The Horror Film and the Horror of Film
Author(s): David Lavery
Source: Film Criticism , Fall, 1982, Vol. 7, No. 1, HORROR AND FANTASY (Fall, 1982),
pp. 47-55
Published by: Allegheny College
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44018718
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The Horror Film
and the Horror of Film
David Lavery
I will suppose not that God, who is
most good and the fountain of truth,
but rather that some evil genius, at
once very powerful and cunning, has
bent all his efforts to deceive me. I
will suppose heaven, air, earth, colors,
shapes, sounds and everything external
are nothing but the delusions of dreams
that he has contrived to lure me into
belief.. ..I will resolutely guard against
assenting to falsities and against what-
ever this deceiver can imply to trick me.
Rene Descartes, Meditations
The eyes of the crow and the eye of the
camera open
Onto Homer's world, not ours. First
and last
They magnify earth, the abiding
Mother of gods and men; if they notice
either
It is only in passing: gods behave,
men die,
Both feel in their own small way, but
She
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Does nothing and does not care,
She alone is seriously there.
W. H. Auden,
"Memorial for the City"
"The tradition of horror," writes Frank McConnell in The
Spoken Seen , "as we are coming now to realize, is one of the oldest
and most continuous of cinematic genres. That this is so should not
surprise anyone who has even a minimal acquaintance with the
imaginative life of the West, since terrifying tales are among the most
ancient and most persistent stories in our inheritance, perhaps, indeed,
in the inheritance of the human subconscious." In fact, McConnell
concludes, "A psychic history of culture. ..could be written very
efficiently from the morphology of its monsters, the history of those
personifications of the void which successive generations have selected
as their central nightmares."*
Paradoxically, any "morphology" of those monsters which the
movies have unveiled should now include the movies themselves
among possible threatening forms. For the movies, it seems, have
convinced at least one theoretician of the art, Roger Munier, that their
impact on man's perception of his world will be to displace man from
his position of preeminence over things, replaced--oh horror !-by the
world itself, that is, by the "void "--for the "void" to which McConnell
alludes is man's name for all he cannot control, for that which "alone
is seriously there."
I would like first to put in context and then to explore Mun-
ier's startling conception of film. Using it as a "viewfinder," I shall
then examine a single illustrative example of the horror genre-Nico-
las Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973)--as a film whose horror springs in
part from a horror of film.
II
In a sense, the genre of the horror film-if we define such to be
all films whose primary effect is to surprise, terrify, or alienate an
audience by means of a narrative and cinematic techniques which are
disorienting and aggressive, violent, or discomforting--is co-equal with
the history of film itself. For when the Lumiere brothers opened the
first movie theatre on December 28, 1895, in the basement of a Paris
Cafe, a "horror" film was on the bill, though unexpectedly. One of
the Lumieres' shorts that day, L'Arrivé d'un train en gare, a simple
shot of a railroad train pulling into a station, elicited from that initial
audience shrieks of fear, as they ducked to avoid the menace they
perceived to be hurtling directly at them.^
Such fear stemmed in part from the simple fact that the
populace had not yet learned to watch movies and was unprepared for
withstanding their realism. However, as Noel Burch has reminded, the
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reaction of that first audience was no mere aberration: for movies
have from their inception been perceived as a kind of threat, "a
veritable public menace"; hence the early and persistent demands
throughout their history for censorship of them-for protection of the
public against their aggression. And such a reaction is, Burch obser-
ves, hardly groundless, for
Whatever his level of critical awareness,
a viewer sitting in the dark alone and
suddenly face to face with the screen is
completely at the mercy of the film-
maker, who may do violence to him
at any moment and through any means.
Should the viewer be forced beyond the
pain threshold, his defense mechanisms
may well be called forth and he may
remind himself that "it's only a movie"
...but it will always be too late... the
harm will already have been done;
intense discomfort, and perhaps even
terror, will ahready have crept across
the threshold.
Movies, then, are always at least potentially, horror movies.
As the sophistication of the audience increased, as man learned
how to see in a cinematic way, the threshold of terror rose, of course.
By 1929, a train pulling into a station was no longer perceived as a
menace, and Buñuel and Dali, in Un Chien Andatoli, had to resort to a
razor blade slicing an eyeball to push the viewer past the pain thres-
hold. And now many sophisticated 1980 's moviegoers cannot even be
scared by the numerous projectiles and appendages thrown at them by
a demented killer in a movie like Friday the 13th, Part 3, even though
the effect of the assualt on the audience is heightened by the baroque
device of 3D.
It was not, however, just the image of a physical threat such as
a hurtling train which surprised and discomforted the first film
viewers. Sadoul has recounted that audiences were powerfully moved
by the first cinematic presentations of all sorts of natural movements:
the sight of smoke ascending into the sky, waves breaking on a shore,
leaves trembling in the wind. In an essay entitled "The Fascinating
Image," Roger Munier has attempted to explain the true source of the
power those first movie images had to affect an audience :
Up to that time one said: the smoke is
rising into the blue, the leaves are trem-
bling; or the painting suggests such
movements. In the cinema, however,
the smoke itself is rising, the leaf really
trembles: it declares itself as a leaf
trembling in the wind. It is like a
leaf that one encounters in nature and
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at the same time it is much more,
from the moment when, in addition
to being that real leaf, it is also, indeed
primarily, a represented reality. If it
were only a real leaf, it would wait
for my observation in order to achieve
significance. Because it is represented,
divided in two by the image, it is al-
ready signified, offered in itself as a
leaf trembling in the wind.
Things, as seen in the movies, are thus "photogenic," Munier explains
(he borrows the term from Louis Delluc), the ' 'photogenic" being:
"the self-expression of the world in the image," "that appeal coming
to us from the object via the interpretation of its imaginary replica
whereby it designates itself as an object," "the sense which things give
themselves" (p. 90). In Munier's concept of the photogenic, I would
like to suggest, lies the basis for not necessarily a theory of the horror
film, but rather a theory of the horror of film. For Munier's essay is
misnamed: it might better be called "The Terrifying Image."
Ill
That in the movies things have their way with man, that the
movies depict an almost inhuman world, such film theorists as Andre
Bazin, Amèdee Ayfre, Jean Mitry, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and
Stanley Cavell, each influenced in some way by phenomenology, have
all agreed. To Bazin, the real force of the movies was "centrifugal,"
focusing not on man but rather throwing him outward into the
frontiers of the world beyond the screen. To Ayfre, the movie image
is a seed which produces fruit in man only in order to fertilize that
which originally produced it-the world. For Mitry, the "cinema is a
world that organizes itself into a narrative." In the view of Mer-
leau-Ponty, movies exhibit a form of perception which enables us to
"rediscover a commerce with the world and a presence to the world
which is older than intelligence" which helps us reestablish the union
of our lived, embodied existence with that world. And to Cavell, the
background of all films is the "promise of the world's exhibition."
However, to Munier alone, who shares with them all the central
conviction that film is a means of access to a world unknown to
rational man, the prospect of such cinematic revelation is well-nigh
terrifying. As Dudley Andrew has observed, Munier sees the movies as
a destructive force, something like atomic energy, the effect of which,
once introduced into the world, cannot be undone.
Since movies are not really "pictures" at all, not really shaped
by the "intimate and reassuring sense we give things," they efface
man, Munier explains (p. 90). By presenting for our inspection the
"pre-face" of the world which, "resuming its ancestral ascendancy,"
takes on "cosmophonic" power, the movies seduce us into becoming
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"shipwrecked" in the image and under the sway of a new logos-the
world's and not our own-which controls us (p. 89). Although in the
movies, as Dudley Andrew summarizes,
We try with our pathetic film syntax,
with our editing and camera placement,
to organize discourse or at least a view
of the world.. .it is always the world
which has the last word. Forever
opaque, it outlives the transparence
of human speech. We have created
machines and tools which no longer
serve us but which serve a world that
now commands us.
The movies, Munier claims, take us to the "other side of things," but
only in such a way that we come to witness
the world. ..in its pure state, in the pure
projection of its essence, beyond all
prehension. The world such as it would
be, if it could be set up as a "world/'
outside of any dialectical rapport
with the human. Such as it would be
if it could, in such a solipsistic predi-
cation, exclude us from its own domain.
(P. 87)
We might profitably contrast Munier's point of view with
Cavell 's summary explanation of his "ontology of film" from The
World Viewed :
A world complete without me which is
present to me is the world of my
immortality. This is the importance
of film--and a danger. It takes my life
as my haunting of the world, either
because I left it unloved (the Flying
Dutchman) or because I left unfinished
business (Hamlet). So there is reason
for me to want the camera to deny the
coherence of the world, its coherence
as past: to deny that the world is
complete without me. But there is
equal reason to want it affirmed that
the world is coherent without me.
That is essential to what I want of
immortality: nature's survival of
me. It will mean that the present
judgment upon me is not yet the
last.12
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For Munier, the issue is not so complex; movies convince us only of
our "haunting of the world"; there is no other possibility. And there
is no succor whatever to be found in the realization-imparted by the
movies-which consoles Cavell: that the world is "complete without
me." Munier's conception of film, as well as his fear of it, is apparent-
ly grounded on a chauvinistic, Cartesian humanism which is, in its
philosophical underpinnings, a kind of epistemological incest. He
desires no intercourse, perceptual or artistic, with any relations out-
side the human family, beyond the sphere man alone has constructed
and colonized. He must, he senses, steel himself against what would
be to his way of thought the ultimate terror: to be truly "fascinated"
by the world. He resists, with a Cartesian will, film's "evil genius,"
lest its "centrifugal" force expel him from the comforts of the human-
ly manipulated, lest it deceive him, trick him into giving his assent to
all those things external to the human ego which film can make so
appealing, so fascinating. His theory of film is an intellectual con-
struction designed to ward off, if possible, the realization film asks
him to agree to: that the eye of the camera opens onto "the abid-
ing/Mother of gods and men," a world in which men are not all.
Why does a Munier find the potential for terror in the movies,
while a Bazin discovers a means of redemption? To ask such a ques-
tion is the equivalent of asking why one filmmaker creates an Um-
berto D and another Friday the 1 3th. The sustaining energy of any
film, as well as any film theory, is the filmmaker's (or theoretician's)
particular "fascination" with the image and the quality of his regard
can be judged by his fruits. A film in which images have murderous
intent, in which the "genius" of images is not generative but fatal,
would seem in the last analysis to have much in common with, and
offer a doctrine similar to, a film theory which is "Contre L'Image."
Roeg's Don't Look Now is a horror film which could be said to be
possessed by an "evil genius," which offers us fascinating images but
warns us not to give them our assent-warns us to be "Contre L'Im-
age."
IV
As an epigraph to "The Fascinating Image," Munier quotes
these words from Orson Welles, which he evidently sees as a cogent
presentation of his own views on film:
The camera... is much more than a
recording apparatus, it is a means
whereby messages from another world
come to us, a world not ours, leading
us to the heart of the great secret.
(P. 85)
Don't Look Now is certainly a film in which the motion picture
camera discovers "messages from another world." All of its viewers
and most of its critics find it a terribly, perhaps needlessly, enigmatic
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film. For the film's central character, John Baxter, however, these
messages-captured and revealed through cryptic editing and consum-
mate photography-do not lead to the heart of any great secret,
though every image of the film hints at its existence, though his final
encounter with the secret's emissary at the movie's close causes his
brutal death. If we use Huss and Ross' classification scheme for the
horror genre (from Focus on the Horror Film ), we might be
tempted to characterize Don 't Look Now as either "gothic" (certainly
its setting-Venice-and overall atmosphere qualify it as such) or as
"psychological" (on the strength of its demented mass murderer and
the importance to the plot of parapsychology). Let us instead desig-
nate it as a "Munierian" horror film. For the real horror of a film like
Don't Look Now is not merely gothic or psychological; it springs
instead from the impression that an inhuman logos is at loose in the
world, a logos which shapes the film-is, in fact its narrative ener-
gy-but to which our perception is not geared. It is this force which
makes us unable to "look now."
"The farther I go, the more Byzantine it gets," John Baxter
remarks to his wife Laura, as they sit together at lunch the first time
we see them in Venice. It is not just the project of restoring a 16th
Century church to which he refers. His perception itself has become
"Byzantine," and the visible world is consequently transformed into a
mosaic he cannot interpret. The world in which he moves throughout
the film, even before he journeys to Venice, seems utterly suspi-
cious-imminent. Rain falling on a pond, a smashed mosaic tile,
a bishop's handkerchief, rats crawling out of a canal, a child's doll, a
bucket of water thrown into the street, all seem numinous, all appear
to hint of a "great secret."
However, Baxter is unwilling to admit the existence of any
such secret. Though he possesses-in the estimate of the blind mystic
with whom his fate seems irrevocably intertwined-ESP ("a gift from
the good Lord who gives all things"), he remains, true to his profes-
sion as an art-restorer, trapped in the maintenance of old ways of
seeing, mired in the "picturesque," seeking to restore it and the world
view of which it partakes: a comforting, ordered, humanly secured,
known realm. But Baxter lives, and dies, as we the audience know,
for we see him see and see what he does not know : that he never just
"looks now" but sees through time as well as space-under the sway of
the photogenic, not the picturesque.
In the film's first scene, in which the Baxter's daughter,
Christine, drowns in a pond, we see Laura reading a book entitled
Beyond the Plane Geometry of Space and inquiring of her husband
about the reality of the curvature of the ocean's surface. Absent-
mindedly he replies-as he concentrates on the inspection of a slide of
the Venetian church he has been hired to reconstitute-that "Nothing
is what it seems." This statement is not a testimony to his sense of
wonder, however. Cartesian doubt, not wonder, guides him. He will
not be lured into acceptance of anything he cannot rationally under-
stand. Though within seconds of this declaration he senses-informed
by his own second sight-that his daughter is in danger and rushes out
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of the house to try to save her (though too late), it is we, not he, who
understand how he knew to come to her aid. Things speak to John
Baxter-almost every aspect of the film's decoupage reveals their
discourse-yet he does not always know that he hears or reads their
logos.
Only in the film's last, long sequence does Baxter-now alone
in Venice-shaken out of his normal skepticism by a series of eerie
incidents and coincidences-including seeing his wife (who is supposed
to be in England) on a funeral barge-begin to believe that he is in fact
being contacted by some irrational force and thus seeks it out. He
even comes to suspect-as do his wife and the blind mystic-that his
dead daughter may be summoning him.
At a screening of Don 't Look Now I once attended I witnessed
a kind of terror I have seldom seen before in a movie theatre sweep
through the audience during this last sequence of the film. As John
Baxter runs crazed through the maze-like, fog-shrouded streets and
alleys of Venice, hard on the track of what he believes to be his
daughter returned from the grave, as he finally catches up with the
small figure in a red raincoat-identical to the one Christine was
wearing when she drowned-only to discover that the being he has
sought is in fact a grotesque dwarf with a butcher knife, the film's
viewers became nearly frenzied. A veteran of the film myself, I found
it more interesting to watch them than the screen, and I was aston-
ished by what I saw. Perfect strangers were reaching out to each other
in the packed theatre for comfort, actually grabbing onto the nearest
possible person in the hope that their terror might so be relieved.
I do not think it was the content, the plot, or the "monster"
of Don't Look Now which provoked such a reaction. Don't Look
Now seemed a true horror film that evening for much the same reason
that L'Arrivé d'un train en gare momentarily terrified the Lumieres'
audience: because it hinted of another way of seeing, and hence of
another world; it spoke òf a vision and of another side of things to
which we are not yet adapted. And Baxter's brutal murder brought
screams from that audience because they understood it--though
tacitly-as a movie metaphor for-as Munier would say-being "ship-
wrecked" in that other world, after having first been seduced into
going to sea (see?) by the fascinating, photogenic appeal of film.
It is the essence of the horror film, R. H. W. Dillard has
observed, to teach "an acceptance of the natural order of things and
an affirmation of man's ability to cope with and even prevail over the
evil of life which he can never hope to understand...." In order to
accomplish this, it "sets out to purge us of our fear of death by
exposing us to death as we have never seen it before, by distorting the
fact of death into all possible contortions to help us see its simple and
natural reality."14 Such acceptance and affirmation, however, are
precisely what Don't Look Now-- and the Munierian horror film-does
not teach us. For it implies instead that man can only prevail over
that which he understands, that anything beyond the human is
potentially evil, that we must not confront the world beyond the
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humanly imposed "natural "--for beyond is death; it teaches that the
image--and hence the imagination-kills; that the "photo-genic" is
"photo-lethal." It convinces us that the Cartesian voice which we still
hear admonishing us within not to be deceived or tricked by the world
is the one we must heed--for if we do not, we might come face to face
with that evil genius who lurks within the visible world, wielding a
butcher knife.
Notes
1. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 1 SÖ-
ST.
2. See Gerald Mast's account in A Short History of the Movies
(Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1971), pp. 32-33. As Mast notes,
this event has been recreated in Godard's Les Carabiniers , in which
a young boy, watching his first film, is terrified of a similar image.
3. Theory o f Film Practice , trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Prae-
ger, 1969), pp. 124-25.
4. Diogenes , 38 (1962), 90-91 ; all future references to this work will
appear in the text. Munier has published a book on film as well,
Contre L 'Image, which was unfortunately unavailable to me.
5. What Is Cinema? ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1971), II, 105-07.
6. See J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduc-
tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 253.
7. Andrew, p. 208.
8. "Film and the New Psychology," in Sense and Nonsense , trans.
Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), p. 52.
9. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New
York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 159.
10. Andrew, p. 248.
11. Andrew, p. 240.
12. Cavell, p. 160.
13. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972).
14. "Even a Man Who's Pure At Heart: Poetry and Danger in the
Horror Film," in Man and the Movies , ed. W. R. Robinson (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 65.
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