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Sex and Horror

10/17/2014

16 Comments

 
Since it’s the Halloween season, stories about hauntings, ghosts, and horror have begun to fill the society and culture sections of mainstream publications in an annual orgy of macabre journalism. Over at Salon.com, sex and porn correspondent Tracy Clark-Flory published a piece linking horror to sadomasochistic sex, reflecting outdated conceptions of horror that trace their descent to Sigmund Freud’s essay on “The Uncanny” (1919). Or, as Clark-Flory put it in her inimitably eloquent style:
Sex, sexuality, sexiness — they are all so blatantly hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-fist-sized-dildo present in everything from slasher movies to women’s Halloween costumes. Then again, sex is such a long-time staple of horror that it’s easy not to notice or wonder about it. It just is, as the sky is blue.
Clark-Flory assumes, wrongly, that because modern horror movies and Halloween costumes are predicated on sexiness that sex is an inherent facet of horror. This is the same argument made by David J. Skal in The Monster Show (2001), an argument I disliked so much that I wrote a book in argument against it, Knowing Fear (2008). The trouble is that horror is, by definition, the literature of fear, and its relationship to sex is not a 1:1 correlation since not all fear is related to sexual performance anxieties or, in Clark-Flory’s preferred idea, puberty panic.

Name a movie genre aimed at anyone over the age of 12 that has no sexual connotations. It’s impossible to do, not because comedy, drama, or action are inherently tied to sex but because moviemaking, like most media products, relies on sex to draw in an audience. That “sexy” Halloween costumes are not inherent in the holiday requires nothing more than memory of Halloween parties from a few decades ago, when creepy rather than sexy was all the rage. 

Clark-Flory asked a porn star why horror is sexy, and Lorelei Lee said she thinks it’s because sex and fear both activate endorphins, and that a good scare is similar to an orgasm. This really says much less than Clark-Flory thinks, since one can make the same argument that the thrill of an action movie is the same pseudo-sexual release, with explosions mimicking orgasms; or that the release of laughter in a comedy offers similar pleasures. In other words, fear isn’t unique in that regard, as Clark-Flory accidentally admits in citing psychological studies that link sexual arousal to any strong emotional state, not just fear.

She further cites the work of Walter Evans (“Monster Movies: A Sexual Theory”) and the late film critic Robin Wood, both of whom used Freudian theories to explain horror. Clark-Flory is particularly taken with Evans’s idea that horror is essential a reenactment of the transformative horror of puberty—this is the same argument Skal seized upon to argue that horror movie monsters like the Wolf Man are projections of teenaged boys’ anxieties about secondary sex characteristics and masturbation. Evans in particular argued that all horror could be reduced to one of two fears: masturbation (male) and menstruation (female).

Here’s how Skal actually described what he saw as masturbation imagery in ads for Universal Horror monster models in the 1960s: “Dracula, in his typical mesmeric stance, strokes and pulls at the air; the Frankenstein monster is caught in a startled, ‘hands-off’ pose, and the Wolf Man’s hair-spouting palms hardly require comment.” Seriously: He thinks everything is masturbation imagery. Even Noël Carroll, one of the major philosophers of horror, originally tried to understand horror as Freudian in his early work before eventually rejecting the argument as unsustainable in his classic Philosophy of Horror (1990).

I criticized the Freudian argument in Knowing Fear, which I encourage you to buy! There I argued that the primary reason that horror seems to conform to Freudian readings is because the creators of the most famous horror movies—those of the 1930s to the 1980s—were working at the height of Freudian psychology and intentionally used Freud in creating their horror movies. The best illustration of this is Psycho. The novel’s writer, Robert Bloch, explicitly modeled Norman Bates on Freudian concepts because he thought they’d make for a good story, despite not being a firm believer in Freud; and Hitchcock ended the movie version with a lecture on Freudian psychology.

I had thought about trying to list some examples of horror that clearly had nothing to do with sex, but if you’re a determined enough Freudian, you can find sex in anything. I wouldn’t think that Ambrose Bierce’s “Damned Thing,” or Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game,” or Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” were terribly sex-filled stories, but I guess a case could be made if you really wanted to stretch it.

So instead I would like to point out that horror literature and sex are closely entwined, and have been since the Gothic launched the horror genre in 1764. The first wave of horror stories were Gothic novels, and they tied their terrors to the traditional subject of romantic fiction: sex and relationships. The typical Gothic novel built toward a wedding and took its form from earlier romances. And I think that’s the key: The Gothic was one variation on the romance (traditional usage: narrative fiction), which also gave rise to the novels of Jane Austen (who penned the Gothic parody Northanger Abbey) and thus to the romance (modern usage: love) genre.

The romantic aspects were not unique to the Gothic, and the work of the horror genre in the nineteenth century was to remove horror from the romantic strain of romance and give it a different purpose. In my mind, that different purpose was related to the concept of forbidden knowledge, of which sexual knowledge was reduced to a subset, albeit a large one. But for that argument, buy my book!
16 Comments
EP
10/17/2014 08:17:06 am

"a good scare is similar to an orgasm"

Yeah, I confuse the two all the time :)

Reply
Dave Lewis
10/17/2014 09:58:06 am

BOOI!

Reply
EP
10/17/2014 10:00:32 am

It was good for me, was it good for you?

CHV
10/17/2014 08:45:02 am

I thought the whole sex/horror argument was settled with the original DRACULA in 1897.

Reply
EP
10/17/2014 10:08:05 am

Jason, you may be interested in Noel Carroll's recent collection "Minerva's Night Out", which contains an essay on psychoanalysis and horror film, as well as one on Halloween and another one on the grotesque.

Reply
The Other J.
10/17/2014 06:19:57 pm

What's his psychoanalytical take?

Reply
EP
10/17/2014 06:36:33 pm

I wouldn't call it a psychoanalytical take. He remains critical of psychoanalysis.

PaulN. link
10/17/2014 10:08:33 am

Two films come to mind that do not have overt sexual overtones (other than the usual hero and heroine type). Night of the Demon (1957 British film) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 version) rely more on aspects of horror and the unknown, than on sexual ambiguities.
Night of the Demon would be better if they left out the cheesy demon and just left its presence as innuendo, as they did with Harvey. Invasion of the Body Snatchers had to have five minutes of footage added to give the viewing public a positive conclusion.
As it stands with some perceptions (sexual or otherwise) it is like Percival Lowell's Martian canals, it just depends on which end of the telescope the intelligence is on.

Reply
An Over-Educated Grunt
10/17/2014 10:26:26 am

This isn't exactly my area, but even within the same author sex isn't always the driver: Machen pretty clearly leaned on it in "The Great God Pan," but "The Black Seal," where reproduction was an important element, had it mentioned but shoved to the back. A case has been made that reproductive fears drove Lovecraft pretty hard, and you can see some of that in Machen, but equating reproduction and sex isn't a perfect fit either.

The bridge between your position and hers, I suspect, is that her writing is focused on visual horror, of a more modern type, rather than literary horror. I can understand even the scene from "The Exorcist" where Regan O'Neill comes crab-running down the stairs backwards and vomits blood onto the camera as shocking, and the endorphins being released, but having seen it on page and on screen, I can say that the impact on screen is far more instantaneous, but the page impact is far more disturbing.

Reply
EP
10/17/2014 12:35:01 pm

"even within the same author sex isn't always the drive"

"equating reproduction and sex isn't a perfect fit either"

These things are both true.

It's also important to remember, and this often gets lost in these debates, that psychoanalytical interpretations aren't always about sexuality and that not all sexually driven works are in principle susceptible to illuminating psychoanalytic interpretation (at least when it comes to their sexual aspect). People often think by association in something like the following manner: sexually suggestive imagery -> unconscious -> psychoanalysis -> Freud. But that oversimplifies every link in the chain.

A good example is the poetry of the Brownings. It is filled with thinly veiled sexual innuendo, but a lot of the time it is quite conscious, indeed deliberate on their part. One does not need psychoanalysis to explain it any more than one needs circumstantial evidence in a murder case where the act was videotaped and there is an uncoerced confession.

Somewhat paradoxically, one has as little reason as in any other case to employ psychoanalysis when examining a work that consciously and explicitly integrates or alludes to Freud's (or Jung's, or whoever's) theories.

Reply
The Other J.
10/17/2014 06:32:30 pm

"Somewhat paradoxically, one has as little reason as in any other case to employ psychoanalysis when examining a work that consciously and explicitly integrates or alludes to Freud's (or Jung's, or whoever's) theories."

Yip. Psychoanalysis is generally used to disclose hidden narratives, or at least discover hidden and unacknowledged psychological processes and put them into narrative form. Given how many horror films and thrillers directly employ either some kind of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic elements, giving them a psychoanalytical critique is kind of like diagnosing a diagnosis, or making a meal out of actual recipe cards.

The best you can really do is to see how accurate the employed psychoanalytical elements are, or go the whole Zizek route and argue the work means precisely the opposite of what the work thinks it means.

EP
10/17/2014 06:40:15 pm

You'd be surprised, but occasionally you do see people arguing that there must be something to psychoanalysis because it sure helps make sense of all these works (which have psychoanalytical elements consciously built into them by their authors)! :)

The Other J.
10/17/2014 06:49:08 pm

Reading Lacan, Zizek and their fallout helped me amass a good collection of facepalm gifs.

EP
10/17/2014 07:05:02 pm

Zizek is kinda awesome in his own way. Like, he gives no fucks.

He's like the Myron Fass of philosophy! :)

The Other J.
10/18/2014 06:57:40 am

I saw Zizek give a presentation about the New Testament and how eternity was a prison from which god needed to break free, but the only way to do it was to send himself down to his own creation as his own son to die. It was an interesting construction, but it also meant that if you believe you're going to heaven after you die, you're going to an eternal jail sentence.

His shirt was unbuttoned three buttons down, the sleeves were down but the cuffs were unbuttoned, and he sweated profusely. It was definitely entertaining.

EP
10/18/2014 07:36:12 am

Being hairy and sweaty is essential for cultivation of his image as "the wild man of Theory"... Yuck!




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