Sex and Horror, Part 9

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Having provided both Freudian and Christian definitions and examples of erotic horror, I would now, in the final installment of my “Sex and Horror” series, like to offer my own thoughts concerning this subgenre of horror fiction (or, depending upon one’s point of view, this subgenre of erotic fiction). Although I fervently disbelieve in psychoanalysis, I also believe that Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality does provide some insights that may be, in some sense and to some extent, valid and applicable to the horror genre in general and to the erotic horror subgenre in particular. I likewise believe that the Christian criticism of such fiction, both Catholic and Protestant, offers valid insights concerning sex and horror.

Freud’s emphasis upon unconscious drives and impulses as wellsprings of human behavior is certainly valid, as is the Christian insistence that non-reproductive sex necessarily involves one in human relationships and possibly human-divine relationships as well and may constitute “sinful” conduct. Unless masturbatory, sex must involve at least two individuals, after all, and even masturbatory sex doesn’t occur in a vacuum--a whole web of social and cultural values, taboos, and inducements, including religious ones, apply--even in the commission of solitary sexual activities.

For me, however, sex and horror merge mostly in the duality of human beings as, on the one hand, material-animal beings and, on the other hand, as spiritual-human beings. As ghosts inhabiting machines, men and women are both part and parcel of the natural world and, at the same time, transcend the natural world. As minds, or spirits, people are able to freeze experience in thought and to react or respond to it emotionally and imaginatively; they can project themselves forward in time and imagine a variety of sexual pathways, alternatives, and futures, both for themselves as individuals, for others as individuals, and for society.

In addition, one may find that he or she does not measure up to the expectations of others, whether the “other” involved is one’s partner or one’s society. Perhaps a man may discover that he is impotent, that he cannot perform, or please his lover; a woman may find that she is more highly sexually charged than society deems correct or that she prefers one of her own, to the opposite, sex. Men and women may have trouble relating to anyone else, male or female, on intimate emotional, physical, and sexual levels. They may fear not sex itself but what it will reveal concerning innermost secrets of the self which they would conceal at all costs.

Moreover, social mores shift from time to time, and what is permissible in one era may be impermissible in another; what was once “right” may now be “wrong”--or what was impermissible or wrong in an earlier time may be acceptable or right today. The recognition of the relative and ethnocentric nature of morality is usually disturbing, whether it occurs through reflection upon one’s sexual behavior (or sexuality) or upon human experience in general, and erotic horror is often a product of a character’s discovery of such limitations.

Sex is a physical act in which the heart rate increases as muscles flex and contract, blood flows more copiously, the lungs pant, and body fluids, ultimately, are exchanged. In short, sex reveals human beings’ animality, an aspect of themselves that, in polite society men and women generally take pains to obscure, preferring to think of themselves as “a little lower than the angels” rather than as “higher animals.” Paradoxically, sex, which can generate life, is also a reminder of death. People are animals. They are meat. They will die. Sex brings men and women close to the physical--and, indeed, the visceral--components of themselves and, in doing so, with their own imminent mortality.

But sex is also about power, too. It is about conquest. It is about seduction. Men sometimes regard themselves as conquerors, sex as a means of conquest, and women as the conquered. Sex is, such men suggest, a "war" in which, sooner or later, women are likely to become "casualties." Sex is a series of ongoing "battles" in which the strongest will survive, and men are stronger than women.

Some women, on the other hand, consider sex a means of seduction. In nature, the male animal is bright, beautiful, and alluring, but, among human beings, women adorn themselves, attract and lure, seduce, and claim as their own the suitors who fight among themselves for the exclusive claim to women’s charms. In either vision, the male or the female, sex itself is about power, especially the taking of it from one person--and from one sex--and the conferring of the taken power upon oneself--and one’s own sex.

Many of the icons of horror fiction are used to suggest the multivalent nature of erotic horror: the demon, its amoral quality; the ghost, the repressive social and cultural limitations associated with it and the personal and psychological responses to such restrictions and taboos; the vampire, its predatory aspects; the werewolf, its animality; and the witch, its seductive character. Often, scenes of so-called bondage and discipline highlight the sexual, the social, and the sadomasochistic qualities of sex, suggesting that it is emotionally, physically, and sexually painful and that there is a dynamic of power and powerlessness, of dominance and submission, involved in every expression, of whatever variety, of the sex drive.

Sex is primal and instinctive; sex is personal and secret; sex is social and cultural; sex is revelatory and fearsome--it is a complex set of behaviors, including thoughts and emotions, because humans are themselves complex dualities which are neither exclusively physical or material nor completely incorporeal or spiritual. Men and women live in a number of twofold worlds, but they are defined by none of them: the material and the spiritual, the animal and the human, the temporal and the eternal, the private and the public, the barbaric and the civilized, the natural and the cultural (and, indeed, it may be, the natural and the supernatural). These crossroads of being come together, as it were, as many intersections, the centers of which are often sexual.

Sex unifies us, both as individual persons and as societies and cultures, just as, at the same time, it separates us, both from ourselves and one another. At the heart of erotic horror is our duality as material-spiritual beings who have a foot in both the world of nature and the world of the supernatural, ghosts in machines for whom neither oneness with God or the universe nor oneness with our own fleshly existence is completely comfortable or sufficient. Therefore, sex will always be both a delight and a horror, the center and the fulcrum of erotic horror.

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 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 3

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

From a Freudian point of view, ghosts often appear to represent sexual repression. They are appetites that, although suppressed, refuse to be banished and tend to haunt those whom they afflict, returning again and again to trouble and disturb those upon whom they would assert themselves. Such is the case--or may be the case, at any rate--with regard to Henry James’ classic novel, The Turn of the Screw, in which it is debatable as to whether the story’s apparitions are in fact specters or figments of the governess’ own mind. In Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, Jason Colavito lays out the dichotomy of the novel's criticism (and its resolution) in succinct fashion:

Scholars are divided in their opinion of what “really” happened in The Turn of the Screw, falling into two camps. One holds that the story is a tale of a ghostly haunting, taking at face value the governess’s story. The other camp believes the governess insane and that the story is the record of her hallucinations and madness. Edmund Wilson, the eminent twentieth century critic, inaugurated this school of thought in a 1938 essay calling for an explicitly Freudian reading of the novel in which the governess is treated as a “neurotic case of sex repression.” By this reading, the towers of Bly House are phallic symbols, and the governess is acting out repressed sexual rage at the patriarchy, as represented by Miles and his (absent) uncle. As Willie van Peer and Ewout van der Camp have noted, however, these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive and can both be true. In fact, the Freudian interpretation is quite clever but forgets that fiction is, well, fictional, and therefore can play by its own rules. In the world of The Turn of the Screw it may just be that Freudian interpretations are the false reality and ghosts are the truth that Freudian theories unfairly obscure. Since it is a novel, and not an autobiography, we can never know (136).

From a Christian point of view, ghosts are real (in a post-resurrection appearance to His disciples, Jesus assures them that He is not a ghost). Some regard them as the souls of departed (that is, dead) persons who are allowed to tarry on Earth for a time before continuing their journey to heaven (or possibly to hell). Others contend that ghosts are really demons in disguise. While the former may attempt to warn unbelievers of the consequences of their unbelief, the latter may seek to deceive the living and draw them away from God. (The nature of the ghost of Hamlet's father--as actual ghost or as demon in disguise--and its motives are questions that have considerable importance to the plot of Hamlet.) In either case, ghosts are considered potentially dangerous, and Christians are forbidden to summon them. (There may be reason to believe that the ghost who appears in Hamlet may be a demon in disguise, rather than the soul of the prince’s slain father).

Accordingly, the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw may be the souls of the deceased spirits of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, former servants who had had a sexual affair with one another while in the employ of the uncle of the two children, Miles and Flora, who has entrusted their care to the governess. The governess supposes that the ghosts may have sexually molested one or both of the children, but the novel is ambiguous; it could be that she herself is obsessed with the children’s sexuality and is tempted to molest them, blaming her compulsions upon the supernatural specters that she imagines she sees. Alternatively, the ghosts may be demons who have disguised themselves as ghosts in order to deceive the governess and draw her away from God. However, she never seems to be overtly or especially religious, or, for that matter, Christian.

There is a second possibility for a Christian interpretation of the story, that of Robert Heilman, who argues, in “The Turn of the Screw as Poem,” namely, 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).

Either interpretation, the Freudian or the Christian, makes of the novel both more and less than it seems to be in itself, for the story, capable of prompting both interpretations (and others), makes sense from both points of view but exhausts them rather than being exhausted by them. As usual, it seems that the way by which one interprets literature indicates at least as much about the interpreter as it does the interpreted. For Freudians, the story is about sex, because all things are reducible to sex. For Christians, the same story is about sin and redemption, because the world itself is a product of creation, sin, and redemption.

For me, it is clear that the Christian understanding of the story is richer and more complex than the psychoanalytical one, for life is more than sex and requires, to be appreciated properly, a world view that embraces both spirit and flesh (and both eternity and time) rather than simply the erotic impulse and its effects. The Freudian interpretation is reductive and simplistic; the Christian, expansive and intricate--rather like The Turn of the Screw (and life) itself.

In Knowing Fear, Colavito also discusses Richard Matheson’s novel, Hell House, a sort of revitalization of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, in which a team of paranormal investigators led by a scientist named Dr. Barrett descend upon a reputedly haunted house to ascertain whether it is actually haunted. The investigation is financed by “a dying millionaire,” Rolf Randolph Deutsch, who seeks assurance, in the existence of ghosts, should their presence in “the old Belasco mansion” be proven, of life after death (297).

It is clear that the spirits in the novel represent sexual lust, for, as Colavito points out, they are “decadent Jazz Age ghosts whose debauchery and sexual excess corrupted them into evil.” Their leader was “Emeric Belasco, the house’s builder and leader of the debauchery.” However, it was through the application of both science, and not sorcery alone, that Belasco corrupted his guests:

Belasco, it transpires, was a genius who studied deeply of the sciences and the dark arts, including the occult, and used his powers to mentally dominate his guests and turn them toward sensuality and destruction as part of his experiments and almost anthropological studies in evil. Under his auspices, men and women became like animals. . . and the guests killed and ate one another as they reveled in freedom and joy (298).

Dr. Barrett “is a skeptic about spiritualism,” attributing the Dionysian activity of the supposed ghosts to “energy” derived from “unconscious human powers.” In the course of the investigation, the investigators are sexually molested and assaulted by the spirits in the house, or, as Dr. Barrett contends, as a result of “the unconscious minds of the psychics” he employs and the telekinetic attacks they launch. For their part “the psychics believe Belasco’s shade is controlling a number of ghosts who commit the assaults” (298).

The novel’s resolution indicates that it is Belasco himself, “who survived death to continue his experiments in evil,” and Dr. Barrett’s weapon against the “electromagnetic radiation emitted from the [human] body” does its trick so that “Belasco’s power fades away,” suggesting, Colavito says, that the novel’s author intends the story’s theme to be that “the faith-based world of the mediums’ belief must bow before science”; their powers seem, after all, to have been grounded in physical, rather than spiritual, reality, products of “electromagnetic radiation,” and not demonic activity: “in the end even the most horrible of supernatural nightmares is reducible to natural law” (299).

There seems to be one major flaw in Matheson’s argument. His resolution remains ambiguous as to which force, Dr. Barrett’s scientific materialism or Dr. Belasco’s metaphysical dualism, is stronger--or, for that matter, ultimately true--for, as Colavito points out, the former’s triumph against the latter notwithstanding, Belasco’s continued existence after death indicates that “Dr. Barrett’s theories are wrong” and that “personality does survive death.” Therefore, although Dr. Barrett was able to shut down Dr. Belasco’s evil experiment by using his “Reversor, a gigantic machine that uses electricity to cleanse a space of . . . electromagnetic radiation,” the machine wouldn’t have been needed at all had Dr. Belasco not survived death and proved, thereby, that ghosts are, in fact, real. Therefore, it might be argued, Belasco’s use of both scientific materialism (as represented by his studies “of the sciences” and his conduct of “experiments and almost anthropological studies in evil”) and metaphysical dualism (as represented by his use of the “dark arts, including the occult”) indicate that he, not the materialistic Dr. Barrett, was right concerning his belief in the realities of both matter and spirit. In spite of his own efforts to dismiss a belief in ghosts as naïve, it is the belief in materialism that, the story indicates, is the truly naïve point of view regarding the nature of reality.

The ghosts of Matheson’s novel are both physical and spiritual, like the universe itself, which is precisely the view, concerning the nature of reality, that Christian thought itself argues. Ironically, Matheson’s novel seems to prove what it sets out to invalidate. Not only are the ghosts--or ghost, actually, for “the entities in the house” turn out to be “in fact but one--Emeric Belasco himself”--the source of the mischief, but they are also proof of the ability of the human soul to survive physical death (299). The ghost in the novel is himself a rather reluctant apologist, of sorts, for the Christian view of reality as consisting of both the physical and the spiritual.



Note: In Part 4 of “Sex and Death,” I will take a look at another horror icon, that of the werewolf.

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”

Characterization via Tarot

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Using the Tarot deck as a shorthand system for establishing the bases of characters can be as effective as any other approach. Whether the mysticism behind the Tarot deck or the Jungian brand of psychoanalysis, which shares some of the same notions concerning human nature and the human condition as the Tarot tradition proposes, is true or even valid is debatable at best. However, fiction, by definition, is itself not true; it needs only to be true to life, or believable, and whatever approach to personality and human behavior appears plausible is likely to be acceptable to most readers. Psychology, after all, is an inexact science, with many schools of thought concerning why people behave as they do, and fiction has always been pragmatic in electing to use whatever theory, of psychology or any other discipline, might promote its own literary aims. Before psychology existed as a study, writers referenced the theory of the four humors to explain human conduct, and some students of human behavior refer, even today, to the ideas of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. Horror writers need be no different than other writers.

So, what can horror writers gain from Tarot? The positive aspects of the cards (especially those of the major arcana) provide traits useful for characterizing the good guys and gals of your narrative, while these qualities, reversed (opposed or blocked), suggest possibilities for the characterization of the bad guys and gals.

I won’t go through all 21 of the major arcana cards. Information about them is readily available. To illustrate my point, I will suggest how three of these cards could be employed to create protagonists, antagonists, and other sympathetic or unsympathetic characters.

In most stories, the protagonist is apt to be an embodiment of the Fool, who seeks a new start, embracing life’s possibilities as he (or she) embarks upon a journey, actual or figurative, sometimes without planning all that well, if at all, for the eventualities that are likely to be encountered. The Fool has a profound, albeit perhaps rather naïve, faith in the notion that he’ll be able to get by, that his needs will be fulfilled, that he will be all right regardless of how much he plans, works, or strives. In fact (especially in a horror story), he may not be, of course, and his shortsightedness and spontaneity might help to bring him to misfortune.

Reversed, the Fool is apt either to have trouble getting started upon his adventure (that is, he may suffer from the failure to launch syndrome), or he might get stuck in his ways, failing to find the inspiration that motivates him to continue the adventure he’s undertaken.

When you think about the Fool, chances are you will recall having read about him in a horror novel or seen him in a film of this genre. Gordie LaChance and his buddies, Chris Chambers, Teddy Duchamp, and Vern Tessio, the boys in Stephen King’s The Body (and the movie, Stand By Me, based upon it), come to mind.



The Sun character is the successful, triumphant man or woman who, having discovered a great truth (or maybe several great truths) about life enjoys pleasure and fulfillment. He or she enjoys his or her day in the sun.

According to Jung, the Devil archetype represents the repression of desires, impulses, and other aspects of one’s unconscious that are condemned by society.

Opposed. This character is subject to emotion and superstition and is apt to reason falsely, taking evidence out of context or reaching warped or twisted conclusions about the facts before him or her.

Blocked, the Sun character suffers from confusion, perceiving things as through a glass darkly, and he or she may have trouble interacting with youngsters.

When you think about the Sun, chances are you will recall having read about him in a horror novel or seen him in a film of this genre. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg is an example, as is Smallville’s Lex Luthor.




The Devil card does not refer to Satan or a lesser demon. Rather, this card alludes to unbridled ambition and a lust for power. He or she can be authoritative, powerful, even manipulative and controlling.

Opposed, the Devil character can succumb to temptation.

Blocked, this character is repressed and timid in the face of risk and unwilling to take chances.

When you think about the Devil, chances are you will recall having read about him in a horror novel or seen him in a film of this genre. Victor Frankenstein and Dr. Moreau are examples.