Against Death', Chapter XIV) suggests that
Luther ascribes to himself - the revelation
52
of the sexuality beneath the sublimations of a je 's enforced ignorance of menstruation.) sodomy. One can distinguish two points of
Catholic culture ('The Pope is the Devil [he de-sublimation of the Virgin Birth is attack - the concept of motherhood as the
Incarnate'). On this level, both i) the dualism Jjnked to the castration imagery through the place of female sexuality ('Your mother
maintained in the conscious discourse of the desecration of the statue of the Madonna, sucks cocks in hell!'), and clerical celibacy.
film is inverted, and ii) the attack on sub- which takes the form of endowing her with The relationship of Karras and Father Dyer,
limation is itself seen as filthy. As Brown three monstrous red-tipped phalluses. The treated very much in terms of 'just good
remarks, 'as long as basic repression is main- defacing of the archetype of woman as Good friends', has as its complement the torrent of
tained, a return of the repressed can take tv{ other, uncontaminated by sexuality (by a homosexual abuse with which Regan greets
place only under the general condition of body), again connects Regan's awakening the two priests during the exorcism. Here, as
denial and negation' - that is, the death with appropriation of the phallus and castra- elsewhere, the Devil survives on the notion
drive. 'The unconscious self is perceived, but :ion of the male (significantly, it precedes the that there are certain things which are
in an alienated form, as the not-self.' One disruption of the party). naturally unnatural, and it is scarcely startling
might compare here the opposition in The c) Sexual practices officially regarded as that gayness and assertive female sexuality
Exorcist between well-appointed bourgeois abnormal and disgusting - fellatio and should emerge simultaneously as 'the other'.
WASP domesticity and immigrant, working: Andrew Britton
class slum with Hitchcock's use, in Shadow of
a Doubt, of the iconography of small town
and infernal city.
The repressed returns in various forms.
a) Anality. The McNeil home is charac-
terized in terms of lightness and brightness.
In the first shot inside it Chris turns on a
lamp, and' the next sequence juxtaposes the
first noises in the attic with Chris' white neg-
ligee, white flowers, white candles on either
side of a table, as if on an altar. Chris is 'a
very nice lady', and Lieutenant Kinderman
has seen her in a film called Angel six times.
Regan's first action as devil is to piss on this
niceness, as all the adults, gathered around
the piano, sing 'Home, Sweet Home' to
Father Dyer's accompaniment (he has just
imagined heaven as 'a solid white nightclub
with me as the headliner') - a moment
which, in our sense of what, through Regan,
is demanding recognition, becomes a crux of
modern American cinema. The anal imagery
is subsequently transferred to Regan's
vomiting, once over Merrin's vestments, and
once in reply to Karras' question about his
mother's maiden name.
b) The de-sublimation of Catholic
mythology, most emphatically of the concept
of the immaculate conception - the devil
enters Regan through her vagina. The theme
recurs later in the masturbation with the cru-
cifix ('Let Jesus fuck you!'), in both cases
inseparably from Regan's discovery of her
body ('D'you know what she did, your cunt-
ing daughter?'): blasphemy, refusal of sexual
guilt and the theme of the 'thankless child'
(Regan as the namesake of one of King
Lear's bad daughters) are fused symbolically.
(Compare here De Palma's treatment of Car-
Comfort of religion (The Exorcist)

Jaws
The keynote of Peter Benchley's novel
'Jaws' is an immitigable contempt for every-
one and everything. It is the post-Watergate
best seller, a novel of complete disillusion-
ment, cynicism and despair,_which arouses
and exploits, with dazzling efficiepcy, s:yery
phobia orffie--mlddle-aged, middle-class,
-·menopau-sarA:merTcan-mal~. The-mayor has
- soict ·lirs souT to ihe -MatTa; the country is
racked by threats of economic recession,
unemployment, racial violence; law and
order is disintegrating; the environment is
being polluted; everyone is motivated by
greed and self-interest. The heru,__.£Q]ice
Chief Brody, is worried by his spreading mid-
dle and his ability to attract his wife, who
yearns for the upper-middle-classness from
which she descended to marry him, and who
seduces the young, rich, predatory intellec-
tual who loves sharks. The novel is intensely
misogynistic, and, most striking of all, inten-
sely anti-youth: young people are either
'Aquarians' or complacent zombies, both
types being regarded with equal scorn, and
both inseparable, in Mr. Benchley's mind,
from drugs and promiscuity. The shark is
progressively identified with ~~e-ryone,
-;n.audl!ig;T!nany;IJroay··himsdf..There-an!
hints throughout that it is some sort of
retribution for sin, a vengeful materialisation
of the ills of America, which include every-
thing from rampant black rapists and axe-
murderers to avaricious store-keepers who
don't object to Amity becoming a garbage-
54
dump if there's profit in it. What is genuinely
disturbing and subversive in the novel is con-
stantly trivialised by the shrill, simplifying
generalisations of its symbolism and by its
perverse refusal of any alternative to a
culture it shows to be corrupt. We are invited,
instead, to immerse ourselves in Brody's
mounting sense of inadequacy and outrage,.
his dread of youth, women, effete culture,
anarchy, permissiveness, personal impo-
tence. The novel - and its success - are
symptoms of the failure of psychological and
cultural confidence.
The tone and purpose of Steven
Spielberg's film are as far from this as it is
possible to be. The new Jaws might best be
described, perhaps, as a rite-a communal
exorcism, a ceremony for the restoration of
ideological confidence. The film is incon-
ceivable without an enormous audience,
without that exhilarating, jubilant explosion
of cheers and hosannas which greet the
annihilation of the shark, and which
transform the cinema, momentarily, into a
temple. Annihilation is the operative word. It
is not enough for the shark to be killed, as it
is in the book, only two feet from a helpless,
hopeless hero whose two companions have
already been devoured, and who has, him-
self, been implicated too disturbingly in the
tensions which the shark has released. The
film monster has to be, literally, obliterated.
Evil must vanish from the face of the earth.
Crucial in this change of strategy is the
removal of the adultery sub-plot and with it
all trace of conflict within Brody's family. In
an article in the Times Higher Educational
Supplement, Stephen Heath has discussed
the film in terms of an unresolved displace-
ment of sexuality onto the shark. It seems to
me, rather, that the extraordinary concentra-
tion of erotic imagery in the opening
sequence (the double row of wooden fenc-
ing; the boy's repeated remark, 'I'm coming!
I'm coming!'; the phallic marker-buoy) sug-
gests the sh_ark'sternpQrJUY_us.urpalian of sex-
uality, this tying in with the central theme of
male territorial rivalry, and with the fact that,
once the shark has been established as
'~~IJ~nergy'_ in tlg:__first~~tacl, sexual
connotations are conspicuous _b_y__their sup-
pression On comparison both with the novel
aila the horror genre). 'Possession of the
phallus' is of the essence of the territoriality
theme, and the ending perfectly resolves it,
potency being transferred, by right of con-
quest, from the supreme representative of
destructive lawlessness to the policeman's
rifle. Similarly, Mr. Heath's comment that,
after the girl, '~ID.ale.and the
foc~sj~_on losing legs,' while not actually
untrue (although ·anTyone leg is lost), signifi-
cantly distorts the film's emphasis, which is
that the shark attacks a woman and children
- that is, the home, the family, the basic
unit of American democracy. Thus, although
a man is killed in the Pond sequence, the
thematic point here is to stress, by absten-
tion, the near-death of the hero's son in a
secluded pool where he has been sent for
safety. This is clearly a deliberate structural
choice, in terms both of the sequence of the
attacks (a girl offshore; a little boy inshore;
Brody's little boy in the pool) and of the
material employed - there is no equivalent
to the Pond sequence in the novel, and the
film also introduces the potential threat to
the Boy Scout swimming contest.
The weight given to the vulnerability of
children and the need to protect and guard
them is there from the first scene in the
Brody house, Brody warning the kids away
from the swings and Ellen washing a cut on
her son's arm. It is reinforced throughout the
first half of the film - the death of the
Kintner boy; Brody's son in his new boat; the
baby sitting lost and in tears amidst the panic
on the beach - and all the home scenes
create a pervasive sense of the supreme value
of family life, a value clearly related to
stability and cultural continuity, so that the
shark becomes a threat to the inheritance of
ideology (consider, for example, the beauti-
ful little sequence in which Brody's son sits
watching him at the table, imitating his
gestures and expressions). Mayor Vaughan is
revealed to be totally corrupt at the moment
at which he hisses to Brody that he is per-
fectly willing to let his own children go swim-.
ming. Indeed, the emphasis on children is
linked explicitly to the regeneration theme.
Ellen tells Brody that their boys may grow up
afraid of water, like he is, to which he replies
at once, 'I don't want that to happen, you
know that'. The shark's death not only cures
his own neurosis - it preserves his children
from it.
55
With the adultery plot, the film also aban-
dons the theme of the social-class divisions
within Amity, based on the distinction bet-
ween all-year residents and summer visitors,
and centred on Ellen. The Brodys are recre-
ated as the nice, average, bourgeois couple,
their sexuality and aspirations perfectly
accommodated by their marriage. What does
remain, crucially, is the fact that they are
New Yorkers, a note sounded on their first
appearance (the business of Brody's accent).
This is important for the confidence theme in
two respects. 1) It places Brody outside the
insularity and predatory acquisitiveness of
the community ('You're not born here,
you're not an islander'). Thus, although he
succumbs temporarily to the persuasions of
the authorities, he is not, like the natives,
intrinsically corrupt, and the film can move
towards an expiation of the failure of respon-
sibility defined in safely non-social, symbolic
terms. 2) On the journey out to Ben Gar-
dener's boat, Brody tells Hooper that in
Amity, as opposed to New York, 'one man
can make a difference'. The contradiction to
this implied by the shark's presence and
Brody's moral weakness is cancelled when
Brody kills the shark single-handed, the
implication being that individual action by
the one just man is still a viable force for
social change.
In fact, the concentration on the hunt
seems designed to distract us from the real
problem, which is not the shark at all, but the
city council. The personal catharsis for the
hero (and, by identification, for the
audience), by which he is, simultaneously,
purged of his guilt and cured of his lifelong
dread of the sea, conveniently ignores the
fact that nothing has been done about Mayor
Vaughan. Jaws is a monster movie in which
the hero kills the wrong monster; and this
would seem to confirm Robin Wood's thesis,
in Movie 21. that the disaster is meant to
stand in for - and thus to discount -
revolution. Brody's ability to enter his house
justified is also felt to justify the house -
'The tide's with us. Keep kicking!'
The hunt is built on a simple pattern of
dramatic reversal - the two self~confidently
potent figures are defeated, and the man
whose confidence has been challenged, and
potency undermined, is victorious. We are
given a version or Moby Dick in which
Ishmael kills the whale. The super-
masculine, proletarian, Hemingway hero
with his harpoon fails; the upper-class,
adolescent, technologised intellectual with
his 'power-head' fails. Triumph is reserved
for the fallible middle-class cop, Everyman
with a rifle, a bourgeois Leatherstocking with
'Ia longue carabine' who has previously been
excluded from the phallic communion of the
others, and is left toying with a coil of rope
while they compare scars (the red badge of
courage) and toast each other's legs. More
exactly, Hooper is implicated in the victory,
but only by proxy - through the gritty,
tenacious improvisation which transforms a
piece of apparently useless scientific equip-
ment into a weapon.
The relationship between the three men is
significant here. In the novel, both Quint and
Brody detest Hooper, their dislike forming
common ground between them (though Mr.
Benchley carefully refrains from following
through the logic of Brody's development,
and exonerates him from wishing Hooper
dead), and Hooper is killed before the final
confrontation with the shark. In the film, the
camaraderie of Brody and Hooper is constant
from the beginning, culminating in the classi-
cal American image of the 'marriage' of two
men, or at least a conservative variation of it
- they are returning to society, not in flight
from it. Here, as elsewhere, the film gets it
both ways, the defence of home and family
consummated in an emotional union which
excludes them.
It is as important for the film to get rid of
Quint as to get rid of the shark. Alone of the
three men, he is identified both with the
destructive potency of the monster and the
voracious callousness of the community
('Pay me or suffer all winter'). As a native of
Amity and an embodiment of its evils (self-
interest, commercialism, complacency), he
can be used as a scapegoat for them. Even
more interestingly, the film's treatment of
him suggests not only a bourgeois aversion to
and dread of a bourgeois caricature of the
proletariat ('Don't give me that working-class
hero crap'), but also - returning to Jaws as a
rite - the symbolic sacrifice of a particular
concept of the hero. Thus although the film
preserves the 'prove your virility by slaying
56
the sacred animal' syndrome ('The Bear', home' (sharks) are murderous, with the of the bourgeois order which its premise
The Old Man and the Sea), it transfers its three men suspended between them in a sort undermines, works towards the dissolution
allegiance - ostensibly - from the ideal of of limbo. Hence the imagery - a motionless of the group which can only become a group
asocial masculinity to the ideal of the law- boat on a dead sea at night, the renewal of the through its members' recognition that,
and-order man, the defender of bourgeois shark's attack on the word 'home', the really, they have nowhere to go.
ideology. It is clearly significant that a work- scene's conclusion on the failing of the boat's
ing-class character should appear centrally for lights. The film, committed to the reassertion Andrew Britton
the first time in the 'disaster' cycle in such a 'W
form.
This may help to explain the extraordinary
clash of conventions in the film's acting.
While Roy Scheider appears to be playing in
a realistic drama, the curiously sexless
schoolboy embodied by Richard Dreyfuss
and Robert Shaw's Quint, all yo-ho-ho, roll-
ing eyeballs and dirty limericks, are straight
out of 'Boy's Own'. The changes here are
related to the softening of the novel's sexual
theme, and have the effect of making the
only given alternatives to the hero
(ideologically, morally, sexually) slightly
unreal. Monogamous, heterosexual nor-
mality is reinstated between dangerous
potency on the one hand and Peter Pan on
the other.
The one crucial addition to the novel is
Quint's account of the sinking of the
Indianapolis, the ship which transported the
Hiroshima bomb, which was torpedoed on
the return journey, and two-thirds of whose
crew were devoured by sharks before they
could be picked up. The three men find a
brief solidarity through an expression of
mutual alienation - Brody, who is excluded
from the exchange of phallic boasting (Quint
and Hooper together in two-shot, seated;
Brody apart in medium shot, on his feet), is
brought in for the singing of 'Show me the
way to go home'. Implicit here - as in the
entire first half of the' film - is a sense of the
shark as Moloch; the scene comes close to
identifying the men as victims of American
ideology, suggesting the link between
sacrificing bathers on 4th July ('Amity means
friendship') and sacrificing servicemen in the
war to end war ('world peace for
democracy'). In this light, the hint of subjec-
tion and helplessness in Quint's theme-song
('For we've received orders) becomes as
important as the rejection of women
('Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish
ladies'). Logically, the scene implies com-
plete despair, since both 'home' (America as
Amity/ America as warship) and 'outside
 I MESE INS AT BIRTH
Sisters
What the
Devil hath
joined together
let no man
cut asunder! I have argued that horror films can be
profitably explored from the starting-point of
applying a simple all-purpose formula: 'Nor-
mality is threatened by the Monster'. The
formula offers three variables with which to
go to work on the analysis of individual films:
the definition of 'normality', the definition of
'the monster', and, crucially, the definition
of the relationship between the two. As a
general rule, the less easy the application, the
more complex and interesting the film,
though no horror film is entirely simple (i.e.,
with the monster as purely external threat).
Take War of the Worlds ( Haskin/ Pal, 1953),
as an example of the horror film at its
simplest (as far as meaning is concerned).
There, on surface level, Normality =
humans, the monster = Martians; this
covers (not very concealingly) a second level
where Normality = the 'free world' and the
monster = Communism (the news builetins
in the film name every major country but
Russia as the victim of 'Martian' invasion, an
absence that leaves the audience to make a
simple deduction). Yet even here the threat
only appears purely external. The topical fear
of Communist invasion in its turn covers a
more fundamental fear, and the true sub-
ject of horror films, the fear of the release of
repressed sexuality: the Martian machines
are blatantly phallic, with their snake-like
probing and penetrating devices, it is the
~~~~~E~~t~~N~JG~~~l~~~~~f\~N~!~~v~~~Ln' SISTERS'
monogamous heterosexual couple (Classical
CnSto•rmg
Hollywood's habitual basic definition of 'nor-
mality') who are centrally threatened, and
R Pressman · Lkc:1d h· Brian De P.·1i!'u ,\
59
the film ends with God and Nature combin-
ing, at the very moment when the whole
'world' (i.e. normality) is in imminent danger
of destruction, to reunite the couple, annihi-
late the invaders, and restore repression. The
film is also crudely sexist - lip service is paid
to female equality, the heroine being sup-
plied with an M. A. in technological science
but once that's been established all the fil~
gives her to do is scream every time a Mar-
tian phallus pokes in through her window.
War of the Worlds, then, to which the formula
applies very simply, is (like thousands of
other films) reducible to the simplest and
crudest patriarchal ideology.
The great horror movies demand a far
more complex application of the formula. For
example, I Walked with a Zombie is struc-
tured on a complicated set of oppositions
(crudely reducible to normality/monster)
which the film systemically undermines until
everything is in doubt; in Psycho 'normality'
and 'the monster' no longer function even
superficially as separable opposites but exist
on a continuum which the progress of the
film traces. Psycho is clearly a seminal work,
definitively establishing (if hardly inventing)
two concepts crucial to the genre's subse-
quent development: the monster as human
psychotic/schizophrenic; the revelation of
horror as existing at the heart of the family.
The continuum is represented not only by the
transition from Marion Crane to Norman
Bates, but by the succession of references to
parent/child relationships that starts with
Marion's mother's picture on the wall over-
seeing the 'respectable' steak dinner and
culminates in Mrs. Bates. The relevance of
Psycho to Sisters scarcely needs spelling out,
the film beong on one level De Palma's con-
scious hommage; its thematic content is in
fact very different.
Since Psycho, and particularly in the 70's,
the horror film has established itself as the
major characterizing genre of the period: the
two most interesting American directors to
emerge in the 70's seem to me Brian de
Palma and Larry Cohen, both of whom have
gravitated to the horror genre and both of
whom pay regular homage in their work to
Hitchcock. Here, and in other distinguished
modern horror films, the definition of 'nor-
mality' becomes increasingly uncertain,
questionable, open to attack; accordingly, the
'monster' becomes increasingly complex.
The force and complexity of Sisters (still,
I feel, DePalma's finest achievement, and
one of the great American films of the 70's)
can be demonstrated through the ways in
which it responds to the formula. Traditional
normality no longer exists in the film as
actuality but only as ideology - as what
society tries, at once unsuccessfully and
destructively, to impose. Specifically, it is
what Grace Collier's mother wants to do to
Grace (Jennifer Salt) and what Emil Breton
(William Finley) wants to do to Danielle/
Dominique (Margot Kidder). Grace's
mother speaks condescendingly of her
daughter's journalist career as her 'little job',
regards it as a phase she is going through,
looks forward to her marrying, and proposes
an appropriate suitor; Emil's obsessive pro-
ject has been to create Danielle as a sweet,
submissive girl at the increasing expense of
Dominique (eventually provoking Domini-
que's death). 'Normality', therefore, is still
marriage, the family and patriarchy - all that
the monster of the horror movie has always
implicitly threatened; but whereas in the tra-
ditional horror film there had to be an
appearance of upholding normality, however
sympathetic and fascinating the monster, in
Sisters, 'normality' is not even superficially
endorsed. If the 'monster' is defined as 'that
which threatens normality', it follows that
the monster of Sisters is Grace as well as
Danielle/Dominique: a point the film
acknowledges in the climactic hallucination/
flashback sequence wherein Grace becomes
Dominique, joined to Danielle as her siamese
twin, the film's privileged moment on which
its entire significance hinges. Simply, one can
define the 'monster' of Sisters as Women's
Liberation; adding only that the film follows
the time-honoured horror film tradition of
making the monster emerge as the most sym-
pathetic character and its emotional centre.
Sisters analyses the ways in which women
are oppressed within patriarchal society on
two levels, which one can define as the
professional (Grace) and the psychosexual
(Danielle/Dominique). Grace's progress in
the film can be read as a depiction of how
women are denied a voice. At times this can
be taken literally: the police inspector denies
Grace the right to ask questions or to make
verbal interventions; in the asylum she is
60
prevented from using the phone, her
attempts to assert her sanity (and even her
own name) are overruled, and she is silenced
by being put to sleep. More widely, her
professional potency is frustrated at every
step: the police refuse to believe her story;
her editor habitually gives her ludicrous
assignments such as the convict who has
carved a model of his prison out of soap; her
mother tries to make her 'normal'; even
when she gets permission to pursue her
investigations, it must be under the guidance
of a (male) private detective (Charles Durn-
ing); the detective rejects her spontaneous
ideas in favour of the methods he has been
taught in training school. Finally, rendered
powerless by a drug, she is given her words
by Emil Breton: all she will be able to repeat
when she wakes up is "There was no body
because there was no murder." At the end of
the film she is reduced to the role of child,
tended by her mother, surrounded by toys,
herself denying the truth of which she once
alone had possession.
Also - and this is where the Hitchcock/
De Palma fascination with voyeurism
becomes incorporated significantly in the
film's thematic structure - Grace
transgresses by her desire to usurp the male
prerogative of the look. The opening of
Sisters succinctly establishes the gaze as
another means of male dominance: Danielle
is blind; not only does Philip watch her begin
to undress, but we, the cinema audience
(thus defined by identification as male) also
watch. This is of course immediately and bril-
liantly undercut: we discover that, having
allowed ourselves to be drawn into the
voyeuristic act, we have identified ourselves
less with Philip than with the lewd and
philistine panel (with male andfemale mem-
bers) of a particularly mindless TV show.
But, having established 'looking' as a theme
at the outset, De Palma can take it up again
later. There, it is Grace who aspires to the
'look' of dominance, the look that will give
her knowledge, and it is for this that she is
most emphatically punished - the hallucina-
tion sequence is introduced by Emil's telling
her that, as she wanted to see, she will now
be forced to witness everything, and is
punctuated by huge close-ups of her terrified
eye. What Grace 'sees' is the ultimate sub-
jugation (castration) of woman by man.
Possession of the phallus (Sisters)
When Danielle/Dominique murders Philip,
her attack is on the two organs by which male
supremacy is most obviously enforced, the
phallus and the voice (the shot of the knife
being driven into his mouth, as a shadow on
the wall, seems to be missing from all British
prints, presumably removed by the censor);
the logic of the film perhaps would also
demand that she blind him. Through the pre-
sentation of Danielle/Dominique the theme
of women's oppression is given another
dimension, an altogether more radical level.
Crucial to it is the opposition the film makes
between 'freaks' and mad people. Freaks are
a product of nature; the insane are a product
of society ('normality'). The two mad people
we see are simply carrying to excess two of
society's most emphasized virtues, tidiness
and cleanliness, the man obsessively trim-
ming hedges with his shears in the night, the
woman with her cleaning-cloth terrified of
the germs that can be transmitted through
telephone wires; both pervert the 'virtue'
into aggression. (One might note here that
the detective's van assumes two disguises in
the course of the film, first that of a house-
cleaning firm, later that of 'Ajax-Extermina-
tors'). Freaks, on the other hand, are natural:
it is 'normality' that names, degrades, rejects
or seeks to remould them (see Danielle's
horror, in the hallucination sequence, not of
being a freak but of being named as one). The
morality of using real freaks (the photo-
graphs of genuine Siamese twins in the
videotape Grace is shown, the various freaks
discernible in the hallucination sequence)
may be touched on here, and the essential
point made by comparing De Palma's use of
them with Michael Winner's in the worst
(most offensive and repressive) horror film
of the 70s, The Sentinel. Winner, with his
usual taste and humanity, uses real freaks,
unforgivably, for their (socially defined) ugli-
ness, to represent demons surging up out of
Hell. De Palma uses them, in a film that con-
sistently and subversively undercuts all
assumptions of the 'normal', to symbolise all
that 'normality' cannot cope with or encom-
pass. To object, in this context, to the
association of Women's Liberation with
'freaks' would be simply to endorse 'nor-
mality's' definition. 'Freaks' only become
freaks when 'normality' names them; to her
mother, as to the police inspector, Grace is
62
clearly a 'freak', hence the mother's
appearance with a camera in the hallucination
sequence, where Grace becomes Dominique.
Danielle/Dominique function both literally
and symbolically: literally, as 'freaks' whom
'normality' has no place for, must 'cure',
hence destroy; symbolically, as a composite
image of all that must be repressed under
patriarchy (Dominique) in order to create the
'nice', 'wholesome', submissive female
(Danielle). Dominique's rebellion against
patriarchal 'normality' took the extreme but
eloquent form of killing Danielle's (unborn)
baby with garden shears; after which Emil
killed her by separating her from her twin.
What is repressed is not of course annihi-
lated: Dominique continues to live on in
Danielle. Further, the point is made (and
underlined by repetition: the speech of the
priest in the videotape that recurs during the
hallucination sequence) that Danielle 's
sweetness depends on the existence of
Dominique, on to whom all her 'evil'
qualities can be projected. Equally, Domini-
que is Danielle's potency: the scar of separa-
tion, revealed by the slow zoom-in to her
body as she and Philip make love, is also the
'wound' of castration. Having deprived
Danielle of her power (creating her as the
male ideal of the 'sweet' girO, Emil can real-
ize a union with her only when she, (or the
'repressed' Dominique), in turn, has castr-
ated him, signified by his pressing their
clasped hands into the blood of his wound.
The intelligence (and radicalism) of the
film is manifested in its refusal to produce a
scapegoat, in the form of an individual male
character who can be blamed. Philip is an
entirely sympathetic figure, Emil ultimately a
pathetic one (he loves Danielle in precisely
the way ideology conditions men to love
women). He is also one of De Palma's hope-
less romantic lovers, played by William
Finley who was to fill the same role a year
later in Phantom of the Paradise.
Philip, moreover, provides a further
extension of the 'oppression' theme in being
black. The film at no point presents his col-
our as an 'issue', but shows it as an issue for
white-dominated 'normality' (his prize for
his TV appearance is dinner for two in 'The
African Room'; the police sergeant's com-
ment is that 'those people' (i.e. blacks) 'are
always stabbing each other'). The amiable
private investigator asserts his authority over
tion, wherein the woman is ignored, taken
Grace because he is placed in that position. for granted or maltreated, her role as wife
The final image of him (last shot of the film),
and mother being assumed to be all she
up a telegraph pole by a tiny railway depot needs. The end of the film unites her with a
somewhere in remote Quebec, watching the
n:tan who will treat her well, permit discus-
sofa containing Philip's body, which there is siOn, and perhaps allow her to pursue her
nobody left alive to collect, is at once funny
?Wn career on the side: the patriarchal order
and poignant. The assertion of male domi- 1s restored, suitably modified. Sisters is
nance in the film is shown everywhere as ~eyond such inoculation. On the one hand,
destructive, nowhere as successful: variously tdeol<?gy ~an always render anything safe by
misguided, disastrous and futile. labellmg It: to label Sisters 'horror film' is to
One must not, however, look to Sisters for place it beyond serious discussion. On the
any optimistic portrayal of liberation. If the other hand, it is only under the disguise of
horror film of the 70's has lost all faith in being 'just entertainment' (a disguise that
'normality', it simultaneously sees all that may fool the film-makers as much as the
'normality' repressed (the 'monster') as, public) that really subversive films can be
through repression, perverted beyond made in Hollywood. Sisters may be the only
redemption. In its apocalyptic phase, the hor- really radical Feminist film Hollywood has
ror film, even when it is not concerned given us since the heyday of Dietrich and
literally with the end of the world (The Sternberg. Robin Wood
Omen), brings its own world to cataclysm,
refusing any hope of positive resolution (see,
to name three distinguished and varied
examples, Carrie, God Told Me To, and The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre). The most dis-
quieting aspect of Sisters is that the two com-
ponents of its composite 'monster', Grace
and Danielle/Dominique, are in constant and
unresolved antagonism. They operate on
quite distinct levels of consciousness: Danie-
lle tells Philip near the beginning of the film
that she is not interested in Women's Libera-
tion; Grace clearly is, but only on the profes-
sional level. Even when forced together (as
Siamese twins) they are constantly straining
apart. The deeper justification for the use of
split screen (which also works brilliantly on
the 'suspense' level) is that it simultaneously
juxtaposes and separates the two women,
presenting them as parallel yet antagonistic.
The question whether Sisters is really
'about' the oppression of women or is 'just' a
horror movie is one that I decline to discuss.
It is, however, illuminating to place it beside
a Hollywood film whose concern with
Women's Liberation is conscious and overt,
Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More. Alice (a
charming, indeed disarming, film) is a per-
fect example of what Roland Barthes calls
'inoculation': ideology inoculates itself with a
small dose of criticism in order to distract
attention from its fundamental evils. The
opening of the film (after the childhood
prologue) depicts an impossible marital situa-
63

Full Circle
A Circle of
Deception
Full Circle (1977) is a neglected horror
film that demands from its audience an emo-
tional responsiveness to mood and an
intellectual awareness of how tensions are
built through audience identification with
characters. Unlike many contemporary hor-
ror films, e.g., Carrie, Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, Halloween, and more in the tradi-
tion of the Val Lewton horror films of the
1940's, the film employs a subtle rather than
direct confrontation with its subject matter
and the implications it offers.
In terms of narrative structure, Full Circle
manipulates some basic horror film conven-
tions but without the self-conscious
reference to the manipulation found in a self-
reflexive film like The Fury. After a some-
what startling opening sequence, in which
Julia (Mia Farrow), a young British house-
wife, tries to save her daughter's life by cut-
ting open her throat when the ~irl chokes on
an apple, the film seems to leave itself open
to a standard 'descent into madness'
interpretation. This idea is enforced for the
viewer by having Julia's husband, played by
Keir Dullea, presented as a menacing figure
who has married her for her money and
whom she flees after being released from the
hospital - so that she can buy a sinister old
ltouse which promises to drive a character
like Julia crazy. For good measure, the film
has a seemingly evil sister-in-law, a seance,
and hallucinatory images of the dead
1
daughter. And, finally, there is Julia's gra-
Mia Farrow as Nosferatu? (Full Circle)
dual discovery that the house she owns har-
bours the ·spirit of a girl who died under
strange circumstances many years ago.
Although Full Circle lovingly introduces
the above mentioned conventions, the film is
centred on a more complex concept than
testing audience familiarity with the horror
film structure. In actuality, the film is a study
of Julia's guilt and the possibility of her
possession by evil. It is Julia's wish to be free
of her husband and family that produces the
guilt she feels. The film suggests the guilt
feeling might be justified when Julia realizes
that her daughter's death has been the means
of escaping her existence as a married
woman. After the death, Julia becomes
haunted by both the spirit of the daughter
and her own conscience.
In part, the strength of the film is that
Julia isn't overtly presented as being guilty.
The genre conventions are used to undercut
this aspect of the film as the audience is made
to identify with Julia's peril. Like the
audience, the idea of her guilt is something
she doesn't immediately comprehend. It is
only by trying to capture the past presence of
the house that she progressively becomes
caught up in the circular guilt quest she has
initiated with the death of her daughter.
Also, it is to the credit of the film that Julia's
discovery and acceptance of guilt isn't
reduced to a study of pure evil. Because her
realization isn't given this direct interpreta-
tion, we are left with a complex portrait of a
desperate and, essentially, sympathetic
woman.
To this extent, the film works as an
interesting study in the need for liberation
and, by presenting an extreme example of
how this desire can find release, makes a
chilling statement. The killing of her
daughter, the willing of other deaths and,
ultimately, Julia's acceptance of her guilt and
own death is the price she has to pay to find
release from an unwanted relationship - a
relationship based on the dominance of the
male through marriage and the family unit.
Significantly, when Julia begins to unravel
the secret of the dead girl who haunts the
house, she finds the 'evil' she is pursuing
involves the killing and castration of a male
child by the girl. This knowledge, which is
actually a retaliation against patriarchal domi-
65
nance, leads her to accepting the idea that
she is as guilty as the girl and, emotionally,
she is a girl child who, also, must die for her
deed. Julia's death, by cutting her throat with
the sharp edge of a tin cymbal-player toy,
isn't just an ironic ending to the narrative but
its logical conclusion. She at once re-enacts
the killing of her own daughter and expresses
her identification with the figure of the child.
Richard Longcraine, the director, is to be
commended for being able to keep the pre-
mise of the film under control. One example,
a small but important moment in the film
occurs when Julia frightens herself by unex-
pectedly seeing her own image in a mirror.
The film steadily traces a vortex which can
only end with the recognition and acceptance
of the self. And the presence of Mia Farrow
in the main role is extremely effective. She is
on-screen during most of the film's running
time and contributes to the impact of the
Motherhood and Monsters (Rosemary's Baby)
film's statement. Farrow, with her sensitivity
and frailness, is very much in tune with
material like this where she can contrast
these qualities against forces that try to over.
power them. As in Rosemary's Baby, she ere.
ates a portrait of a woman who must confront
the entrapping horror society can inflict on
the female - a male-dominated society
where an image of femininity as projected by
Farrow is always seen as vulnerable and, yet
as a necessity in order to make the male i~
our society feel manly.
In comparison to the film Sisters. Full Cir-
cle is limited in the statement it makes about
the abuse and exploitation of women in a
patriarchal society. Still, it is an intelligent
and perceptive film on the subject within a
genre, indeed, within an industry, that is
notorious for the exploitive use of the image
of women.
Richard Lippe
66
Assault on
Precinct 13
The Mechanics of
Repression
"And my whole philosophy of movies is that
movies are not intellectual, they are not ideas, that
is done in literature and all sorts of other forms.
Movies are emotional, an audience should cry or
laugh or get scared. I think the audience should
project into the film, into a character, into a situa-
tion, and react".
- John Carpenter
"Great literature is at once the apprentice and
the master of myths. Its sources are mythic, for its
statements refer to the ultimate questions of
human consciousness and human existence, and it
employs metaphors appropriate to the experience
of the writer and his audience, his culture and his
people. But the literary artist employs myth to
probe both the bases of myth - that is, the psy-
chology and history which gave birth to a specific
myth - and the ultimate consequences of the
acceptance of myth".
- Richard Slotkin
After a decade of radical generic develop-
ments, the American horror film is presently
in stalemate. The advances of the Satanist
cycle and innovations of directors such as
Brian de Palma, George Romero, Larry
Cohen and Tobe Hooper have either been
ignored by a trend-seeking industry or dissi-
pated in inferior sequels. Spielberg's Close
Encounters of the Third Kind now provides the
religious reassurance of The Ten Command-
ments to a public disturbed by the implica-
tions of The Exorcist. If retreat is not made
67
into the infantile regressive fantasies of Star
Wars or Batt/estar Ga/actica then God him-
self visits Earth in the persona of George
Burns. Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes
gratuitously and derivatively exploits the
implications of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
while The Fury loses the potentials of the
family horror movie in the climactic visual
explosion of John Cassavetes. Damien-Omen
II not only fails to develop the themes of its
predecessor but .explicitly announces the
demise of its hero in the forthcoming sequel.
Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 is a tran-
sitional film in this decline. It is a movie
where analysis is subordinated to effect,
enquiry to audience reaction, recognition of
the implications of the material to non-politi-
cal and non-ideological professionalism. The
aim of this article is not condemnatory. On
the level on which Carpenter chooses to work
Assault is a technically professional work
based upon classical Hollywood tradition. In
its utilization of materials it recognises the
proximity of the Western and horror tradi-
tions. But Assault can not advance beyond the
level of homage and probe into the nature
of the materials it uses. It is a perfectly con-
structed mythic artifact but no more than
this. Knowledge of the utilised traditions
brings many levels of interpretation to the
film. Carpenter's refusal to examine the
nature of this material is highly disturbing.
There is a conflict between the director's
intention and the sub-text generated by the
material, a conflict which is illuminating in
regard to its contradictions but damaging to
the film's integrity.
Assault bears comparison with the literary
perspectives of J. Fennimore Cooper, Robert
Montgomery Bird, Timothy Flint and
Thomas Bangs Thorpe. Valuable though
their insights were, they were deeply flawed
by an inability critically to confront the nature
of their sources. What makes Moby Dick and
Walden great literature is the level of the cri-
tical interpretation brought by Melville and
Thoreau to their material. Although they
were naturally dependent on their primary
texts they did not feel themselves bound by
them but channelled a certain depth of
intelligence, awareness, and emotional sen-
siti vi·ty into them. Although Carpenter has
acknowledged his debt to an earlier tradition
he has not radically investigated the implica-
tions of this material both in the light of the
seventies and in regard to contemporary
developments in the horror movie. There
ought to be no contrast between the views of
Carpenter and Slatkin in the opening quota-
tions. Though the former refers to film and
the latter to literature, the emotional and the
analytic ideals ought not to be incompatible.
That Carpenter finds them so makes Assault
less of an accomplished work than it ought to
have been. Its appeal primarily lies in its
illustration of the mechanics of repression.
Despite his claims, Carpenter has made an
unconsciously reactionary film whose
implications are highly disturbing.
The dark forces in American society are
now the inter-ethnic youth gang. In Rio Bravo
(Assault's model) they are immobilised by
rapacious capitalist rancher, Nathan Burdett,
to spring his brother from jail. Assault differs
in defining their anarchic uncontrollableness
as motivated solely by the aim of revenge on
capitalist society. If Nathan Burdett recog-
nises the existence of a system which he
intends ruthlessly to exploit, his alienated
counterparts in Assault do not. In both films
the besieged area is in the middle of a town/
city whose inhabitants do not participate in
the action. Rio Bravo's defendants are John
T. Chance, alcoholic deputy Dude, green
Colorado and cripple Stumpy, men isolated
from their society, united by group solidarity
with at least a belief in the efficiency of law
and order which their civilisation represents.
In Assault, a large city, not a Western town, is
the battleground. Except for the upright
Ethan Bishop and Leigh, most of the law-
and-order representatives appear vicious and
alienated from the public they are supposed
to serve. This appears not only in the treat-
ment of Wilson by the prison warder but also
in the attitude to the police expressed by
Lawson to his young daughter. When she
suggests asking directions from a patrol car in
the ghetto neighbourhood as her teacher
would, her father makes an ironic comment
on the teacher's non-advancement beyond
the sixth grade. The police are as feared as
the urban gangs.
Only in the figures of Bishop and Leigh
(as well as the two cops who discover the
telegraph operator) are the police given any
positive qualities which distinguish them
from Street Thunder. The point is made in
68
relation to Wilson. He is introduced by a • , . .
track-in to a heroic facial close-up like that of Dead_(Lawson s collapse m~o a catatomc st~te close thing in there. You were good" and
John Wayne in Stagecoach. For two-thirds of ~ecalhng _that of the herome of the earh_er "Very close thing. You are good sometimes"
the film his request for a cigarette is refused ttlm). It ts true that on _a form~! referentt~l - need no further explanation for Hawks
either by his fellow prisoners ("Smoking's tevel thes~ paralle~s a~e. mterestmg but thetr enthusiasts.
bad for your health") or Starker (who turns a true effectiveness ts ~~t~ated_ no~ only by lack Another reference which appears to have
blind eye to his ill-treatment by the warder). of ~wareness of thetr tmphcat10ns but also gone unnoticed so far is to Sergio Leone's
Leigh offers him his first cigarette. Bishop JVOtdance of. the contem~orary relevance Once Upon A Time In The West. This occurs in
does not. Yet he at least replies "No sorr ,, they take on m genre movtes such as Race the dialogue Starker has with Wilson in the
between the cell bars. These 'repre~ent ~he with the Devil, The Texas Chainsaw_Massacre, prison bus. It not only places Wilson in the
first acts of respect and kindness Wilson lnd_ The _Hills Have Eyes. _The fuston ~f the tradition of Leone characters such as Col.
receives in the film. !ndt~~ wtth the Horror Ftlm Monster ts too Mortimer, Indio, Harmonica and Sean
Like the besieged of Rio Bravo, the ;tgmf~c~nt now to be a~counted _for in any Mallory, but has a relevant function in the
inmates of the police station exh'b' ;tmphsttc black-and-whtte morahty system. film. In the prison bus Starker comments to
unspoken trust and moral integrity tow~r~~ ~eft on the formal_ investiga_tive level it Wilson, "You're not a psychopath, certainly
one another. But these qualities are personal ,tmply bl_ows the fabnc of t_he ftlm. apart. not stupid. Why did you kill those men?"
and isolated from any institutional system. The ftlm works best on tts mamfest level. Wilson tells him about the preacher he
Unlike Rio Bravo, the film lacks an outside ~ere. Carpent~r reworks the. structures of encountered many years ago who said, "Son,
agency of acceptable law and order. to which ;lasstcal_na~ratt~e Hollywood cmema admira- there's something strange about you. You've
both characters and audience can appeal. The ~ly. As m tne ftlms of H~~ks and Mc_Car~y, got something to do with death. Being young
choice is between anarchic violence and ;ame~a movements, . edttmg and hghtmg I believed." This parallels Cheyenne's
arbitrary legality. techmques are_ subordmated to plot require- description of Harmonica in Once Upon A
Both the past and present generic nents .. G~nenc h?m~ges are subtly in~egr­ Time In The West. Again when Starker
references of Assault are of crucial value in Jted wtthm t?e ftlm s structural confmes. enquires "How come you got to be called
analysing the film. Although much of it func- fhey ar~ obviOus to the aware but d_o not Napoleon?" Wilson replies that he'll tell him
tions in direct referential form, in many cases tntr~de m such_~ ma_nner as to mysttfy a.n "When I'm about to die" which mirrors Har-
other aspects take on unconscious implica- !Udte~c~ ~nfamtha.r wtth the refer~nces. Thts monica's "Only at the point of death" to
tions far transcending the director's inten- 5 the t~tttal appeal._ an adventure ftlm for the Frank.
tion. mtertamment audtence and a referentially To a question as to whether Wilson has
In his picture of the youth gangs Car- ;tructured na~Tative, film for an audi~nce come from another film, Carpenter answered
pen ter attempts a return to what he believes Jware of the dtrector. s. sources and consciOus "Or maybe another time". He continued,
is the old-fashioned black/white dichotomy lf the way he has utthse? th~m. "Out of the Old West. I try to make him so
of villain/hero existent in the heyday of . Assaultt~us succee?s ~~ bemg a homage to that he doesn't really belong with the people
classical cinema. The evil of the bad has to be R1.0 Bravo wtthout fallmg mto the trap of gra- around him. He's completely out of place as a
emphasized. For Carpenter the killing of the tuttou_sness. Bogdanovich 's self-conscious- prisoner. He is, in a way, removed in a heroic
little girl was "specifically planned for that ness ts. absent. Two examples of the apt sense from everyone else, and I try to define
reason". Similarly, the inter-ethnic gang tn.tegratiOn of_ ref~rences are relevant here. his character less in terms of him being psy-
composition is deliberately aimed at keeping Ftrst, the reahzat10n .by the two patro.l cops chologically strange than through his lines,
it "a little shadowy and indistinct" and avoid- that the report of prect~ct ?tsturbances t.s true through the sort of metaphysical level on
ing the question of social comment. Yet, the comes from blo~d ~nppmg onto thetr c~r which he judges people".
very nature of this gang's structure, together roof. ~omp~re thts wtth the sce~e of Dude s As loner Wilson functions not only on the
with the roles of Bishop and Chaney raisepursutt of hts wounded quarry m RIO Bravo. explicit heroic level but has a relevance
fundamental implications beyond' Car- fh~ key mom~nt that conv~nces D~de .that beyond the strict confines of the film. If he is
penter's supposed uncomplicated functional- he ts not a VJ~t 1 m. of alcoholic hallucmat10ns given the explicit status of the 'man who has
ism. ts blood dnppmg mto hts beer m the saloon. something to do with death' from the Leone
This is also the case in regard to his fher~ are climactic m?ments in bo.th films, film, then his Western status has relevance to
amalgamation of elements of the Western markm~ a new stag~ 10 the na~rattve. Car- the outside Indian forces. During the attack
and Horror film. Street Thunder are thepenter s parallel ts subtly tntegrated. the strict time-scheme utilized so far disap-
Indians of the classical Western· their silentSecondly, the no-surrender motif is effected pears. The implication is .that the civilized
attacks and popping silencers r~call the old by aural means in Rio Bravo- the playing _of reliance on time is under attack by the out-
attacks on the wagon trains. The Oriental ~e Alamo theme. from t~e saloon - whtle side forces. If Once Upon A Time In The West
gang-leader is garbed like an Indian. They are ssault uses the stlent dehvery of th,e C~ola uses chronology to mourn the passing of the
simply undifferentiated killing-machinesby the gang leaders. Both Carpenters edttor Old in favour of the future Western capitalist
akin to the zombies of Night of the Livinlseudon~m John T. Cha~ce and the com- matriarchal society, then Assault reveals the
ments Wtlson makes to Letgh - "That was a entire disruption of time. In the one film the
69
 past vanishes to make way for the present. In
the other the time structures of contempor-
ary society are attacked by representatives of
past and present anarchistic forces which
America seeks to repress. As in the Rio Bravo
parallels, the Leone references are taken over
and moulded for a different functional pur-
pose, whether consciously or not.
There are two further references, explicit
and implicit, to another movie - The
Searchers. Both have unconscious implica-
tions which disrupt the ideological project
Carpenter attempts - the separation of
attackers and victims. Ethan Bishop has the
first name of John Ford's Ethan Edwards.
Henry Brandon's presence stands out in a
film otherwise noted for its unknown names
and faces. Not only is he one of Hollywood's
most enduring character-actors, but also
nothing he has done since has overshadowed
the effectiveness of his role in The Searchers.
Since one of the key motifs of The Searchers
is the mirror imagery connecting the Indian-
hater Ethan Edwards and his Indian foe Scar,
the presence in Assault of the name Ethan
and Carpenter's actor who played Scar dis-
rupts efforts to keep besieged and besiegers
clearly separated.
Carpenter has attempted to present the
alternatives of law and order and the
anarchistic forces so that no identification is
possible with the motives of the latter.
Although there is little conviction as to the
validity of the established order, prisoners
fight on its side. On one level the film pre-
sents this as being unavoidable since they are
in danger from the mindless violence of
Street Thunder. On another it reflects the
American cinema's current reluctance to
affirm alternative values. Street Thunder are
superficially unindividualized monsters. On
the formal surface of the movie no identifica-
tion is possible with them. Yet there are deep
implications in the way they are constituted,
despite Carpenter's aim of keeping them "a
little shadowy and indistinct". They are all
young, racially mixed and living in a ghetto
area. It is as if the non-violent sixties protest
movement of flower power has changed tac-
tics and turned into an uncontrollable revolu-
tionary force which the American establish-
ment can not ignore or attempt to recuperate
into the system. One aspect of the group is
certainly not ambiguous. The chicano leader
70
has a Guevara beard and beret. On the latter
is a red triangle, obviously functioning for
the red star. The attempt is to equate the
Marxist alternative to American society with
mindless violence. It belongs in the tradition
of American right-wing movies where con-
servative individualism is opposed to unin-
dividualized, violent totalitarianism. Assault
is thus not a mere blending of the Western
and Horror genres for the purpose of simple
action entertainment. Its premises are highly
reactionary.
Carpenter regards the murder of Lawson's
daughter simply as having a functional ele-
ment in showing the bad guys as totally evil.
As another example of his refusal of any
political or social message in relation to Street
Thunder, it was "specifically planned for that
purpose". Yet the slaughter of the child by
outside forces is a key constituent element of
the American tradition seen in works as
diverse as Mary Rowlandson' Captivity Nar-
rative, Fennimore Cooper's Last of the
Mohicans, and Drums Along The Mohawk.
Carpenter's perfunctory treatment of Street
Thunder is as disturbing as his treatment of
Michael in Halloween. Attack on the family
is one of the key features of the return of the
repressed in the American horror film.
The outside forces are emanations of the
; repressed tensions of those within, whether it
' be in The Birds or Night of the Living Dead.
Consciously, in Assault there seems to be no
connection between elements inside and out-
·side. Unconsciously, as will be demonstrated,
!it is another matter.
Certain other scenes intended to
demonstrate the evil nature of Street
Thunder may have meanings beyond the
obvious ones. In two scenes the white gang-
leader points the rifle sights at two blacks. On
the basic level this appears racialist. But when
we consider the inter-ethnic nature of the
gang, the fact that all function as one unit,
and the other associations of the blacks in
question, the action becomes less arbitrary.
The first, a woman, is an obese, middle-aged
'Mammy' type. Her family associations, as
well as the use of this ethnic stereotype in
Hollywood cinema, make Street Thunder's
action here seem more logical. The second
figure is a wino. On one level he is a victim of
his society. But when we consider the zealous
puritanism exhibited by revolutionary move-
The 'Marxist alternative' (Assault on Precinct 13)
ments in Algeria, Libya and Ireland against
alcoholics as miscreants who turn to drink
instead of actively seeking to change their
situation, another aspect of Street Thunder
becomes explicable.
John Carpenter has constructed Assault on
formal repressive lines as regards Street
Thunder. No identification with them is con-
sciously permitted. This is in line with the
Puritan strand of mvthogenesis outlined by
Richard Slatkin in Regeneration Through
Violence. The Puritans saw the wilderness as
the land of the terrible unconscious where
the free sexuality and blood rituals of the
Indians appeared as symptomatic of the
natural state of man. Theologians held that
their community was in danger. Were it not
for their repressive beliefs of physical and
spiritual apartheid white settlers would
quickly yield to temptation. The wilderness
was naturally the domain of Satan and his
children, the Indians - fearful symbols of
the libido. For the Mather group of Puritan
divines no relationship with them could be
possible. Unconscious deep psychological
bonds between the settlers and the forces
outside could never be recognised.
This pattern of thought entered into cer-
tain important works of the American
cultural tradition. In Moby Dick, Nick of the
Woods and Big Fear of Arkansas the only
solutions envisaged are exorcism and hunt.
Identification between Indian and horror film
monster (a key element in contemporary
genre mov1es and one operational in Assaul,!
occurs as early as Ford's Drums Along Tile
Mo/ia~t·k. There the Indian Blue Back, on his
first appearance, is visually equated with the
Frankenstein monster.
That this mythical archetype is still rele-
vant is demonstrated by Richard Slatkin in
his concluding chapter, "A Pyramid of
Skulls" in Regeneration Through Violence.
"The archetypal enemy of the American
hero is the red Indian, and to some degree all
groups or nations which threaten us are seen
in terms derived from our early myths.
Rebellious urban blacks, hippies and the
"youth culture" are recent examples. For
most of our history, our most significant con-
flicts were the campaigns against the Indians,
and most American wars against European or
Mexican powers until 1898 were accom-
panied by wars with the Indians. The Indian
72
wars were in many ways the characterizing 'venge for the murder of his daughter. The how he was brought into the station once as a
event of American history, bringing into dra- .11tack will now centre on the Precinct which young boy for swearing at his mother. Then
matic focus the forces contending for mas- 0ntains Lawson, patriarchal representative he had left obscene graffiti on the police
tery of the opening continent. f the family institution. The third factor is desk. Bishop left the area when he was
In the mythology derived from the 1e presence of Ethan Bishop. He provides twenty, old enough consciously to consider
literature of the Indian wars, the Indian is the 1e link between the forces inside and out- the implications of the move and his probable
representative of a culture and a social order tde, a link as crucial as those relating the two career-aspirations. The point is that Bishop
that offer a radical alternative to the estab. 1rces in films such as The Birds and Night of has come from the same background as
lished order of Euro-American society. His 1e Living Dead. His blackness, his treatment Street Thunder. He has had an early anti-
very existence, even as a symbol, poses the 1 the hands of the white establishment, and social history but has "reformed" and gone
fundamental question: why should we order ts origins in the ghetto environment of over to the other side. Apart from this revela-
our lives in this way, since there is clearly an treet Thunder are all constituent elements tion to Leigh, he shows no affinity with the
alternative? In this guise he appeared to the 1 this. They are not emphasised but are still area and its representatives. When he is tra-
Puritans who suppressed Thomas Morton rucial. velling through the area at 5:32 p.m., he
and to the fearful conservatives of the 1790's Bishop's first appearance is immediately abruptly switches off the radio report men-
and the 1830's, who associated his savagery fter the vengeance vow of Street Thunder at tioning Street Thunder's inter-ethnic racial
with Jacobinism and the philistine radicalism 50 p.m. He leaves his home in a middle- mixture, as if conscious of its implications.
of the Jacksonian westerner. The Sons of lass suburb. Bishop has worked his way up While he is on the radio to Control an attrac-
Liberty who adopted Indian garb to dump 1e ladder to his first duty assignment as tive Negro girl frequently passes him in an
the tea in Boston Harbor and the westerners eutenant. When he calls his control, a opposite car before she is finally left behind,
who identified their own prowess and inde- Jperficial familiarity characterizes their con- perhaps serving as a sexual emblem of a
pendence with the Indian held similar ideas ersation, a familiarity which contrasts with repression which will take a violent form
about Indian character, although their 1e assignment he is given. It is a temporary when Street Thunder attack.
response was one of temporary identification uty - caretaker of a closing precinct station. In many ways Bishop can be regarded as a
rather than repudiation. So in the 1970's the lespite the sub-Fordian conversation - seventies descendent of Ford's Blue Back. If
Indian is chosen by the media and by young You can't be a hero on your first night out, Bishop is not treated as a joke, and is given
people in rebellion as a revolutionary symbol .is hop". "There are no heroes, only men some dignity in character, his position in
of the exploited poor of America and the ho follow orders" - this denotes white society is still uneasy. Apart from Law-
third world and as a symbol of a utopian uthority's view of his status. It is verbally son's role, Bishop is the instrumental ele-
vision of a new, more 'natural' political choed in the comment made by the morose ment which activates the return of the
economy, a freer and more expressive form recinct captain to Bishop, "I guess someone repressed in Assault.
of love and worship". 1 the Central Office wanted to offer you The very nature of his name, Ethan, has
The Oriental leader's Indian costume, the ~mething special on your first night out", to unconscious implications of identity with the
silent classical Western Indian movements of hich Bishop ironically mutters, "That sure outside forces, inherited from The Searchers.
Street Thunder, and the silencer shots dup-.ot around fast". Bishop's arrival at 5:49 in Chaney is the first to be killed during the sta-
licating the whizzing Indian arrows, all defy 1e Precinct visually illustrates the nature of tion attack and he is played by Henry Bran-
any simplistic definition of Street Thunder as 1e treatment given him. When Bishop don, the earlier Ethan's Indian alter ego. It is
evil. Slatkin also draws attention to the pproaches Sgt: Chaney at the desk, the latter almost as if an unconscious attempt is made
employment of the myth of attack on the xhibits suppressed resentment and to dispose of an actor whose most prominent
family during the Vietnam War. In 1965 ~difference towards his new temporary cap- role in the Hollywood cinema raised into con-
President Johnson invoked captivity-myth 1in before he goes off to report his arrival. sciousness the basic fears of Western
imagery in which the family (in Assault's case lathing is explicitly said to him by the outgo- capitalist repressive fantasies. Assault on Pre-
one child) is the victim of dark and savage 1g Captain either. Only his gruff con- cinct 13 is a film formally built on the
forces from beyond the borders. ;mptuous attitude reveals the true nature of mechanics of repression whose ostensible
There can be no simple denial of any rela- fficialdom's view of Bishop. Before he project is torn apart by the nature of the
tionship between the forces inside and out- ~aves, the Captain locks the rifle he has been materials it uses. The very parallels between
side Precinct 13. In fact there are three ~acting away from Bishop's presence as if white - John Wayne - hunter - Ethan/
important factors which set the attack in rotecting it from an incompetent child. Negro - cop - Ethan Bishop and white -
motion. The first is the death of the gang- In the previous scene with Leigh, Bishop Henry Brandon/Indian - Scar are enough to
leaders at the hands of the police in the open- ases his uncertainty by making a joke to her demolish any simplistic project of good-ver-
ing sequence. A vengeance vow is made bYoncerning the coffee. When she asks, sus-bad.
the remaining leaders. So far, this vow is 'Black?" he replies, "For over thirty years",
general. What gives it specific direction is the. joke which is not appreciated. He tells her
killing of the white leader by Lawson in,f his originally belonging to the area and Tony Williams
73

World of Gods &
Monsters:
The films of Larry
Cohen
It can be no accident that three of the most
interesting directors to emerge in the Holly-
wood cinema of the Seventies - Brian De
Palma, Tobe Hooper, and Larry Cohen -
have all gravitated to the horror film. Or, to
approach the same phenomenon from
another viewpoint, no accident that it is
within the horror genre that the most inter-
esting work is currently being produced. In
an issue of Film Comment I argued that the
evolution of the American horror film can
be read in terms of the evolution of a na-
tional collective unconscious. The Seven-
ties have seen the raw materials of the horror
film develop to the point where their signifi-
cance and implications (concealed earlier by
the insistence on the exotic, the bizarre, the
foreign, and by notions of "entertainment"
md "escapist fantasy") are at last fully
recognizable: the "double" motif, the defini-
tion of the "monster" as the product of the
normality it threatens (the return of what
normality represses), the location of horror
at the heart of the bourgeois-capitalist family.
What the horror film now insists upon is
the impossibility (not just undesirability) of a
society founded upon monogamy and family
and their inherent repressiveness. The horror
rtlm has entered its apocalypse phase (some-
times literally, as in the two Omen films or
The Chosen} In the characteristic Seventies
horror film the stress is on powerlessness and
uncontrollability and nothing can be saved;
"good" is destroyed with "evil." The
Death of a disciple (Demon)
monster can no longer be repressed, but
neither can it be conceived in positive terms.
If the energies it represents were once posi-
tive - and the energies of many contempor-
ary "monsters," such as De Palma's
Danielle/Dominique (in Sisters) and Carrie,
have strong positive connotations - they
have been perverted, turned destructive, by
the length and thoroughness of the repres-
sion.
Without getting drawn into useless ques-
tions of what is conscious and what
unconscious in an artist's work, one can sug-
gest that different degrees or levels of con-
sciousness are demonstrable, in general
terms, in different oeuvres. It may be only
through a consciousness of issues (as opposed
to plot, characterization, emotional effect,
etc.) that the horror film can develop beyond
its present apocalyptic despair. Any work of
construction demands analysis as its starting
point.
The work of Larry Cohen is clearly
enough circumscribed within the syndrome I
have described. It does not offer an alterna-
tive, except by implication, to a society per~
ceived as locked in the processes of its self-
destruction. But the particular distinction of
It's Alive and God Told Me To can partly be
defined by saying that they could only have
been made by someone aware of the issues.
This does not affect my argument that horror
films represent our collective nightmares,
and depend for their existence on a certain
relaxation of consciousness. The play bet-
ween conscious and unconscious (which can
take an infinite number of forms) is central
to the phenomenon we call art.
The material of Cohen's films, however
personal (and I shall show how consistent his
work to date has been), is also central to the
evolution of the horror film; his films, like
those of other filmmakers, are the product
of a given culture at a given phase of history.
But the artist - any artist - is not entirely
helpless or determined; anyone who has
attempted to analyze his own dreams (which
will inevitably bear a significant relationship
to the dreams of others within the same
culture) will know that it is possible to
achieve a certain degree of dominance over
them. The conscious artist - the conscious
part of any artist - does not so much invent
dreams as inflect the available ones, pointing
 their significance, perhaps re-directing them. Afarnie, might reasonably be called the father
?f the modern horror film). Here one should
mclude Tobe Hooper as well: the build-up to
Cohen and De Palma the first killing in The TexasChainsaw Massacre
is w~rt~y, _shot b~ shot, of the Master in the
An attempt to define Cohen's work can s~phistlcatJo? of 1ts suspense devices, its play
profitably begin by comparing it with De w1th suggestion, expectation, relaxation, the
Palma's; their careers to date offer remarka- subtle discrepancies between the characters'
ble parallels that serve to illuminate the awareness and the audience's. The influence is
differences. In their early works both direc- most obvious in De Palma because
tors. use blacks as a threat to white d~l_iberatel~ 0aunted, an aspect of the sig-
supremacy, a variant on the "return of the mfled, but 1t IS clear enough in Cohen, in the
repressed" theme: De Palma in the extraor- overt homage of the staircase assault in God
dinary "Be Black, Baby" section of Hi Mom! Told Me To and more pervasively in the
(and, although not presented as a threat, suspense techniques (including subjective
Philip in Sisters is relevant here); Cohen in ~am era) of It's A li~·e. Most specifically, there
Black Caesar, Hell Up In Harlem, and, very IS the use both directors have made of Ber-
impressively, in Bone. Both directors have nard Herrmann, who composed the scores
attempted overtly experimental works early for Sisters, Obsession, and It's Alive, and to
in their careers, disrupting the conventions who_m God Told Me To is dedicated; he also
of realist narrative (Greetings, Hi Mom!; rece1ves a posthumous credit for the score of
Bone). Both have returned repeatedly to the It Lives Again.
horror film (Sisters, Carrie, The Fury; It's De Palma's work has achieved great
Alive, God Told Me To, It Lives Again). Both commercial success and widespread (though
have abandoned their early experimentalism, still unsufficient) critical attention; Cohen's
temporarily at least, to express an obviously has achieved neither. It's A live did well enough
genuine (not merely commercial) allegiance at the box-office, but Bone, God Told Me To
to the Hollywood tradition. Thus De Palma and Hoover- all very difficult box-office pr~­
"remakes" Phantom of the Opera as Phantom positions requiring careful and intelligent han-
of the Paradise, Psycho as Sisters, Vertigo as dling- have been thrown away. Cohen's work
Obsession, in each case producing a valid is scarcely referred to by critics, though It's
variation rather than imitation. In the case of Alive was summarily dismissed in a recent ·
Cohen, the allegiance is expressed less Film Comment as a Rosemary's Baby/Exorcist
specifically (though Black Caesar very rip-off' (I think it is more intelligent than
conscious!)' transposes the structures of the either, and owes them about as much as Rio
Thirties gangster film, drawing particularly Bravo owes High Noon). It can be argued that
on Little Caesar and Scarface) but seems even Cohen has not yet achieved the brilliance of
stronger. Sisters, but his oeuvre to date strikes me as
One form it takes is Cohen's exten- easily the more satisfying and consistent of
sive use of Hollywood old-timers: Sylvia the two. Why, then, this neglect?
Sidney and Sam Levene in God Told Me To One might start with the word "bril-
and most of the cast of The Private Files of/ liance," which for me always carries a hint of
Edgar Hoover (Broderick Crawford, Dan possible pejorative overtones: Carrie and The
Dailey, Celeste Holm, June Havoc, Jose Fer- Fury are also"brilliant, "and arouse a fear that
rer). The choice of Miklos Rozsa to score the showman in De Palma is going to take over
Hoover is also relevant here, Cohen using his completely, that the interest of his films is
"stirring" end-music with splendid irony. becoming submerged beneath the desire to
Cohen also wanted Rozsa for God Told Me dazzle with an ever more flamboyant rhetoric
To: Rozsa has been quoted as saying that he and effects out of all proportion to meaning.
saw the movie and God told him not to, a Cohen, on the other hand, never attracts at-
smart line that unfortunately rebounds. tention to himself; his work relates back
The most obvious link is the com- beyond the director-as-superstar era to the
mon debt to Alfred Hitchcock (who, with classical Hollywood tradition of directorial
Shadow of a Doubt, Psycho, The Birds, and self-effacement. I would find it difficult to
76
~escribe a Cohen visual style that would
; ;!early distinguish his work from the
·nainstream of contemporary cinema; like a
}lawks or a McCarey he is content so far to
' II'Ork within the anonymity of generally
JCCepted stylistic-technical procedures.
indeed, if his work stands out stylistically
from a cinema given more and more to forc-
·tng itself on the spectator, it is precisely
oecause of a frequent refusal to underline
effects or insist on points. One tiny example:
tn God Told Me To the protagonist, visiting
the woman who turns out to be his mother in
:Jcr old people's home, is instructed by the
over-casual nurse to take the first door on the
left; he takes, correctly, the first door on the
right. The point is given no emphasis
whatever, whether in acting (gestures of
hesitation), editing (a "significant" track-in
or zoom). At that stage of the narrative it
5eems without any meaning. It is only subse-
quently that we register it (if we remember it
at all) as the first hint of the protagonist's
mpernatural powers.
The peculiar distinction of De
Palma's work lies in its disturbing and paradox-
ical fusion of an extreme passionate romantic-
ism with an equally extreme self-conscious-
ness and obtrusive technical sophistication.
Both are foreign to Cohen, who consistently
refuses his audiences both the visual kicks of
:split-screen and slow motion and the satisfac-
tion of emotional identification with a central
figure that largely accounts for Carrie's com-
mercial success. On the one hand, we regard his
protagonists more critically, from a greater dis-
tance; on the other, we see them as people
(however fallible) more capable of choice, of
thinking and learning. De Palma is the readier
simply to surrender to, express, and reinforce
the prevailing desperation of the modern
American cinema; Cohen's work, while offer-
ing no "solutions," is far more critical and
analytical. There is the sense that he, his pro-
tagonists, and his audience, have more
freedom, more space to breathe.
Cohen as Auteur
If it is difficult to define Cohen as yet
in terms of stylistics, it is relatively easy in terms
of theme and structure.lt is worth noting here
that all of the Cohen films to date are "writ-
ten, produced and directed by Larry Cohen";
all are original screenplays, not adaptations;
all are Larco productions. Insofar as it can be
77
said of anyone, he is in complete control of
his own work.
Two structural features, closely inter-
connected, dominate his films:
1. The refusal of the "hero." No one
in Cohen's films is "right," no one is glorified,
no one is exonerated. Not only is there no
character with whom the spectator can identify
(as distinct from "feel sympathy for"), there is
no "correct" position offered within the action
in relation to its conflicts, the resolution in
every case leaving a sense of dissatisfaction,
uncertainty, or loss. The inherent but conven-
tionally suppressed ambivalence of the hero-
villain, hero-monster dichotomy is here
brought to the surface, made explicit, in a
dialectic in which neither term is endorsed
(though neither is simply denounced or desig-
nated evil). Implicit in this is a radical (rather
than liberal) critique of Western capitalist
culture. There is never a suggestion that things
can be put right, solutions found, within the
system; the conflicts are presented as funda-
mental and unresolvable, short of a total
rethinking.
2. Central to the Cohen structure is
the figure ofthedouble, which I have suggested
is the privileged form of the "return of the
repressed" in horror movies: the recognition
of the monster not as external threat but as
other-side-of-coin, normality's mirror-image.
The films' recurring structure can be rendered
in terms of a formula: the protagonist learns to
recognize his identity with the figure he is com-
mitted to destroying. As with my horror film
formula - "Normality is threatened by the
monster" - the intention is not at all to col-
lapse all the films into a single, simple meaning,
but to provide a starting-point from which their
individual complexities can be explored.
There has been to date no repetition in Cohen's
work. Each film constitutes a significant varia-
tion on this basic structure (which is more
obviously central to some, namely the horror
films, than to others), as the notes that follow
will attempt to show.
Bone
(a.k.a. Bever[v Hills Nightmare, Dial Ratfor
Terror. Housew{(e}
This is the film about which I must be
most tentative. It is Cohen's most obviously
difficult work, an example of that generally
doomed phenomenon, the attempt by an
American director at the equivalent of an Euro-
 pean art-house movie (compare Puzzle of a
Downfall Child, Mickey One, and Images, which
I list in what I believe to be descending order of
artistic merit), though it is much less anxious
than its fellows to impose its signifiers of
"artisticness." And it is virtually inaccessible.
(I have seen it only once, at a screening specially
arranged forme in the Museum of Modern Art,
in the middle of which two security guards
attempted to evict me from the auditorium,
despite the fact that I was the only person pre-
sent and the film was presumably being pro-
jected for someone. I lost about ten minutes,
and concentration was seriously hindered.)
Bone is the only Cohen film to date that is not
easily classifiable within a genre. If it reminds
one of any other movie, it is Weekend, to which
its opening seems to pay homage. As in
Godard's film, the action is looselycen tered on
the desire of husband and wife to destroy each
other, money-greed being the chief motiva-
tion.
The film opens with an executive
from a car company (Andrew Duggan),
microphone in hand, giving what appears to be
a TV commercial. The camera zooms out to
reveal that he is in ajunkyard and that the cars
are all wrecks; subsequent shots show that they
are filled with bloody corpses. It is important
that the level of' 'reality'' here is never defined
(as nightmare, fantasy, or whatever). Unlike
Weekend, the main body of the film operates in
terms of a heightened naturalism; the action,
however unpredictable, is plausible enough
within a mode of caustic satire. But no level
of "reality" is maintained consistently, so
that the viewer's illusionist involvement is
continually threatened and at times under-
mined. The film allows its audience no
security whatever.
The action proper begins with the
executive and his wife beside their Beverly
Hills swimming pool; a rat emerges from the
drain, as succinct an image for the return of the
repressedasonecouldaskfor. (There is a thesis
to be written on the significance of the rat in
contemporary cinema, from Willard and Ben
up through Straw Dogs- "Rats is life" - to
Last Tango in Paris and Dusan Makevejev's
Switchboard Operator.) A phone call to the pool
servicing company produces nothing but
indifference; but Bone (Yaphet Kotto)
materializes abruptly beside the pool as if in
answer to it, kills the rat, and proceeds to take
78
over the household, keeping the wift;: (Joyce
van Patten) under threat of rape and murder
while the husband goes into town to draw ran.
som money. The latter, however, meets Jeanie
Berlin in the bank and decides to leave his wife
to her fate. She, realizing she has been aban.
do ned, enlists Bone in a plot to kill her husband
- and the two couples become mirror-images
of each other. At first, the Berlin character's
kookiness seems to be offered as a positive:
bourgeois eccentricity against bourgeois con-
formism. Subsequently, it is revealed as the
mere cover of neurosis.
Two issues become central:
1. Boneasasymboloftheforceswhite
capitalist society represses. Although the film's
nearest approach to a "positive" character, he
is presented as involved in the same pro-
cesses, the same value-system, as the white
oppressors. The killing of the rat is itself an
ambiguous action: Bone has the power to do
what thecorruptandaffluent whites are incapa-
ble of; yet the rat (Liberty Valance to Bone's
Tom Doni phon?) is a symbol of the energies
bourgeois civilization represses. Bone's
challenge to the supremacy of the white world is
more apparent than real. When he attempts to
carry out the threatened rape of the wife, he is
impotent; they make love later when she wants
him. Like the protagonist of Black Caesar, his
impulse is to reverse the terms rather than
change them. The film never suggests that he is
the answer to anything.
2. The hypocrisy of bourgeois-
capitalist marriage/family. The couple are held
together purely by money· when that tie proves
illusory (the husband is in li~bt up to his ears
and has been secretly swindling his wife), their
essential hatred of each other surfaces. Their
beloved son is supposed to be a prisoner in Viet-
nam (a myth they have almost convinced
themselves is true); in fact he is in a Spanishjail
for dope smuggling - his parents could have
used their money to buy him out but the
sacrifice was too great. The end of the film
intercuts the mother battering the father to
death on a vast sand bank with the son laughing
hysterically in his cell; Bone, having no force
that can offset the entrapment in familial guilt,
vanishes as abruptly as he appeared.
Bone might be regarded as Cohen's
Mickey One; I am not sure how successful it is,
though it clearly lacks the vagueness and sen-
timentalitythatflaw Penn's film. At the least, it
makes explicit Cohen's ambition, a charac-
teristic that the modest genre frameworks of
Black Caesar and It's Alive (films no less
ambitious, in their implications) conceal. The
''double'' motif is less obvious here than in any
of the other films; in a sense it is diffused
through the whole structure, all the characters
mirroring each other in their entrapment in a
process. But a local instance is provided in the
husband's acceptance that he is the man who
molested Jeanie Berlin in a cinema when she
was thirteen -an acceptance based less on any
certainty that he is than on a feeling that there is
no reason why he shouldn't be.
Black Caesar
Cohen's analytical intelligence is
immediately manifested in the way in which he
rises to the challenge of a blaxploitation movie
with Fred Williamson. CharacteristicallY. he
rigorously rejects what appeared to be one of
the genre's basic conditions: the celebration
of the black hero. The film is deliberately
modeled on the Thirties gangster films
evoked by its title, and inherits their ambiva-
lence toward the gangster-protagonist. Here,
however, the violence- whether that of the
oppressive white world or that of black
retaliation - is never exhilarating (as it is,
for example, in Scarface). never accom-
panied by any sense of release or satisfaction.
The film takes as premise the pro-
tagonist's humiliation in youth, as a delinquent
shoeshine boy, at the hands of a white police
detective, and his desire for revenge on the
white world in general and the policeman in
particular. Its point is that, sharing the world's
ideological entrapment, its materialistic
values, his imagination cannot rise above the
aim of reversing its terms, without changing
them. His purchase of the high-rise apartment
where his mother works as maid (complete
with its white owners' furnishings, pictures,
clothes, etc.) in order to install her in it, merely
destroys her sense of role without replacing it,
leaving her lost and empty amid luxuries that
continue to intimidate and oppress her. He
himself can find nothing to do with all the
expensive clothes but fling them from the high
balcony in a gesture of grandeur and futility.
The film moves logically to the scene that
stamps it as Cohen's: with the policeman at last
in his power, the protagonist blacks his victim's
79
face with shoe polish before killing him. The
psychological motivation is to repeat, in
reverse, the initial act of humiliation: for the
movie audience, the two become mirror-
images, equally monstrous, locked in a com-
mon process whose only resolution is the
acknowledgement of futility.
The ending of the film, with the pro-
tagonist returning to his childhood slum tene-
ment (now half demolished, but with no sign of
any rebuilding) to die, is quite different in
effect from the moralistic endings of Little
Caesar and Scarface: not the reimposition of
established valu~s but a reminder of the social
roots of the evil and an acknowledgement that
nothing has been achieved. The overt expres-
sion of a revolutionary commitment is still
impossible within the Hollywood system, and
there is no evidence that Cohen would wish to
offer it. But it is implicit in all the films that the
revolutionary position - on all levels: social,
political, sexual, personal- is the only tenable
one.
Hell Up in Harlem
Hell Up in Harlem (the instant sequel) is
much less successful: one suspects at its
basis a battle between Cohen and the star
persona Fred Williamson was beginning to
develop. The presentation of the central
figure (carried straight over from the pre-
vious film, Hell's first ten minutes borrowing
lavishly from its footage and rewriting its
ending, with the protagonist saved from
death and hospitalized in a sequence directly
anticipating It's Alive) is less secure, more
ambiguous, his monstrousness compromised
by a tendency to glorification. The film looks
as though it were thrown together in a great
hurry, the narrative is incoherent, the
sequences very uneven in interest. There are
a number of characteristic moments: the
scene where Williamson and his gang force
the white leaders of a drug organization to eat
"soul food" and sing the Star Spangled Ban-
ner; the brilliant use of an airport baggage
collection area in a climactic scene of violence
(with the brutal but unobtrusive irony of a
sign "No live animals," as a body is pushed
down a delivery chute); the final reversal of a
black man lynching a white (a variant on the
shoepolish climax of Black Caesar) . Cohen
undercuts the attempts to build the William-
son character into a conventional "blax-
ploitation" hero in several ways: the theme
of his moralistic crusade against drug traffic
is simply dropped; interest is deflected from
him to his father (Julius W. Harris), who
becomes the film's emotional centre, the
theme of his destruction by his own son car-
ried over and developed from the previous
film; the apparently optimistic ending
(Williamson's rescue of his child) is coun-
tered with a chilling irony ("I'll love you like
I loved my father"). But for all the film's
crude energy the final effect is stalemate.
It's Alive
The relationship of It's A live to the
Satanist cycle is more that of intelligent com-
ment than of ''rip-off." What is crucial to
the film -and profoundly characteristic of
Cohen - is its difference from all the other
"monstrous child" movies of the past
decade, notably in its resolute refusal of any
Christian-metaphysical explanation and/or
solution. Unlike The Exorcist, it does not reim-
pose repression at the end (the destruction of
the baby is by no means regarded as posi-
tive). And unlike Rosemary's Baby and The
Omen, it does not present the birth as the
inevitable outcome of ancient prophecy, its
consequences beyond anyone's control.
Cohen's films never repress the possibility of
imagining that the world might be changed;
indeed they implicitly encourage it.
The film takes up from Bone the concern
with the family, though the scathing tone of
the earlier film here gives way to sympathy
and compassion. The opening offers Frank
Davis (John Ryan), his wife (Sharon Far-
rell), and son as the model American nuclear
family, affectionate, humorous, warm,
relaxed - except that no one is really
relaxed, and the tension in retrospect is not
entirely accountable for by the fact that
Lenore is about to give birth to another child.
Frank chews gum all the time, and has a
curiously aggressive-humorous way of
awakening his son (applying the family cat to
the back of the boy's neck). The sweetness-
and-light of the family relationship begins
to appear an artificial construction, imposed
above all by the father, epitomized by the
wallpaper above Chris's bed which loudly
advertises the world "LOVE". Before the
departure for the hospital, Frank pauses
80
proudly in the doorway of the ·new nursery
in the attitude of creator-proprietor, and w~
note that the walls are blue; in the car
Lenore tells Chris that they'll phone to tell
him if he's got 'a baby sister or a baby
brother'. The lies on which the relationship is
built are represented for us later by the casual
hypocrisy of Frank's clam that he has
generously taken a vacation for Lenore's
sake (he has in effect been laid off from his
public relations job, against his will and
despite his protests, because of the 'scandal'
of the new baby). Nevertheless, the film
gains strength from the sense that the
Davises represent the bourgeois-capitalist
family at its best rather than (as in Bone) its
worst: we are not allowed to dissociate from
them as a "special case".
The monster-child is never explained by
the film, though two possible explanations
are hinted at. The first, made fairly explicit in
the scene in the hospital waiting-room before
the birth, is ecological: the child is the pro-
duct of man's pollution of his own environ-
ment. The second, implicit but much more
pervasive, is that the child is actually the logi-
cal product of the family itself. The two
explanations are not incompatible. Frank's
role as head of the patriarchal capitalist
family is not distinct from his work-role as
public relations man; in both, he is a compla-
cent and typical member of the social order,
committed to and dependent upon its conti-
nuance. The concept of pollution becomes as
much metaphorical as literal.
The film is centered on the process
whereby Frank moves from rejection to
acceptance of the child as his own. Around
the midpoint of the film he reminisces about
the movie-going experience of his youth: he
always thought "Frankenstein" was the ·
name of the monster, not the creator. The
reference is crucial, giving point both to the
film's title (the phrase "It's alive!" echoes
down through the horror film, of course, but
the strongest ~~sociation, and presumably its
source in the sound film, is James Whales'
Frankenstein) and to the protagonist's Chris-
tian name. Who, ultimately, is the more
monstrous, creator or creature, progenitor or
progeny - when the latter is, in both cases,
the embodiment of what is repressed in the
former? The climactic line of Frank's speech
('Somehow, the identities get all mixed up, Monstrous birth (/ r'.s A live)

don't they?') might stand as epigraph for all
Cohen's films to date.
The action of the film alternates between
the child's inexorable progress home to
demand recognition by the family (via the
school playroom of the "good" son, the
theme of brotherhood extending the "dou-
ble" motif), and Frank's development from
disowning his offspring (to the point of wish-
ing himself to be the one to kill it) to pas-
sionately accepting and defending it, in the
Los Angeles sewers to which Oike the giant
ants of Them!) society has driven it. The end-
ing of the film (the child's destruction,
followed immediately bY the announcement
that another has been born elsewhere),
besides offering the opening for a sequel,
extends and generalizes its theme: not just
this family - any family.
God Told Me To <Demon)
For me, God Told Me To is Cohen's most
fascinating film to date, and the most
ambitious in theme (while characteristically
modest in budget and treatment). Its subject
is no less than the repression of bisexuality
within Christian patriarchal culture. The film
strikes me as somewhat less than completely
realized: its science fiction aspects are cum-
bersome, its narrative sometimes awkward,
and one wants almost everything in it
developed more fully. It should be seen,
perhaps, as a sketch for the great movie
Cohen may make one day.
A police detective (Tony Lo Bianco),
reared a strict Catholic, but with both a wife
(Sandy Dennis) and a lover (Deborah
Raffin), investigating a series of apparently
random and motiveless killings by various
assassins, traces them to the inspiration of a
young god, born of a human virgin impreg-
nated by light from a space craft. He also dis-
covers, however, that he is himself another
such "god," though in him the supernatural
force has been repressed by his Catholic-
orthodox upbringing. He kills (or seems to
kill) his unrepressed ''brother," and ends
convicted of murder, repeating as explana-
tion of his motive the phrase used earlier by
each of the assassins: "God told me to."
The god is conceived as both beautiful and
vicious. Like the snake of D. H. Lawrence's
famous poem, he is associated with danger,
82
energy, and fire - with forces that society
cannot encompass and therefore decrees
must be destroyed. His disruption of the
social order is arbitrary, involving a series of
meaningless sniper-killings, the devastating
of the St. Patrick's Day Parade, and the
annihilation of a family by its father; yet the
imagery associated with him (the dance of
light and flame) gives him stronger positive
connotations than any other manifestation of
the return of the repressed in Cohen's work,
or indeed in any other contemporary horror
film.
Crucial to the film is the god's dissolution
of sexual differentiation: apparently male, he
has a vagina, and invites the protagonist to
father their child. The new world he
envisages is, by implication, a world in which
the division of sexual roles will cease to exist.
What is proposed is no less than the over-
throw of the entire structure of patriarchal
ideology. Tht; two god-inspired assassins
whom the film presents in any detail are
strongly characterized in terms of sexual
ambiguity: the first (played by the actor who
originated the role of the homosexual in A
Chorus Line) is clearly meant to be taken as
gay; the other (the young father who has
murdered his wife and children) is also given
culturally recognizable signifiers of gayness.
Against all this is set the tangle and misery of
the protagonist's sexual life under Christian
culture, characterized by possessiveness,
secrecy, deception, and denial. Significantly,
what first arouses him to open violence is the
young father's sense of release and happiness
after he has destroyed his family.
Like Cohen's other films, God Told Me To
proposes no "solution." If its god was ever
pure, his purity has been corrupted through
incarnation in human flesh and the agents he
is forced to use (the disciples are business-
men and bureaucrats, the possessed execu-
tants are merely destructive). Yet, unlike the
use of Catholicism in The Exorcist , the
restoration of repression at the end of the
film is not allowed to carry any positive force,
uplift, or satisfaction - only a wry irony. It is
not even certain that the god is dead: thenar-
rative says he is; the images, editing, and
implications question it. We last see him
(after he appears to have been buried in the
collapse of a derelict building) rising up in
flames, his native element. Nothing clearly
connects the protagonist to the god's destruc-
tion, so we must assume that his conviction
for murder rests on his own confession; we
may infer that he has confessed in order to
reassure himself that his antagonist-brother-
double is really dead. In fact, the ending is
left sufficiently open for one to wonder
whether, had the film achieved any commer-
cial success, Cohen would have written and
directed a sequel to it rather than to It's A live.
Certainly, the issues it opens up are both
immense and profound, and absolutely
central to our culture and its future develop-
ment.
The Private Files of
J. Edgar Hoover
" ... we soon found ourselves besieged on
all sides with no political group to spring to
our defense."
- Larry Cohen
Hoover is perhaps the most intelligent film
about American politics ever to come out of
Hollywood. I cannot speak for its historical
accuracy, or for the justice of its speculative
audacities: that Clyde Tolson was Deep
Throat; that Hoover may have· been impli-
cated in the assassination of Bobby Kennedy
- a possibility the film, keeping just the safe
side of libel, allows us to infer rather than
states. But the film would be no less
intelligent were its entire structure fictional.
It is a question, not of whether what the spec-
tator sees on the screen is "objective truth,''
but of the relationship between the spectator
and narrative.
The revealing comparison is with All the
President's Men. The overall effect of Alan
Pakula's film is complicated by the pervasive
urban paranoia of film nair. a dominant ele-
ment that makes the film's relationship to
Pakula's The Parallax View less clearly one of
simple contrast than the director seems to
have intended. Nevertheless, it offers its
audiences satisfactions that Cohen's film
rigorously eschews, notably in its suspense-
thriller format and its hero identification-
figures. Hoover offers no equivalent for
Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman; there
are no heroes on whom we can rely to have
everything put right at the end. No "correct"
position is dramatised in the film with which
the spectator might identify, by which he
might be reassured. As there is no hero to
83
uncover, be threatened by, and finally rectify
the corruption, there can be no suspense,
only analysis. Beside the obvious thriller bril-
liance of All the President's Men, the sobriety
and detachment of Hoover might be mistaken
for flatness. In fact, the narrative's ellipses
and juxtapositions demand a continual
activity on the part of the spectator very
different from, and incompatible with, the
excitements of "What happens next?"
In the famous Cahiers du Cinema analysis
of Young Mr. Lincoln, the editors claimed that
the film eventually produces Lincoln as a
"monster", both castrated and castrating.
What is arguably implicit (or repressed) in
John Ford's film is the explicit subject of
Cohen; applied to his Hoover, the Cahiers
description is exact, word for word. Two
points are made about the "purity" which
Hoover attempts to bring to his work: that it
is at all stages compromised by the corrup-
tions of the system; and that it is itself
artificial, an act of will growing out of a denial
of the body. The film translates into overtly
political terms the dialectic of its pre-
decessors: neither the purity nor the corrup-
tion is sanctioned, they are presented as two
aspects of the same sickness. As in It's Alive.
the monster is the logical product of the
capitalist system.
Here, the "double" motif is made ver-
bally explicit in the scene with Florence
Hollister (Celeste Holm). Hoover has been
responsible for the death of John Dillinger
(whom he wanted to kill in person), and has
since obsessively preserved his deathmask
and collected relics. Mrs. Hollister tells
Hoover that he would secretly like to be
Dillinger, and the context links this to
Hoover's sexual repression. Having
destroyed Dillinger, Hoover has internalized
his violence, converting it into a repressive,
castrating "morality."
Essential to the repression theme is the
film's treatment of Hoover's alleged
homosexuality, and his relationship with
Clyde Tolson. The presentation of Hoover-
as-monster rests on the notion that his
repression is total, that he is incapable of
acknowledging a sexual response to anyone,
male or female. The desolate little scene
where he sits in semi-darkness and long-
shot, listening to a tape of erotic love-play of
 a politician he has bugged, suggests less a
vicarious satisfaction than his sense of exclu-
sion from an aspect of life as meaningless to
him as a foreign language. Elsewhere, he can
"innocently" reminisce about the time when
Bobby Kennedy, as a child, sat on his lap and
asked if he was "packing a gun"; for the
audience, the line evokes Mae West, yet it is
clear that for Hoover the obvious implication
(that the boy's proximity had given him an
erection) simply does not exist.
The Tolson- Hoover relationship is treated
with great delicacy and precision; out of it
develops the film's culminating irony.
Hoover wants publicly to repudiate the
press's "slanders"; Tolson quietly advises
him just to leave things alone. Tolson, in
other words, is perfectly aware of what
Hoover can never face: the real nature of
their relationship. For a time it looks as if the
film is going to produce Rip Torn as the
politically aware (and heterosexual) hero
who sets things right; but it is Tolson who
acquires the private files, in his determina-
tion to vindicate his friend, after which the
film is content enigmatically to inform us that
Watergate happened a year later and Hoover
couldn't have done a better job.
The film's point is that Watergate was
made possible, not by the altruistic endeavors
of a couple of heroic seekers after truth, but
by the unfulfilled personal commitment of
one man to another. Hoover's one "pure"
achievement, that is, grows inadvertently and
apoliticially, after his death, out of a relation-
ship he could never even recognize for what
it was. If the film celebrates anyone It 1s
Tolson, but he is scarcely presented as any
kind of answer. All the President's Men com-
municates (at least on surface level) that the
System may be liable to corruption but will
always right itself; Hoover views such a belief
with extreme sketpticism.
It's Alive II (originally It Lives Again)
(Notes made in collaboration with
Richard Lippe and Andrew Britton within
three hours of viewing the film). We
expected a "run for cover" movie (after the
commercial disaster of God Told Me To and
the protracted problems over even getting
Hoover a release); we got what appears (in
the immediate excitement of discovery) one
84
of the richest horror movies of the Seventies
and a decisive confirmation (if any were still
needed) of Cohen's intelligence, consis-
tency, and capacity for significant develop-
ment. (Its critical reception, insofar as there
has been one, has been predictably stupid
and ignorant - see, for example, the review
in Variety). It proves the ideal film on which
to end not only the present article but the
work on the horror film of which it forms a
part. We feel unable to do more, under the
circumstances, than offer rough notes which
a subsequent article might develop.
1. The film is deeply rooted in the entire
American horror tradition, evoking (without
ever appearing imitative or eclectic)
Frankenstein, King Kong, The Thing, The
Birds, Rosemary's Baby. It thereby confirms
the basic unity of horror movie material,
however heterogeneous the particular exam-
ples may appear, and however significant the
individual inflections.
2. The general tendency of Cohen's work
has been to lead the spectator toward a recog-
nition and qualified acceptance of the "other-
ness" of the monster that is impossible for
the characters (clearest in God Told Me To). It
Lives Again takes up and substantialy
develops from the end of It"s Alive the
possibility of dramatizing this recognition
within the film, through the responses to the
monster of the characters. Hence it is among
the most humane and progressive of all hor-
ror films, but never at the cost of sentimen-
talizing the monster or diminishing its
dangerousness.
3. With Hom•er and It Lives Again Cohen's
films are noticeably growing in stature,
developing from rough sketches into fully
realized works, becoming more reflective and
elaborated, the mise-en-scene more con-
sidered, the narrati•;e more complex.
4. The implications of the monster-baby
(here babies) are worked out and followed
through much more thoroughly than in It"s
Alive , the children being both savage and
destructive and (perhaps) superior beings, a
new stage of evolution. (This development,
together with the thread of religious imagery
- Frank Davis as the Annunciation, the
male and female babies named Adam and
Eve, the climactic reunion of a new "holy
family" - provides an important link bet-
ween It's Alive and God Told Me ToJ. This
ives rise to a number of richly suggestive
mbiguities: a. The baby is at different points
~ the film identified with both rattlesnake
nd pigeon: the dual aspects of nature kept
igorously separate in Murnau 's No!Jferatu are
nited in Cohen's monster-child. b. The cyc-
ical nature of the beginning and end: the
;ather (at both points) is ambiguously com-
11ensating for his complicity in the death of
nis own child and willing a similar child onto
JOOther couple. c. The audience's ambivalent
1ttitude to both baby and parents, dramatized
n the constant reversals of their behavior,
1scillating between acceptance and rejection.
l. The disturbing use of subjective shots for
,:hild's-point-of-view (carried over from It's
'4/ive but here much more meaningful), plac-
j.ng the spectator abruptly in the position of
1he "other." Two rhyming moments stand
'1
1ut: the child's focally distorted first sight of
1ts father (to whose vie'Ypoint we have been
fairly close up to that moment); the climactic
l1ubjective shot (derived perhaps from Spell-
bound) when the father shoots his baby by
firing directly into camera.
5. The tensions between the parents are
developed far more explicitly here than in It's
41ive. The birth of the baby provokes in the
wife a sexual revulsion and terror (which her
mother partly stimulates) that appear to be on
the verge of resolution in the "family reu-
nion" scene (surely one of the most moving
scenes in any horror film) where she per-
mades her husband to accept the child, but
are only actual(v resolved when he shoots it
(the only time subsequent to the birth when
the couple embrace).
Postcript
After some hesitation, I have decided to
leave the last section of this essay as we wrote
it, qualifying it with some additional com-
ments rather than attempting a revision; it
was an honest response to our immediate
experience of the film, and the points it
makes are (if incomplete) mostly valid.
It is the third of the notes on It's Alive II that
most demands qualification, the proposition
that it is a 'fully realized' work, 'more reflec-
tive and elaborated, the mise-en-scene more
considered, being contradicted more than
confirmed by re-viewing. In fact, my descrip-
tion of God Told Me To as 'a sketch for the
85
great movie Cohen may make one day might
stand, to varying degrees, for all his films so
far. The reasons for the apparent sketchiness
and haste are probably complex, and not to
be accounted for simply in economic terms of
low budgets and short shooting-schedules
(relevant as such conditions clearly are). The
realization of the films sometimes testifies to
bad habits acquired from television and
never quite cast off (useful, no doubt, in the
saving of time and money). The conven-
tional, at times perfunctory, ping-pong cross-
cutting of dialogue scenes (Hitchcock's
phrase 'photographs of people talking'
springs to mind) suggests a film-maker
whose ambitions don't entirely transcend
expectations of casual viewing and immedi-
ate disposability (the general critical response
to Cohen, if it can be said even to exist,
would scarcely encourage him to think
beyond that). It may be, however, that these
are the conditions in which Cohen operates
most spontaneously and effectively - the
urgency and intensity of the films may be
partly dependent on the speed with which
they are tossed off (I once heard Cohen
speculate about the film he could make with
the budget De Palma had for The Fury 'Or
rather', he added, 'the three or four
films ... '). Tony Williams's complaint (in his
essay on Assault on Precinct 13) that John
Carpenter lacks intellectual awareness of the
implications of his material seems to me
(though not without validity) problematic.
The richness of an artist's work often arises
from the dramatization of tensions and con-
tradictions that intellectual awareness may
actually inhibit and impoverish. In Cohen's
case, such tensions are centred on attitudes
to the family: the thematic thread connecting
all his films is the 'monstrous' child's striving
for recognition by his parents and the
impossibility of such recognition within exist-
ing familial codes and structures. It does not
seem to me clear that his work would
necessarily improve were he given more time
to prepare and reflect, more time to shoot,
and more money to spend. Which is not, of
course, to say that one would not be
extremely interested to see the results ...
The fascination and importance ot
Cohen's work lies primarily, then, at the con-
ceptual level. Many people are puzzled that I
value the It's Alive films above Halloween.
 Yet the pleasures of Halloween are not of the
kind that (in D. H. Lawrence's words) 'lead
the sympathetic consciousness into new
places, and away in recoil from things gone
dead'. Halloween in fact, does nothing new,
but does it with extreme cinematic
sophistication and finesse. Cohen, on the
contrary, extends the boundaries of the genre
to breaking-point. The intelligence behind
the It's Alive films drives its thinking to the
point where the horror movie becomes
impossible and must logically give way to
some form of revolutionary movie; to the
point at which the monstrousness of 'nor-
Rick Baker (designer) and his creation (/t's A live)
mality' is explicitly recognized. It's Alive II is
surely the first horror film in which the
suspense derives as much from attempts to
protect the monster as from the menace it
represents. The traditional concept of horror
on which the genre rests can scarcely survive
The Horror of
such a development. But any responsible
celebration of achievements within the genre
Martin
should contain the acknowledgement that
what we are striving towards is a civilization
in which it could no longer exist - in which,
in fact, its very premises would become
strictly meaningless.
Robin Wood
Ostensibly, George Romero's Martin
(1977) makes an attempt to explore the
viability of horror film genre conventions. In
particular, the film wants to call into question
or, as Romero puts it, 're-vamp' the tradi-
tional vampire myths e.g., the use of garlic
land the cross to combat the vampire; the
,vampire sprouting fangs to bite his victim;
lthe cloak as working garb for the vampire,
etc.
In the film, these cliches are, most often,
mockingly exposed as cliches by the film's
protagonist, Martin (John Amplas) who has
been led to believe by his family that it has a
history of vampirism and that he himself is
an eighty-four-year-old vampire. Perhaps the
best illustration of Martin's attempt to dis-
credit cliches occurs when he terrorizes his
cousin Tata Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), in the
playground scene. Martin appears
mysteriously out of the fog wearing a black
:loak, his face whitened with greasepaint,
md reveals huge fangs when he opens his
mouth. Tata Cuda cowers at Martin's
Jtsguise and produces a cross to protect him-
>elf - Martin, after he has made his point,
rips out the false teeth and tells Tata Cuda it's
1ust a costume. Indeed, the elaborate scene is
~xposed as a 'staged' theatrical set-piece for
!)oth Tata Cuda and the film viewer. As Mar-
:in says earlier, there is no magic.
In fact, the relation between such con-
;epts as myth, magic, fantasy and reality is
;rucial to the film. In the opening sequence,
86
Martin selects a female victim while boarding
the train bound for New York via Pittsburgh.
Before entering her compartment, he pre-
pares for the killing, checking his working
equipment - a hypodermic needle and a
razor blade. The moment before Martin
bursts into the compartment he has a 'fan-
tasy' (shown in the colour film by the use of
black and white stock) about what will hap-
pen - the woman groomed and dressed in a
flowing nightgown, will welcome him as her
lover. Instead, an unglamorous woman, who
has just flushed the toilet, appears from the
bathroom wearing a beauty mask on her face.
She struggles to defend herself against Mar- .
tin's assault until the drug takes over, at
which point Martin undresses them both to
perform a sexual ritual that includes sucking
the blood of his partner.
When Martin arrives in Pittsburgh, the
meeting with his cousin Tata Cuda is given
suggestive undertones as the elderly cousin
appears apparition-like dressed in white and
surrounded by a cloud of grey smoke - in
actuality, the smoke is nothing more than
steam from the train. Still, chance circums-
tance has supplied Tata Cuda with a theatrical
effect and it is well used. Like Martin's fan-
tasy before the killing, this brief scene is
important to the thematic of the film - it
suggests that the underlying factor in their
relationship is a common need to give their
lives significance in a squalid reality that
denies individuals a sense of self-importance.
The junkyard that is seen in passing as Martin
is taken to Tata Cuda 's house is a reflection
of the day-to-day reality that surrounds them.
Tata Cuda's belief that Martin is a vam-
pire and that it is his responsibility to both
save Martin's soul and defend the family
name from shame gives him a sense of worth
in the present. The belief is based on out-
dated ideas from the past when people
thought evil could possess the soul and, also,
a time when the family name had meaning.
The young neighborhood· priest (George
Romero), reflecting contemporary existence,
is embarassed by the idea of possession by
evil spirits and dismisses it with a reference to
fiction - the film The Exorcist.
This indirect relation made between fic-
tion as film and reality as fantasy by the priest
is a relevant aspect of the film Martin -
especially in the conception of the Martin
87
',character. Martin, too, lives in a past and pre-
sent in the film. The inter-cut black and white
film images that appear periodically after
!,Martin has been confronted by his cousin as
'Nosferatu' can be read as scenes from his
past life. Since these past images usually
parallel events in Martin's present (e.g., the
images of the torch-bearing mobs occur as
Martin is being pursued by the police), it is a
logical assumption. But, it is also possible to
read these images as remembrances from fic-
tional films Martin has seen into which he
now projects himself (Romero, in a publicity
article he wrote for the release of Martin, sug-
gests this interpretation of the black and white
images). The idea that these are just fic-
tional images that Martin uses to flesh out a
·fantasy that he and Tata Cuda share is re-
enforced by the use of the young woman in
these images. In particular, she beckons him
by continually calling out his name. It is a
kind of recognition Martin doesn't receive in
his daily existence. In reality, Martin's claims
to recognition can only be that he is a profi-
cient killer - or, a young man with a severe
sexual problem.
In fact, the women that Martin encounters
in reality are not unlike himself and Tata
Cuda - they are also attempting to escape
reality through self-recognition and, also, to
the extent that it becomes self-absorbing.
,Tata Cuda's grand-daughter Christina
(Christine Forrest) is involved in a relation-
ship with a blue collar worker who is more
interested in making money than he is in her.
When she isn't struggling with him, she
struggles with Tata Cuda. She gives Martin
the little sympathy she can afford but, as he
says, she won't remember him when she
leaves. Mrs. Santini (Elayne Nadeau), the
housewife who initiates Martin into the 'sexy
stuff' as he calls it and thereby undermines
the belief that he needs to suck blood,
chooses to commit suicide rather than con-
tinue to cope with the reality of her existence.
Mrs. Santini's seduction of Martin is but
attempt to escape the banality of her
ntity as a typical unhappy suburban wife
h a typical cheating husband. The third
in the film, the housewife (Sarah
e) that Martin catches in bed with her
lover whom he kills to suck his blood,
given much of a character definition
the suggestion that her affairs, like
Mrs. Santini's, are a compensation for a love-
less marriage and conceived with considera-
bk calculation. It is in this sequence that
Martin begins to separate the blood-sucking
from the sexual experience. He caresses the
nude body of the housewife but no longer
feels compelled to drink her blood. And this
sequence gives another indication that the
black-and-white images are pure fantasy.
During the course of the assault on the
house, a black-and-white image shows that
Martin has killed the young woman who led
him into the bedroom, having sucked her
blood, yet, later, after he has spared the
housewife, a black-and-white image appears
showing this woman to be alive and embrac-
ing Martin. Martin has altered the fantasy to
make it coincide with the real event.
On the fringes of this reality, there are the
hostile and aggressive housewives who
patronize Cuda's store; the punks who annoy
female shoppers at the malls; the motorcycle-
obsessed neighbors; the winos and petty cri-
minals in the deserted warehouses; and, the
radio talk show with an announcer who at
first sounds sympathetic to Martin but, in
actuality, is exploiting Martin's story to
increase listener interest. They, in their
individual ways, each reflect forms of self-
absorption.
Except for There's Always Vanilla,
Romero's feature film work, Night of the Liv-
ing Dead, Jack's Wife, The Crazies, Martin and
Dawn of the Dead belong in the horror film
genre (though their relationship to it is often
somewhat eccentric). Considering Romero's
involvement with the genre and the fact that
he is a contemporary filmmaker, it isn't
surprising that he should want to make a self-
reflexive film like Martin which has the
intention of exploring the genre's conven-
tions.
In the final analysis, however the explora-
tion remains on the surface level, managing,
through the use of the Martin character, to
toy with a few accepted myth-conventions of
the genre - such as the earlier mentioned
scene where Martin confronts Tata Cuda in
the playground wearing a cloak and fangs.ln
filmic terms, the confrontation is staged as a
scene from a 'typical' horror film, e.g., night,
fog, sinister sounds, the dramatic impact of
Martin's appearance depending on cutting,
etc. On this level, horror film genre conven-

tions stay intact and are needed to make the
scene work. And the fact that Romero avoids
making Martin a traditional vampire, a vam-
pire that needs human blood to exist, tends
to indicate he isn't willing or finds it impossi-
ble to use conventions and their implications
beyond a certain point. Martin is a horror film
and Martin, like Norman Bates of Psycho, is a
sexual psychopath.
Finally, the premise on which the film is
based, an age-old vampire living in a modern
world, is subtly evaded by Romero's
seemingly open-ended narrative. Romero
has devised an elaborate film structure so
that the film can be read as saying Martin is a
vampire or that he is, like everybody else, a
victim of a barren society. In reality, the film
endorses the second interpretation by being
Romero (left) on the set (Martin)
centered on the concept of fantasy. In addi-
tion, the ironic ending with Tata Cuda think-
ing Martin is responsible for Mrs. Santini's
death and killing him by driving a stake
through his heart just as Martin has begun to Apocalypse Now:
see himself as 'normal' is calculated to make
Martin sympathetic to the viewer. Perhaps
the romantic Martin is Romero's lament for
Notes on the Living
the fantastic - he documents a culture that Dead
insists on conformity and exists on the foun-
dation of materialism. Near the end of the
film, Martin watches chickens being
slaughtered. The slaughtering is filmed in
close-up - a brief documentary episode in a
fictional narrative film that serves to
metaphorically reflect the real horror the film
explores.
Richard Lippe
Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn
of the Dead (1979) are the first two parts of a
1rilogy which Romero plans to complete later
with Day of the Dead. They are among the
most powerful, fascinating and complex of
modern horror films, bearing a very interest-
ing relationship both to the genre and to each
other. What I want to examine here is their
divergence: together, they demand a partial
redefinition of the principles according to
which the genre usually operates; and they
are more distinct from each other - in
character, tone and meaning - than has
generally been noted (Dawn of the Dead is
much more than the elaborate re-make it has
been taken for).
The differences - both from other horror
films and between the two films - are centred
on the zombies and their function in relation
to the other characters. The zombies of Night
answer partly to the definition of the monster
as the 'return of the repressed' - but only
partly: they lack one of the crucial defining
characteristics, energy, and carry no positive
connotations whatever. In Dawn, even this
partial correspondence has almost entire1y
1 Jisappeared. On the other hand, the zombies
1 )f both films are not burdened with those
, r~ctively negative connotations ('evil incar-
:~.ate', etc.) that we have seen as defining the
·eactionary horror film. The earlier films to
1 which the 'living dead' movies most signifi-
;antly relate are both somewhat to one side
)f the main development of the horror film:
The Birds (Night more than Dawn), and Inva-
91
sian of the Body Snatchers (Dawn more than
NightJ. The strategy that connects all four
films (and at the same time distinguishes
them from the most fully representative
specimens of the genre) is that of depriving
their 'monsters' of positive or progressive
potential in order to restore it to the human
characters. From this viewpoint, Dawn of the
Dead emerges as the most interesting of the
four films (which is not to say that it is 'bet-
ter' - more complex, more suggestive, more
intelligent - than The Birds).
Much has been made of the way in which
Night of the Living Dead systematically under-
cuts generic conventions and the expecta-
tions they arouse: the woman who appears to
be established as the heroine becomes vir-
tually catatonic early in the film and remains
so to the end; no love relationship develops
between her and the hero. The young couple,
whose survival (as future nuclear family) is
generically guaranteed, are burnt alive and
eaten around the film's mid-point. The film's
actual nuclear family are wiped out; the child
(a figure hitherto sacrosanct - even in The
Birds children sustain no more than super-
ficial injuries, and this is the same year as
Rosemary's Baby) not only dies but comes
back as a zombie, devours her father, and
hacks her mother to death. In a final
devastating stroke, the hero of the film and
sole survivor of the zombies (among the
major characters) is callously shot down by
the sheriff's posse, thrown on a bonfire, and
burnt.
But the film's transgressions are not just
against generic conventions: those conven-
tions constitute an embodiment, in a skeletal
and schematic form, of the dominant norms
of our culture. The zombies of Night have
their meaning defined fairly consistently in
relation to the Family and the Couple. The
film's debt to The Birds goes beyond the
obvious resemblances of situation and imag-
ery (the besieged group in the boarded
house, the zombies' hands breaking through
the barricades like the birds' beaks): the
zombies' attacks, like those of the birds, have
their origins in (are the physical projection
of) psychic tensions that are the product of
patriarchal male/female or familial relation-
ships. This is established clearly in the open•
ing scene. Brother and sister visit a remote
country graveyard (over which flies the stars-
 and-stripes: the metaphor of America-as-gra-
, veyard is central to Romero's work, the term
'living dead' describing the society of Martin
as aptly as it does the zombies). Their father
is buried there, and the visit (a meaningless
annual ritual performed to please their
mother) is intensely resented, actively by the
man, passively by the sullen woman. They
take their familial resentments out on each
other, as (the film indicates) they have
always done; the man frightens his sister by
pretending to be a monster, as he used to do
when they were children; the first zombie
lurches forward from among the graves,
attacks them both, and kills the man. At the
film's climax, when the zombies at last burst
into the fi!rm-house, it is the brother who
leads the attack on his sister, some obscure
vestige of 'family feeling' driving him for-
ward to devour her.
In between, we have the film's analysis of
its 'typical' American nuclear family. The
father rages and blusters impotently, cons-
tantly reasserting a discredited authority (the
film continuously counterpoints the disin-
tegration of the social microcosm, the
patriarchal family, with the cultural disin-
tegration of the nation, the collapse of confi-
dence in authority on both the personal and
political level). The mother, contemptuous
of her husband yet trapped in the dominant
societal patterns, does nothing but sulk and
bitch. Their destruction at the hands of their
zombie daughter represents the film's judge-
ment on them and the norm they embody.
The film has often been praised for never
making an issue of its black hero's eolour (it
is nowhere alluded to, even implicitly). Yet it
is not true that his colour is arbitrary and
without meaning: Romero uses it to signify
his difference from the other characters, to
set him apart from their norms. He alone has
no ties - he remains unconnected to any of
the others, and we learn nothing of his family
or background. From this arises the signifi-
cance of the two events at the end of the film:
(a) he survives the zombies, (b) he is shot
down by the posse. It is the function of the
posse to restore the social order that has been
destroyed; the zombies represent the sup-
pressed tensions and conflicts - the legacy of
the past, of the patriarchal structuring of rela-
tionships, 'dead' yet automatically continu-
ing - which that order creates and on which
Family feeling (Night of the Living Dead)
93
it precariously rests.
Almost exactly halfway between the two
'living dead' films, and closely related to
both, is The Crazies, an ambitious and neg-
lected work that demands parenthetical
attention here for its confirmation of
Romero's thematic concerns and the particu-
lar emphasis it gives them. The pre-credits
sequence is virtually a gloss on the opening of
Night of the Living Dead, with brother and
sister as young children and the acting out of
tensions dramatized within the family.
Again, brother teases sister, pretending to be
a monster coming to kill her; abruptly, their
'game' is disturbed by the father, the first
'crazy' of the title, who has already murdered
their mother and is now savagely destroying
the house. The subsidiary family of the main
body of the film (here father and daughter),
instead of killing and devouring each other,
act out the mutual incestuous desire on
whose repression families are built. In
general, however, the film moves out from
Night's concentration on the family unit into
a more generalized treatment of social disin-
tegration (a progression Dawn will com-
plete).
The premise of the film is similar to that
of Hawks' Monkey Business (that the same
premise can provide the basis for a crazy
comedy and a horror movie is itself sugges-
tive of the dangers of a rigid definition of
genres, which are often structured on the
same sets of ideological tensions): a virus in a
town's water-supply turns people crazy, their
craziness taking the form of the release of
their precariously suppressed violence, its
end result either death or incurable insanity.
The continuity suggested by the opening bet-
ween normality and craziness is sustained
throughout the film; indeed, one of its most
fascinating aspects is the way the boundary
between the two is continuously blurred. In
the first part of the film, after the declaration
of martial law and the attempt to round up
and isolate all the town's inhabitants, the
local priest finds his authority swept aside
and the sanctuary of his church brutally
repudiated. He becomes increasingly dis-
traught, and publicly immolates himself. We
never know whether or not he is a victim of
the virus (acting, in his case, on a desire for
martyrdom). Once such a doubt is implanted,
 it becomes uncertain what instigates the
uncontrolled and violent behaviour of vir-
. · ,,.,.,.,.,#'"'%!i 'tually everyone in the film. The hysteria of
the quarantined can be attributed equally to
the spread of contagion among them or to
their brutal and ignominious herding
;together in claustrophobically close quarters
by the military; the various individual charac-
ters who overstep the bounds of recognizably
'normal' behaviour may simply be reacting to
conditions of extreme stress. The 'crazies', in
other words, represent merely an extension
of 'normality', not its opposite. The spon-
taneous violence of the mad appears scarcely
more grotesque than the organized violence
of the authorities.
\ The end of Night of the Living Dead implies
that the zombies have been contained and
are in process of being annihilated; by the
end of Dawn of the Dead they have apparently
over-run everything and there is nothing left
to do but flee. Yet Dawn (paradoxically,
though taking Jhe cue from its title) comes
across as by far the more optimistic of the two
films. This is due partly to format (bright col-
ours, against Night's grainy and drab black-
and-white), partly to setting (garish and bril-
liantly lit shopping mall, against shadowy,
old-fashioned farm-house), partly to tone (in
Night, the zombies are never funny, the
,, film's black humour being mainly restricted
to the casual brutal ism of the sheriff's posse).
But these are only the outward signs of a
difference which is basically conceptual. Both
films are built upon all-against-all triangular
structures, strikingly similar yet crucially
different:
NIGHT
Besieged
Zombies 6
DAWN
Posse
Besieged
Spontaneous violence, organized violence (The Crazies)
Zombies 6 Gang
95
(The Crazies essentially repeats the pattern
of Night, with 'crazies' instead of zombies
and the military in place of the posse) .
The functions of the sheriff's posse in
Night and the motorcycle gang in Dawn are in
some ways very close: they constitute a threat
both to the· zombies and to the besieged
(even if, in Night, inadvertently, by mistak-
ing the hero for a zombie); more impor-
tantly, both dramatize (albeit in signiticantly
different ways) the possibility of the develop-
ment of Fascism out of breakdown and
chaos. The difference is obvious: the purpose
of the posse is to destroy the zombies and
restore the threatened social order; the pur-
pose of the gang is simply to exploit and
profit from that order's disintegration. The
posse ends triumphant, the gang are wiped
out.
The premise of Dawn. in fact, is that the
social order (regarded as in all Romero's films
as obsolete and discredited) can 'tbe restored;
its restoration at the end of Night simply
clinches the earlier film's total negativity.
The notion of social apocalypse is succinctly
established in Dawn's TV studio prologue: ·
television, the only surviving medium of
national communication whereby social
order might be maintained, is on the verge of ·
closing down; as a technician tells Fran, 'Our
responsibility is at an end'. The characters of
Night were still locked in their responsibility
to the value-structure of the past; the charac-
ters of Dawn are at the outset absolved from
that responsibility, they are potentially free
people, with new responsibilities of choice
and self-determination. Since the zombies'
significance in both films Jepends entirely on
their relationship to the main characters, it
follows that their function here is somewhat
different. They are no longer associated with
specific characters or character-tensions, and
the family as a social unit no longer exists (it
is only reconstituted in parody, when the
injured Roger becomes the-baby-in-the-
pram, wheeled around the supermarket by
his 'parents' as he shoots down zombies with
childish glee). The zombies instead are a
'given' from the outset; they represent, on
the metaphorical level, the whole dead
weight of patriarchal consumer-capitalism,
from whose habits of behaviour and desire
not even Zen-Buddhists and nuns are
exempt, mindlessly joining the conditioned
gravitation to the shopping-mall.
As in The Cra::ies. the seemingly clear-cut
distinctions between the three groups a.re
progressively undermined (aside from the
obvious visual differentiation between zom-
bies and humans). The motorcycle gang's
'mindless delight in violence and slaughter is
anticipated in the development of Roger; all
three groups are contaminated and motivated
by consumer-greed (which the zombies
simply carry to its logical conclusion by con-
,suming people). All three groups, in other
words, share a common conditioning: all are
predators. The substance of the film concerns
the four characters' varying degrees of recog-
nition of, and varying reactions to, this fact.
Two become zombies, two (provisionally)
escape.
In place of Night's dissection of the family,
Dawn explores (and explodes) the two domi-
nant couple-relationships of our culture and
its cinema: the heterosexual couple (moving
inevitably towards marriage and its tradi-
tional male/female roles) and the male
'buddy' relationship with its evasive denial of
sexuality (the pattern is anticipated in the
central triangle-relationship of the three prin-
ciples of The Cra::ies). Through the realiza-
tion of the ultimate consumer-society dream
(the ready availability of every luxury,
emblem and status-symbol of capitalist life,
without the penalty of payment) the
anomalies and imbalances of human relation-
ships under capitalism are exposed. With
the defining motive - the drive to acquire
and possess money, the identification of
money with power - removed, the whole
structure of traditional relationships, based
on patterns of dominance and dependence,
begins to crumble.
The heterosexual couple (an embryonic
family, as Fran is pregnant) begin as a trendy
variation on the norm: they are not legally
married, and the woman is allowed a semb-
lance of independence through her career;
but as soon as the two are together the con-
ventional assumptions operate. It is the man
who flies the helicopter and carries the gun -
the film's major emblems of sexual/
patriarchal authority. At various points in the
narrative Fran nostalgically re-enacts the role
of female stereotype, making up her face as a
doll-like image for the male gaze, skating
alone on the huge ice-rink - woman as spec-
96
tacle, but without an audience. But in the Pawn is perhaps the first horror film to sug- the presence of a third survivor, Fran's
course of the film she progressively assumes ~est - albeit very tentatively - the unborn child, has its significance. Romero
a genuine autonomy, asserting herself tossibility of moving beyond apocalypse. It has set himself a formidable challenge, and it
against the men, insisting on possession of a ~rings its two surviving protagonists to the will be interesting to see how the third part
gun, demanding to learn to pilot the machine. 10int where the WOrk of creating the norms of the trilogy confronts it.
The pivotal scene is the parody of a romantic ·or a new social order, a new structure of
dinner, the white couple, in evening dress, elationships, can begin -a context in which Robin Wood
cooked for and waited on by the black, with
!lowers and candlelight, the scene building to
the man's offer and the woman's refusal of
'the rings that signify traditional union.
The closest link between Night and Dawn
:is the carry-over of the black protagonist -
his colour used again to indicate his separa-
tion from the norms of white-dominated
society and his partial exemption from its
constraints. Through the developing mutual
'attachment between him and Roger, the film
takes up and comments on the 'buddy' rela-
tionship of countless recent Hollywood
movies and its implicit sexual undercurrents
and ambiguities. Neither man shows any sex-
ual interest in the woman, yet both are
blocked by their conditioning from admitting
to any in each other. Hence the channelling
of Roger's energies into violence and aggres-
sion, his uncontrolled zest in slaughter pre-
sented as a display for his friend. The true
nature of the relationship can be tacitly
acknowledged only after Roger's death, in
the symbolic orgasm of the opening of a
champagne bottle over his grave.
Both the film's central relationships are
broken by the death of one of the partners.
The two who die are those who cannot escape
the constraints of their conditioning, the sur-
vivors those who show themselves capable of
autonomy and self-awareness. The film
eschews any hint of a traditional happy end-
ing, there being no suggestion of any roman-
tic attachment developing between the sur-
vivors. Instead of the restoration of conven-
tional relationship-patterns, we have the
woman piloting the helicopter as the man
relinquishes his rifle to the zombies. They
have not come very far, and the film's con-
clusion rewards them with no more than a
provisional and temporary respite: enough
gasoline for four hours, and no certainty of
destination. Yet the effect of the ending is
curiously exhilarating. Hitherto, the modern
horror film has invariably moved towards
either the restoration of the traditional order
or the expression of despair (in Night, both).
97 Flight to a future? (Dawn of the Dead)
 VightoftheLivingDead, 17, 21, 24,28 41 Vampyr, 45
INDEX OF FILM TITLES )8,70,73,87,89-91,93,94 ' ' Vertigo, 76
Vosferatu (Murnau), 11, I4, 43-49, 84
Wagonmaster, 20
'Jbsession, 76 War ofthe Worlds, 59
A lice Doesn't Live Here Any More, 63 Frankenstein, II, 14, I5, 18, 80,83
?men, The, II, 15, I7, 19-20,22,23,31 50 Weekend, 78
Alien, 11, 26-28 Frightmare, 17 i1, 63, 75, 80 ' '
All the President's Men, 82, 83 Frogs, I7 Wild Bunch, The, 78
?men II, 67, 75
Assault on Precinct 13, 11, 24, 67-7 3, 84 Full Circle, 65-66 ?nee Upon a Time In The West, 69 Young Mr. Lincoln, 82
Fury, The, 17, 65, 67, 76, 84
Battle star Galactica, 67 Jarallax View, The, 82
Beast with Five Fingers, The, 13 God Told Me To (see Demon) Jarasite Murders, The, (see Shivers)
Ben, 78 Greetings, 76 Jersona, 43
Birds, The, 17, 41, 70, 73, 76, 83,89 Jfwntom of the Opera, 76
Black Caesar, 76, 78, 79 Halloween, II, 24-26,28,31,65, 70, 84,85 Jhantom of the Paradise, 62, 76
)ossession ofJoel Delaney, The, 1 I, 17
Black Christmas, 26 HandsoftheRipper, I7 )rivate Files ofJ. Edgar Hoover, The, 76 82-
Bone, 76, 77-79, 80 Haunting, The, 18 3 ,
Bringing Up Baby, 11 Heaven Can Wait, 28 )rophecy, I 1
Brood, The, 24 Hell Up In Harlem, 76, 79-80 Jsycho, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 41, 51, 59,
Heretic, The (see Exorcist II) 6,88
CabinetofDr. Caligari, The, 15,49 Hills Have Eyes, The, 13, 17, 21, 67, 69 )uzzle of a Downfall Child, 78
Car, The, 17 Hi, Mom!, 76
Carrie, 17, 51, 52, 63, 65, 75, 76,77 Homicidal, 16 /abbits, (see Night of the Lepus)
/abid, 24
Cathy's Curse, 17
/ace With the Devil, 11, 17, 69
Cat People, 11, 18,27 Images, 78 law Meat, 13, 16, 17, 21,45
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 45 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegei),89 /epulsion, 16
The Chosen, 75 !slandofLostSouls, 11, 15,18 UoBravo 24 68 69 70 76
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 67 It Lives Again (see It's Alive II) 1ocky, 28, ' ' ' '
Crazies, The, 87,91-93,94 It's Alive, 11,13, 14, I7, 24, 31, 41, 75, 76, 79,/ockyHorrorPictureShow, The, 11
Curse of the Cat People, 29,41 8~-8!, 82, 83,84 /osemary'sBaby, 11, 17, 18, 66, 76, 80, 83,
ItsAlivell,II,41,76,83-85 9
Damien (see Omen W I Walked With a Zombie, 18, 41, 59
:carjace, 76, 79
Dark Star, 24 Jack's Wife, 87 :chizo, 16
DawnoftheDead, 41, 87, 89,93-95 Januskopf, Der, 14,46 'earchers, The, 14, 70, 73
Day of the Animals, 17 Jaws, 24, 54-57 :entinel, The, 23, 62
Death Line (see Raw Meat) :eventh Victim, The, 18
Death Trap, 22 King Kong, 18, 83 :hadowofaDoubt, 17, 51, 52,76
Demon, 11, 13, 17,23,28,31,63, 75, 76, 77, Last Tango In Paris, 78 :hivers, 24
81-82,83,84 Leopard Man, The, 18 :isters, 11, 16, 23, 24, 28, 41, 59-63 66 75
Little Caesar, 76 6 ' , '
Dracula (Badham), 32
Dracula, (Browning) 18 Long, Long Trailer, The, 17 'on ofFrankenstein, 14, 15,41
Looking for Mr. Goodbar, 27 :quirm, 17
Dracula's Daughter, 18 :tagecoach, 13, 68
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, (Mamoulian) 14 Mandingo, 20 :tar Wars, 28, 67
DrumsAlongTheMohawk, 10, 70,72 Manitou, The, 11 :rraw Dogs, 78
Man ofthe West, 14, 20 'unrise, 43, 47,49
Eaten A live (see Death Trap) Mamie, 76 'witchboard Operator, 78
Exorcist, The, 11, 17, 23, 26, 29, 37, 39,50- Martin, 32, 42, 86-88, 9I
53,67,76,80,81,86 Meet Me in St. Louis, 17, 26, 37 abu, 43, 47,49
Exorcist II, I 3 Metropolis, 14 exasChainsawMassacre, The, 11, 17,19-22,
Mickey One, 78 3,26,28,41,50,63,65,67,69, 76
Exterminating Angel, The, 13 'hem!, 18, 81
Monkey Business, (Hawks) 91
Murders in the Rue Morgue, The, 15-16, 18 'here'sAlwavs Vanilla, 87
Face to Face, 45 My Darling Clementine, 20 'hey Came From Within (see Shivers)
Father of the Bride, 17 i'hing, The, 15, 18, 27,83
Fly, The, 14 Night of the Lepus, 17
Vninvited, The, I 8
98