Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need for Sex

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

As we saw in the last post (the first in this series), Jib Fowles identifies 15 basic appeals used in advertising. These same appeals, we argue, are frequently employed in horror fiction; indeed, their presence in horror novels and movies accounts for much of the appeal of these types of fiction.

In this post, we'll take a look at the appeal to readers' or viewers' need for sex. The fulfillment of the “needs for,” as opposed to the “needs to” on Fowles's list, require the presence or participation of another person or persons besides oneself. While it is possible to satisfy oneself sexually, by masturbation or other means, to find true sexual fulfillment, one requires a partner (or, some might contend, partners), whether of the male, the female, both, or another gender.

In horror, the need for sex characteristically involves perversion. Since all communication is reducible to seven basic questions, the forms of sexual perversion about which horror writers may write take seven possible types of forms. (A type, as we're using it, means a sexual behavioral set identifiable by shared characteristics.) These types of perversion (i. e., a deviation, corruption, or distortion of the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing) can be subsumed under these questions:

Who?

What?

When?

Where?

How?

Why?

How many? or How much?

We can further refine these questions by associating each of them with specific referents:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)

Let's add a couple more rows, identifying an example of a horror novel or movie that perverts human sexuality by deviating from, corrupting, or distorting the original nature of purpose of a person, place, or thing involved in sexual behavior:

Who?	What?	When?	Where?	How?	Why?	How many? or How much?
Agent (actor)	Object	Age, time, occasion, or duration	Location	Method, process, or technique	Cause, motive, or purpose	Quantity (in volume or number)
Demon Seed (1973 novel; 1977 film)	The Exorcist (1973)	Maleus Maleficarum (1487)*	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])	Alien (1979)	Rosemary's Baby (1967 novel; 1968 film)	The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils])
A computer becomes a woman's sexual partner.	Regan MacNeil, the possessed girl, masturbates with a crucifix.	A demon, having assumed a female form, spends so long in intercourse with her victim that she absolutely drains him of semen and he thereafter dies.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.	Parasitic pregnancy ends in the fetus's bursting through the human host's abdomen.	After being raped by a demon, Rosemary Wood-house conceives a demonic child.	Naked nuns conduct sexual orgies in a convent.

As the above table shows, the same movie may contain two (or more) of these types of sexual perversion: The Devils of Loudon (1952 novel; 1972 film [The Devils]) contains orgies involving many individuals participating simultaneously in various sex acts; it also takes place in a convent. Likewise, these types of perversions can vary in how they are represented.

For example, a perverse location need not be a geographical place or an architectural space (a convent); it could be an anatomical site, as in Teeth (2008), in which a young woman discovers that she has two sets of teeth, one in her mouth, the other in her vagina. Other possible variations? One's partner could be a poltergeist, as in The Entity (1982) (Who?); human corpses, as in the necrophilia scenes in the novel Under the Dome (2009) (What?); or a man transformed into metal kills his girlfriend after his penis becomes a power drill, as in Tetsuo:The Iron Man (1989) (How?).

Writers are limited pretty much only by their imaginations, their sense of morality, their personal taste, and the law of the land. Publishing houses will print and distribute just about anything that promises to make a buck. It seems unlikely, though, that the majority of readers or viewers are likely to have a need for extreme types of sex, even when it occurs in horror stories.

* Although the Malleus Maleficarum is a book—a manual for prosecuting witchcraft trials—rather than a novel or a movie, it contains supposed accounts of demonic sex, one of which suggests such a long-lasting (and fatal) encounter between a succubus and “her” victim, a hermit, that the hermit was completely drained of his semen:

When he [the hermit] was done and had arisen, the demon said to him, “behold what you have done, for I am not a girl or a woman but a demon,” and at once he disappeared from view, while the hermit remained absolutely astonished. And because the demon, with his great power, had withdrawn a very great quantity of semen, the hermit was permanently dried up, so that he died at the end of a month's time.

One can imagine the use of this description of demonic sexual activity as the basis for a terrifying sex scene in a horror novel or movie!

Note: For you may also want to read my post “Note: You may want to read “Bentley Little: Aberrant Sex as Symbolic of the nature of Sin.”

Sex and Horror, Part 8: A Gallery of Sex and Horror

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

While it is not the intent of Chillers and Thrillers to titillate its readers, no series concerning sex and horror truly conveys the subgenre without a display of some of the images that have come to represent it, which is the reason that I conclude this series with some examples of such images.

Abducted by the Daleks

Angel Heart

Breeders

Bride of Chucky

Cabin Fever



Cemetery Man

Children of the Corn

Decoys 2: Alien Seduction

Dreams in the Witch House

Erotic Nights of the Living Dead

Evil Dead

Friday the 13th 2: Jason Goes to Hell

Future Kill

Galaxy of Terror

Inseminoid

Lifeforce

Night of the Demons

Nightmare on Elm Street 3

Nightmare on Elm Street 4

Outer Limits (episode with Alyssa Milano)

Possession

Re-Animator

Rosemary's Baby

Shivers

Sleepaway Camp

Species

Species 2

Spermula

Teeth

The Entity

The Hills Have Eyes 2

The Howling

The Shining

They Live

Zombie Strippers

Perhaps the most blatant example in this gallery for the inclusion of gratuitous nudity in a horror film is Zombie Strippers.  The misogynistic attitude toward women that is displayed by many of these images is also striking, suggesting that Hollywood moviemakers seem to have low regard for the female of the species, considering them to be fallen angels, "breeders" (a term that homosexual men sometimes use to describe heterosexual women), living dolls, victims of abduction and rape, playthings, transsexuals, alien monsters, food, and (even when they are dead) strippers.  However, to be fair, some directors do not find fault with women as such; rather, they find sex itself repugnant and grotesque, as the fiilms of David Cronenberg, for example, often show.

However, sex in horror is not always as gratuitious as it is in Zombie Strippers. As we have seen, it sometimes has a satirical, a philosophical, or even a religious theme.

No pun intended, but, in literature, horror fiction included, nudity is often more complex than it may appear. Frequently, it takes on symbolic significance, representing such states and conditions as human beings’ animality, vulnerability, and mortality. Sex itself, as we have seen, is often linked, in horror fiction, to perversions of, and deviations form, normal, heterosexual, genital (and generative) sex. In horror fiction, sex often involves adultery, bestiality, homosexuality, incest, transsexuality, and even necrophilia. It also sometimes features extraterrestrials, demons, witches, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and other paranormal or supernatural participants. Such behavior flaunts the will of God, as it is established by the Ten Commandments and other divine laws that are transmitted through Judeo-Christian religious traditions. In other words, such behaviors are sinful acts of disobedience to the divine will.

Indeed, sex with aliens challenges the Judeo-Christian doctrine of a great chain of being in which various creatures occupy greater or lesser levels of significance and value, with God at the apex, followed by angels, human beings, animals, and plants, in this order, for it inserts another creature, extraterrestrial beings, into his chain. Such entities may not be the equal of God, but they seem to transcend human beings. Are aliens superior or interior to angels and their fallen peers, demons? Some consider aliens to be demons in disguise, intent upon deceiving humans, as, indeed, Hamlet suspected the alleged ghost of his father might be. Whether aliens are demons or extraterrestrials, they disturb the great chain of being, because such creatures were never part of it before the skies became home to flying saucers and other unidentified flying objects.

Sex in horror fiction is also a means of introducing twists on traditional understandings and folkways. Demonic possession which also involves sexual acts, perverted or otherwise, may signify sexual conquest. As femme fatales, women, who are traditionally regarded as weak or powerless, become strong and powerful in demon or alien guise, and men, traditionally the strong and powerful ones become the weak and impotent ones. Sex can be described in mechanical, going-through-the-motions terms, especially when one or more of the participants is a robot or a cyborg. In horror fiction, sex is also often misogynistic, expressing or suggesting a fear, and, sometimes, a hatred, of women. The vagina may be described as having, or be shown to have, teeth with which it mutilates (dismembers, in both a literal and a Freudian sense) males, castrating them as they penetrate or have intercourse with them. Alternatively, the penis can be a serpent-like monster with teeth of its own, used to devour women from within.

The movies we have listed in this post depict all of these impulses, themes, and ideas and more. Sex in horror is multivalent, multidimensional, and multifaceted.

In Horror Films of the 1980s, published in 2002 by McFarland & Company, Inc., of Jefferson City, NC, John Kenneth Muir points out some of the additional concerns of sex in horror. The movie Demon Seed (1977), based upon an early Dean Koontz novel, addresses “women’s rights,” Muir says, as well as “technology run amok,” and the story, which involves “rape by [a] computer” that is “programmed by men,” denies the protagonist, Susan Harris, “control” over both “her own body” and, since it causes her to experience an orgasm, against her will, even the very “biochemical” processes of her body (467-470).

Likewise, Muir sees David Cronenberg’s Shivers as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of so-called casual sex. It is about the consequences, Muir says, of “infidelity, STDs, pedophilia,” and other perverted, deviant, criminal or otherwise incautious sexual behaviors. In the film, a parasite that resembles a phallus (or “fecal matter,” in Muir’s view), and may or may not have been inspired by the disembodied, living, often winged phalli of ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, infect hosts with an aphrodisiac-like chemical that turns men and women into promiscuous sex maniacs who further spread the parasites and their disease. Equal opportunity parasites, the phallic pests enter their hosts orally, anally, or vaginally, through both hetero- and homosexual sex acts. AIDS and other STDs, Muir believes, are the subtext to this film, which, he argues, in some ways anticipates the movie Alien.

The sex in Wes Craven’s film The Last House on the Left serves a theological, or at least a metaphysical theme. In this film, sex takes the form of the rape of a teenage girl and represents, Muir contends, an atheistic world view in which there is no God and, therefore, no purpose in life and “terrible things” can and do “happen to good people” for no reason. The movie’s “theme song,” “The Road Leads to Nowhere” suggests, Muir says, as does the futility of the religious characters’ prayers, to the movie’s theme, that there is neither an “afterlife” nor a God, and that the journey of life “ends only in death.”

Sex in horror can transcend just sex for sex’s sake, or gratuitous sex, and can symbolize social, political, economic, and even metaphysical or theological issues. Often, for Judeo-Christian readers and moviegoers, sex in horror is related to, and often critical of, human beings relationships with themselves, each other, nature, and God. Even when sex in horror is limited to psychoanalytical interpretations, it can sometimes elucidate the causes and consequences of sublimation, repression, and other alleged psychosexual mechanisms.

Sex and Horror, Part 7

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Although he employs psychoanalysis himself on rare occasions in his analyses of and commentaries upon horror fiction, Stephen King doesn’t seem to be a fan of Freudian thought. Critics who approach criticism from this point of view, he says, tend to conceive of “the writer’s books” as “Rorschach inkblots that will eventually reveal the author’s anal, oral, or genital fixation” rather than illuminate the literature they allegedly interpret (“Horror Fiction” from Danse Macabre in Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, 190).

This is not to suggest, however, that horror fiction is devoid of sex; as I have demonstrated in previous posts, the genre is replete with examples of erotic behavior, especially of the perverted and deviant sort. It’s just that the sex is not sex for sex’s sake; it is not gratuitous, nor is it an expression of unconscious impulses. Often, when it occurs, it is presented within a context of social, or even sociological, significance.

According to Anne Rivers Siddons herself, the author of The House Next Door, she was careful to create a menace with which her sophisticated, upwardly mobile, middle-class suburbanite characters (and readers) could identify as relevant to their lives:

A traditional ghoulie would be laughed out of the neighborhood. So what would break and crumble defenses and penetrate suburban armors? It would have to be different in each case. Each person has his own built-in horror button. Let’s have a house that can isolate and push it, and then you’ve really got a case of the suburban willies (quoted in “Horror Fiction,” 98).

“The whole point of the book, of course, is not so much the house and its peculiar, terrible power,” she continues, “but what effect it has on the neighborhood, and on the relationships between neighbors and friends, and between families, when they are forced to confront and believe the unbelievable”:

This has always been the power of the supernatural to me. . . That it blasts and breaks relationships between people and other people and between people and their world, and, in a way, between people and the very essences of themselves. . . . For belief is everything; belief is all. Without belief, there is no terror” (quoted in “Horror Fiction,” 898-99).

King offers an example of Siddons’ implementation of her theory. During a party hosted by the haunted house’s first residents, Walter and Pie Harralson, guests come running to the bedroom in which the hosts have left their coats when they hear Pie screaming. King describes the scene, before offering his commentary concerning it:

Near the end of their housewarming party, Pie begins to scream. The guests rush to see what has happened to her. They find [her husband] Buddy Harralson and [his mentor at their law firm] Lucas Abbott embracing, naked, in the bedroom. . . . Pie’s Daddy has found them first, and he is in the process of expiring of a stroke on the floor while his Punkin Pie screams on. . . and on.. . . and on” (102).

King sees this scene as exemplifying Siddons’ use of the conventions of “the new American gothic to examine. . . . social codes and social pressures” (“Horror Fiction,” 168):

The essence of the horror in this scene. . . lies in the fact that social codes have not merely been breached; they have been exploded in our shocked faces. . . . It is a case of everything going just about as totally wrong as things can go; lives and careers are ruined irrevocably in the passage of seconds (“Horror Fiction,” 102).

King’s insights concerning horror are, as usual, spot-on, as is his further contention that this genre of literature has the dual purposes of exploring “taboo lands” before confirming readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo” (“Horror Fiction, 107).

At times, horror fiction crosses paths with erotic fiction; indeed, sometimes, the two merge, producing hybrid monsters that are half-sex and lust, half fear and revulsion. Even when they remain more or less distinct, however, the two genres have a lot in common--at times, at least. King suggests as much when he differentiates classic Gothic from new American Gothic horror fiction. “Once upon a time,” he observes, “the Bad Place was seen by critics as symbolic of the womb--a primarily sexual symbol which perhaps allowed the gothic to become a safe way of talking about sexual fears,” but, with the advent of “the new American gothic,” which depends more upon the use of a microcosmic setting and a narcissistic protagonist, “the Bad Place” now more often represents “interest in the self and fear of the self” (“Horror Fiction,” 106-107).

Although erotic fiction differs from horror fiction in that the former plays upon readers’ ideas, emotions, fantasies, and experiences concerning lust and sex and the latter relies upon readers’ ideas, emotions, fantasies, and experiences concerning fear and revulsion, they share the same purposes, at times, at least, as the dual purposes identified by King. After exploring social taboos concerning lust and sex, erotic fiction may or may not then confirm its readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo,” for after observing or participating for the first time in a sexual act of a usually deviant or perverted nature, a protagonist can either reject the sexual experience into which he or she has been initiated (a decision which reinforces the status quo concerning what is normal, permissible, right, or appropriate sexually); accept the sexual experience (a decision which rejects the status quo’s censure of such sexual behavior); or remain, for the time being, at least, undecided and confused concerning whether to accept or reject the sexual experience (a decision which suspends acceptance or rejection of the status quo’s censure of such sexual behavior). Unlike horror fiction, erotic fiction can, but need not, confirm readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo” and its censure of unusual sexual behavior.

Examples in which protagonists reject unusual sexual experiences after trying them or having them forced upon them, accepting the status quo’s censure of this behavior, are the Marquis de Sade’s satirical novel Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1791), and James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) and the movie version of it (1972), directed by John Boorman.

Examples of stories in which protagonists accept unusual sexual experiences after trying them; rejecting the status quo‘s censure of this behavior; include the Marquis de Sade’s novel, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Ang Lee’s film, Brokeback Mountain (2005).

An example in which the main character seems to remain undecided as to whether to accept or reject unusual sexual experience, neither accepting nor rejecting the status quo’s censure of this behavior is Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992).

Another similarity between horror fiction and erotic fiction is the concern of each of these genres with power. For King, horror is a subdivision of fantastic literature, and fantasy, in turn, is comprised of “tales of magic,” which are, in turn, “stories of power”: “One word nearly defines the other. Power is magic; power is potency. The opposite of potency is impotence” (“Horror Fiction,” 184). Often, the concern with, and for, power takes a sexual form, especially for men: “I think that most men, even today, tend to identify the magic most strongly with sexual potency. A woman may not want to but she can; a man may want to and find that he cannot” (“Horror Fiction,” 186).

Drugs such as Cialis and Viagra, penile implants, and other products of technology may be enlisted as “magical” means by which to empower sexually impotent men and to level the playing field, as it were, between women who “may not want to but. . . can” and men who “may want to and. . . cannot.” In extreme examples of erotic--or pornographic--films, mechanical devices, or sex machines are shown as leveling the playing field, as it were, between women’s innately greater sexual capacity and men’s more limited sexual stamina, replacing flesh-and-blood male organs (and men themselves) with tireless contraptions of steel, rubber, and plastic that operate, fluidly and forever--or, at least, until the gasoline that powers them runs out. Never has even the most virile alien, beast-thing, or monster in horror fiction had such tireless staying power as these mechanical contrivances!

Another way in which horror fiction and erotic fiction parallel one another is that both invite audiences, whether readers or moviegoers, to become voyeurs. Audiences are invited to observe, or even to participate, vicariously, through identifying themselves with the stories’ protagonists, in all manner of sexual behaviors, many of them deviant or perverted.

It is important to understand that the reader or the viewer is invited, not forced, to observe and to participate in these sexual acts, for he or she (more commonly, he) is free to refuse the invitation altogether by not reading or watching the story at all; is free to stop reading or watching at any moment that he no longer wishes to accept the invitation; and is free to read or watch the story all the way through--several times over, if he likes. In any case, the reader or the moviegoer, if he does accept the invitation, does so on his own volition; therefore, he is complicit in the seduction, perversion, deviance, abuse, violation, and any other sexual behavior, even that which is immoral or even criminal, that is described on the page or depicted on the film that he, voluntarily, reads or watches.

For readers, viewers, and critics who accept the Freudian view of fiction, horror fiction is more or less an extravaganza of unconscious sexual drives centered upon anal, oral, and genital fixations, Oedipal conflicts, castration complexes, penis envy, and so forth, whereas readers, moviegoers, and critics who interpret horror fiction from a theological Judeo-Christian worldview understand such literature to assess and address human beings’ relationships to and interrelationships with one another, with nature, and with the Creator of both humanity and the universe.

This distinction between these two approaches to literary analysis and criticism points to yet another parallel between horror fiction and erotic fiction. There is a reason that, in horror fiction, as in erotic fiction, the sex that is described or depicted tends to be deviant and perverted.

King asserts that the fiction of fear--and, it might be added, of lust--is a disbelief in, or a rejection of, God--the same God, it should be remembered, who bade Adam and Eve “to be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” and not to experiment with their sexual organs and orifices just to have sex for sex’s sake:

All of these [horrible and absurd] things are mentally acceptable if we accept the idea that God abdicated for a long vacation, or has perchance really expired. They are mentally acceptable, but our emotions, our spirits, and most of all our passion for order--these powerful elements of our human makeup--all rebel. If we suggest that there was no reason for the deaths of six million Jews in the camps during World War II, no reason for poets bludgeoned, old women raped, children turned into soap, that it just happened and nobody was really responsible--things just got a little out of control here, ha-ha, so sorry--then the mind begins to totter (“Horror Fiction,” 144-145).

Perhaps King is right, but, as far as lust and sex are concerned, it appears that many men and women are happy to accept horrible and absurd behavior. Almost anything between two consenting adults is considered permissible by many and desirable by some. In erotic fiction, it is rare that an initiate rejects unusual sex in favor of accepting the status quo’s censure of it.

Much more often, it seems, the protagonist is apt to follow the example of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist of Brokeback Mountain or of Eugénie of The Philosophy in the Bedroom, who accept their perverted sexual experiences, rejecting the status quo’s censure of the deviant sex into which they have been initiated, or the example of the indecisive Jimmy Fergus of The Crying Game, who is reluctant to accept or reject either the deviant sexual experience into which he’s been initiated or the status quo’s censure of it.

Much less often, it appears, a protagonist rejects the perverted sex into which he or she is initiated, in favor of adhering to the status quo’s censure of the deviance, as do the lampooned Justine of Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and the pathetic, ravished adventurers Bobby Trippe and Ed Gentry of Deliverance.

If this is true, and most erotic fiction shows acceptance--or, indeed, approval--of the perversions that are part and parcel of the genre, erotic fiction’s rakes and reprobates are atheists or apostates for whom, in the absence of God, nothing is too sordid or depraved and everything sexual is sexy. Whether, if there is a God, despite their unbelief or faithlessness, they are damned is another question; however, since the monsters in horror fiction are often prompt in slaying those who act in a lewd and lascivious manner, the welfare of the promiscuous sinners of erotic fiction appears none too certain!

Note: "Sex and Horror, Part 8" will present a gallery of images from a number of movies depicting sex and horror and some final thoughts concerning this topic.

Sex and Horror, Part 6

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Freudian psychoanalysis is all about sex. Christianity concerns, among other important issues, human relationships: relationships between human beings and God, between one human being and another, and between human beings and nature. In psychoanalysis, the superego replaces God, heaven, and moral righteousness; the ego, human will, the earth, and corrupted virtue; and the id, the devil, hell, and sin. Therefore, literary analysis and criticism that is based upon Freudian theory will offer an interpretation of fiction as representing sexual concerns, whereas literary analysis and criticism from a Christian perspective will offer an interpretation of fiction as representing human relationships with God, humanity, or nature.

In much horror fiction, when sex is depicted, it is often perverted sex: incest; non-procreative sex, both hetero- and homosexual; group sex; and the like. A psychoanalyst would explain such deviations as expressions of the tendency of human beings toward “polymorphous perversity,” wherein any body part is capable of providing its owner a form of erotic pleasure. A man, a woman, or even an infant, Freud argues, can find sexual pleasure in almost anything.

Christianity explains sexual perversions and deviations as expressions of human beings’ innate depravity, or inborn tendency to sin. Most theologians would define sin as disobedience to the divine will; an action is sinful if it defies or is at odds with God’s will, whether communicated directly or through institutions he has established. For example, God instituted marriage between a man and a woman, not between two men and two women; therefore, homosexual unions would be considered sinful. Likewise, he orders men and women to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Therefore, non-procreative sex is sinful, whether it takes the form of masturbation, oral or anal copulation, bestiality, or some other activity. Moreover, whatever sexual unions that God has forbidden, such as those between parents and siblings, between two men, between two women, and otherwise, is, by definition, sinful.

It is important to understand these distinctions if one is to understand the differences between the sexual perversions and deviations that are fairly commonly depicted in horror films, which is the subject of this post.

In the 1960s and 1970s, horror films began to heat up--with sex as well as violence, and the sex, more often than not, tended toward the perverse and the deviant. Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) explores the link between art and sex as voyeuristic filmmaker Mark Lewis skewers his female models on a customized tripod leg as he photographs them looking at their deaths by impalement as the look into a mirror mounted atop the camera’s stand.

The Freudian critic sees the film as a visual exposition of the Oedipal complex in which a son comes to terms with his burgeoning masculinity by seeking to mate with his mother but, frustrated by his stronger father, seeks, instead, to marry--or at least to mate with--a woman just like dear old mom.

A Christian interpretation would view this film as an example of the sexual perversions that result from human beings’ rejection of God’s commands for moral and sexual purity in favor of a sinful pursuit of forbidden fruit in the form of beautiful, helpless women over whom they may exercise a seemingly omnipotent and sadomasochistic power of life and death. In short, for Christians, the film exemplifies a sexual expression of idolatry; the idol is the self of the sinner whih, separated from God, employs lust instead of love in failed relationships with women.

A ham-fisted approach to filming Henry James’ novella The Turn of the Screw, The Nightcomers (1971) makes explicit one interpretation of James' story, thereby ruining the ambiguity that makes James’ work psychologically complex and artistically sophisticated: the children, Miles and Flora, imitate the tawdry sex they witness their uncle’s perverted servants, Quint and Jessel, perform, killing the couple when they try to leave, just before the arrival of the children’s governess, who, presumably, will see Quint and Jessel when they return as ghosts to haunt the estate.

Freudians would no doubt interpret this movie as an exemplum of the harm that can be done to children who witness the primal scene. Usually, the primal scene is enacted by the child’s parents, but, lacking a father and a mother, Miles and Flora must settle for witnessing the sex that occurs between their uncle’s servants. As children, however, they are unable to assimilate the sex they see and, as a result, they themselves become hypersexual. In the novella, Miles is expelled from school for what the governess seems to believe was an incident involving precocious sexual behavior. According to Freud, a child who witnesses sex between his parents (or other adults) is apt to regard their lovemaking as a sadistic act, so it might be that Miles’ own behavior at his boarding school involved some sort of homosexual act of sadism. James merely hints at such things and even suggests that the sex may be in the governess’ own mind, like her encounter with the ghosts of Quint and Jessel, but the film’s director, Michael Winner, makes his own interpretation of the story’s psychosexual dynamics clearer than most fans and critics like.

As we saw in Part 3 of this series, a Christian interpretation of the story has been offered by Robert Heilman, who argues, in “The Turn of the Screw as Poem,” that--

The story is virtually a morality play, involving the typical conflict of divine and demonic agents fighting for the soul of Everyman. The garden at Bly is the Garden of Eden; Miles and Flora are Adam and Eve in a state of prelapsarian innocence; Quint corresponds to folklore descriptions of the Devil; the governess is both an angel sent from God and a Christ-like mediator. By the end of the story, the Fall has occurred, but at the last minute the governess exorcises the demon from Miles’s soul and thereby saves him. Other apparitionist critics have expanded and rounded out this interpretation; the only character left unaccounted for is Miss Jessel, who too often is seen as merely the artistic counterpart to Quint. Miss Jessel, as cohort of Satan, is probably the Lilith in the Judaeo-Kabbalistic tradition who united with Adam and brought forth the race of demons, imps, and fairies (Rictor Norton, “Henry James's The Turn of the Screw,” Gay History and Literature, 1971, 1999, updated 20 June 2008).

In William A. Fraker’s A Reflection of Fear (1971), an adolescent falls in love with her father when he returns home after a fifteen-year absence, seeking to divorce his wife so he can remarry. She also develops a strong hatred of both her mother, who has reared her in isolation, and her grandmother. A boy kills the women and later seeks to harm the girl’s fiancée. Her father pursues the male attacker, only to discover that he is really his own daughter, who was raised by her mother (his late wife) as a girl, because her mother hated men.

Freudians would attribute the transvestite adolescent’s dilemma to an emasculating mother who herself suffers from penis envy. Apparently having driven her husband off, perhaps because of her emotional castration of him, she now avenges herself upon men by denying her son his own masculinity, feminizing him in a symbolic and, indeed, socialized castration through feminization.

From a Christian point of view, the film is another instance of sexual perversion such as results when human beings substitute their own will for the will of their Creator. God created men and women in His own image, and, for Christians, God does not make mistakes, intending males to become men and females to become women. The Bible, in fact, forbids the wearing of clothing of the opposite sex, judging such behavior to be abominable: “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God” (Deuteronomy 22:5). The mother is guilty, not the son, however, for he is in her charge and subject to her authority.

The Bible commands children to “honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee” (Exodus 20:12), but the mother has denied her son the opportunity to honor his father and she has made it difficult, if not impossible, to honor her, for her emasculation and feminization of him is abusive in the extreme.

The son’s love for his father, although it may involve a homoerotic aspect, since the boy has been reared as a girl and is clearly jealous of his father’s fiancée, seeing her as a rival for her father’s affections (in what Freudians would characterize as a twisted Oedipal situation of sorts), nevertheless shows his desire to embrace masculinity and to be himself a man. For Christians, the movie is the story of child abuse, not gender dysphoria, resulting from another instance of an individual's (the boy’s mother) defying God’s will in favor of her own.

Examples could be multiplied, for many horror films depict all manner of sexual perversions and deviations, including adultery, homosexuality, incest, masturbation, sadomasochism, sodomy, voyeurism, and other activities that modern psychologists define as paraphilias or sexual deviations. Indeed, the 2009 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual lists 547 paraphilias! To Christians, however such sexual deviations are sinful acts, usually considered instances of sodomy, a term which includes any sort of unnatural or non-genital sex act, and result from the sinner’s idolatrous placing of his or her own will above that of God’s will that human beings be either and exclusively male or female, in accordance with their sex, adopting the roles, manners, and modes of behavior that are consistent with their respective genders. The Bible insists that the only legitimate form of sex is heterosexual, marital, and, in principle, reproductive. Anything else is sinful, hellish, and demonic. Horror movies show that the sexual gateway to hell, so to speak, is wide, indeed, but the way to heaven is narrow.


Note:  In the next installment of "Sex and Horror," I consider the haunted house and the sex and horror that are sometimes associated with this horror fiction icon.

Sex and Horror, Part 2

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

As I mentioned in Part 1 of “Sex and Horror,” in this and future installments of this series, my aim will be to provide my own Christian-based explanations of the same stories for which Jason Colavito, author of Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, presents Freudian accounts, supplying the psychoanalytic explanations before offering my Christian alternatives. Whether one regards Christianity itself as true or mythical is inconsequential to my enterprise, just as it is likewise irrelevant whether one accepts Freudian thought as true or mythical. Both Christianity and psychoanalysis exist and have been, and continue to be, used as tools for literary analysis, which is what matters in this situation.

As Colavito points out, “Under the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, horror is traditionally seen as primarily sexual in nature; and most criticism of the genre proceeds from psychoanalytical frameworks emphasizing castration anxieties, phallic symbols, fanged vaginas, and other Freudian baggage” (2).

A Christian interpretation, in contrast, is primarily religious in nature, its criticism proceeding from theological frameworks emphasizing human relationships, especially those between God and humanity, between humanity and God’s creation, nature, and between human beings themselves and other human beings. In short, if psychoanalysis is primarily about sex, Christianity is primarily about divine and human relationships.

In Christian interpretations of horror fiction, where sex is involved, sex is not an end in itself (or shouldn’t be), but is, rather, a means of relating the self to the other, both when the other is nature, when the other is another human being, or when the Other is God. When sex is used other than as God intends it to be used, it is misused. Misused sex is not only perverted sex, but it is also blasphemous and sinful sex, because it perverts the relationships of human beings to God, to themselves, and to nature.

It may be worth mentioning that Freudian psychoanalysis may itself be regarded, from a Christian perspective, as a sort of perversion of Christian theology. In psychoanalysis, the superego is a stand-in, as it were, for God, who lays down the law (and thus morality) through the Ten Commandments and other moral injunctions; the ego takes the place of human beings as conscious beings with wills of their own; and the id is a substitute for the devil and his temptations. Alternatively, one may think of the superego as heaven, the ego as earth, and the id as hell, the geographical or spatial correlatives to God, humanity, and the devil, or as righteousness, corrupted virtue, and sinfulness, or evil, respectively. Thus, within a Christian framework, it is possible to think of the superego, the ego, and the id as either persons, places, or things. Christian theology is at least as rich a basis for literary interpretation and criticism as psychoanalysis purports to be.

Various psychoanalytical interpretations have been offered to explain (or to explain away) Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Basically, as Colavito observes, these analyses boil down to the notions that “the vampire’s fangs represent the penis, that his bite is an oral regression of normal genital sex, and that the novel deals primarily with the Victorian anxiety about changing sex roles and the repression of sexual desire.” The author agrees that this take on the novel is “fine as far as it goes,” but contends, as do I, that “to reduce the whole of Dracula (or indeed all vampire fiction) to mere Freudian allegories of forbidden sex is simplistic and misses the themes of horror that permeate and underlie the book’s terrors” (88).

Nevertheless, as Colavito acknowledges, “there is undoubted sexual energy in the vampire’s embrace”; however, this “energy” is not associated with reproduction, and sex, as the Bible, as the Word of God, states, quite clearly, is intended to be a means of reproduction. In Genesis 1:28, God commands Adam and Eve to “be fruitful, and multiply” that they might “replenish the earth,” and any form of sex that does not have reproduction as its end is, Catholics (and many other mainstream Christian communities) contend, sinful sex, since it frustrates its divinely prescribed purpose and constitutes, thereby, a blasphemous rebellion against the divine will.

Dracula’s emphasis upon oral sex, symbolized by his biting the necks of his victims, who are both male and female, not exclusively female, transposes sex from its assigned genital locus and its assigned generative purpose to a rebellious misuse of the body. In Dracula and other vampire fiction, sex is not a means of reproduction but of subjugation through sadomasochistic predation and victimization, a preying of the strong upon the weak, of the powerful upon the powerless, of the parasite upon the host.

Not reproduction--and certainly not love--is the end; sex, as it is represented, symbolically, by the biting of the necks of victims by the fanged vampire, is all about the ability of one person, the monstrous sadist, to subjugate another, the persecuted masochist. It is a denial of the interpersonal and mutually respectful relationship between equals that Jewish theologian Martin Buber describes in his insightful book, I and Thou; sex, as depicted in Dracula, is not an “I-thou,” but an “I-it” relationship, in which the predatory and sadistic vampire elevates his own value by reducing the value of the other person to that of a mere object. A woman (or, sometimes, a man) becomes a thing--food--to be exploited by the rapacious raptor. Vampire sex is dehumanizing sex; it is also blasphemous and sinful because it perverts the nature and intended purpose of sex itself, as instituted and defined by God.

Perhaps this is why Dracula and other vampires are depicted as fearing crucifixes and crosses. These artifacts symbolize both the sacrificial death of Christ Himself and represent the self-sacrificial life that God has shown humanity, through Christ’s own example, that He expects of all human beings. However, vampires’ very way of life is all about self-aggrandizement and the elevation of the self at the expense of others. As Christ redeemed humanity through the shedding of His own blood, vampires seek to increase their own vitality by the shedding of the blood of others. Their lives are exact opposites of the life of Christ, counterexamples, as it were, of His example. In beholding the crucifix or the cross, these monsters behold their own iniquity and are reminded of the selfish and self-serving lives they lead. These artifacts are reminders, too, of the vampires’ own eventual damnation as sinful beings whose very lives both pervert the ways of God and mock their Creator.

In short, as demonic creatures, vampires are hell-bound sinners.



Note: In Part 3 of “Sex and Horror,” I will take up the psychoanalytical and Christian implications of another horror icon--ghosts.

Sex and Horror

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

In a caption to a photograph depicting Lon Chaney as Erik in The Phantom of the Opera, Jason Colavito, author of Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, quotes David J. Skall’s observation that the actor’s “portrayal” of the characters is suggestive of a “ruined penis” (207).

This sort of statement might strike one as odd, to say the least, especially if he or she is unfamiliar with psychoanalysis, the invention of Sigmund Freud, which uses mythology, both classical and Freud’s own personal brand, to supposedly analyze human thoughts, feelings, unconscious impulses, and behavior. For those who do know a thing or two about psychoanalysis, including how fanciful it frequently is, such a statement, although perhaps incredible, is not as surprising. Indeed, as Colavito points out, psychoanalysis has been used (some would say misused) to explain (or to explain away) not only literature in general, but also the horror genre in particular:

Indeed, when we think of horror at all, we think of it in the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, positing a range of explanations for the “true” meaning of horror stories, especially psycho-sexual explanations. This is the most popular school of thought about horror, producing works with titles like Walter Evans’s “Monster Movies: A Sexual Theory” (Monsters reflect “two central features of adolescent sexuality: masturbation and menstruation”), Richard K. Sanderson’s “Glutting the Maw of Death: Suicide and Procreation in Frankenstein” (Viktor reveals his fear of female sexual autonomy and his own ambivalent femininity”), and Joan Coptec’s “Vampires, Breast Feeding, and Anxiety” (“I will argue that the political advocacy of breast-feeding cannot be properly understood unless one sees it for what it is: the precise equivalent of vampire fiction”). There are many, many more than follow such Freudian views of horror (6).

Although Colavito rejects many such interpretations (“Somehow Boris Karloff’s stiff-armed Frankenstein walk never struck me as interrupted masturbation”), he does often include the psychoanalytical “explanations” for horror fiction’s characters and themes. He acknowledges that psychoanalytic theory has had a major influence on the understanding and interpretation of horror fiction, but largely, Colavito contends, because filmmakers themselves used Freudian thought as a basis for investing their films with psychoanalytical--or, at least, psychosexual--implications:

Critics have historically discussed horror films in terms of sex, and specifically Freudian psychoanalytic views of sex, whereby horror’s primary concern is a fear of sex, usually female sexuality. Thus vampires are phallic symbols or fanged vaginas; Frankenstein’s Monster [sic] a parody of birth; the wolfman anxiety over puberty; and any mutilation a playing-out of castration anxieties. But part of this is because many horror filmmakers, even as far back as the 1930s, purposely used Freudian ideas in their scripts during a wave of Freud-mania in that time. “Why should we take psychoanalysis seriously in thinking about Hollywood movies?” asked William Paul, “because Hollywood took psychoanalysis seriously” (201).

Although I am also more than a bit skeptical of Freudian claims (and, indeed, of Freudian ideas in general), I have employed psychoanalysis as a tool for exploring, if not explaining, some of the deeper psychosexual and sociosexual implications that appear to be present in The Descent, for the same reason that Colavito and Paul cite: whether credible and scientific or not, Freudian ideas have become a seemingly inescapable part and parcel of Western culture.

To exclude psychoanalytical thought as sound doesn’t mean, of course, to deny that the issues of sex and gender do not rear their heads, as it were, in horror fiction--far from it. The genre is, in fact, permeated with themes involving both sex and gender, the literature of horror just doesn’t necessarily analyze these themes along Freudian lines of thought and, even when it does do so, its analysis often also involves other than Freudian insights, implications, and interpretations.

In this article, I would like to suggest one of my own theories concerning how sex and gender, as they appear in horror fiction, may be interpreted along Christian, rather than Freudian, lines. In this view, sex and gender, as they are depicted and rendered in horror fiction, are perversions of both the natural biological drive to reproduce the species and the divine command that men and women “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28).

Colavito sees the story of Adam and Eve as “foundational” to the horror genre; it is, he contends, the “cement” that “links. . . [the] forbidden knowledge, sin, and punishment found in horror fiction” (11). In the Bible, the term “knowledge” sometimes refers to carnal knowledge, or the understanding that derives from sexual intercourse. This “knowledge” of sex and gender can become twisted, or perverted, the apostle Paul suggests:

Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient. . .(Romans 1:21-28).

Of course, the literature of horror is too extensive to evaluate in this (or any other manner) in as brief space as a blog article (or series of such articles) warrants, so I will undertake a compromise, providing my own Christian-based explanations of the same stories for which Colavito presents the Freudian accounts, supplying the psychoanalytic explanations before offering my Christian alternatives. Whether one regards Christianity itself as true or mythical is inconsequential to my enterprise, just as it is likewise irrelevant whether one accepts Freudian thought as true or mythical. Both Christianity and psychoanalysis exist and have been, and continue to be, used as tools for literary analysis, which is what matters in this situation.


Next: Part 2, “Sex and Horror”