Body Horror

Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) by Darryl Jones

Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018) is a brief but meaty overview of Horror fiction and film since about 1800. Jones is erudite and clever, insightful without being glib. He takes a global comparative view of his materials, stressing themes and motifs. Happily for the reader, he does not recapitulate the already chewed-over work of earlier scholars like Praz, Punter, and Bloom. Sleeping with the Lights On is also an excellent survey of academic thinking on issues raised by works of horror.

I first read Sleeping with the Lights On two years ago. At that time I wrote:

....For most of the very brief book, Jones addresses the market-driven historical vicissitudes of horror film and TV work. As a teacher he's probably learned that students are willing to discuss "True Detective" or "Buffy," but  not Melmoth the Wanderer or "Laura Silver Bell." (Sorry to be wearing my Sneering S. T. Joshi hat today.)

I was surprised that the most recognized and influential contemporary stylists of horror prose today get little mention.  Stephen King is discussed, as are Victor LaValle and Michelle Paver, but not Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, or Reggie Oliver. Perhaps that's just me, though. Jones is clearly aiming at a short, popular outline, employing sexy tops like "body horror" and "torture porn." His discussions of these topics are sober and thoughtful, and do point readers at the best examples.

This past week I read the latest, expanded edition of Sleeping with the Lights On, which OUP has recruited to its long-running series A Very Short Introduction.

Jones has added an updated final chapter survey of the field circa 2020, which begins:

Where is horror today? Throughout this book, I have tried to stress the cultural proliferation of horror, and its plurality. Horror is tentacular, spreading everywhere. It is Protean, taking many forms. It manifests multiple personalities and has been put to many uses, made to suggest or articulate a variety of positions, ideologies, arguments, and worldviews, not all of them consistent and some of them downright contradictory. While some, including myself, would argue that horror is at its most powerful when it is at its most confrontational—violating taboos, flowing over boundaries, antagonizing respectability—there is no doubt that some of the finest horror shores up traditional worldviews.

Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) is a book worthy of your time and attention. I will be posting some excerpts in the coming days.

Jay

Excerpt:

     Such cinematic transformations are inevitably technology-driven, and entered a decisively modern phase in the early 1980s, as advances in visual effects and make-up, pioneered by the likes of Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Tom Savini, and Stan Winston, meant that monstrous transformations could be shown onscreen for the first time in ways that often comprehensively exceeded the power of the audience’s imaginations. In An American Werewolf in London, Baker’s transformation of David Naughton into a wolf, with elongation of limbs and face, cracking of spine, and agonizing screams, is one of the defining moments of modern horror cinema. In Bottin’s effects for John Carpenter’s The Thing, the human body is given a nightmarish plasticity, seemingly able to recombine in any form, as a severed head sprouts spider’s legs, Arachne-like, or a huge, fanged gash opens up in a torso, like the very mother of all vaginae dentatae. This was the world of 1980s ‘body horror’, which radically figured, disfigured, and refigured the human body, focusing on it relentlessly as a site of pain, and anxiety and disgust, but also of transformation and transcendence, often with highly sophisticated philosophical and intellectual underpinnings. Body horror of this kind is particularly associated with the work of the Canadian auteur David Cronenberg and the British writer and film-maker Clive Barker.

     Consistently across a very distinguished body (corpus) of work, from early low-budget films such as Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1978), to 1980s classics like Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), or The Fly (1986), and beyond the millennium (including his 2014 novel, Consumed), Cronenberg has given artistic form to his sense of the human body as a corporation, composed of parts which have their own identities and individuality, which they seek to assert, in what is a radical literalizing of mind–body dualism. As a university literature graduate, Cronenberg is also an articulate theorist of his own work:

     I don’t think the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism…I think to myself: ‘That’s what it is: the independence of the body, relative to the mind, and the difficulty of the mind accepting what that revolution might entail.’

     Cronenberg’s use of the rhetoric of decolonization here, and his insistence on the relationship between the corporation and the corporeal, suggests a political reading of his work, underlined by his tendency to invent imaginatively named shadowy scientific/commercial organizations (Spectacular Optics, ConSec, the Raglan Institute for Psychoplasmics) which seek to distort and exploit the body for commercial gain. From rapacious capitalism to the AIDS crisis to the ‘beauty myth’ and its discontents, body horror became an effective means of engaging with and representing the grotesque elements of contemporary lived reality in the 1980s.

     The politics of the body are even more to the fore in the work of Clive Barker. Another humanities graduate (English and Philosophy), Barker is, like Cronenberg, a ready theorist of his own work, which he has discussed across numerous, often very candid interviews. Barker, to begin with, is no believer in what was defined in the Introduction as the aesthetics of terror, arising out of implication, restraint, or uncanny uncertainty. There is no fear of the unknown here, and certainly no sense that the reader’s or viewer’s own imagination should be allowed to conjure the greatest horrors:

     The kind of horror which is all suggestion and undertow, and ‘it’s what you don’t see that horrifies you’ kind of stuff—that doesn’t do a thing for me.…I like imagining horrors in detail. I like to be able to give the reader everything I can imagine on a subject.…Horror fiction is about confrontation.

     Barker’s aesthetic radicalism—his uncompromisingly confident representational style—is matched by a commensurate political radicalism. His best work, the stories collected in the Books of Blood, are tales of riotous fleshly mutability, often with an avowedly feminist and/or an openly gay politics. In ‘Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament’, for example, a bored and frustrated housewife discovers that she has the power to mould flesh, and turns her sexist doctor into a woman:

     She willed his manly chest into making breasts of itself and it began to swell most fetchingly, until the skin burst and his sternum flew apart. His pelvis, teased to breaking point, fractured at its centre…It was from between his legs all the noise was coming; the splashing of his blood; the thud of his bowel on the carpet.

     Deliberately extreme and often brilliant, Barker’s work is a classic example of horror at its most divisive, self-consciously setting out to shock and alienate large sections of the population, while establishing a devoted cult following. As Barker himself maintained:

     I like to think there’s some kind of ‘celebration of perversity’ in the Books of Blood. That’s a response, simply, to normality. What I cannot bear is ‘normality’. What I’m trying to upset is not something hugely repressive—but something banal, that is, the lives most people lead.

Sleeping with the Lights On The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018

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