Pharmakos

A child awakens, alone in a dark room. Solitary with her thoughts. Terrifying thoughts. "Go back in your room," her mother says. "There is nothing to be afraid of." There is always something to be afraid of. Adults, for instance. Did not her mother tell her not to talk to strangers? The world is full of terrors. Abductors. Molesters. Murderers. Monsters. "Go back in your room," she is told. Go back to your fears.

Real threats in a real world, what need of fantasy? Yet it persists. The imagination goes where it wants. A child cannot control his or her nightmares. Do we outgrow them or do we just become inured to the persistent strangeness of our dreamlife? We have just left a century that saw its share of horrors. Global wars and a multitude of lesser conflagrations. And we have had our share of monsters, real monsters, too. They have names: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. And there are others, too numerable to mention, whose names are known to the masses or only to their victims. And there are those who are unnamed. What room is there left, in the imagination, to conjure up more atrocities, more monsters? Has familiarity with real horror banished the monsters to the dark recesses of our unconscious? And still we seek them, in books, in films, in the stories we tell ourselves to become spooked. Perhaps we invent an imaginary world of terrors so that we can convince ourselves that they are not real. But they are, but they are.

I used to have bad dreams when I was young. the kind that sent me running to the safety of my parent's bed. That place where, arguably, all my troubles started. The first thing they did was forbid me to watch scary movies. The image of a giant octopus wrapping its tentacles across a bridge still haunts me, a residual childhood fear. I have swam in shark-infested waters, but the unlikely image of a giant cephalopod strikes more irrational fear in me than the grinning-teeth of a great white. Such is the power of images, however, mundane, on impressionable minds. My parents banished me from their bedroom which seems, at this remove, the appropriate thing to do, but it took them years to convince me there were no such thing as monsters. By then I was old enough to go to church and I learned to fear the devil instead.

The fallen angel, a cautionary tale. Lucifer, the radiant one, the upstart son. He is cast out of heaven for disputing God's supremacy. A rebel, an old, old story. Now the devil reigns in Hell and makes our lives miserable, or so we are told. But not everyone feels this way. In the mountains of Iran, there exists a sect who worship Satan. A proud, fierce tribe, they recognize in him a fellow rebel, one who stood up against an oppressive master, and paid the price for his rebellion.

It is important to remember the devil was once an angel. Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France under St. Joan of Arc, retreated to his castle after she was burned. This pious man turned his attention from God and France, to the black arts and diabolism. He is reputed to have murdered hundreds of children in his fiefdom, before being tried for his crimes and hung. From him we have the legend of "Bluebeard". Evil always has its twin and the monsters we create are like mirrors which reflect ourselves back at us.

history lesson #1
When the Puritans settled New England they brought their God with them but found that the devil was already there. There was the devil outside, in the forest, with the aboriginal peoples. And there was the devil inside the communities, inside Boston and environs, inside Salem. There is record of monstrous births, heresies, witches' Sabbaths. Fires were lit, necks were broken. The history of early New England, written by the light of a burning witch.

the ruined abbey
Georgian England, perhaps chafing at the democratic pressures of the times, looks backwards and indulges in a kind of faux-medievalism, in the form of ruined abbeys and castles, made-to-order. This first reveals itself in the vogue for Salvator Rosa's twisted landscapes and the revival of gothic architecture, which will soon provide the setting for a new literature about to be born. The Gothic, in literature, may be dated no later than Horace Walpole's novel, "The Castle of Otranto", in 1764. It is certainly well established with the appearance of Radcliffe and Monk Lewis's tomes in the 1780s. The tropes, the figures, are all familiar: the ruined castle or abbey, the faux-antiquities --the whole prop room from myriad Roger Corman films are found in Walpole's, Radcliffe's, Lewis' novels.

acephalus
Sade, an aristocrat whose imagination has engendered unspeakable cruelties, gains freedom with the storming of the Bastille. With the Terror of 1783-84, the gutters of Paris run with blood. The head-count reaches astronomical figures. The logic of the Terror runs its course until it consumes its architects. What need of monsters when you have the Terror? Sade's horrific fantasies, related in masterful prose, pale in comparison to the real horrors visited by the Terror. France cuts of the head of its sovereign and refuses to stop there. It becomes a body without a head. The philosopher of the bedroom will himself appear as a monster, two centuries later, in Robert Bloch's "The Head of the Marquis de Sade."

Monstrum, the Latin root of 'monster', can also mean 'a portal'.

It is the age of revolutions: American, French, Industrial. New anxieties are milled, translated into print. In 1816, in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, a young woman pens a horror story on a dare. A cautionary tale about scientific hubris. She is in the company of two poets, one of them a notorious aristocrat. A third member of the party is a literary-minded physician. Her name is Shelley, her book, "Frankenstein". But it doesn't end there. Polidori, the doctor, expands on a fragment by one of the other two. He expands upon it and in doing so he turns it into something else. He turns the main character into a version of the original author and hence, the figure of the sensual, charismatic, aristocratic vampire is born, modeled on Lord Byron. Bram Stoker, at the end of the century will take this further still. Most of us learned this story through a filmed version, in black and white --Nosferatu, Dracula-- or, if you are English, in lurid color --the Hammer films. Hammer Films returned the aristocratic vampire to our screens, and brought its latent sexuality to the fore, anticipating the revolution of the body which commenced in the nineteen-sixties. The vampire comes on like the true return of the repressed, no matter how many times you drive that stake through its heart, it keeps coming back again. This line perhaps reached its culmination in Warhol's version featuring Udo Keir where irony, kitsch and insincere radical politics supplant dread and fear--Marx meets Pop--although apologists for Coppola's "Dracula" and fans of Ann Rice might argue differently.

Note: One of the traditions, in vampire literature, is that a vampire cannot cross the threshold unless it is invited.

pleasures and terrors

"Submission, the gothic imagination insists, is empowering, impervious, heroic."
--Richard Davenport-Hines

"Submission is a gift, go on give it to your brother."
--Charles Manson

Horror, in particular what is known as Gothic, is a product of collective anxieties. From its inception, the Gothic has been associated with inversion, incest, outlaw sexuality, a confusion of categories. Backwards-looking, retrograde, radical, irrational. The dungeon, the rack, implements of torture figure in the classic horror story just as they do in a contemporary S&M catalogue.

Desire is invasive, an irruption. It can overwhelm us, weaken us. It can drive us mad. We may demonize the object of our desire or say a daemon has possessed us. Or, if we are so inclined, we may say that we have fallen in love with an angel but it's the devil we're concerned with here. The old game of attraction and repulsion. Add sin into the mix and you have a potent cocktail indeed. We are punished for our pleasures. There's the perpetual dialectic of the body and the spirit, older than the Greeks. The ancients, like ourselves, had an answer for anything. If there was an erotic disturbance while one was sleeping it was attributed to incubi or succubi, demons in male and female form who had sex with helpless dreamers. In the Christian era, this dialectic is played out in the Lives of the Saints; the sublime suffering of the martyrs, the tortured agonies of the damned. Flesh is torn, burnt, pricked and pulled. It's all about the body. What is done with it, done to it. The saint is most often depicted with a beatific, almost erotic, heavenward gaze. The 'bottom' in S&M might understand this look; it is about transcending the limits of the body, wedding the antipodes of pleasure and pain, and entering a realm of bliss.

little deaths
The spectacle of the splatter film seems to have other things in mind. Its punishments have nothing of the sublime. We have left the company of the saints and are back in bed with the Puritans. Think for a moment: in most splatter films, what is the last act before the victim gets the ax? The sex act. In this spectacle every transgression is punished. These films seem to have the same effect as public executions once had. Witness the magnitude of this transgression and the ferocity of its retribution. The message, in other words, is don't go there.

Sex, fear, contagion. Venereal disease becomes funereal disease. The virus is a potent symbol, something that burrows deep and corrupts from within. The history of man is the history of his diseases. The hysteria surrounding the AIDS epidemic is a sort of social amnesia, a forgetting of plagues past. We're always dying of one thing or another. This virus has been demonized like no other in recent history, perhaps because of its first appearance in the margins of society. Its vectors are blood, semen, sexual secretions. Its first known carriers were inverts, demi-mondaines. It is, in other words, a gothic disease. Possession, infection, are two words for the same thing; we are invaded by something without and transformed by it. Horror has always played on these fears (as have politics). The vampire myth most pointedly so. It all comes down to penetration and an exchange of bodily fluids. Perhaps it's just coincidence that Ann Rice's novels have become popular in the twenty years since the start of the epidemic. The repressed, wrote Freud, in one of his earliest texts, "acts like a foreign body which, long after its entry, must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work."

closing time
The End of Days or the End of History, millennial fears have not yet been laid to rest. Horror shifts shape. Dread remains constant. We are still frightened by monsters. We are still frightened by ourselves. Horror straddles a variety of genres, from Gothic proper to speculative fiction. Its broad outlines were first limned in the eighteenth century. It has kept pace with science, psychology, and technology, adapting, like a mutable virus, to each new shift in paradigms. In the twentieth century, psychology seemed to supplant the supernatural. There is an explanation for everything. But the inexplicable, the irrational, has returned with a vengeance. Like the return of the repressed.

The child, now grown, has new fears, new pleasures, new anxieties. His or her body strains, mutates into something new, something foreign, something fascinating. Dreams bring new terrors, new sensations. Now he or she seeks out the dark, and in that dark place, his or her fears are projected on a screen. There is no escaping what terrifies us, just as there is no escaping our own death. We submit, willingly, with fear and trembling.

KEVIN O'SULLIVAN