Theatricality in the Horror Film: A Brief Study on the Dark Pleasures of Screen Artifice 2019949651

Table of contents :
Cover
Front Matter
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1-6
Chapter 1 Introduction: of Monsters and Monstration
Chapter 2 Horror, Realism and Theatricality
Chapter 3 The Theatricality of Monstrous Villainy in Film Adaptations of Horror Plays
Chapter 4 The Theater as Locus Horribilis: Staging the Paradox of Tragic Horror
Chapter 5 The Theatricality of Horror: Characters, Unities and Styles
Characters
Unities
Styles
Chapter 6 Conclusion: The Theatricality of Horror Spectatorship
End Matter
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Theatricality in the Horror Film

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Theatricality in the Horror Film A Brief Study on the Dark Pleasures of Screen Artifice

André Loiselle

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Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2020 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–​76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © André Loiselle 2020 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2019949651 ISBN-​13: 978-​1-​78527-​128-​1  (Hbk) ISBN-​10: 1-​78527-​128-​8  (Hbk) This title is also available as an e-​book.

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CONTENTS List of Illustrations

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1. Introduction: Of Monsters and Monstration

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2. Horror, Realism and Theatricality

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3. The Theatricality of Monstrous Villainy in Film Adaptations of Horror Plays

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4. The Theater as Locus Horribilis: Staging the Paradox of Tragic Horror

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5. The Theatricality of Horror: Characters, Unities and Styles

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6. Conclusion: The Theatricality of Horror Spectatorship

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Bibliography Index

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ILLUSTRATIONS 1.1 Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates dressed up as Mother in Psycho 2.1 The stills that close Night of the Living Dead evoke actual horrors outside the parameters of the scary movie 2.2 Michael Rooker as a Brandoesque rebel in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer 3.1 Robert Englund as Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare 3.2 The Villain in full theatrical view compared to the victim’s close-​up in Murder in the Red Barn 3.3 Juxtaposed shots of outdoors normality and indoors satanical madness in Brimstone and Treacle 3.4 Rhoda’s abnormal doll-​like plastic perfection in The Bad Seed 4.1 The gory spectacle of murder staged by the Golem in The Limehouse Golem 4.2 The final shot of The Gallows 5.1 Theatrical crucifixion in The Silence of the Lambs 5.2 The righteously vengeful Punch in Dolls (1987) 5.3 From normality to horror in Event Horizon (1997) 5.4 The influential stylistic artifice of The House of Usher (1960) 5.5 The theatricality of torture in Torture Chamber (2013) 5.6 Montage and viral gossip create the monster in Cry_​Wolf (2005) 6.1 The terrified audience of Paranormal Activity

2 15 19 26 33 35 43 52 70 77 82 89 91 93 96 105

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Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION: OF MONSTERS AND MONSTRATION  Let us begin this brief study on theatricality in the horror film with a question on etymology and syntagmatics,1 however pedantic it might seem. If, as Robin Wood has famously suggested, the horror film can be summarized as “normality is threatened by the monster” (Wood 1979, 14), then how does the syntagma “monster” signify its threatening difference from the syntagma “normality”? While there are many definitions of what a monster is, including Jacques Derrida’s statement that “a monster is a species for which we do not yet have a name” (Derrida & Weber 1995, 386), etymologically the term is specifically related to the notion of being put on display. Derived from the Latin monstrare, the word “monster” connotes the state of being shown. The term is also associated to monere, “to warn”:  the monster is a warning sign of impending disaster (Huet 2000, 87). The term “monster” therefore is recognizable as a signifier of threatening ostentation that brazenly challenges “normality,” which, by definition, is unremarkable, banal and commonplace. As Ernest Mathijs puts it, “ostentation certainly characterizes every monster role” (Mathijs 2012, 139). The monster stands out in all its spectacular abnormality before the appalled gaze of the “normal” observer who sees it as an omen of terrible things to come. The monster is often a weird creature from some strange land. But it does not have to be. It might be an ordinary person, an everyday object or merely a vague impression. Whatever it is, however, the monster ostentatiously appears at some critical point in the film as an aberrant display that threatens mundane reality. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) might look perfectly normal through most of Psycho (1960, Alfred Hitchcock). But at the climatic moment of horror, he emerges as the grotesquely bewigged

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 Here I use the term “syntagmatics” to refer to the horizontal succession of syntagma, as signifying units that acquire meaning through their mutual relationship along a linear signifying chain. See, for instance, Christian Metz, Film Language:  A Semiotics of Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), especially ­chapter 5.

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Figure 1.1  Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates dressed up as Mother in Psycho.

embodiment of abnormality, shocking everyone on screen and in the cinema (Figure 1.1). The term “monster” is also a close relative of the narratological term “monstration,” used primarily by historians of early cinema, such as André Gaudreault, to explain cinema’s relationship to the theater, and its departure from it. In his book Du littéraire au filmique: Système du récit (1988), Gaudreault argues that film creates its meaning through a combination of two broad techniques: monstration, or showing in a continuous shot, and narration, or the juxtaposition of shots through editing. Monstration is the aspect of cinema that links it most directly to theater. In fact, what Gaudreault calls profilmic monstration “is the equivalent on film of the monstrative work performed on stage” (Gaudreault 1988, 121).2 Although certain types of filmographic monstration, like variable framing, differ from traditional theatrical staging, monstration on stage and in film share the notion of the unity of time and space. But, unlike the theater, Gaudreault continues, film can escape the limits of monstration through narration or montage, which allows it to move freely across time and space. Gaudreault writes, Although filmographic monstration […] can detach itself from profilmic monstration, although it can become autonomous and add a discursive layer to the profilmic, it is still nailed to the hic et nunc of the enunciation 2

 All translations are my own.

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[…] It is impossible for filmographic monstration to achieve what is so simple for the filmographic narrator: namely, to move instantaneously (time) from one place (space) to another. (123, emphasis in the original) Monstration, therefore, is the aspect of film that can most readily be labeled “theatrical,” for it is the aspect of the cinematic text that achieves its effects primarily through a straightforward showing within the unity of time and space of a scene. Given the close relation between monster and monstration, and given that monstration is an instance of the theatrical within the cinematic, it follows that the presence of the monster in the horror film is likely to operate as an instance of monstrative theatricality. In other words, the emergence of the monster in the horror film interrupts the narrative flow of the film as theatrical monstration disrupts the straightforward telling of the normal characters’ stories and imposes the terrifying regime of showing on the spectator, who is suddenly trapped in the here and now of the horrifying spectacle from which there is no easy narrative escape. This moment of monstrous monstration on film corresponds to a process of stylistic transformation that dates back to at least the stage precursor of the horror film: the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. In their book Grand-​Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (2002), Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson argue that horror plays performed at Paris’s Théâtre du Grand-​Guignol from the late nineteenth century to the theater’s closure in the early 1960s generally oscillated in style between naturalism and melodrama. The former would prevail during most of the drama, as the “normal” story would unfold, until the “moment of horror” when the tone would switch drastically to melodramatic dread. “It is at these moments that any pretense of naturalism is finally abandoned and the full force of stylized melodrama is brought to bear on the performance,” say Hand and Wilson. The moment of horror represents, through stylistic shift, “a journey which leads from bourgeois security to mortal danger, from the rational to the insane, from—​ in effect—​ Naturalism to Melodrama” (Hand and Wilson 2002, 37–​38). In this book, I will argue that a similar shift operates in the horror film. At moments of horror, the scary movie replicates the theatricality of stylized melodrama, breaking with the naturalism or realism of narrative normality. In Chapters 2 and 3, I will further discuss the ramifications of the term “melodrama” for the study of theatricality in the horror film. Theatricality in the horror film expresses itself in many ways. First and foremost, it comes across in the physical performance of monstrosity, where its size and broad histrionics often stunningly clash with discreetly diminutive normality. But it also manifests itself through the depiction of the sites of horror—​the locus horribilis. Several horror films actually use the theater as a

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creepy setting whose artifice is conducive to terror. But even in seemingly “normal” environments, at the moment of horror, space can become a monstrous theatrical spectacle. Similarly, radical stylistic departures through discontinuous editing or aberrant cinematography, as well as the ostentatious personification of the monster’s victims, and the oppressive spatiotemporal limitations of the scary situation function as shocking devices that contrast drastically with “cinematic normality.” In the following chapters, I propose to explore these various incarnations of theatricality within the cinematic world of the horror film to provide an alternative way of interpreting the effects of the audiovisual tale of terror. I claim “alternative” because the reading of horror I propose here differs markedly from conventional approaches to the genre. Over the past 40 years, the critical discourse around the horror film has tended to focus on four general areas: (1) the subconscious appeal of the genre (Creed 1993; Wood 1979); (2)  cognitive responses to monstrosity (Carroll 1990; Grodal 1997); (3) the effects of the genre’s gendered narrative on audiences, especially female spectators (Cherry 2002; Clover 1992; Linda Williams 1984; Pinedo 1997); and (4) the relationship between the monster and specific cultural, social and historical contexts (Benshoff 2002; Skal 1993; Wood 1979). But little work has been done on the way in which horror creates its effects stylistically through a radical break with the realism of normality in the form of monstrous theatricality. This book argues that theatricality is at the core of the cinematic tale of terror and is crucial in the creation of horror effects on screen. To carry out this argument, it is important to have a clear understanding of certain key concepts, in particular, “horror” and “theatricality.” Let’s start with “horror.” Although theorists like Noel Carroll (1990, 15) draw a distinction between horror stories and tales of terror (the former showing a supernatural monster, the latter featuring a human villain), I see both genres as belonging to a single mode typified by two basic elements. The first, as has already been discussed, is the presence of a threatening display. The threatening presence (supernatural monster or human villain) is not merely a character driven by greed, lust or anger (for mere greed, lust and anger are the stuff of crime thrillers, not horror). Rather, the character or object is perceived as a force that cannot be reasoned with. The victims cannot simply offer money or sex in exchange for their safety. For example, in an early scene from Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986, Tom McLoughlin), as Jason (C. J. Graham) prepares to impale two unfortunate camp counselors, Darren (Tony Goldwyn) and Lizbeth (Nancy McLoughlin), the latter offers the masked killer cash and her American Express card in exchange for her life. Jason ignores her plea and proceeds to drive a spear through her face. A shot of a few dollar bills and the credit card floating in a muddy puddle after Lizbeth’s gruesome murder

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underscores that the monster has no interest in such mundane objects. Even when sexual desire might seem to underlie the villain’s behavior, as in sadistic slashers like Maniac (1980, William Lustig) or psychological thrillers like Split (2016, M. Night Shyamalan), simple intercourse is never the fiend’s primary goal. There is always a more pressing urge to assert the singularity of a self-​absorbed obsession, be it insatiable voracity, compulsive revenge, irrational envy, blind hatred or some other insane fixation. The monster’s motivations always transcend “normal” material or physical needs. As such, the monster evokes George Bataille’s notion of Evil, which exists for its own sake (Bataille 1973, 18). Even in the rare instances where the monster is eventually revealed to be benevolent and humane, monstrous actions defy “normal” justifications:  as when Dr.  Frankenstein’s forlorn creature (Boris Karloff) unwittingly drowns a little girl by throwing her in a pond the same way he had thrown flowers. The other essential element of horror is best described by the Latin phrase David Cronenberg has cited as the source of all terror: Timor mortis conturbat mea—​the fear of death disturbs me (Morris 1994, 58–​59). The horror film and the tale of terror are characterized by an engagement with the fear of painful death at the hands of monsters and villains. This is what distinguishes the tale of terror and the horror film from other narrative forms that might also exhibit villains, but whose threatening function is seriously downplayed. Comedies often feature wicked characters (think of films ranging from The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) to the Scary Movie series (2000–​2013)). But in such works, the spectator never fears for the life of the protagonists. In the true horror film (no matter how schlocky and over-​the-​top), the audience is intended to vicariously experience the “normal” characters’ fear of painful death. So, for there to be terror and horror there must be an ostentatiously threatening display that causes deathly fear. A simplistic understanding of my argument so far might lead one to mention titles like The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise) as a counterexample, since literal monsters and villains are never seen in that and other similar ghost films. Yet, anyone who pays attention to the techniques used in The Haunting will immediately notice that the threatening presence is displayed in a most ostentatious way through a frightening combination of extreme camera angles, expressionistic lights and shadows, material and visual special effects and menacing sounds. The fact that the threat might be imaginary is not irrelevant to my argument. In fact, this supports my contention that horror resides in the excessive display of aberrance that clashes audiovisually with the generic signs of normality that comprise most of the story. The danger might not be actual, but the theatrical moments of horror nevertheless materialize from the perception of an abnormal threat that causes unbearable dread.

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Let us now examine the concept of theatricality, a term that has multiple connotations (see, for instance, Davis and Postlewait 2003). Patrice Pavis’s definition from his Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis (1998) offers a useful starting point: “Theatricality is that which is specifically theatrical, in performance or in the dramatic text […] [where] theatrical means the specific form of theatre enunciation, the movement of the words, the dual nature of the enunciator (character/​actor) and his utterances […] [and] the artificiality of performance (representation)” (Pavis 1998, 395–​97). This summary of theatricality contains two essential points:  first, its reference to words enunciated in the movement of the actor as character and, second, the artificiality of the performance. While the former (words spoken by actors) is one of the fundamental similarities between theater and narrative cinema that differentiate them from other forms like the novel, the latter (the artificiality of representation) seems to be one of the main contrasts between stage and screen performances, with the latter generally leaning toward realism rather than artifice. But in fact, artificiality is central to the horror film as it precipitates the onslaught against the realism of normality at the moment of horror when theatricality threatens cinematic conventions of transparency. As such, my use of the term “theatricality” differs from the connotations that scholars like Elizabeth Burns (1972) and Richard Schechner (1977) give to the word by relating it to notions of ritual in everyday life where artifice is not necessarily foregrounded. Nor do I follow Josette Féral’s distinction between performance and theatricality as the former exposing and undoing the codes of the latter (Féral 1982, 178). I  also use theatricality in a narrower sense than Samuel Weber does in his influential book Theatricality as Medium (2004). For Weber, “theatricality is defined as a problematic process of placing, framing, situating rather than as a process of representation” (Weber 2004, 315). While Weber’s argument is useful in demonstrating the relevance of theatricality in contemporary media studies—​where framing and situating are the essential conditions for any audience to become involved in the witnessing of any event being mediated—​I find the definition too broad to benefit my reading of the horror film. Therefore, in what follows I will utilize the term more specifically as a practice that draws attention to its artificiality in contrast to the realism of normality. This definition of theatricality must be further refined by introducing Timothy Corrigan’s notion of “cinematic theatricality” (Corrigan 1999, 62–​ 66). This concept serves to acknowledge that while some cinematic practices recall theatrical modes of expression, theatricality on film is never identical to theatricality on stage because of the live presence of the actor in the theater. When I  refer to theatricality in the horror film I  thus imply “cinematic theatricality,” which suggests that cinema recalls the artifice of theatrical

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performance without reproducing its live character. Theatricality, in the context of this study, thus refers to moments where the emergence of artifice or ostentatiousness collides, either stylistically or narratively, with inconspicuous cinematic realism. The very appearance on screen of a stage with poor players strutting upon it declaiming ghastly passages from some gory Elizabethan tragedy is often enough to break with the realism of the normal world outside the theatrical space. But beyond that, the over-​the-​top performance of a chainsaw-​wielding serial killer, the looming Gothic architecture of a gloomy castle in ruins, the use of violently aberrant filmic techniques, or the oppressive claustrophobia of a single-​room setting reminiscent of classical drama, all these are also examples of “cinematic theatricality.” Indeed, any performative element of a film that flaunts its difference from what is considered realistic or normal on screen might qualify as an instance of theatrical artifice, creating an intense affect in the audience; for the artificiality of the horrific spectacle is at the heart of the dark pleasures of horror cinema. As Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues, “awareness of artifice, then, is not a flaw but an essential ingredient of recreational terror” (Pinedo 1997, 55). The relationship between realism and theatricality in the cinematic tale of terror will be explored at more length in the next chapter. In that section, I will examine horror films where the use of an explicitly realist style, as in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), allows for a clear distinction between the realm of normality and the eruption of monstrosity, which triggers moments of highly pleasurable artifice. In Chapter  3, I  will focus on the depiction of the monstrous villains on screen. But rather than casting an overly wide net that would vainly attempt to capture the whole of horror cinema, in this early phase of my argument I will concentrate on horror films that have been adapted from stage thrillers. By comparing theater and film versions of the same villains, I  will be able to zero in on the main characteristics of monstrous theatricality that have been transferred from stage to screen. This heuristic strategy will allow me to highlight the core aspects of stage monstrosity that horror cinema appropriates and, later in the book, to extend my discussion to a wider range of films. In Chapter 4, I will move away from adaptations of plays per se and examine instead films that are set in and around theaters. The films examined in that section, ranging from the early Peter Lorre vehicle Mad Love (1935, Karl Freund) and Douglas Hickox’s cult classic Theatre of Blood (1973) to the Neo-​Victorian Gothic thriller The Limehouse Golem (2016, Juan Carlos Medina), use the theater as the ideal setting to expose the horror film’s deep structural connection to classical tragedy. Of course, the large majority of horror films are not set in theaters. Nevertheless, I argue that much of horror cinema still displays theatricality in its character construction, spatiotemporal restrictions, narrowly focused

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action and stylistic composition. Chapter 5 articulates this argument in detail, demonstrating through several examples that the content and form of cinematic tales of terror reflect the theatricality of the genre even in films that, on the surface, seem to have absolutely nothing to do with theater. Finally, in Chapter 6, the audience takes centre stage. In that chapter, I examine how spectators, especially those who are enthusiastically vocal in their response to gory spectacles, contribute to the theatricality of horror. I suggest that these ostentatious reactions to horror films are not merely spontaneous expressions of fear and delight. Rather, those boisterous horror fans are consciously active participants in the viewing experience of the film, engaging in a theatrical event where what happens in the audience is as purposeful, directed and meaningful as what is happening on screen. The ultimate goal of this study is to suggest that the theatricality of horror cinema echoes the genre’s roots in ancient tragedy. Like Greek tragedy, horror cinema allows spectators to confront their deepest fears within the safe space of the auditorium. Stephen King, among many others, has recognized this link between horror and tragedy. In their description of contemporary American horror fiction, Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison convey King’s opinion that the horror tale provides the audience with an opportunity to gain profound insights into its fears and, by extension, to acquire an array of coping skills. For King, horror art is essentially a moral medium: it teaches us behavior to avoid, illustrates survival mechanisms worthy of emulation, and extols the virtues inherent in experiencing personal tragedy without being overwhelmed by it. King would have us understand that classical tragedy and horror art are related. (Magistrale and Morrison 1996, 3) In addition to the cathartic process suggested in this quote, the horror film’s dichotomy between the stable status quo of normality and the shockingly disruptive moment of horror also rehearses tragedy’s genealogy famously articulated by Nietzsche (1872): the terrifying carnal pleasures of Dionysian excess formalized through a dialectic confrontation with the static Apollonian principles of order, civility and normality. Or as King himself puts it in his essay on the topic, Danse Macabre (1980):  “the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence” (King 1980, 368). Tragic theatricality, this book suggests, is thus the essence of horror cinema.

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Chapter 2 HORROR, REALISM AND THEATRICALITY Before proceeding with my argument on theatricality in horror cinema, it is important to address the fact that many horror films adopt a realistic style to depict terrifying actions performed by ordinary people in commonplace settings, seemingly rejecting ostentatious artifice. From Roberta and Michael Findlay’s psycho-​ voyeur experiment, Take Me Naked (1966), to M.  Night Shyamalan’s gerontophobic The Visit (2015), cinematic tales of terror often rely on documentary realism to create unsettling worst-​ case scenarios where normality suddenly becomes petrifyingly bizarre. Perhaps the most notorious example of this trend is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986, John McNaughton), which at the time of its release “was marketed as an authentic account of the serial killer due to its social realist tendencies and faux documentary style” (Aston 2018, 118). On the face of it, the film does appear to be straightforwardly documenting, from a coldly detached perspective, the actions of the eponymous murderer, played by the disconcertingly appealing Michael Rooker. Shot on location in and around Chicago in 1985, Henry avoids the over-​the-​top histrionics of masked killers common to contemporary slashers of the 1980s. Rather, it presents a slice-​of-​life narrative which drearily follows Henry as he hangs out with his roommates, brother and sister Otis (Tom Towles) and Becky (Tracy Arnold), or proceeds to randomly kill strangers. However, as Jon Nelson Wagner and Tracy Biga MacLean point out in Television at the Movies: Cinematic and Critical Responses to American Broadcasting (2008), Henry is a carefully constructed text that “draws on melodrama, role playing, and serial form, despite the trappings of gritty cinematic realism”  (155). Indeed, Henry is surprisingly reliant on artifice to create the horrifying effects behind its realist surface. Most noticeably from the beginning of the film, the soundtrack brazenly draws attention to itself as it underscores Henry’s homicidal deeds. In the first several minutes of the film, interspersed among shots of Henry eating in a diner, driving his car or working as a bug exterminator, images of his victims are accompanied by hauntingly menacing music and sound effects that stylistically isolate tableaus of slain bodies from

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the documentary depiction of Henry’s mundane existence. Visually, some of the killings strikingly depart from gritty realism, sometimes verging on slapstick comedy, as when Henry and Otis kill a man by hysterically stabbing him and smashing a TV over his head. Realism is further destabilized in the scene where Otis and Henry watch a video of one of their more brutal killings. As Otis replays the tape in extreme slow-​motion, the eerily distorted television image and the unnerving non-​diegetic music work together to shatter any pretense of observational documentary aesthetics and displace the viewing experience toward the artifice of self-​referential spectatorship. Realism is finally thrown out the window completely when, as Becky stabs her brother in the eye after he tried to rape her, a combination of prosthetic special effects and Psycho-​like screeching music turn Henry into a typical 1980s slasher. Therefore, even a putatively realist horror film like Henry still contains multiple elements of theatricality that emerge at moments of horror. In what follows, I will clarify my understanding of the contrast between realism and artifice, using as examples “realist horror films” that integrate elements of theatricality within their otherwise dispassionately observational viewpoint to create their terrifying effects. My understanding of realism in film is influenced to a large extent by the theories that French critic André Bazin expounded in the numerous essays he published in the 1940s and 1950s. According to Bazin, the essential realism of cinema emerges first from the “ontology of the photographic image” (Bazin 2005, vol. 1, 9), that is, the ability of the camera to record the real world with minimal human intervention. For Bazin, only a photographic lens can give us the kind of image of the object that is capable of satisfying the deep need man has to substitute for it something more than a mere approximation, a kind of decal or transfer. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. (14) This ontological link to the real exists in all live-​action films, “no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be” (14). However, the motion pictures that are most worthy of Bazin’s attention are those that aspire to fulfill cinema’s realistic potential, allowing the camera to capture reality as it unfolds before it with only the most subtle of manipulations on the part of the filmmaker; giving the spectators the time and space to observe the materiality of the sensory world and decide for themselves what to make of what they see and hear. The epitome of realist cinema for Bazin can be found in the Italian neorealist films of the 1940s and 1950s that present a seemingly uneventful slice-​of-​life in

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a demoralizing postwar setting, revealing through attentive candor and artistic understatement fundamental truths about the struggles of ordinary men and women living in a real environment. Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948) is a perfect example of this. Cowritten by Cesare Zavattini, whose dream was “to make a whole film out of ninety minutes in the life of a man to whom nothing happens” (Bazin 2005, vol. 2, 82), Ladri di biciclette famously revolves around the banal story of everyman Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) who, in the company of his young son Bruno (Enzo Staiola), spends a day searching for his stolen bicycle, which he needs for work. In the end, out of desperation, Antonio himself resorts to stealing another man’s bicycle. The power of this film for Bazin is that De Sica manages to present a deeply engaging narrative without resorting to any ostentatiously dramatic artifice. “The marvelous aesthetic paradox of this film is that it has the relentless quality of tragedy while nothing happens in it except by chance” (68). For Bazin, realism in film is in great part a matter of style—​a style that uses long takes and deep-​focus photography in the service of reality. As has often been pointed out by film theorists like Gregory Currie, “the style called long-​ take, deep-​focus style—​a style which writers like Bazin have argued is inherently realistic—​extends the possibilities for realism in film; it enhances our ability to detect spatial and temporal properties of the fiction by using the capacity we have to detect those properties of things in the real world” (Currie 1995, 107). Thus, realism is a style that presents objects and situations on screen in a way that replicates how spectators perceive their surroundings in reality. As such, it is the spectators’ impression that reality is revealed to them in a familiar way, through certain cinematic techniques, that creates a sense of realism in film. In his recent reconsideration of Bazin’s theories, Maurizio Guercini explains how realist film techniques, which appear to show the world as we generally perceive it, trigger in the spectator a spontaneous belief in cinema’s ability to reproduce reality through a seeming ontological connection to the actual objects it displays:  “la croyance spontanée du spectateur dans la réalité de l’image provoque une sorte de mécanisme psychique de réalisation ontologique, qui accorde à l’image cette part d’être dont elle est structurellement dépourvue mais qu’elle sollicite en vertu de sa propre genèse technique” (Guercini 2017, 93). The impression of reality created by certain films thus results from the spectators’ recognition that the filmmaker is showing the world on film as it is generally experienced and understood through everyday perception. This is what Bazin implies when he writes “the importance of depth of focus and the fixed camera in the films of Orson Welles and William Wyler springs from a reluctance to fragment things arbitrarily and a desire instead to show an image that is uniformly understandable and that compels the spectator to make his own mind” (Bazin 2005, vol. 1, 92).

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Film techniques that produce an impression of spatial and temporal reality compel the spectators to spontaneously make up their minds about the realistic character of the film. In other words, if a film uses techniques that do not seem to interfere with the spatiotemporal continuity of the material world as we perceive it in our everyday life, then it is deemed to be a “realist” film. Realist cinema, therefore, foregrounds its apparent ontological connection to material reality by eliminating all ostentatious signs of a separation between the real and its recording. Conversely, the more the stylistic choices of the filmmaker seem to break this perceived ontological connection between the image and the real, the less realistic the film will appear to the spectator (Guercini 2017, 92). For instance, Eisensteinian montage, which overtly fragments time and fractures space, shatters the impression of a direct link between the object and its image, and as such goes against notions of realism. Bazin was highly critical of such styles and techniques, which obscure the realist purpose of cinema, hence his “famous prohibition against montage” (Jeong 2011, 179). He also always “asserted the essentially ‘realistic’ nature of film in opposition, for example, to the artifice and ‘expressionism’ of the German film of the 1920s” (Braudy 2002, 32). Not surprisingly, Bazin saw a fundamental difference between realism on film and realism on stage, which is always fundamentally artificial. “There is no such thing as a ‘slice of life’ in the theater,” he wrote. The mere fact of showing “reality” on stage immediately “removes it from everyday existence” (Bazin 2005, vol. 1, 89). Bazin did not necessarily reject film adaptions of plays. He insisted, however, that such films must make the artifice of their source a central element of their aesthetic strategy; as Laurence Olivier does in his version of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944) by opening the film on a prologue that sets up what will follow as a performance of the play at The Globe in 1600, thus “not pretending to make us forget the conventions of the theater. On the contrary he affirms them” (Bazin 2005, vol. 1, 87). In their analysis of Bazinian identification in film, Andreas Spiegl and Fiona Elliot remind us that when Bazin expects a film to present him with the ‘theatrical quality of the drama’ what he in fact is looking for is that the circumstances under which such transformations can take place should be—​if not visible—​ then at least palpable or “comprehensible” on the cinema screen too. In our investigation of these issues the term “theatrical” and “theatricality” may be taken as shorthand for the transformation of the “subject” into a “figure” and the transformation of an everyday space into a stage. (Spiegl and Elliot 2001, 39)

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By “figure” Spiegl and Elliot mean a character whose artifice is made manifest on screen, as opposed to a “subject” who is interpreted by the spectator at least to a certain extent as a “real person.” The next chapter will further explore the construction of such figures in horror films that were adapted from stage plays. For now, we shall focus briefly on George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which offers a good example of the distinction between realist “subjects,” who are perceived as actual people, and theatrical “figures” that are clearly artificial and meant to perform a symbolic function rather than incarnating realistic personalities. From Ben (Duane Jones) the pragmatic survivor and Harry (Karl Hardman) the reactionary family man to Harry’s resentfully submissive wife Helen (Marilyn Eastman) and Barbara (Judith O’Dea) the petrified young woman who just witnessed the violent death of brother Johnny (Russell Streiner), the handful of characters who are trapped in a small farmhouse trying to counter the onslaught from flesh-​eating ghouls appear as actual human beings, subjects with fears, hopes, prejudices and aspirations. The ghouls, on the other hand, with their eerily slow pace, uncannily drifting gait and blank faces made up to look like rotting cadavers, are purposefully devoid of subjectivity. They appear as mindless figures, whose role in the film is to serve as a terrifying omen of horrible things to come: the imminent destruction of civil society. From the beginning of the film, Romero signals that Night of the Living Dead will oscillate between subjects and figures, between realism and theatricality. In The Cinema of George A.  Romero (2015), Tony Williams describes the opening scene of the film, when Barbara and Johnny visit their father’s grave. At first, brother and sister are observed bitterly bickering, the way hostile siblings might appear in a realist docudrama on toxic family dynamics. Johnny acerbically teases Barbara about being scared of what seems to be a vagrant walking in the cemetery, while she scornfully scolds her exasperating younger brother for his juvenile behavior. Barbara’s passive-​aggressive hold on her brother and her moralistic criticisms of his infrequent church attendance clearly represent revenge for her humiliation by the sadistic games he played on her in early childhood. Although she comments, “Stop it. You’re acting like a child,” she also falls into childhood fears as well as having feelings of shame concerning family responsibility towards the stumbling man Johnny taunts. However, as she appears to be just about to apologise for her brother’s regressive behaviour the man attacks her. At this point of the film, camera angles and movement become more destabilised with canted shots and shaky handheld movements prominent during the

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assault and chase scenes. The style abruptly changes from a documentary realist approach […] towards the dangerous visual instability associated with crime and horror genres. (Williams 2015, 30) While Bazin might have appreciated the first few moments of Night of the Living Dead (if he had lived long enough to see the film in 1968), since they reproduce the modes of perception of everyday reality, he would have likely been critical of the expressionistic camerawork and fragmented editing that depict the ghoul’s attack against Barbara, for these techniques weaken the perceived ontological connection between the real and its image. But for our purposes, this shift from realism to the stylistic excesses of horror functions perfectly to juxtapose the theatricality of the ghouls, as the figurative embodiment of an apocalyptic threat against humanity, and the realistic response of ordinary subjects faced with catastrophic circumstances. It is crucial to note that arguably the most disturbing moment in Night of the Living Dead has nothing to do with the flesh-​eating figures. At the end of the film, when morning comes and Ben alone has managed to survive the ghoul outbreak, a sheriff’s posse arrives on the site shooting zombies left and right. The sheriff (George Kosana) notices movement in the farmhouse and orders one of his deputies to kill whatever it is. It turns out to be Ben, who succumbs immediately from a shot “right between the eyes.” What follows is a moment of documentary dread, which shifts the meaning of the film from “recreational terror” (Pinedo 1997) toward the terrifying political reality of the late 1960s in the United States (Figure 2.1). As Kendall R. Phillips writes, The film’s final moments, as the closing credits roll, consist of a series of grainy still photographs of the disposal of Ben’s body on a bonfire filled with the now dead living dead. The sequence is made all the more disturbing as the photographs seem so realistic, reminiscent of the innumerable newspaper photographs from the war in Vietnam and domestic civil unrest. (Phillips 2005, 98) These realist stills potentially affect the spectators much more deeply than the zombies, who are ultimately more amusing than scary; this is an important distinction between documentary realism and theatricality. While the artifice of horror is thrilling it is ultimately far less disturbing than the realism of some documentary material; which is why those of us who love horror generally prefer this genre over the deeply upsetting actuality of many documentaries. For horror film spectators only pretend to be scared. As Bazin observes, “those who love to go to the Grand Guignol play at being frightened but hold on at the very height of the horror to a delicious awareness

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Figure 2.1  The stills that close Night of the Living Dead evoke actual horrors outside the parameters of the scary movie.

of being fooled” (Bazin 2005, vol. 1, 113). Writing about Stephen King’s oeuvre, Douglas E. Winter observes along similar lines that “the function of realism in horror fiction has always been paradoxical. We have noted that horror fiction serves as a means of escape for its readers, suppressing the very real and often overpowering horrors of everyday life in favor of surreal, exotic, and visionary realms” (Winter 1984, 99). The same applies to the horror film, in which “realism” is a paradoxical device that screams “this is real and could happen to you,” at the same time as it explicitly draws attention to the blatant artifice of the tale. It could be argued the horror film that was most obviously influenced by Bazinian realism is the seminal mockumentary The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez). The film claims to present actual footage recovered following the disappearance of three students trying to make a documentary on the elusive Blair Witch. As Peter Turner writes in his book-​length analysis of the film, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez were vitally influenced by the various international new wave movements of cinematic history such as Italian Neo-​Realism and the French New Wave

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[…] Neo-​realism challenged the traditional ways of actors performing their roles by attempting to cast people who would “be” rather than “act” the parts. Attempts to get the actors to be scared rather than to act scared can clearly be seen in the filmmaking techniques employed by directors Myrick and Sánchez. Although the non-​professional actors may not simply be the filmmaker characters of the narrative, they are to an extent “being” scared as opposed to acting scared thanks to the real directors’ method techniques. (Turner 2015,  34–​35) Like De Sica, who hired nonactors Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola to be Antonio and Bruno rather than merely acting the parts of a father and his son, Myrick and Sánchez also hired novice performers Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard and Michael C.  Williams to become the three doomed film students. However, Myrick and Sánchez went further than De Sica by actually abusing their actors to create a greater sense of verisimilitude. To ensure that the actors did not only appear exhausted and scared, but were actually on the verge of nervous breakdown, the filmmakers endeavored to overexert, harass and frighten their cast: “They really slept in the woods at night and experienced the cold and hunger. The production team also kept them walking long distances during the day and kept them awake at night by scaring them” (77). In addition to relying on the authentic actions and reactions of nonprofessional performers to generate an impression of reality in spectators, Blair Witch also reproduces a documentary aesthetic of immediacy and technical imperfection, which has often been used to create a sense of authenticity in found-​footage horror films dating as far back as Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust, released in 1980 (Heller-​Nicholas 2014, 25). The whole film is comprised of the students’ amateurish 16-​mm recording of their failed attempts to find the Blair Witch, and the increasingly disturbing phenomena that they experience as they come closer to the object of their project. The clever “found-​footage” gimmick, which spawned a prolific subgenre, allowed Myrick and Sánchez to produce an extremely cheap film where the lack of aesthetic quality is not a flaw, but an integral part of the narrative. By avoiding the sleek look of Hollywood movies, the filmmakers succeeded in bringing to the forefront the ontological connection between the footage and the reality it claims to depict, “deceiving the viewer into thinking they are watching the actual found footage of three disappeared students” (33). However, the filmmakers’ insistence on creating a sense of raw, unadulterated realism, with excessively unstable camera work, fragmented editing and prolonged direct address, paradoxically draws attention to the

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cinematic apparatus, exposing the constructedness of the entire enterprise. As James Keller observes, The film draws attention to its own fictionality and artifice at the same time that it seeks to convince the audience of the verity of the events depicted and the legitimacy of the Blair Witch legend. This contrast is accomplished through the use of unsteady and ill-​aimed camera shots as well as complete blackouts, all of which draw attention to the camera as a limited and limiting artistic medium as opposed to a window on reality. The audience becomes hyperconscious of the camera’s presence, not because of the artful, well-​designed images, but because there are so few of them. (Keller 2004, 56) This paradox applies to most instances of found-​footage horror. In her book on the subgenre, Found Footage Horror Films:  Fear and the Appearance of Reality (2014), Alexandra Heller-​Nicholas explains, on one hand, the formal construction of these films encourages a sense of verisimilitude and suggests that what is being shown is raw, unprocessed “reality.” At the same time, however, it does this by making it impossible to forget that we are watching a film: If the shaky camera and the regular glitches in sound and vision fail to remind us of this, then the appearance of, and references to, filmmaking technologies in many of these films makes it inescapable. (Heller-​Nicholas 2014, 24) The same is true of faux-​snuff films like Fred Vogel’s August Underground (2001), in which extremely low-​resolution video footage shows the tremendously violent and gory assaults perpetrated by serial killer Peter (Vogel) and his camera-​wielding accomplice (Allen Peters). Vogel’s prototype of torture porn adopts an aesthetics of extreme realism, where “characters are ‘ordinary’ people, the violence unpredictable, ugly, brutal and thoroughly degrading” (Aston 2018, 122). But at the same time “the plot [is] subordinate to the spectacle of killing” (122), which paradoxically showcases the process of filmmaking by presenting “real” murder and mayhem in a way that only cinematic technology can render, thus exposing the artifice of the method. Even a relatively tame found-​footage film like Paranormal Activity (2007, Oren Peli) cannot help but call attention to the cinematic apparatus. The particularly clever gimmick of this film is that it is composed entirely of footage recorded by a surveillance camera that a young couple, Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat), sets up in their bedroom to capture

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evidence of paranormal activity in their new home. The ever-​ present timecode of the video footage, characters looking intently at the camera and, most memorably, a sped-​up sequence during which a transfixed Katie motionlessly stares at Micah for two hours, all work together to underscore the techniques that are used to construct the representation of reality. As such, films like Blair Witch, August Underground and Paranormal Activity “lay bare the device” of cinema, to paraphrase Russian formalist Viktor Shklovskii, in a way that recalls the experiments of early twentieth-​century playwrights and novelists who were “breaking the tradition of realistic motivation in fiction and deliberately revealing the basic technique of narration itself ” (Kolesnikoff 1993, 472). Like Shklovskii, Bertolt Brecht and Vsevolod Meyerhold 90 years before them, early twenty-​first-​century found-​footage horror filmmakers who expose the apparatus are (perhaps unwittingly) “establish[ing] a tradition of undisguised artifice and conscious theatricality” (Eaton 1985, 39). Because realism is generally about the transparent representation of the everyday, self-​conscious excesses of realistic imminence as in The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity and other found-​footage films like Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves), V/​H/​S (2012, Matt Bettinelli-​Olpin et  al.) and As Above, So Below (2014, John Erick Dowdle) undermine their own realist ambitions. Not surprisingly, for Cynthia Freeland realism in horror films is not a matter of adopting a more or less documentary style. Rather, it is a function of the “possibility of their monster” (Freeland 1995, 133). Freeland argues that the core element of “realist horror” is its focus on the depiction of “ ‘ordinary’ men who [are] unable to connect with reality around them.” This is a trend that she traces back to Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell) and Psycho (Freeland 1995, 127)  and is manifest in films as different stylistically as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme). Such films fit under Freeland’s realist horror rubric because they focus on “realistic monsters” (Freeland 1995, 133) as opposed to the supernatural monsters that Noel Carroll sees as the necessary condition to create “art horror” (Carroll 1990, 15). Furthermore, realist horror films are often based on actual killers, whose ordinary monstrosity, cunning amorality and carnal determination fascinate us to the point of erotic fixation. For instance, in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which is based on serial killer Henry Lucas (Figure 2.2), the camera lingers on the good-​looking young actor, Michael Rooker, who plays Henry. He is treated iconographically as a Marlon Brando/​ James Dean angry young rebel, complete with pout, mumbles, short curly hair, square jaw, and white T-​shirt. What is most striking is that

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Figure 2.2  Michael Rooker as a Brandoesque rebel in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

Becky begins to eroticize Henry just when she learns he is a killer—​but isn’t this the source of our fascination, too. (Freeland 1995,131) But even within Freeland’s framework, realist horror films like Henry, Psycho, Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs always contain a strong dose of theatricality, especially in their spectacular killing scenes: Realist horror, whether fictive or factual, like Henry, typically showcases the spectacular nature of monstrous violence […] Although The Silence of the Lambs offers many conventional plot elements, it too allows spectacle a major role. The movie highlights the skinned bodies of Buffalo Bill’s victims and the bizarreness of his underground den and moth fetish. In the outer story, Lecter is an even greater master of spectacle, operating with a Nietzschean aesthetic all his own. We witness one of his grotesque aesthetic acts (almost a piece of performance art itself) when he orchestrates the murder of his two guards as part of a seamless whole that includes his drawings of Clarice with a lamb, a dinner of rare lamb chops, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. (Freeland 1995, 132)

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I further discuss the theatricality of Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in Chapter 5. Suffice it to say here that spectacle is always at the core of realist horror, even in a film like The Silence of the Lambs that produces its haunting effects less through ostentatious displays of blood and gore than through the psychological subtlety of the actors’ performances. It is worth noting here that those few horror films that have earned the praises of mainstream critics have generally been those that display subtle and nuanced realist performances. It is a well-​known bit of movie trivia that Jodie Foster spent a week at the FBI headquarters to help her draw a more realistic portrait of Clarice Starling (Branston and Stafford 1996, 69); to say nothing of the fact that the 1992 best-​actor Oscar went to Hopkins, “whose performance exemplifies the power of playing realistically a character that is not at all realistic” (Clark 2004, 169). According to some, Psycho “is still unparalleled as a horror and suspense film […] because of its realistic acting and eerie atmosphere” (Kathar 2004, 61); one of the keys to the critical success of Se7en (1995, David Fincher) is “a terrifically understated performance by Morgan Freeman as Somerset, the cop a week from retirement” (Mayo 2013, 316). But behind the subtle acting that so impresses critics, there often lies the kind of outrageously grotesque theatricality that fascinates horror fans. Mainstream cinema, as far back as the 1910s, when the classical Hollywood style started to emerge as the dominant idiom of the global motion picture industry, has emphasized realistic acting, which focuses on minimal gestures, restrained emotional expression and understated physicality. As Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment remind us in Realism and Popular Cinema (2000), the histrionic acting style that early cinema inherited from nineteenth-​ century melodrama was very quickly replaced by a more verisimilar code of performance. “Melodramatic actors play to the gallery, using a repertoire of stock gestures and responses to convey particular emotions and character traits, judged by their ability to create striking attitudes and poses in fixed tableaus that present performance as spectacle” (Hallam and Marshment 2000, 21). But as soon as early Hollywood filmmakers discovered the close-​ up, which could focus on minute gestures and facial expressions, screen performers started emulating the understated acting style that characterized realist drama, which had emerged in the late nineteenth century as a reaction against melodrama (Hallam and Marshment 2000, 6–​7). Realist actors were encouraged to accumulate nuances and detail by the scientific observation of real human beings, to make a connection between artistic representation and the actual experiences of everyday life. Within the box set favoured by realist dramatists, the actors play to each other, ignoring the audience, acting as if they are unseen and unheard. ln this

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way, the realist stage aimed to create the illusion of everyday life. By 1912 there was an increasing demand for natural, sincere, unmelodramaric acting in popular film. (Hallam and Marshment 2000, 21) To a large extent, the horror film has remained closer to the “ ‘immoral’ and corrupting influence of melodrama” (22) than most other mainstream genres. This lasting connection between melodrama and horror is not surprising though. As Peter Brooks points out in his influential reexamination of the popular 19th-​century genre, The Melodramatic Imagination (1976), horror is an essential element of the form. While melodrama can be generally described as “a spectacular homage to virtue” (Brooks 1976, 25), one of its necessary dramatic components is that the virtuous character must be confronted with the villainous horror of a nightmarish situation in order to ultimately emerge triumphant: Subjected to horror, virtue must undergo an experience of the unbearable. Melodrama is similar to tragedy in asking us to endure the extremes of pain and anguish. It differs in constantly reaching toward the “too much,” and in the passivity of response to anguish, so that we accede to the experience of nightmare […] Like the characters, the audience experiences basic emotions in their primal, integral, unrepressed condition. From their full acting out, the “cure” can be effected. Virtue can finally break through its helplessness, find its name, liberate itself from primal horror, fulfill its desires. We awake from the nightmare. (35). Brooks’s description of melodrama as a nightmare is significant, for it explains in part the importance of ostentatious performance on the melodramatic stage. From a Freudian perspective, the dreamwork involves a process of “dramatization” that “is similar to the work done by the director of a play who transforms a written text into a theatrical representation” (Quinodoz 2013, 41). In the nightmare, those representations become “fantastic human caricatures” (Jones 1951, 80) that project a stunningly dreadful combination of violence, cruelty, lust and voluptuousness. For Brooks, this means that the melodrama-​as-​nightmare is a form that necessarily breaks with the socially imposed restraints of the “reality principle”: We may now advance the hypothesis that melodramatic rhetoric, and the whole expressive enterprise of the genre, represents a victory over repression. We could conceive this repression as simultaneously social, psychological, historical, and conventional: what could not be said on an earlier stage, nor still on a “nobler” stage, nor within the codes of society.

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The melodramatic utterance breaks through everything that constitutes the “reality principle,” all its censorships, accommodations, tonings-​ down. Desire cries aloud its language in identification with full states of being. Melodrama partakes of the dream world. (Brooks 1976, 41) Melodrama, like the nightmare and the horror film, shatters the realist understatements, moderation and orderly behavior imposed by the reality principle and, however briefly, celebrates in a most ostentatious fashion the return of the repressed. It is not surprising either that the ultimate triumph of virtue usually incarnated in the melodrama by a chaste young heroine (Brooks 1976, 32) finds a direct equivalent on screen in the character Carol Clover has famously labeled the “Final Girl” (Clover 1992, 35), who terminates the outrageous spectacle of monstrous villainy through her virginal perseverance and bookish resourcefulness, and in the process reasserts the values of modesty, prudence and reason. There is thus a fundamental justification for the broad histrionics that characterize melodramatic horror:  the repressed cannot express its return through the realist subtleties and common sense imposed by the reality principle. It can express its difference from realist restraint by being ostentatious and immodest, so that the virtuous modesty and sensible restraint of the chaste young heroine/​Final Girl can emerge stylistically as a repressive counterpoint and suppressing conqueror of histrionic villainy. Villainy can also express itself through excessive coldness and rigidity, which similarly breaks with the proper show of emotions dictated by the reality principle that guides the heroine. This unnatural stillness is generally found in the shrewd and scheming villain characterized by “calculating intellect and emotional emptiness” (John 2003, 63). This type of callous villain is often wealthy and powerful, representing the dark side of nineteenth-​century capitalism and industrialization. He is “an evil capitalist, a corrupt businessman, or a cruel factory owner” (Anker 2007, 97). He tends to be intellectually and socially superior to his mundane opponents: “In melodrama, then, the villain is usually older, more knowing, and better educated than the hero; he is described as cold and calculating; and he uses sophistry in making his case, perhaps with logic or the letter of the law on his side in foreclosing a mortgage” (Westfahl 2007, 152). This rigid emotionlessness incarnates the “Machiavellian villain’s cold intensity of selfishness” that Charles Dickens discussed in his 1856 article “The Demeanour of Murderers” on Dr.  William Palmer, whose cunningly calm and deviously composed persona as a respectable surgeon hid the monstrosity of a serial killer (John 2003, 74). The unrealistic representation of the villain in melodrama thus finds a justification in the need for this character to stand in stark contrast from

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the ordinary, boringly virtuous and commonsensical heroes and heroines of the tale. However, most critics do not appreciate this deep structure of the melodrama, which demands that the acting out of villainy clash with the reality that surrounds it. This explains in part why only those horror films that shun, at least on the surface, the excesses of melodramatic acting are deemed to be in “good taste” by critics (Klinger 2012, 102–​103). But in fact, numerous horror films that appear primarily realistic in style nevertheless retain a strong dose of melodrama in the performance of their cast. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992, Francis Ford Coppola) is a good example of this overlap between serious realism and over-​the-​top performances. According to Thomas Sipos, The performances in Bram Stoker’s Dracula are a sort of “stylized realism.” Assisted by Method acting, actor Gary Oldman’s Dracula shed real tears over the corpse of his dead bride, Elizabeta. In his desire to accurately recreate the film’s 1897 period, director Coppola had flyers distributed to the 400 extras in the London street scene, instructing them on the proper demeanor and mannerisms of Englishmen and women according to their class rank in society. But the cast’s realistic performances are leavened with hints of a stylized theatricality (more than a hint in actor Tom Waits’s scenery-​chewing Renfield) that is more common to 19th century stage actors. (Sipos 2010, 36) This intersection between realism and theatricality in film performances results from the fine line that separates the emotional intensity of realist acting from the melodramatic affectations typical of nineteenth-​century stage performances. Case in point, the mannerisms and idiosyncratic gestures of intensely realistic Method actors in Hollywood dramas often verge on clichéd histrionics. As Thomas Caldwell observes, It is worth noting that what is considered to be realistic acting has changed over time. Performances by great actors like Marlon Brando, James Dean and even recent actors such as Al Pacino and Robert De Nero were once regarded as the height of realistic acting, yet today they can appear very staged, stylized or even clichéd […] In less than fifty years time the popular and acclaimed actors of today will most likely seem over-​the-​top or corny as well. (Caldwell 2011, 41) The difference between the hackneyed affectedness of Al Pacino in the film adaption of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992, James Foley), for example, and the striking theatricality of Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, is that while the former unwittingly plays a theatrical character as though he

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was a real person or “subject” on film, the latter self-​consciously performs his cinematic character as a figure of evil whose identity as a villain is in great part defined by the theater. In The Silence of the Lambs, as in many of the films discussed earlier, surface realism only thinly veils the deep melodramatic theatricality that informs the performance of villainy. I will further examine Silence… in Chapter 5. The next chapter will focus on the performance of villainy in films based on “blood and thunder” melodramas and Grand-​Guignol plays. This heuristic approach will help us better understand how such performances represent a self-​conscious cinematic engagement with theatricality as a mode of terrifyingly pleasurable ostentation which breaks with the boring realism of normality.

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Chapter 3 THE THEATRICALITY OF MONSTROUS VILLAINY IN FILM ADAPTATIONS OF HORROR PLAYS  Leatherface, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger are some of the more obvious examples of how the monstrous figure creates a sense of dread through the theatricality of over-​the-​top performance. Famously at the end of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper), in what James Rose has called one of the most powerful images in the history of horror cinema (Rose 2014, 86), Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) engages in a grotesque dance, wielding his bloody chain saw as he mesmerizingly spins around in the sun, performing a ghastly choreography of melodramatic horror. This is a moment of pure cinematic theatricality, where the monstrous figure’s bizarre performance clashes with the gritty realism of Sally’s (Marilyn Burns) escape in the back of an old pick-​up truck. Similarly, Jason’s spectacular brutality always includes a strong element of theatricality. This is especially obvious in Friday the 13th, Part III (1982, Steve Miner), where the masked killer’s (Richard Brooker) propensity for violently crashing through doors, ferociously tearing off limbs, savagely impaling torsos and crushing skulls is augmented by 3D special effects. Theatricality is even more self-​consciously manifest in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994, Wes Craven), the seventh and most self-​referential installment in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Here, Heather Langenkamp, the actor playing Nancy the Final Girl in the original Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Wes Craven appear as themselves having to battle Freddy, who has now managed to enter the “real world.” Early in the film, Robert Englund playing himself playing Freddy Krueger makes an appearance on a talk show, outrageously hamming it up for the fans in the audience. Englund/​Freddy’s ghoulish histrionics captivate the spectators within the film, thus attesting to Craven’s understanding of the role of performance in the construction of monstrosity (Figure 3.1). A few scholars have paid attention to the question of how monstrosity is incarnated on screen through the actor’s performance. However, there is

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Figure  3.1  Robert Englund as Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.

generally little emphasis on the importance of self-​conscious histrionics as part of the fiend’s appearance. Mark Clark in Smirk, Sneer and Scream:  Great Acting in Horror Cinema (2004) examines performances in horror films, but his interest lays exclusively in the unique appeal of certain horror film stars, from Lon Chaney to Robert Englund. He discusses the personal attributes of individual actors, which allow them “to connect with viewers” (Clark 2004, 7) but does not analyze how the theatricality of overacting contributes to creating the moment of horror. His comments on Boris Karloff are typical of this impressionistic approach: “The slender ribbon that ties together Karloff’s best performances is the disarming sense of vulnerability he brought to the screen […] Off-​screen, he was famously un-​frightening, good-​humoured and genteel. Perhaps from his fundamental kindness sprang Karloff’s unique ability to make even the vilest villains somewhat sympathetic” (14). In the case of Peter Lorre, it is his creepy eyes and what lies behind them, “a painful secret, something lonely and macabre” (66), that explain his ability to play demented characters. As for Christopher Lee, it is his striking physique and charisma that help him command the screen: “Few actors occupy the screen as commandingly as Lee, with his razor-​sharp features and bass fiddle voice. Beyond simple physicality, Lee rivets audiences with mysterious aura and lordly demeanour” (Clark 2004, 119). For Clark, therefore, memorable performances in horror films depend on the actors’ innate gifts, unique appearance, natural instincts or “mysterious aura,” rather than their ability as actors to transcend the limits of mundane, realistic subjectivity and capture the imagination of the audience

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as theatrical figures. This chapter will examine how certain films based on horror plays self-​consciously transfer and adapt elements from the stage to create representations of villainy where the actor’s performance is crucial in evoking the monster’s theatrical threat against realist normality. William Rothman, in “Virtue and Villainy in the Face of the Camera,” offers a thoughtful discussion of the function of the actor in exhibiting the villain’s evilness. But he is primarily interested in how the camera reveals evil apart from the physical performance of villainy (Rothman 1990, 35). While recognizing Rothman’s point about the importance of the camera in creating moments of horror, a point to which I will return later when examining the film adaptation of Giles Cooper’s (1971) Unman, Wittering, and Zigo (1971, John Mackenzie), I would suggest that the performance of the actor is also central, for it is through the theatricality of aberrant presence, rather than strictly cinematic devices, that the monster displays malevolence. The fact that monsters fascinated audiences long before the invention of cinema demonstrates that film techniques are not the only means to create fear in the spectator. Indeed, the typical horror-​film device of first hiding the monster to build up anticipation and then revealing it in all its horrific glory finds its origins as far back as medieval morality plays like Mankind (c. 1470). In Mankind, the appearance of the devil Titivillus, a subversive figure very much as Andreas Spiegl and Fiona Elliot understand the term (Spiegl and Elliot 2001, 39), who scorns moderation and common sense, marks the climactic point of the show, as spectators are solicited for donations before they can enjoy the excessive display of evil (Bevington 1975, 901, 920). Surely, Titivillus’s appeal to medieval audiences had something to do with the captivatingly grotesque performance of an actor who knew how to use movement, voice, masks and props to titillate as well as terrify spectators. Aaron Taylor in his PhD dissertation, “Cain’s Homecoming: Villainy and the Cinema” (2005), discusses briefly the influence of medieval morality plays like Mankind on depictions of villains in film (Aaron Taylor 2005, 13–​14). From Titivillus through Iago and nineteenth-​century melodrama mustache-​twirling fiends to Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) in American Psycho (2000, Mary Harron), the villain is by definition a performer, explains Taylor. The villain is a master of trickery, disguise and deception who self-​consciously plays to, and with, audience members to turn them into accomplices in the spectacle of treachery and betrayals. Taylor’s intricate argument is quite perceptive in its analysis of the spectator’s contradictory hatred of, and identification with, the villain, which are “attributable to [the] character’s very identity as an immoral individual,” an identity externalized through villainy as spectacle (Aaron Taylor 2005, 230). But while Taylor does examine the gestures and postures used by actors to construct the character’s moral identity, he spends

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much less time analyzing performance than discussing ethical responses to, and motivations for, performances of villainy. Taylor’s ultimate goal is to demonstrate that perverse allegiance is conducted in the interest of moral clarification—​ the acquisition of empathic knowledge that not only allows us to broaden our sympathetic faculties for a wide spectrum of individuals, but also assists in perceiving one’s life “as a connected whole.” In short, the imaginative experience of villainy supports one’s efforts to regard oneself as a complete moral being. (Taylor 2005, 238) The spectators’ capacity to identify with villains, Taylor suggests, allows them to experience themselves as moral beings able to empathize with all human experiences, even villainy. Other books, especially collections of essays such as Stacy Gillis and Philippa Gates’s The Devil Himself (2002) and Murray Pomerance’s Bad (2004), also discuss evil characters, but the focus here is either on the narrative function of the villain as symbol of otherness (racial, sexual, social, ideological) or, again, on idiosyncratic personifications of evil. For example, in Bad Tony Williams reads Eric Portman’s villainous roles in the light of the actor’s homosexuality, which colors his performances, rather than in terms of his use of theatricality to upset the constrictive normality that surrounds him (Tony Williams 2004, 157–​71). As much as these studies provide insightful readings of the villainous character as trope, they generally ignore what is right before their eyes: the body of the actor in performance. As an alternative to such readings, this chapter looks at the monstrous villain in film adaptations of stage thrillers as an unsettling composite of performed gestures and sounds that affect the spectator perceptually rather than metaphorically. Steven Shaviro in The Cinematic Body (1993) examines the visceral impact of monstrous bodies in the films of George A. Romero and David Cronenberg (Shaviro 1993, 83–​106, 127–​57) but does not base his analysis of affect on the work of the actors playing those monstrous parts. Similarly, Vivian Sobchack in Carnal Thoughts (2004) devotes a section to the affective embodiment of “scary women” in such Gothic Hollywood films as Robert Aldrich’s 1962 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (Sobchack 2004, 36–​52). But for Sobchack the embodiment of female monsters depends on the types of bodies depicted rather than on modes of performance; it is Bette Davis’s aging body that generates horror, not her use of a melodramatic acting style. Unlike these studies, I propose to discuss the surface of the actor’s performance to argue that, through the theatrical artifice of either ostentatious histrionics or “unnatural” stillness, the figure of the

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villain appeals first to the spectator as a perceptual aberration within the realistic milieu depicted on screen. As mentioned in the previous chapter, mainstream cinema has traditionally favored understated, realist acting styles and has shunned the grandiloquent, physical performances that are associated with stage melodrama. For instance, James Naremore in Acting and Performance in the American Cinema (1988), talks of “the ‘gestureless’ form of classic cinema” (Naremore, 4). But the rigid distinction between subtle film acting and ostentatious, gesticulatory theatrical performance simply does not apply to the excessive signifying modes of horror. As important as camera work and special effects might be, the central weapon in the horror film’s machinery of terror remains the monster’s histrionics, which successfully creates fear in both the victim and the spectator. Naremore unwittingly makes a point relevant to this issue when he writes, “presentational theatrics are possible in movies, but usually they are played for a fictional audience inside the film” (Naremore, 30, emphasis in the original). While he does not discuss the theatrics of the film monster, his observation offers some insight into the performance of monstrosity, for the fiend almost always performs his nefarious gestures to affect an audience before him, inside the film, namely, the victim, terrified by his threatening physicality. My contention, therefore, is that the theatricality of villainy generates horror through the phenomenology of a deviant physicality that threatens unremarkable normality, as the artifice of performance shatters the confines of proper conduct and realistic film acting. While normal characters are made to appear commonplace in keeping with cultural standards of realism, monstrous villainy is performed to create the engaging but disturbing spectacle of deviant behavior. In Chapter 5, I will argue that this applies to monsters in a wide range of horror films. But, as an initial step toward a general theory of theatricality in the horror film, I will start in this chapter by focusing on the theatricality of the monstrous villain in film adaptations of stage tales of terror. Below, I will review a few examples of film adaptations of horror plays to show how cinematic fiends are constructed through theatrical techniques analogous to those used to create the same terrifying characters on stage. Such examination of the passage of villainy from stage to screen has rarely been done. David Skal in Hollywood Gothic (1990), as well as in Dracula (1997) with Nina Auerbach, addresses at length the passage of Bram Stocker’s classic horror story from novel to theater to film, but spends little time analyzing the various physical embodiments of the vampire on stage and their relationship to film versions. He does quote reviews and commentaries that hint at certain specific acting practices, but never seizes on this information to investigate the various aspects of the performance of villainy. He includes several photographs that display

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actors contorting their bodies to incite fear. But he does not peruse the stills as visual evidence of performative practices. More attention has been paid to the acting work of Tod Slaughter, who played many of the same villainous roles on stage and on film from the 1920s to the 1940s. A look at Slaughter’s performance style will prove instructive here. Famous in the 1920s for his excessive stage performances in “blood and thunder” melodramas in England’s “fleapit theatres” (Boot 1995,18) and active in the British film industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Conrich 2002, 67–​68), Slaughter incarnated memorable villains in such masterpieces of the cinema as Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn (1935, Milton Rosmer), Crimes at the Dark House (1940, George King), Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (1938, George King), and most famously, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936, George King). In the 1920s and early 1930s Slaughter made a name for himself as theater actor-​manager, leading a company specializing in over-​the-​ top Victorian melodramas. In the mid-​1920s, he ran the Elephant and Castle Theatre in the working-​class area of South London, where his troupe enjoyed significant success, even attracting the discerning theatergoers of the West End (Richards 2001, 144). In fact, in December 1931, Slaughter “ ‘barnstormed’ the West End” when he “brought his troupe from the Elephant and Castle Theatre to the New Theatre in The Crimes of Burke and Hare” (Play Pictorial 1932, vi). The Crimes of Burke and Hare and other staples of Slaughter’s repertoire were successful in giving audiences what they wanted. “The real theatrical thrill,” said Slaughter, “crime and punishment; mystery; the villain brought to justice” (Richards 2001, 144). A 1926 documentary entitled London after Dark (Harry B. Parkinson) shows a brief sequence where N. Carter Slaughter, as he was known at the time, can be observed in a performance of William Price Drury’s military drama The Flag Lieutenant at the Elephant. Spectators appear riveted by the fast-​paced action on stage and delighted by a bit of comedy performed by a creepily jovial Slaughter. “In 1931, the Observer claimed that ‘probably no actor in England has a bigger public than’ Tod Slaughter” (Killeen 2016, 200). Given his fame, it is not surprising that in 1934 he would make the move from the stage to the talkies. By 1937  “the World Film News acknowledged Slaughter as ‘the last outstanding representative of the real people’s theatre’ ” (200). While achieving recognition on screen, Slaughter continued to perform on stage for the rest of his life. Coincidentally, the last play in which he ever appeared, shortly before his death in February 1956, was the first melodrama he ever brought to the big screen: Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn, based on Constance Cox’s 1902 crime thriller (Pitts 1991, 205). Just like Slaughter never left the theater despite his success in the movies, his film adaptations never fully detach themselves from the stage either.

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Indeed, to me what is most striking about Slaughter’s screen performances is that the theatricality of his villainy is explicitly acknowledged in most of the film versions. For instance, in Murder in the Red Barn, the “players” are first introduced as stage actors who are going to perform the tragic tale of Maria Marten’s horrific murder before the filmic narrative per se begins. This prologue was evidently meant to appeal to spectators who knew Slaughter as a stage actor and were now attending the cinema to reexperience the pleasures of his evil theatrics through the new technology of talking motion pictures. But beyond this, the prologue remains a surprisingly self-​conscious acknowledgment of the direct lineage between the traditions of nineteenth-​century melodrama and the emerging conventions of B movies. While Bazin never wrote about Tod Slaughter’s melodramatic films, which are very far from his neorealist ideal, he would have probably still appreciated this candid acknowledgment of the film’s theatrical origins. Even those films that do not explicitly display a stage still emphasize the artifice of Slaughter’s performances through various devices that undermine any sense of realist immediacy and position the tale of terror squarely within the realm of dramatic fantasy. For instance, The Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936, George King) introduces the gory tale of the serial killer known as the “Spinebreaker” through a radio interview with the celebrated melodramatic actor himself, who describes with ghastly delight his new role as “a fiend terrorizing the whole countryside so that no man, woman or child knew peace or sleep.” In Sweeney Todd, the tale of the Demon Barber appears as a distant flashback eerily told by a modern-​day hairdresser to a terrified client. And in A Face at the Window (1939, George King) an opening scroll, superimposed upon a blatantly artificial decor, sets the stage with frightening fondness for the old melodrama that the viewers are about to see: “France 1880—​A series of unsolved murders—​A country panic-​stricken—​Fantastic stories of Le Loup—​ A Wolf Man. A  wave of terror which inspired this melodrama of the old school—​Dear to the hearts of all who unashamedly enjoy either a shudder or a laugh at the heights of villainy.” This prologue not only evokes F. Brooke Warren’s original Victorian drama first produced in 1897 but also insightfully acknowledges the affection that spectators still have for this outdated form of popular culture, and this, 25 years before Michael Booth’s English Melodrama (1965) first sought to redeem the genre in the eyes of serious theater scholars. As Jeffrey Richards suggests, these references to the theatrical origins of the films were a way to distinguish the original Victorian melodrama, in which the setting of the play was basically contemporary with the performance (i.e., events taking place in 1880 being dramatized in 1897), from the film versions which, by the early 1930s, had already become costume dramas (Richards 2001, 149). The historical distance of the screen adaptations from the issues

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that the original plays more or less directly tackled allowed for a strong dose of nostalgia to permeate the viewing experience of the film spectators, many of whom could probably remember the pre-​cinematic heyday of the popular stage spectacles. The distance from the original context of the plays also allows the spectators to whole-​ heartedly enjoy Slaughter’s joyfully stereotypical performances of villainy. It is a cinema of excess in which Slaughter is in his element, gleeful in his villainy, leering, cackling, eye-​rolling, hand-​rubbing, revelling in lechery and murder but doing it with such eye-​twinkling relish that he makes the audience his accomplices. It is impossible not to warm to him as he repeats his catchphrases in Sweeney Todd: “I’ll polish him off” and, caressing the throats of his victims, “I love my work.” (150) Slaughter’s villains on screen could thus be readily enjoyed without any moral ambivalence, for the artifice of his monstrosity was always rendered evident through the distancing effect of the performance’s purposefully outdated theatricality. In addition to these explicit references to the theatrical roots of the screen versions, moments of horror in Slaughter’s films are generally composed so as to foreground his theatrical presence. Most often, in those moments he is shown in medium and long shots that display his entire body in action. While there are some close-​ups during those scenes, those are secondary to the full body shots that give the film audience a sense of Slaughter’s commanding stage presence. Menacingly hunched forward, shoulders and arms aggressively rigid, hands clawing and gripping, face scowling with terrifying intent, malevolent grin and depraved gaze, Slaughter’s threatening figure is exhibited in all its sordid glory. Conversely, his victims are more often presented in close-​ ups showing their petrified faces. In such moments, spectators might model their emotional responses on those of the victim observed in close-​up, as Noel Carroll suggests (Carroll 1990, 18). But the guilty pleasure of horror is definitely created through the perception of Slaughter’s entire villainous physique shown on screen as it would appear on stage through cinematic theatricality. He exposes in full body shots, with astonishing disregard for realist restraint and understatement, his malevolence before his spectators both inside and outside the diegesis. As Bryan Senn puts it, “Slaughter’s broad performance may lack subtlety, but his gleefully enthusiastic villainy remains quite entertaining to watch” (Senn 2006, 481). Tod Slaughter’s histrionic style self-​consciously harkens back to nineteenth-​ century melodrama and relies on clichés such as devious hand-​rubbing that are obviously not present in all performances of villainy. In fact, even in

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Figure 3.2  The Villain in full theatrical view compared to the victim’s close-​up in Murder in the Red Barn.

Victorian melodramas, the rhetoric of villainy evolved over time, as despicable characters moved away from mustache-​twirling and adopted different signifiers of malevolence. But the one element that remains constant throughout the history of villainy on stage, and I  would argue on film as well, is that evil must explicitly be “acted out” (Brooks 1976, 19). “Acting out” for the villain was indeed so important in the Victorian age, that when realist drama started emphasizing subtlety in the 1870s and 1880s, observers as astute as famed stage designer, director and theorist Gordon Craig saw restraint on the part of these “realist villains” as a sign of sheer ineptitude: I have seen such actors recently in London. The villain of the play comes on the stage smiling: he is quite alone; and though he remains alone for five minutes, he does not dare to tell us that he is “the villain”—​has not dared to let any tell-​tale look escape him, and he fails to explain anything to us. It is called realism—​it is no such thing: it is mere incompetence. (George Taylor 1989, 123) The villain’s acting out was crucial to make manifest on stage the conflict at the heart of Gothic melodrama, “in which a very passive heroine is subjected to terror by the machinations of a monstrous villain” (Lutwack 1984, 110). It was the perceptual conflict between the hyperbolic villain and the subdued heroine that appealed to the fans of melodrama. As Ben Singer writes in Melodrama and Modernity (2001): “Stage melodrama’s aesthetic appeal derived in part from the frank artificiality of its devices and settings. Its pleasures were based on the flux between absorptive realism (or perhaps only apperceptive realism) and the enjoyment of overt theatricality” (178). This flux between the overt theatricality of the villain and the realism of the world

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around him became increasingly evident in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the Gothic melodrama started to recede and the “domestic melodrama reigned supreme,” as Bridget Walsh puts in. “The adoption of a domestic setting enabled the exaggerated excesses of the melodramatic mode to become rooted in a more realistic setting; what Booth regards as ‘the curious paradox of […] a dream world disguised as a true one’ ” (Walsh 2014, 23–​24). The acting out of villainy, therefore, is marked by artificiality defined as difference from the assumed realism of the surroundings and the normal people who inhabit this domestic world. Whatever technique the actor might use, the purpose is to set the monster apart from other characters through the artifice of theatricality. This creates dissonance within the otherwise “realistic” milieu in which the drama unfolds. Realism on stage is comprised of a set of codes suggesting that the characters live in a world not entirely unlike ours, a relatively normal world threatened by an unnatural villain, whose unnaturalness is in great part conveyed through excessive performance. It is no coincidence that, as Richard Hand and Michael Wilson explain, productions of horror plays at Théâtre du Grand-​Guignol often juxtaposed naturalist sets and highly expressionistic performances (Hand and Wilson 2000, 269–​ 70), precisely to create a shock, a terrifying disturbance between contemporary codes of normality and the villain’s acting out of deviance. In the passage from stage to screen, “normal” characters are made to appear realistic in keeping with the standards of narrative film; but the villain remains theatricalized even within a putatively realist cinematic environment. This explains why Sting’s (aka Gordon Sumner) performance as Martin, a satanic rapist, in Brimstone and Treacle (1982, Richard Loncrain) based on Dennis Potter’s play (1978), is purposefully over-​the-​top in contrast to the mild-​mannered, middle-​aged, middle-​class couple, the Bates, whose severely handicapped daughter, Pattie (Suzanna Hamilton), Martin abuses nightly. In one scene in particular, Martin pronounces a frantic prayer before a mesmerized Mrs. Bates (Joan Plowright), exhorting God to save Pattie from her disease. His demonically grandiloquent incantation, accompanied by thunder and lightning, not only clashes with the subdued whispers of the crying mother but also with the realist environment of the suburban house shown through an insert revealing a quiet, sunny backyard (Figure 3.3). On stage, the villain’s performance must evoke theatricality within the already theatrical setting in which the tale of terror unfolds. Thus, in Potter’s original play Martin’s demonic performance is rendered artificial not only through unnatural gestures as on film—​since all gestures on stage are to a significant degree unnatural—​but also through behavior that clashes with the conventions of realist theater. Stage directions introducing Martin read, “He is

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Figure 3.3  Juxtaposed shots of outdoors normality and indoors satanical madness in Brimstone and Treacle.

Martin Taylor, who throughout, more in timing and coy glances rather than direct address, is the only one of the four characters to be partly aware of the audience. This is partly because he is, or imagines himself to be, a demon” (Potter 1978, 5). Potter’s description is particularly interesting because it makes clear that within this realist play, Martin’s awareness of the audience, of the theatricality of his performance, is directly connected to his being, or imagining himself to be, a demon. While the Bates perform their stage normality unaware of their existence as theatrical characters—​imagining themselves to be actual people, as it were—​Martin, as a villain, immediately becomes conscious of his theatricality. He does not merely perform when he pretends to be one of Pattie’s college friends to fool Mr. and Mrs. Bates into letting him spend time with her. Even when he openly declares his villainous intentions to his powerless victim, his speech is explicitly conceived as artifice. Left alone with Pattie, he pronounces these lines with unnatural precision and rhythm before he proceeds to rape her: Now-​the-​time-​has-​come-​to-​see What-​will-​happen-​twixt-​you-​and-​me. You’ll-​find-​the-​Devil-​is-​hard-​to-​beat You’re-​at-​his-​mercy-​my-​little-​sweet. (Potter 1978,  18–​19) The disturbing impact of this scene1 results in great part from the clash between the realist depiction of Pattie, as she desperately tries to defend herself, 1

 The text was originally produced as a television show by the BBC, but it was banned before ever being broadcast because it was feared that the rape scene would be too upsetting for viewers (Potter 1978, i).

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letting out hopeless, meaningless screams, and the perverse nursery rhyme pronounced by Martin as he violates her—​“Oh-​cinammon-​and-​spice/​Ain’t-​ half-​so-​nice/​As-​giving-​a-​girl-​ee/​The-​right-​sort-​of-​whirl-​ee.” This dissonance between the boisterous artificiality of Martin’s devilishly childish verses and the naturalism of the “loud, gibbering noises” (Potter 1978, 19)  howled by Pattie is the source of the sense of horror and dread created on stage by this moment in the play. As mentioned above, horrific dissonance does not result exclusively from broad histrionics; it can also operate through highly static performances, which equally clash with realist mannerism. This is evident in Daughter of Darkness (1947, Lance Comfort) adapted from Max Catto’s play They Walk Alone (1938), in which church organ music triggers a servant girl, Emmy (Siobhan McKenna), to turn into a murderous nymphomaniac. At those moments of horror, Siobhan McKenna in the lead role adopts an awkward trans-​like, sensual vacuity, which signifies her cold monstrosity in the eyes of the gossipy women who denounce her unnatural interest in men. Catto’s stage directions often emphasize the horrifying effect of her motionlessness when she “stiffens with the faintest involuntary gasp” (Catto 1948, 84). “There is something terribly potent in her very stillness” (59), “there is a curious puckered rigidity about Emmy” (103). Bess (Anne Crawford), the first character in the play and the film to perceive the threat that Emmy presents to the local young men who cannot resist her mysterious charms, perceives her as being “as cold as death and oppressive as evil” (87), immediately evocating typical descriptions of the cold, calculating villain of nineteenth-​century melodrama. Emmy’s abnormal rigidity stands out as monstrous especially in contrast with Bess, whose generally calm demeanor transforms into frenzy when she feels that men in her family and village are falling prey to the nymphomaniac. This is especially manifest when Bess believes that her younger brother Larry (Grant Tyler) has been killed by Emmy: She hurries down, goes to the yard door, peering out; then closes door. She runs into the kitchen calling “Emmy, Emmy!” […] Suddenly Bess darts to the kitchen, comes out with coat, which she drags on, darting to the door […] Bess (her voice rising to a scream): You fool, you fool. I tell you—​I know it! I feel it! (All Bess’ sober composure is gone now, she begins to beat the table with her fists.) He’s dead! He’s dead! He’s…. (110–​12) Bess’s agitation appears realistic under such stressful circumstances, as opposed to Emmy’s callous stillness. Even at the very end of the film, when Emmy is

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attacked and killed by the vengeful dog of one of her victims, she remains unnaturally stiff and awkward. In some instances, the villain’s performance oscillates between the two extremes of over-​the-​top belligerence and uncanny inertia. As Adrian May writes, “the devil can be both energy and fixity, an aspect of character which performs a liberating function or a regression into vanity and stasis” (May 2013, 173, emphasis added). An instructive example can be found in Neil Jordan’s Byzantium (2012), based on Moira Buffini’s play A Vampire Story (2008), which revolves around a mother, Clara (Gemma Arterton), and her daughter, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), who have been feeding on the blood of men for 200 years. Clara’s main concern is to protect and control rebellious Eleanor, who is eager to escape the vampire lifestyle by revealing her true identity to normal people around her. Clara best represents the two extremes of monstrous theatricality, ranging from hysterical histrionics to cold-​hearted restraint. When she is about to attack one of her male victims, the literal femme fatale is a paragon of statuesque motionlessness, using her cold and composed voluptuousness to lure men to their gory demise. However, when her daughter is at risk, especially near the end of the film as the members of a men-​only brotherhood of vampires threaten Eleanor, Clara shrieks, claws and tears like a wild beast anxious to defend her offspring. Ingeniously, in the play Buffini splits her female vampires into two characters each, to show them simultaneously in the early nineteenth century and in the present. Clara and Elizabeth exist in the early 1800s, while Claire and Ella exist in the twenty-​ first century. On stage, Clara appears as a feisty Georgian harlot, a “hardfaced slag” (Buffini 2016, 23)  willing to do anything for her daughter Elizabeth. Conversely, Claire is the self-​controlled, seductive modern woman eager to contain the rebellious Ella. The stage directions are telling when Claire, now a barmaid, zeros in on her next victim, Briggs: “Claire watches from behind the bar, pulling a pint in slow motion, her serenity a counterpoint to all the movement—​as if time is standing still for her. She focuses on Briggs, taking note of everything he does” (Buffini 2016, 19, emphasis added). Another example of the villain oscillating between broad histrionics and unnatural self-​control is found in The Mafu Cage (1978), Karen Arthur’s adaption of Éric Westphal’s play Toi et tes nuages (1971), in which older sister Ellen (Lee Grant) has promised her late father to take care of her mentally unstable sibling Cissy (Carol Kane). Cissy is sometimes uncannily calm, saccharinely sweet and childishly loving. But she can also be extremely violent, especially toward the apes that Ellen, with the help of family friend Zom (Will Geer), provides her with for the purpose of drawing anatomical sketches as a peculiar way to maintain some vague sense of connection with their primatologist father. But whether she is gentle or brutal, Cissy always displays a degree of

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unhinged intensity that is markedly different from Ellen’s behavior, an astrophysicist who epitomizes level-​headed normality in the face of her sister’s manic comportment. In the film, Cissy’s excessive theatricality takes two conspicuous forms:  self-​conscious performances of African dances and rituals, complete with traditional garments and ceremonial body paint, which she learned as a child when her family lived in Africa for her father’s research; and her uncontrollable fits of rage, which actress Carol Kane incarnates through over-​the-​top gestures of madness and fury. The delicate balance that Ellen has managed to maintain in their jungle-​ decorated mansion starts to unravel when she witnesses Cissy’s violent attack against her latest “Mafu,” an orangutan. In the past, she had always believed that Cissy’s apes had died accidently. Observing her sister brutally beat the chained animal to death leads her to terminate the supply of primates. Simultaneously, she starts developing a romantic interest in a colleague at the observatory, David (James Olson), which triggers Cissy’s incestuous jealousy. While Ellen is away on a brief research trip, David decides to visit Cissy. The young woman fools him into going into the Mafu cage, where she chains him to the wall. When Ellen returns, all seems normal. The Mafu cage is empty, as it should be. But she notices David’s car in the driveway and, more disturbingly, sees an uncanny sketch of David as an ape. Ellen now understands that her indulgence of her sister’s irrational behavior has not only caused great suffering for countless animals but has also cost David his life. Realizing that she has been found, Cissy captures Ellen with a net, imprisons her in the Mafu cage and kills her. Perhaps realizing what she has done, Cissy wails and cries as she disposes of the body. She then locks herself up in the Mafu cage. In the original French-​language play, Adèle is the normal sister who seeks to contain Ernestine’s manic insanity. There is no love interest in the play. The equivalent to David is an anonymous door-​to-​door salesman only referred to as L’Homme, “the man,” whom Ernestine locks up in a cage. But Adèle returns home before any real damage is done and manages to buy L’Homme’s silence about his ordeal with 700 francs. In spite of the differences between the play and the film, Ernestine’s monstrosity is as dichotomous as Cissy’s. Before L’Homme leaves the premises with his money, Ernestine asks him to describe how she behaved when she attacked him. L’Homme responds:  “Froide, déterminée, inhumaine”—​cold, determined, inhuman (Westphal 1972, 83). While this callous emotionlessness characterizes some of Ernestine’s behavior, at other times she is frantic, agitated and uncontrollable, as when she maniacally goes on and on telling her sister how wonderful life would be if only Adèle had the courage to kill her deranged younger sibling. After Ernestine’s “exalted” dithyramb (Westphal 1972, 69), Adèle literally calls her sister a monster and pleads with her to try to behave “normally” (Westphal

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1972, 70). But Ernestine cannot be normal. As she keeps Adèle chained to a chair and starves her to death in the final scene, Ernestine’s behavior ranges from violently cruel to freakishly calm, pealing fruit in preparation for dinner and explaining on an imaginary phone that she, herself, is already dead (Westphal 1972, 92–​93). Similarly, in John Mackenzie’s adaptation of Giles Cooper’s Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971), the monsters range in their behavior from rigid politeness to chaotic violence. The drama revolves around John Ebony (David Hemmings), a schoolmaster who is hired at a boys’ school halfway through the term to replace Mr. Pelham, who fell to his death off a nearby cliff. On his first day, Ebony learns from his teenage students that they were the ones who killed Pelham, crushing his skull with stones and throwing him down the precipice into the crashing waves, because he tried to discipline them. They imply that the same could happen to him, but they would rather “work out a modus vivendi,” whereby the pupils and the master could “peacefully coexist” (Cooper 1971, 24). The arrangement is that Ebony would teach the brighter students half the time, to prepare them for university, while ignoring the other students; during the other half, he would facilitate their betting on horse races. The schoolmaster agrees to the arrangement as a way to keep the boys under control while he tries to identify the ring leader and bring him to justice. But Ebony’s efforts to ask individual boys, “Who’s your leader? Who thought the thing up?” (46), lead only to greater frustration as the students stubbornly insist that there isn’t one leader. Significantly, the schoolmaster starts referring to his students as “devils” (26). This is meaningful, for, while the play and the film have no element of the supernatural, the boys’ insistence that they operate as a leaderless multitude clearly evokes the name of the devil as famously expressed in the biblical account of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5:9. “My name is Legion, for we are many.” It is this confusing collectivism that most baffles Ebony and which leads him to eventually break with the “modus vivendi,” which incites the boys to go after his wife, Nadia (Silvia in the film, Carolyn Seymour). As devils, “whose sole idiom is chaos and deceit” (Maggi 2001, 108), the cunning students appear through most of the drama as unnaturally polite boys, sitting straight at their desks and punctuating every statement to Ebony with an unnervingly respectful “sir.” But moments of disorderly aggression transform them into a distorted mass of undifferentiated bodies collectively attacking their victims. In both the play and the film their main target is Wittering (Colin Barrie), an awkward boy whom the others mercilessly bully, physically ganging up on him. But the best example of the chaotic merger of violent bodies appears in the film. In both the film and the play, two boys, Lipstrob (James Wardroper) and Terhew (Michael Cashman), go to Ebony’s

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house while he is away at the pub, with the intention of attacking his wife. But they do not manage to muster the courage to go through with the plan. In the play, that is the end of that. But in the film, they regroup and lure Silvia into the school’s gym. There, the whole class gathers and proceeds to terrorize her. The space being dark with only a few spotlights on their intended victim, the boys become literally indistinguishable. They run around the large room taunting Silvia, often shouting unintelligibly and becoming a bizarre blob of human figures. Here, the camera is an important participant in engendering confusion through the use of dizzying circular dollies and rapid pans that emphasize the destabilizing theatricality of the boys’ performance. Having cornered her, the boys appear ready to rape her. Confusion is accentuated narratively when Wittering, the pathetic victim of the other boys, adopts an entirely different persona. In a cold, calculating and callous tone he tells Silvia: “We are going to show you how grown up we can be … in a very special way. In a way you won’t want to tell anyone about. You won’t dare tell anyone. You will be so ashamed, feel so dirty, so disgusted with what’s happened to you.” As the boys start taking off their pants, Silvia challenges them: “Now that you have succeeded in exciting yourselves, which one of you ‘men’ is going to start?” In yet another confusing spin, the cold-​hearted, implacable Wittering is chosen by his peers to begin, but he collapses under pressure, is unable to get an erection and immediately resumes his previous role as the crumbling target of bullying. This moment gives meaning to the title of Cooper’s drama. While Unman, Wittering and Zigo putatively refers to the last three names on the class roll-​call list, at this moment the bullies figuratively unman Wittering. The boys gathering around the limp Wittering to rough him up allows Silvia to escape. Following this humiliation, Wittering commits suicide, revealing in a note to his parents that he was both the cruel, scheming leader who instigated Pelham’s murder and the wretched scapegoat of the group. Wittering’s shift from motionless, ruthless fiend to quivering, whimpering martyr reflects the two extremes of monstrous monstration. As Harold Bloom puts it, “Satan is both Iago and the ruined Othello, both Edmund and the maddened Lear, both the exalted and the debased Hamlet, both Macbeth poised on the verge of regicide and Macbeth lost in the ensuing web of murder” (Bloom 2014, 180). More often than not, however, the monster adopts either broad histrionics or unnatural stillness. Christian Slater exhibits petrifying self-​ control as sadistic teenager Mark Collins in Twisted (1986, Adam Holebder), based on Jack Horrigan’s play Children! Children! (1970). In both play and film, Mark terrorizes babysitter Helen Giles (Lois Smith), a middle-​aged woman who has recently suffered from a nervous breakdown following the death of her mother for which she was responsible. As Mark’s psychological tortures unfold, using primarily Wagnerian music and Nazi-​inspired speeches on the

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need to dispose of the weaker members of the human race, Helen reacts with hectic gestures and frantic actions that are more ostentatious than the teenager’s callous motionlessness. Yet it is he who appears monstrously abnormal in his static wickedness, while Helen’s hysteria seems normal under the circumstances. In the end, Mark wearing a Pickelhaube physically threatens Helen with a sword. She manages to shove him and he impales himself on his helmet. He eventually bleeds to death. The play is less fatalistic in its conclusion, but even more ominous. In the original, Mark’s parents return home before any serious physical violence is inflected on any character. However, the traumatized Helen warns Phillip Collins that his children might want to hurt him or Mrs. Collins. “You’re trapped here with them,” she says despondently, “and every hour they’re growing bigger, and smarter and bolder; and I can’t help wondering who’s next … Another sitter? … You? … Yes, you! … lock your door tonight” (Horrigan 1970, 64). In the play, 12-​year-​old Mark works with his disturbingly mature eleven-​year-​old sister Susan and, to a much lesser extent, their five-​year-​old brother Bobby to bully Helen. In the film, Susan is a mostly inoffensive five-​ year-​old and Bobby does not exist. But in spite of Susan’s contribution to Helen’s mental collapse in Children! Children!, Mark remains the true source of evil in the play, as he is in the film. His presence on stage is as eerily static as it is on screen. In his first and last appearances in the play, Mark stands as a motionless shadow that threatens the normality of his upper-​middle-​class environment. His first appearance is shortly after Helen’s arrival before the Collins and their friends leave for a New Year’s Eve party: Helen: Hello. I hope I haven’t delayed you, but the transportation is impossible tonight. So much snow. The bedroom door at far Left opens slowly a short distance, and the figure of a young boy is silhouetted against a room bathed in bluish snow-​reflected light. He remains motionless, listening and observing. (11) From the start, Mark is presented on stage as a threateningly still and cold (note the snowy, bluish lighting) figure whose power rests it his unnerving self-​ control. At the end of the play, after Mr. Collins has been informed of the menace embodied by his young son, the last stage directions read: Marc turns and goes into his room, closing the door silently behind him. Philip stands there a few moments longer, staring, deep in troubled thought. Then he reaches up and presses a button on the wall, and the second level lights go out. He turns, goes back into the bedroom, closes the door, and all is in darkness. Then the door to Mark’s room

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slowly opens and he stands there as before, silhouetted against the pale blue light, motionless, listening … waiting. ln a moment, from the darkness at Stage Right, we hear the smooth metallic click of a door being locked (68). This moment illustrates perfectly the power of motionlessness and silence as an effective means for the villain to send shivers down the spine of his potential victims and the spectators. While Slater’s precise and controlled performance as Mark in Twisted is quite adequately unsettling, Patty McCormack as Rhoda in The Bad Seed (1956) probably represents the best example of static, phlegmatic, cold, distant, calculating villainy. First a novel by William March (1954), then a play by Maxwell Anderson (1955) and a film by Mervyn LeRoy—​to say nothing of Rob Lowe’s radically different television version from 2018—​T he Bad Seed tells the story of Christine Penmark (Nancy Kelly) and her perfectly beautiful and well-​behaved eight-​year-​old daughter, Rhoda. Before the story even begins, Rhoda has already killed an old lady for a trinket she coveted; then she proceeds to beat a boy to death, Claude Daigle, because he won a penmanship medal she felt she should have won, and later sets a handyman on fire because he was teasing her about her responsibility in Claude’s death. As Christine gradually comes to understand that her excessively neat, mature and level-​ headed daughter is in fact a remorseless murderer, she also discovers that her own mother, Bessie Denker, whom she only knew for a brief period in her childhood before being adopted, was also a heartless killer. Convinced that she is the one who passed on the “bad seed” of villainy to Rhoda, Christine decides to kill her child and commit suicide to free the world of them both. However, while Christine does succumb to a gun-​inflicted wound (in the novel and the play, but not in the film), the child is saved by neighbors who bring her to the hospital before the potentially lethal dose of sleeping pills can have its full effect. It is instructive to compare the novel to the play and film in terms of the personification of evil. Central to the novel is the idea that master criminals like Rhoda and her grandmother, Bessie, appear perfectly normal. Reginald Tasker, the criminologist whose knowledge helps Christine figure out the truth, argues that villains rarely appear as abnormal monsters: The normal are inclined to visualize the multiple killer as one who’s as monstrous in appearance as he is in mind, which is about as far from the truth as one could well get. He [Tasker] paused and then said that these monsters of real life usually looked and behaved in a more normal manner than their actually normal brothers and sisters: they presented a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presented of itself—​just

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Figure 3.4  Rhoda’s abnormal doll-​like plastic perfection in The Bad Seed.

as the wax rosebud or the plastic peach seemed more perfect to the eye, more what the mind thought a rosebud or a peach should be than the imperfect original form which it had been modeled. (March 1954, 182) The corresponding passage in the play shifts the meaning ever so slightly to avoid mention of villains looking normal: Christine: And do they look—​like Brutes? […] Tasker: Sometimes they do. But often they present a more convincing picture of virtue than normal folks. A wax rosebud or a plastic peach can look more perfect than the real thing. They imitate humanity beautifully. (Anderson 1955, 59) While the cuts effected by playwright Maxwell Anderson to the passage from March’s novel are, in part, for the sake of condensing the expansive literary material into the more concise form of drama, the choice of what has been excised is not irrelevant. Unlike in the novel, Tasker on stage and on film, in which he speaks virtually the same lines, never claims that villains look normal; they are in fact clearly characterized as being different from “normal folks,” by looking more virtuous, more perfect, like plastic fruit, but not more “normal” than ordinary people (Figure 3.4).

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As Cyndy Hendershot points out in her reading of The Bad Seed and other 1950s horror films, “one aspect of Rhoda that is disturbing is her lack of ordinary flaws” (Hendershot 2001, 22). If normality implies the presence of all-​too-​human flaws, then Rhoda is certainly not more “normal” than the norm. Rather, her perfect little-​blonde-​girl looks undoubtedly set her apart from “normal folks.” Chuck Jackson suggests that Rhoda is unlike traditional Southern villains insofar as her “evil cannot be read on her body. She is not marked by deformity or slovenliness” (Jackson 2000, 68)  She remains nonetheless deformed on the inside, as her “ ‘perfect’ exterior clashes with her ‘imperfect’ interior” (68). This is expressed evocatively in the play in one of Christine’s descriptions of natural-​born killers as “poor deformed children, born without pity” (Anderson 1955, 61). Villains like Rhoda and Bessie are deformed, but their innate deformity is not a physically visible one, being tightly concealed behind an image of abnormal perfection. Nevertheless, the deformity is made manifest on stage and on film through the performance of difference: a difference between normal imperfection and performed perfection; normal terror and performed innocence. First, Rhoda is not only a cute little white girl; she is a platinum blonde little white girl. Significantly, this element of the performance of perfection is not present in the novel, in which Rhoda’s hair is “dark, dull, brown” (Jackson 2000, 69; March 1954, 6). On stage and on screen, however, the artificiality of her extreme blondness manifestly contrasts with the natural brown hair of virtually every other character, especially her mother’s. More significantly, throughout the narrative, Rhoda’s “wide-​ eyed and innocent” performance (Anderson 1955, 88)  clashes with the dreadfulness of her deeds. As Jackson notes, “the horror of the text lies in the combination of Rhoda’s performance of ‘innocence’ […] with the act of violence” (Jackson 2000, 69). Rhoda’s performance of innocent indifference in the face of terrifying actions is nowhere more evident than in the passage where the handyman, Leroy (Henry Jones), runs for his life after having been set on fire by the evil little monster. In all three versions, the little girl shows inhuman placidity as the man screams, his clothes, hair, skin on fire, as he tries to run to a pond that he never reaches. But while in the novel, Rhoda casually eats ice cream as Leroy is burning alive (March 1954, 219–​21), on stage and on screen she is uncaringly playing “Au clair de la lune” on the piano (Anderson 1955, 85–​88). Both activities—​eating ice cream and playing the piano—​are equally dreadful in their lack of human compassion. But while the former is a normal gesture, the latter is explicitly defined as a performance. In fact, that the girl continues playing the piano throughout the horrible scene of Leroy’s death is perceived by Christine, herself, as an unbearable performance of villainy. Her lines in the play read:

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[The tune continues in the den] Christine: I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it! She’s driving me mad! [She leaps up and runs towards the den] How can she play that tinkle now? Rhoda! Rhoda! […] It’s heartless; I  can’t bear it! I  can’t, I  tell you! Rhoda! Rhoda! Will you stop that music! [But it continues …] Christine: Rhoda! Rhoda! Stop that music! (Anderson 1955, 73) There is no equivalent to this in the novel. In March’s original, Christine obviously recognizes the horror of the deed committed by her daughter, but she blames herself and never snaps at her daughter for eating ice cream, like she does on stage and on screen when the girl won’t stop her musical performance. The moment of Leroy’s death, in the novel, is marked by guilty introspection on the part of the mother: There was somebody screaming somewhere, and she [Christine] turned to people who watched her and said in a lost chiding voice, “Quit screaming, please! Screaming doesn’t help!” She closed her eyes and leaned against the fence; and then she knew the person screaming was herself […] Then, in sudden resolution, as though summoning the last of her strength, Christine stood up, and, supported by Mrs. Forsythe and a man she’s never seen before, she went to her own apartment, and lay flat on her bed. She turned on her side, thinking this time it was surely her fault. (March 1954, 221–​22) That Maxwell Anderson in the play and Mervyn LeRoy in the film choose to transform this scene into an embodied opposition between normal hysteria and the abnormal performance of indifferent innocence in the form of a childish piano tune, rather than reproducing the introspective character of the original, makes perfect sense. Unlike the fundamentally internal process of cognition involved in reading written words on the page, the stage and the screen demand externalization for the spectator to observe the perceptual, audiovisual signs of theater and cinema. The parallel between Christine’s growing frenzy and the accelerating tempo of the piano tune is a remarkable example of the play and film’s emphasis on affect rather than judgment and morals. What disturbs the spectators during this scene is not the moral question of whether Rhoda’s inability to feel compassion is hereditary or not. Rather, it is the literal dissonance between the mother’s screams and frantic movements, and the daughter’s aggressively antagonistic tinkle. Sounds and visuals alone—​very much apart from considerations of ethics or metaphorical meanings—​create terror in this scene.

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The choice of having the child play music as a sign of performative villainy does have a rationale, though, as it stems from a line by Tasker, in all three versions (Anderson 1955, 55–​56; March 1954, 83), in which he compares murderers to musicians in the precocity of their respective talents. But while this analogy does not go anywhere in the novel, it is implied twice again in the play and the film. The first time during the scene of Leroy’s death, the second at the very end of the story, when Kenneth Penmark (William Hopper) returns from an extended absence to find that his wife has shot herself and poisoned their daughter. In the novel, we learn quickly and rather uninterestingly through narration that Rhoda survived (March 1954, 245). In the play and film, we are held in suspense as to Rhoda’s fate. In the last scene of the play, we see Kenneth grieving over his wife’s death and trying to understand her actions. Through most of the scene, as Kenneth speaks with Tasker, as well as neighbors Monica (Evelyn Varden) and Emory (Jesse White), the spectator has no sense of whether the girl has survived. And then, Rhoda is heard playing “Au clair de la lune” on the piano in the den, bringing joy to her father but sending shivers down the spectator’s spine (Anderson 1955, 96). The film somewhat alters the conclusion, having Kenneth at the hospital waiting to find out whether Christine will survive her wound. Through most of the conversation between Kenneth, Emory, Monica and Christine’s father, nothing is said about the girl. Then, after a brief reference from Monica about Rhoda having survived, we suddenly hear the child humming “Au clair de la lune” with disconcerting indifference as she appears on screen. The visceral impact of these few ironically pleasant musical notes is what demarcates the effect of the novel from the effect of the play and film. In the original literary work, we are guided by the narrator through the thoughts, fears and moral judgments of a woman who discovers a terrible secret about herself. In the play and film, we are terrified by the unbearable (e)motionlessness of a wicked child whose behavior constantly clashes with the benevolent world around her. The two experiences are quite different. While the novel tells us about evil and guilt and invites us to reflect upon these issues, the play and film leave us petrified by the spectacular divergence between 1950s normality and the terrifying progeny it spawned. The ending of the film was deemed potentially so disturbing, especially for “impressionable children” (Simmons 1994, 4–​5), that the concluding scenes were altered, allowing Christine to survive and showing Rhoda receiving divine retribution by being struck by lightning. That such a ridiculously awkward ending still works might be because the spectacle of the girl bursting into flames is actually in keeping with the logic of the performance of villainy, where terror emerges from the dissonance between the normal and the monstrous. Rhoda’s stolidity in the face of human suffering is as strikingly

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discordant with normality as is the thunderbolt dispatched by a vengeful Old Testament God to punish a malevolent child. Not surprisingly, Christine observes somewhere in the novel that “Rhoda has some strange affinity for the cruelties of the Old Testament. There’s something as terrible and primitive about her, as there is about them” (March 1954, 201), something too terrible for mainstream cinema. After the film’s final credits, Christine/​Nancy Kelly is allowed to playfully spank Rhoda/​Patty McCormack in a creepy closing image paradoxically meant to reassure the audience. As the examples reviewed in this chapter show, the acting out of monstrous villainy on stage and on film can take various forms, from broad spectacle to unnatural stillness. All of these performative forms, however, are equally marked by artifice as a threatening deviance from the realism of normal surroundings. This opposition offers a context within which to ascertain other aspects of the horror film’s theatricality. The next step in our analysis is to propose that the horror film does not only borrow modes of villainous performance form the stage but also adopts a fundamental dichotomy at the core of classical tragedy, namely, the tension between the unruly passions of characters and the aesthetic restrictions of cathartic drama. This dichotomy is especially manifest in films that visually and narratively acknowledge the theatrical genealogy of cinema. While not based on plays, the films analyzed in the next chapter expose the profound influence of theater, especially of classical tragedy, on the horror film by using the stage as a locus horribilis par excellence.

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Chapter 4 THE THEATER AS LOCUS HORRIBILIS: STAGING THE PARADOX OF TRAGIC HORROR A number of horror movies are set in theaters and emphasize the artifice of stage performance as both reflexive and constitutive of cinematic terror. As I have discussed at length elsewhere (Loiselle 2012), many of these films use the theater not only as a space where gory spectacles can be staged but also as a physical and conceptual framework within which “real” horror transpires. This chapter will argue that, through this intersection of theatrical and cinematic terror, these films illustrate how screen horror replicates the paradox of ancient Greek tragedy: a Dionysian spectacle of bestial lust and brutal violence contained within a rigid Apollonian image of controlled civility and stable normality (Price 1998). At an even more primeval level, this paradox opposes the crude materiality of animal sacrifice to the transcendental function of rituals aimed at “communicating with ghosts and gods” (Pizzato 2005, 17). The purpose of this paradoxical tension is to achieve a sort of catharsis, where the spectator can enjoy the threatening pleasures of gory excess and devastation, while transcending the fears associated with such petrifying overindulgence through the aestheticism of artistic or religious experience. This catharsis reaffirms “the mind’s ability to envisage everything that threatens the self, to attain a kind of mastery in the process and—​what is more—​to delight in that mastery” (Foster 2017, 79). This paradox thus allows the audience to relish in spectacular carnage while remaining within the safe space of a meaningful formal practice. The theatricality of horror cinema emerges from this same paradox, which is made manifest in those films that use the theater as the ideal setting to showcase terrifying beauty. In his 1827 satirical essay “On Murder, considered as one of the Fine Arts,” Thomas De Quincey sardonically praises the terrifying beauty of murder by linking the bloody deed to the cathartic outcome of tragedy. “The final purpose of murder,” writes De Quincey, “considered as a fine art, is precisely the same as that of tragedy, in Aristotle’s account of it, viz., ‘to cleanse the heart by means

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of pity and terror’ ” (De Quincy 1889, 59). Juan Carlos Medina’s 2016 Neo-​ Victorian Gothic thriller The Limehouse Golem revolves around De Quincey’s argument that murder, when ascertained according to “the principles of taste” rather than morality, can be seen as “a very meritorious performance” (13). De Quincey’s ironic lecture to the “Society of Connoisseurs in Murder” discusses the aesthetic qualities, “originality of design” and “boldness and breadth of style” of finely composed and executed murders (41). In particular, he praises the 1811 Ratcliff Highway murders. Comparing mass killer John Williams to ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus, De Quincey says of the murderer that “he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity” (6). The Ratcliff Highway murders also form the backdrop of The Limehouse Golem. Based on Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, Medina’s film takes place in 1880 in the dark, foggy streets of London’s Limehouse district, around seedy pubs, dingy whorehouses, smoky opium dens and crowded music halls. The film opens on a strange stage performance where a male actor plays a female role with great melodramatic pathos. The spectator understands, in hindsight, that the stage performance shows Dan Leno (Douglas Booth), an actual late nineteenth-​ century comedian well known for his “Dame” roles, offering a queer rendition of Lizzie Cree (Olivia Cooke), a fictional member of Leno’s troupe who has attained fame in the musical hall but dreamed of becoming a serious actress. There soon follows a narrative that focuses on two seemingly separate murder cases. The first involves Lizzie, who stands accused of having poisoned her abusive husband, failed playwright John Cree (Sam Reid). The second revolves around detective John Kildare (Bill Nighy) who must investigate gruesome killings attributed to pre-​Jack-​the-​Ripper serial killer, “The Golem.” The first multiple murders that Kildare is faced with took place at 29 Ratcliff Highway, where 70 years earlier John Williams had butchered the Marr family. Painted in blood on a wall at the scene of the crime, the Golem left a message in Latin: “non minus cruore profunditur qui spectat, quam ille qui facit.” Kildare soon realizes that this is a fragment from a passage by the fourth-​century theologian Lactantius chastising the Roman fascination with gory gladiator spectacles, reproduced in De Quincy’s essay on murder. De Quincy translates the phrase as “the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply imbued in blood than he who passively looks on” (De Quincey 1889, 15). Kildare’s slightly different phrasing evokes the same meaning: “He who observes spills no less blood than he who inflicts the blow.” Passive spectatorship of a horrific event implies complicity. This self-​ conscious reflection on spectatorship leads to a rather intricate narrative, which requires some extensive description. Hopefully, the reader will bear with me as I go through some of the odd details of this peculiar scenario.

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The clue left by the Golem stirs the detective toward the reading room of the British Library where he retrieves De Quincey’s volume of “Collected Essays.” Kildare discovers that the book contains aggressively penned marginalia describing chronologically the recent murders, leading him to suspect that the Golem himself wrote this peculiar diary. The Library’s records show that four men might have consulted the volume recently:  philosopher Karl Marx (Henry Goodman), novelist George Gissing (Morgan Watkins), actor Dan Leno and playwright John Cree. As is typical of Neo-​Victorian literature, historical figures interact with fictional characters, here the latter being the only fictional character on the list. John Cree soon emerges as the link between the two separate murders introduced earlier in the film. Reading the morbid diary entries scrawled all over De Quincey’s essay, Kildare imagines each of his four suspects committing the horrible crimes described. The accounts of the murders, presented as uncannily distorted soliloquies spoken by the suspected killers over images of the horrid deeds, employ highly theatrical language to evoke the spectacle of horror put on by the Golem. The first entry reads: September the 5th, 1880. It was a fine, bright evening, and I could feel a murder coming on. Since it was to be my first show, I decided—​by way of inspiration—​to pay a visit to the site of the immortal Ratcliff Highway murders … But I was a beginner, an understudy, not yet ready for the great stage … Tonight I would start with a small, private rehearsal. Kildare envisions John Cree savagely stabbing a prostitute and gouging out her eyes, concluding, “My first performance was complete.” The detective also pictures the three other suspects describing the murders as “an act of the crowd-​pleasing sort,” “a spectacle that no beholder would ever forget,” “pantomime in its purest form,” “how could any Londoner fail to delight in this piece of theatre.” Kildare briefly focuses his investigation on Leno, especially since his theater company brazenly produces a show entitled “The Limehouse Demon,” which seems to put the blame on an unrecognizably caricatured Karl Marx. But soon, Kildare becomes convinced that Cree is the Golem, who sought fame through spectacular murders after the abject failure of his melodrama Misery Junction, in which Lizzie performed the lead role. The detective feels deep empathy for Lizzie, who grew up in appalling conditions as a sexually exploited child, before she made it on the stage. As a closeted homosexual who has suffered the opprobrium of Victorian society’s homophobia, Kildare sees in the accused actress a kindred spirit who seeks justice in an unjust world. Evidence, especially the similarity between the Golem’s handwriting and Cree’s as it appears in the manuscript of Misery Junction, leads him to believe

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Figure 4.1  The gory spectacle of murder staged by the Golem in The Limehouse Golem.

that Lizzie, refusing to stand by like Lactantius’s complicit spectator, decided to take action against her brutal assassin husband. The detective hypothesizes that, having discovered her ill-​tempered husband was the Golem, she felt compelled to poison him to put an end to the carnage. Kildare manages to temporarily postpone Lizzie’s execution, asking for a brief period of time to speak with the magistrate and try to demonstrate her noble justification for killing her husband. In a final twist, however, Lizzie reveals to Kildare that she, in fact, is the Golem and that she killed her husband when he discovered her hidden identity. Having grown up in an extremely violent environment, murder comes naturally to Lizzie. In a flashback, she is seen pushing a dwarf performer down a flight of stairs to his death after he had groped her. Elsewhere, she smothers the manager of the theater, “Uncle” (Eddie Marsan), when he tries to force her to pose for his S&M pornographic gallery. It is thus easy for her to move on to more spectacularly performative murders when her one chance to be recognized as a serious actress in Misery Junction fails miserably. She performs all the bloody murders dressed as a man and uses her victims as props in ghastly tableaus, including a grotesque crucifixion (Figure 4.1). The theatricality of the murders does not result merely from Lizzie’s perverse aesthetic propensities. Rather, she sees the crime scene as a veritable stage upon which she can display the sublime theatrical talent that could bring her more fame than Leno’s third-​rate music hall productions ever could. But Kildare denies her this fame, withholding the evidence that she is the Golem and letting her go to the gallows to be hanged for the unimpressive murder of her husband by poisoning, rather than for her more spectacularly blood-​ spattered slaughters. Ironically, her story is only told as a campy tragicomedy at Leno’s theater in a revised version of Misery Junction, advertised as “a shocker

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in two acts based on the tragic life of Elizabeth Cree, slayer of the notorious Golem.” The denial of Lizzie’s power as a spectacular killer is typical of Neo-​ Victorian literature, at least according to Elizabeth Ho’s reading of the genre in her book Neo-​Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (2012). The mainstream emergence of Neo-​ Victorianism over the past few decades reflects a paradoxical interest in the nineteenth century as a time, not unlike our own, that witnessed unprecedented technological and scientific progress, as well as remarkable literary and artistic accomplishments, but was also plagued by staunch political conservatism, strict social censorship and ruthless colonial oppression. Neo-​Victorian literature is itself imbued with such paradoxical tensions between progress and conservatism. Neo-​ Victorianism readily condemns the repressive mores of Victorians about sexuality. That Kildare’s homosexuality is the object of Victorian censure is a typical late twentieth-​ century condemnation of late nineteenth-​century narrow-​mindedness. But at the same time, Neo-​Victorianism remains troubled by female authority. Most strikingly, Neo-​Victorianism is ambivalent about the iconic figure of the time, Queen Victoria, who embodies simultaneously extraordinary female power and constant subjugation of female agency. This situation was reproduced from 1979 to 1990 by Margaret Thatcher’s disconcerting role as the masculine “iron lady” of British politics. Thatcherism was undoubtedly instrumental in the resurgence of Neo-​Victorian literature in the late twentieth century; after all, Thatcher did call for a “a return to ‘Victorian values’ ” (Johnston and Waters 2008, 11). Speaking specifically about Ackroyd’s novel, Ho points out that anxiety about female power expresses itself more problematically in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. The foil to male impersonator Elizabeth Cree, Ackroyd’s female Ripper figure, is transvestite performer Dan Leno, the star of the London stage. Leno’s cross-​dressing talents on the stage are recognizable, enjoyable burlesques of the traditional dame figure of pantomime: the novel allows Leno to move in and out of his cross-​dressing parts with relative ease and stability […] Unlike Leno, Lizzie’s cross-​dressing—​and by extension, Thatcher’s—​appears pathological, forming the outward expression of the schizophrenia that makes her both a killer and a very good actress. (Ho 2012,  37–​38) Ho’s reference to the “Ripper” is another typical aspect of Neo-​ Victorianism. Influenced by Judith Walkovitz’s 1982 article, “Jack the Ripper and the Myth of Male Violence,” much of Neo-​Victorian literature has aimed to expose how the misogynistic culture of the nineteenth century lead to the

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horrifying violence against women perpetrated by Jack the Ripper. As Ho explains, “The 1980s marked a surge in feminist readings of the Whitechapel murders against the glorification of misogynist sex crime in the cult of the serial killer” (33). More specifically, there has been an effort to demonstrate that the elusive serial killer has been glorified as a model of English masculinity. “Christopher Frayling implies that by attempting to understand and market the Ripper within the context of a media tradition that employed mainly Gothic conventions, the late-​Victorian media had actually created a distinctly masculine and English Masculinity” (32). Ackroyd attempts to shift the narrative away from a masculinist perspective by giving agency to a female character, Lizzie Cree, whose killings can be seen as a sign of her self-​determination. In his essay “ ‘Jack the Ripper’ as Neo-​ Victorian Gothic Fiction: Twentieth-​Century and Contemporary Sallies into a Late Victorian Case and Myth,” Max Duperray describes Lizzie Cree as the heroine of a Neo-​Dickensian thriller. Hers is the life-​story of a Dickensian waif becoming the self-​made woman, tearing herself away from the poverty-​ stricken Limehouse marshes of her childhood to step on to the stage of variety theatres. […] She palliates [her husband’s] incapacity to bring a play to completion by replacing him for the job. Her talent at writing ultimately proves to be an unexpected key to the thriller, giving it a shocking twist as melodrama would have it, and throws a retrospective light on the peculiar mores of the woman. (Duperray 2012, 186) However, the paradoxes of Neo-​Victorianism, both on the page and on screen, undermine the progressive potential of The Limehouse Golem, by subsuming Lizzie’s voice to that of Leno. The final moments of the film reproduce the opening shots with Leno in the role of Lizzie in a way that normalizes his cross-​ dressing while evoking the madness of the murderess. The actress initially cast to play Lizzie in Leno’s tragicomedy, her rival Aveline (María Valverde), dies on stage at the beginning of the show as the result of a prop malfunction during the hanging scene. But the audience’s shock lasts only a brief moment, as the stage quickly theatricalizes even the most terrible of deaths. Within seconds, the spectators are cheering again, enthusiastically acclaiming Leno who readily steps into the role of Lizzie, absorbing her agency through his theatricality. As the audience applauds their favorite cross-​dressing star, Leno gradually becomes Lizzie, soaking in the adulation from “her” adoring fans. As Lizzie’s tragedy disappears behind Leno’s burlesque performance, the horror of the Golem murders is absorbed by the comedic spectacle and vanishes behind the tacky sets and humorous routines.

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The Limehouse Golem thus incarnates the theatricality of horror with direct references to the spectator’s cathartic appreciation for the staging of gruesome spectacles, whose initial Dionysian shock is relieved through the static configuration of the Apollonian form. Unlike Lactantius’s guilty spectator who witnesses actual violence in the gladiatorial ring, the spectators at Leno’s theater are watching a representation that aestheticizes the horrifying reality that unfolded outside the walls of the Palace Musical Hall, and which has now been brought to an end by detective Kildare—​himself in the audience observing Leno’s incarnation of Lizzie. After the nightmare of the Golem murders, the inhabitants of the Limehouse district are provided by Leno and his company with an outlet to purge, as it were, the terror that they have experienced. As Vassilis Lambropoulos writes in The Tragic Idea (2006), paraphrasing David Hume’s “Of Tragedy” (1757), “while the events of the play are themselves awful and the passions they arouse disagreeable, the depiction of painful material by the fine arts ‘affords the highest entertainment’, because painful emotions are transformed by the infusion of the feeling of artistic enjoyment. Artistic qualities balance sorrowful emotions” (Lambropoulos 2006, 17). This is the aesthetic function of both the classical tragedy and the grisly horror film. A related interpretation of the paradox of tragedy is theater’s ability to arouse passions that it then proceeds to regulate. Referring to “Aristotle’s implicit mixing of the Dionysian and the Apollonian,” Linda and Michael Hutcheon explain in Bodily Charm:  Living Opera (2015) that “drama excites the emotions of pity and fear but also regulates, controls, dispels, indeed purges those emotions, in part through the distancing effect of the staged action” (Hutcheon and Hutcheon 2015, 170). Several horror films set in and around the theater explore the clash between unruly passions and regulatory aesthetics, in particular the horrifying consequences of failing to distinguish the uninhibited carnal pleasures of the stage from the necessarily prosaic civility of reality. As I have argued elsewhere (Loiselle 2012, 58–​61), this tension is at the core of Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935), which revolves around a perverse spectator, Doctor Gogol played by the mesmerizingly creepy Peter Lorre, whose irrational passion for horrifying stage spectacles exceeds the theatrical setting and, therefore, must be “regulated” in the broader narrative architecture of the film. Mad Love begins at the “Théâtre des horreurs,” where spectators scream and laugh, and where a nurse is even espied in a corner, mimicking one of the better-​known publicity gimmicks of the original Théâtre du Grand-​Guignol (Hand and Wilson 2002, 71–​72). After the opening shots at the Théâtre des horreurs, where a woman refuses to go in and chides her male companion for bringing her to such a sordid place, the scene moves to the dressing room of the famed actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), where she says a few kind

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words about her most devoted fan, the brilliant surgeon Doctor Gogol. He has attended forty-​seven performances of her current show, Torturée, and now arrives to enjoy Yvonne’s final appearance in the play. Within the first five minutes of the film, Gogol’s fixation on Yvonne is manifest. He stares, with his eerie Peter-​Lorre eyes, at a wax figure of his idol in the theater’s lobby; he becomes jealous when a drunk patron lustfully addresses the wax figure; sitting alone in his private box seat, he gazes with passion as Yvonne is stretched on the rack in the climactic scene of the Gothic drama in which she stars. As she is poked with a white-​hot iron before her jealous husband and screams “yes, yes” in a mixture of pain and pleasure, Gogol slowly closes his eyes in a display of internalized orgasm. The theater arouses irrepressible passion in him that only the peculiar narrative structure of the horror film can contain. While the performance at Théâtre des horreurs has a deep impact on Gogol, the spectacle itself only makes up a small fraction of the film. Most of the plot is occupied with his obsessive love for, and sadistic revenge against, Yvonne. Gogol initially attempts to endear himself to Yvonne, by carrying out a delicate operation on her pianist husband, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive), whose hands were crushed in a train crash. But when she refuses to reward him with her love, which she would refuse him even if she were not married because there is something about him that repulses and frightens her, he plots to incriminate Stephen so he can possess Yvonne. His desire to “own” Yvonne as an object, which is first manifested through his fixation on the spectacle of the woman being tortured on the rack, is further expressed though his purchasing the wax figure he had previously admired in the theater lobby. He brings the wax figure home, plays music for it and has his maid (May Beatty) take care of it as though the statue were human. But the statue cannot reciprocate his love and therefore he must possess the real Yvonne. During Stephen’s operation, Gogol and his assistant Doctor Wong (Keye Luke) did not reconstruct his crushed hands as they claimed they would. Rather they secretly removed the pianist’s hands and grafted the hands of a recently guillotined murderer, knife thrower Rollo (Edward Brophy). When Stephen confides in Gogol that his post-​operation hands want to kill with knives, the vengeful doctor sees a way to get rid of the husband and appropriate the wife. Knowing that Stephen and his stepfather had an argument earlier, Gogol stabs the stepfather, and then appears as a mysterious stranger in dark cloak to reveal the “truth” to Stephen. As he shows his artificial, steel hands to Stephen, Gogol whispers: “Look, I have no hands. Yours, they were mine once … and so, when you knifed your father in the back last night, you killed him with my hands.” He then reveals himself to be Rollo, whose head has been reattached to his body by the surgeon. Petrified by the vision of the knife thrower, as performed by Gogol wearing a bizarre contraption of metal

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and leather around his neck, Stephen runs away in fear convinced that he has murdered his stepfather with Rollo’s hands. It is no coincidence that, as part of his evil plot, Gogol would choose to dress up in this outlandishly artificial costume to play the role of a dead man, for theatricality is everywhere in this film, from the stage performance that triggers Gogol’s fixation to the “Caligariesque” expressionism of the surgeon’s clinic. The most obvious manifestation of artificial theatricality is Yvonne’s wax figure. Near the end of the film, the actress, having entered Gogol’s house and accidentally broken the statue, chooses to impersonate the artificial figure. To avoid discovery, writes J. P. Telotte in his interpretation of the film, she pretends to be that figure, that possessed, powerless, tortured piece of artifice—​which she has, in another fashion, already become. A series of close-​ups points out the agony of that status, as she tries to stifle her natural urge to flee or cry out her very humanity while Gogol plays to the wax figure. (Telotte 1995, 85) When he hears the wax figure scream, as she is scratched by a pet parrot, Gogol immediately believes his Pygmalion fantasy to have materialized (incidentally, the drunken maid who has been taking care of the statue also believes that the real Yvonne is the artificial thing come to life). As voices tell him that “each man kills the thing he loves,” Gogol puts his hands around Yvonne’s neck to squeeze the life out of what he believes to be an animated wax figure. Stephen and the police arrive in the nick of time, and using his new-​found skills, the pianist throws a deadly knife at the twisted doctor, thus achieving the final suppression of the sadomasochistic passion that the opening theatrical production arose. The theatricality of Mad Love is not limited to its brief opening references to the Grand Guignol. Rather it operates as the structuring principle of the whole plot, as it entirely revolves around the spectator’s fanatical urges triggered by the gory tragedy Torturée, which the horror film must eradicate through its implausible but internally logical plotline. This ardent fanaticism is not only present in the spectator who cannot control the passions elicited by the stage. It can also be found in actors and stage directors who become overwhelmed by the power of their own spectacles and bring their unruly emotions into the “real” world around them. Several horror films feature sadistic stage directors who use the theater as their public torture chambers where the paradox of strict discipline and gory excess finds a most pleasantly disturbing incarnation. Theatre of Death (1966, Samuel Gallu), which also acknowledges explicitly the Grand-​Guignol heritage of the horror film, features Christopher Lee in the role of Philippe Darvas, the domineering new director of Paris’s “Théâtre de la

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Mort.” The film opens on a guillotine scene in which a beautiful young blonde ingénue, Nicole Chapelle (Jenny Till), is decapitated for the enjoyment of a bourgeois audience. A voice-​over then gives us a brief history of the theater that deliberately recalls that of the original Théâtre du Grand-​Guignol, which had shut down in 1962 just a few years before the film’s production. Unlike Gogol’s sadism, which always operates behind the scenes, Darvas’s sadism takes center stage. Darvas dominates his actors, hypnotizing them into submission, making them perform acts of unbearable violence. For instance, during a public reading for an upcoming show, The Witches of Salem, he directs his protégée Nicole into using a hot iron to burn the troupe’s leading lady, Dani Gireaux (Lelia Goldoni). The torture would have been fulfilled if an audience member had not intervened before the poker touched the older actress’s face. Darvas is but one in a long line of sadistic stage directors in horror films, such as Sardu (Seamus O’Brien) in The Incredible Torture Show (aka Bloodsucking Freaks, 1976, Joel M. Reed), and Montag (Ray Sager/​Crispin Glover) in The Wizard of Gore in both its 1970 (Herschell Gordon Lewis) and 2007 (Jeremy Kasten) versions. In these films, the theater becomes an arena for repulsive, mesmerizing and sexually charged spectacles in which the male stage director performs excessively violent and gory attacks on female bodies. That Darvas, Sardu and Montag are misogynistic bastards is undeniable. Yet the shear artificiality of the staged violence undoes, at least in part, the disturbing impact of the sexist assaults and foregrounds the theatricality of both the villain and the victim. Both the histrionic villain and the overly eroticized victim serve as theatrical hyperboles used to create an aesthetics of terror that declares its own inauthenticity. While Sardu’s and Montag’s violence against women on stage translates into “real”—​albeit implausibly bloody and gory—​violence offstage, Darvas’s cruelty remains strictly stage-​bound. Although he is portrayed as an excessively unpleasant man offstage, Darvas never actually murders anyone, even if much of the narrative revolves around the suspicion that he might very well be a homicidal vampire. As such, Theatre of Death makes manifest what is implicit in The Incredible Torture Show and The Wizard of Gore, namely that the terrifying deeds of the sadistic theater artist are just for show. Sardu’s and Montag’s “actual” slaughter and disembowelment of “actual” victims are so impossibly gruesome, indulging in such improbable imagery of nightmarish carnage, that the “reality effect” is utterly disavowed. This is not unique to the films considered here. Most of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s canon, including The Uh-​Oh Show (2009) in which participants in a brutal gameshow can potentially win big money but also run the risk of being dismembered and disemboweled if they lose, as well as the entire goresploitation output of Lloyd Kaufman’s Troma Studios and the gorier installments of the “Asia Extreme” phenomenon (Choi and Wada-​Marciano

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2009), like Kôji Shiraishi’s Grosteque (2009), showcase such an overflow of gooey red liquid that the ghastly spectacle eradicates any pretense of realism. As Steven Jay Schneider puts it, “the good horror film and the uncanny tale successfully marshal, cultivate, and maintain chary disbelief […] horror films are generally not as circumspect about maintaining the reality effect as Freud would like” (Schneider 2004, 150). The films that do foreground the artifice of theatrical horror only make the unreality of their scare tactics more obvious than other horror movies. Not surprisingly, at the very end of the original Wizard of Gore, Montag, the master hypnotist and illusionist, is dismissed by an incredulous female spectator (Judy Cler) as a phony, thus asserting the artificiality of his sadistic persona and exposing his “real” acts of violence as mere fiction. The 2007 version of the film, which emphasizes the artificiality of neon lights, expressionistic camera work and CGI special effects, opens with a film noir type voice-​over narration by Montag’s nemesis, investigative reporter Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue): “They say all the world is a stage, and the sucker that I was bought the line. I made myself the star. I built the stage. I  cast the actors […] and you’ll see how it all went to the devil.” By the end of the film, where the past-​tense narration merges with the present tense of the image, it becomes evident that the bloodbath we have witnessed was nothing but a performance staged by Bigelow’s sick mind. Theatricality is foregrounded to highlight the horror film’s own fictitiousness. The sadistic director is not the only figure who can expose the paradoxical artificiality of the horror film. Often it is the neurotic actor whose monstrous histrionics reveal that all the world is a bloody stage. This is the case for the Vincent Price vehicle Theatre of Blood (1973, Douglas Hickox), in which spurned actor Edward Lionheart, believed to have committed suicide after having been denied an award in recognition of his artistic achievements, returns to seek revenge on the drama critics who have slighted him. Lionheart cunningly uses Shakespearean plays as templates for increasingly inventive and bloody reprisals against his scornful enemies. Robert Murphy, Geoff Brown and Alan Burton have said that “Theatre of Blood is crude, witless Grand Guignol” (Murphy, Brown and Burton 2006, 292). While as I  have said elsewhere (Loiselle 2012, 70–​71), Theatre of Blood is clearly an example of Grand Guignol transposed to the screen, many would disagree that it is witless. Neil Sinyard, for one, has described it an “ingenious Vincent Price comedy thriller” (Sinyard 1986, 23). What critics like Murphy et  al. find crude is Price’s flamboyant performance as the avenging thespian. But what is crude for the conservative viewers becomes evocative for queer theorist Harry Benshoff, who sees Lionheart “as a campy madman who busily avenges himself upon the body of heterocentrist discourse via the bodies of its patriarchal agents” (Benshoff 1997, 205). For my purposes, the queer politics of Theatre of Blood—​however

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elaborate and multifaceted it may be, especially when Lionheart appears as the gay hairstylist Butch to get at the only female critic on his blacklist (Benshoff 1997, 214)—​is secondary to the film’s use of theatricality, not only as a mode of display but also as a narrative principle, as in Mad Love. Although there are more numerous and explicit references to the theater in Theatre of Blood than there are in Mad Love, both films function similarly as representations of the paradox of tragedy. Indeed, like Gogol, Lionheart is a character who embodies the kind of Dionysian excess and brutality that is at the heart of the scary movie, but which must ultimately be contained within the Apollonian structure of the horror film. Unlike Gogol, however, Lionheart is at once the embodiment of unruly perversion and the incarnation of regulatory suppression. Not only does he always conceive his vengeful actions as carefully staged enactments of Shakespearean tragedies, but even at the moment of his fiery death he confines the horror of the spectacle to a bombastically kitschy soliloquy inspired by the last scene of King Lear (1606), mourning the death of his beloved daughter, Edwina (Diana Rigg). The campy aesthetics of the film is the most obvious sign of the dichotomy between subversive desire and reactionary restraint through the safe artifice of Lionheart’s comical performances and disguises that create an element of distantiation for the spectator—​more on this below. Shakespearean tragedies at once incite Lionheart to commit atrocious murders and provide the playful frame within which the gory deeds can be neutralized through over-​the-​top acting. Ridiculed by mean, pompous drama reviewers for the excessive theatricality of his stage performances, Lionheart assimilates theatricality to his economy of retribution as he appears in ludicrous costumes for every vengeance he stages. Either as a surgeon who decapitates a man lying in bed next to his sleeping wife (inspired by Cymbeline (1611)) or as a chef who prepares a meat pie out of small dogs, which he then feeds to their horrified master (after Titus Andronicus (1593)), every gesture performed by Lionheart is an act of Shakespearean revenge and every act of revenge is a Shakespearean performance. After the opening credits, played over footage of silent film adaptations of Shakespearean plays that exhibit the sort of exaggerated theatrics Lionheart was criticized for, the first vengeful performance is set in motion. On March 15, 1972, the Ides of March, drama critic for the Financial Times and chairman of the Bermondsey Housing and Redevelopment Committee George Maxwell (Michael Hordern) is called to deal with squatters in an abandoned building. As he arrives at the site, Maxwell is greeted by two police officers who escort him in. There he finds a group of homeless people huddled in a small area of a large warehouse, surrounded by industrial detritus, concrete walls and grids of metal wires. As Maxwell walks among the wretched of the earth, contemptuously poking at them with the tip of his umbrella ordering them to

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leave the premises, some start moving, first slowly and uncertainly, but soon with increased determination and eventually with unbridled aggressiveness. One homeless man grabs a bottle and breaks it ominously, another finds a cleaver, a third one has a knife. As they advance menacingly toward Maxwell, the threatened man appeals to the police officers who remain impassive. As the group of squatters starts chasing Maxwell around this space of industrial decay, the camera becomes increasingly unstable, capturing the action through wire meshes, panning and zooming frantically, until the victim is cornered and stabbed to death by the hobos. One of the police officers starts reciting a passage from Julius Caesar (1599):  “O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers!” (Act 3, Sc. 1). The cop is Lionheart; the other cop is later revealed to be his daughter Edwina. This scene offers a particularly striking allusion to the tension between Dionysian madness and Apollonian confinement. As the dispossessed advance menacingly toward the scornful bourgeois, close-​ups on distressed faces and grotesque bodies, shots trough bars and wires, groaning, laughing and demented taunting all work together to readily bring to mind the insane asylum of Peter Brook’s 1967 film adaptation of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/​ Sade (1964). Brook’s stage production of Marat/​Sade and subsequent film version are often seen as the first full test of Antonin Artaud’s 1930s theories of the “Theatre of Cruelty” (Styan 1981, 112). Artaud’s cathartic goal “to assault the audience’s senses, to cleanse it morally and spiritually, for the improvement of humankind” (Barranger 1986, 271)  is shockingly fulfilled at the end of Weiss’s drama, when the inmates regress into ferocious lunacy, attacking one another and going after the audience within the play. The hectic camerawork, frenzied editing and aggressive cacophony that overwhelm the scene at the end of Brook’s film are clearly evoked in the first murder scene of Theatre of  Blood. The very last shot of the screen version of Marat/​Sade shows inmates confined behind bars, before an audience that remains safe from their attacks. This moment literalizes the strict Apollonian regulation of Dionysian bedlam by showing how the madness that is unleashed onstage is ultimately restrained by the very form that engenders it. Less literally, but no less effectively, the pandemonium of the opening scene of Theatre of Blood is similarly controlled by Apollonian restrictions. This time rather than concrete prison bars, containment takes the form of a highly static and rigid rendition of Julius Caesar, as the scene cuts from the carnage in the abandoned building to Lionheart’s stiff classical delivery of his lines in a conventional theatrical space: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him […] Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest […] Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.” (Act 3, Sc. II). As his audience comprised of hobos becomes

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rowdy, the indignant actor barks:  “Stage manager, discipline in the theatre is your responsibility. Please do enforce it immediately!” “Discipline in the Theatre” are perhaps the most Apollonian words ever spoken in a horror film. The scene then cuts to the even more stiff and stultified meeting of the London Theatre Critics’ Circle, where Maxwell’s absence is dismissively remarked upon until his death is announced. The film’s first 15 minutes, or so, thus deliberately oscillate between distressing chaos and oppressive order as a means to set the stage for the tale of terror to follow. The stylistic allusion to Marat/​Sade that hints at Artaud’s theories is later augmented by Edwina’s reference to the Living Theatre, Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s avant-​gardist experiment in “Theatre of Cruelty” (Styan 1981, 160). As such, Theatre of Blood is not merely a “witty […] self-​reflexive horror film […] [with] knowing self-​reference to the world of theater (and its critics)” (Muir 2002, 306). Rather, it stands as a conscious and cognizant—​and humorous—​addition to a late-​1960s/​early-​1970s artistic movement exploring the nexus between terror and theatricality, patently positioning itself within the broader context of Artaudian experiments. However, it must also be noted that the 1960s/​70s rediscovery of Artaud was accompanied by a growing interest in Bertolt Brecht on the part of experimentalists (Saal 2007, 153). Central to Brecht’s contribution to this revival of the politicized avant-​garde was “the distantiation effect, Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the device made of humor, irony, warning, disillusion, and complicity” (Jablonka 2018, 254). It is not surprising then, that the film’s engagement with contemporary dramatic practices would contrast its indulgence in Artaudian blood and gore with a strong dose of Brechtian distantiation through humor. The campy settings, costumes and performances that position the bloody slaughters within a distancing discourse of derision serve to witticize, or purify, the abjection of Lionheart’s horrid deeds. The film ends with a typically British bit of dark tongue-​in-​cheek irony as the last surviving critic, Peregrine Devlin (Ian Hendry), mockingly dismisses Lionheart’s dying rendition of Lear’s agonizing lamentation as “madly overacted, as usual.” This sarcastic line ensures that any intense emotional reaction to the film’s abject imaginary is neutralized through sly mockery. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971, Gordon Hessler) is another early 1970s film that explores the theater as a site of Artaudian cruelty. But stage cruelty demands that actors strictly respect the fourth wall of conventional drama to restrict madness, violence and lust to the playing area, as in Artaud’s own production of Roger Vitrac’s Victor (1929) where he “suspended empty window, door and picture frames from the proscenium in order literally to create a fourth wall” (Innes 2003, 71). The film exposes the grisly consequences of actors failing to respect this fictional limit. Murders in the Rue Morgue opens on

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a scene reminiscent of Mad Love as a frustrated sadist (Jason Robards) about to abuse a female victim (Christine Kaufmann) declares, “Just as I  once begged for your kisses, now you will beg for your death […] prepare my darling for pain, exquisite pain!” But the impending torture is interrupted by a large ape that bursts into the room and takes hold of the victim. As the woman is being carried away by the ape, she has nightmarish visions of being pursued in meandering hallways by a masked man armed with an axe; these visions reappear throughout the film. The nightmare is then cut short by the police barging in. An officer shoots the ape, but it still has enough strength to wrestle with the sadist and eventually chop off his head with an axe. As the ape triumphantly brandishes the sadist’s severed head a woman is heard screaming. A  cut reveals an audience, terrified, amused and enthralled by what they have just seen: a stage rendition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” performed at Paris’s Rue Morgue Theatre. The sadist and the victim are Cesar and Madeleine Charron, the owner and leading lady of a Grand-​Guignol theater troupe. Shortly after the performance, it is discovered that the man who usually plays the ape was brutally murdered, his face burned with vitriolic acid, and it was his murderer who played the role of the primate during the scene that opens the film. This is the first in a series of bizarre and grisly attacks on current and former members of Charron’s troupe, always involving disfigurement with acid. The murderer is revealed to be René Marot (Herbert Lom), himself an actor, believed to have died long ago. Years before, Marot and Charron were rivals for the love of an actress, Madeleine’s mother, also named Madeleine (Lilli Palmer). One night, during the performance of a Gothic torture play in which Marot, Charron and Madeleine senior were performing, a special effect went terribly wrong and Marot was burnt with real acid. The story goes that a disfigured, insane Marot killed Madeleine senior with an axe and committed suicide. But Marot’s suicide was faked and he has returned to reveal the truth and seek vengeance on his former thespian colleagues. At the climax of the film, Marot confronts Charron on stage and exposes him as the man responsible for his acid disfigurement and as the mysterious axe man who killed Madeleine senior and now haunts Madeleine junior’s nightmares. All of Charron’s troupe had lied to defend their boss and swore that Marot was the insane killer. All but one, a demented dwarf puppet master, Pierre Triboulet (Michael Dunn), who now helps Marot achieve his revenge on those who lied, and especially Charron who disfigured him and killed his beloved Madeleine. After Marot kills Charron, the film closes as it had opened, on a performance of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” But this time, when Marot, again wearing the ape suit tries to abduct Madeleine junior, “real” police officers step on stage, interrupt the performance and pursue

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Marot until he eventually falls to his death from the rafters of the theater onto the stage. Murders in the Rue Morgue is somewhat awkward in its baroque extravagance, and clearly derivative of Terence Fisher’s classic Hammer version of The Phantom of the Opera (1962), in which Herbert Lom also plays a disfigured man seeking revenge (Weaver 1999, 150). But Rue Morgue still remains an intriguing attempt to examine the intersection between the theater of cruelty and the “actual” brutality perpetrated by an actor whose passions are not purged by catharsis. It overtly foregrounds the necessity to restrict terror to the stage lest tragedy spills into the real world. What is most important from my perspective is that Marot’s revenge, triggered by a stage performance gone horribly wrong, is aimed at actors who broke the ancient Apollonian contract whereby Dionysian barbarism, shock and chaos are to be kept firmly within the very strict formal boundaries of theatrical artifice. Marot does not merely kill people because they happen to have been associated with Charron. Rather he seeks revenge on Charron’s actors, who did not only strut and fret their hour upon the stage pretending to be what they are not, but deliberately broke the fourth wall and carried out their pretense offstage. They lied and cheated, causing his ghastly demise. Their mortal sin is to have been performers who failed to see the difference between stage tragedy and real-​life horror. It is no coincidence that his revenge on Charron himself is principally directed at making him tell the truth—​to force him to put an end to his performance—​before he beheads him on stage. By disfiguring and beheading these actors, Marot teaches them a valuable lesson in dramatic theory, on the crucial importance of maintaining the delicate balance of tragic composition between unruly Dionysian carnality and formal Apollonian control. The theater has always been torn between indulgence in extreme spectacles of pain and pleasure and the didactic urge to contain, stifle and suppress such immoderation. As Anja Müller-​Wood observes, “by putting violence, bloodshed and terror on the stage, early modern playwrights demonstrated their ability to rein them in” (Müller-​Wood 2007, 19). Although Müller-​Wood is talking about Shakespeare’s contemporaries, I would argue that the notion of theatrical indulgence in lies and vices and blood and gore as a means to contain such excesses still applies today in various contemporary forms, especially the horror film. In the late sixteenth century, Stephen Gosson argued against the theater in terms of the essential deceitfulness and treachery of actors, whose only purpose is to pretend, being the main attractions in a parade of duplicity. For Gosson, the theater was the work of the devil. Plays, he wrote, are “the doctrines and inuentions of the deuill.” Their material cause is “such thinges as neuer were,” the devil being the father of lies and

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deceptions:  distorted and exaggerated emotions, fantastic events and “many a terrible monster made of broune paper.” Even when treating true events, the poet makes them “seeme longer, or shorter, or greater or lesser than they were.” The formal cause is the manner of representation itself: to act is to lie, and to lie is to sin—​a favorite argument with later Elizabethan critics. (Carlson 1993, 81) The irony is that Gosson had been an actor himself, and his most vicious attack against the theater, Players Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582), adopts the five-​ act structure of Elizabethan drama and explicitly uses an Aristotelian model to construct his argument. So Gosson uses a classical conception of drama to suppress boisterous theatricality. “The theatrical discourse of excess,” says Müller-​Wood, fulfills “the double function of exploring the dramatic value of excess and establishing a moral response to it” (Müller-​Wood 2007, 22). In this vein, Murders in the Rue Morgue uses the stage to foreground devilish theatricality as a means to exorcize it from the theater.1 The film uses blood and gore to expose and condemn unruly, deceitful, malevolent theatricality that cheats spectators into believing its ludicrous tales of terror. Charron’s malevolent theatricality is suppressed by Marot’s own spectacular malevolence. But while Charron is just a lustful, deceitful and violent actor, Marot performs his brutal deeds under the rubric of cathartic vengeance. Of course, the film itself must also punish Marot in the end, for regardless of one’s justification, bloody vengeance is always on the side of Dionysus and therefore must be suppressed by the Apollonian design of conventional cinema to provide the audience with the cathartic experience that horror promises. Murders in the Rue Morgue thus suggests through various levels of performance that horror on stage, and by association on screen, is a dangerously gratifying lie that is summoned for the sole purpose of being drained of its disruptive power. This interpretation of the function of the horror film draws attention to a common misguided criticism of the genre, which accuses cinematic tales of terror of being hypocritical in their simultaneous indulgence in, and condemnation of, gory violence. For instance, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone dismisses the psycho-​thriller Untraceable (2008, Gregory Hoblit) on these very grounds:

1

 As Jacques Bourgaux argues in his book Possessions et simulacres, aux sources de la théâtralité (1973), exorcism always contains an element of theatricality, for the casting out of the devil must also scare the audience into religious submission. Exorcists have always been stage directors:  “Très tôt les exorcistes se transforment en metteurs en scène. Ils ont un message à faire passer mais les exorcisées sont peu dociles et les réactions du public les surprennent parfois. Il faut que les prêtres redoublent de conviction, trouvent de nouveaux effets spectaculaires” (46).

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If hypocrisy was a crime in movies, Untraceable would be facing a firing squad […] The perpetrators of the script think they’re taking the high moral ground, showing us how we’re degenerating into a society of sadistic voyeurs ever ready to log on to the suffering of others. And how are they doing this? By making a movie, directed with graphic intensity by Gregory Hoblit (Fracture (2007)), that shoves the torture right in our faces while inviting us to feel superior. (Travers 2008) But of course, the contradiction that Travers identifies is, in fact, just part and parcel of the paradox of stage and screen horror, as is evident in Murders in the Rue Morgue, whereby Dionysian blood and gore goes hand in hand with Apollonian self-​righteousness. A  horror film that did not simultaneously shamelessly indulge in gruesome excess and harshly condemn such disgusting extravagance would not really be a horror film, would it? There are a number of other films that similarly show actors killing actors to explore the paradox of tragic horror, flaunting carnal terror so it can be neutralized. The Flesh and Blood Show (1972, Pete Walker) is a case in point. A minor cult favorite, The Flesh and Blood Show showcases “lashings of French Grand Guignol melodrama and Shakespearian references and toss[es] in some gratuitous 3-​D effects” (Chipnall 1997, 91). The film follows a troupe of actors invited by an anonymous producer to rehearse a play in a creepy old theater on the English seashore. As the young men and women rehearse their experimental piece, which consists mainly of primitive dances, esoteric gestures and plenty of nudity, a shadowy figure is seen spying on them. Before long, actors start falling victim to a mysterious killer. It is revealed that the serial killer terrorizing the troupe is an old Shakespearean leading man, Sir Arnold Gates (Patrick Barr) who killed his wife (Jane Cardew) and her lover (Stuart Bevan) years earlier during World War II, and in his dementia now seeks to relive the traumatic killings by terrorizing the innocent thespians. The twist is that the original murders happened during a performance of Othello (1603), when Iago’s fabricated romance between Desdemona and Cassio found a manifestation in the “real” world as the unfaithful wife playing Desdemona indulged in a sordid affair with the actor playing Cassio. Flashbacks shot in 3-​D show Gates at the end of a performance of Othello, still in full makeup and costume, catching the lovers in the act. He proceeds to tie them up in the bowels of the theater, where they eventually starve to death. The Flesh and Blood Show thus mirrors Rue Morgue in its assertion that the lust, deceit and cruelty that the theater breeds must be redressed within the logic of the horror film. But unlike in Rue Morgue, the present-​tense victims in The Flesh and Blood Show had no role in the original tragedy. They are just young actors involved in some hippie theatrical experiment. Yet they are guilty:  guilty of being

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actors. When he reveals himself to be the killer, Sir Gates proclaims: “They are all the same, young actors: filthy and degraded lechers. All of them! And the females:  flaunting their bodies, offering their thighs and breasts. Scum! Excrements!” Gates had secretly hired the actors to come rehearse in his theater, knowing that the young thespians would inevitably start indulging in exhibitionism, sexual misconduct and deceit: like his wife and her lover; like all actors. Then he could assuage his monomaniacal compulsion to use the theater to punish the innate depravity of actors. Sir Gates was “an actor who needed to kill actors in his theatre,” observes one of the surviving players at the end of the film. The final twist is that one of the actresses, Julia (Jenny Hanley), is revealed to be Sir Gates’s long-​lost daughter and confesses to having committed one of the murders herself. What is most striking about this finale is not the plot twist itself, but rather that the other actors are hardly surprised at all and barely react to this revelation, thus implying that it is all but natural for an actor to exact deadly punishment over other actors. A very similar plotline appears in the little-​known Canadian film The Clown at Midnight (1998, Jean Pellerin) in which a group of theater students is recruited by a drama teacher (Margot Kidder) to restore an old opera house. Again, the young actors are dispatched one after the other, and again the killer is revealed to be a jealous old man (Christopher Plummer) who had killed his unfaithful opera-​singer wife and framed her lover. Again, the innocent victims are deemed guilty for their indulgence in the theatrical pleasures of dressing up, making pranks, playing violent games and, of course, having sex. Actors punishing actors is also at the center of The Gallows (2015, Chris Lofing and Travis Cluff) and Acts of Death (2007, Jeff Burton); again, revenge is at the core of the plot. In Acts of Death, the actors who are punished are bullies who use the stage as a space for initiation rituals, where they humiliate and abuse new female students before they can join the inner circle of Baxter University’s drama program. But one of their victims returns to strike them with great vengeance and furious anger. On a dark, snowy night, in between rehearsals for Macbeth (1606), things go terribly wrong. New student Angela (Erin Scheiner) overdoses on a rape drug given to her by the troupe’s leading man, Chase (Nathaniel Nose)—​“sadistic thespian numero uno,” as night watchman Gus (Reggie Bannister) calls him. Angela does not die from the overdose, but proceeds to hang herself, in front of her assailant and two other theater students, Felix (Finn Wrisley) and Sabrina (Niki Huey). Chase and his acolytes hide the body and pretend nothing happened. But the following day, theater students start dying in most grisly ways. For a time, the frantically ego-​centric theater professor Eamon, (Jason Carter) is suspected of being the psycho-​killer, wanting to avenge the death of Angela, with whom he was having an affair. But he is also killed, when a rack of spotlights falls on his

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head. In the end, it turns out that Angela’s death, not unlike Marot’s in Rue Morgue, was an act devised by her and half-​brother Felix to exact revenge on Chase. Chase, the spoiled son of the Dean (Bill Vincent) who always gets away with everything, had been responsible for the death of another student, Sandra. He had raped her and she died during the botched abortion Chase’s decanal father paid for. Although Chase is the only one directly responsible for Sandra’s death, all others like him also have to die. “Angela and I vowed revenge,” says Felix, “revenge on you and every one like you”: all those lechers, deceivers and exhibitionists, all those “sadistic thespians” who manipulate others into passive, spectatorial submission. It is significant that Felix spends most of the film with fellow theater students indulging in sex, drugs and petty pranks, before revealing his finale role as a merciless punisher. As such, he perfectly embodies the theatrical paradox of horror, torn between carnal recklessness and moralistic control. In The Gallows actors are again punished by actors. But here the vengeful motivation is less related to a specific urge to discipline lusty and deceitful actors, than to a more broadly defined attempt to expose the theater’s fundamental immersion in sanguinary violence. After all, the theater did emerge from the site of bloody sacrifice. As Mark Pizzato writes in Theatres of Human Sacrifice: From Ancient Ritual to Screen Violence (2005): In ancient Greece the move from ritual sacrifice to more theatrical forms of performance involved a shift in the focus of collective aggression. Instead of an animal as sole “scapegoat,” sacrificed to please the divine audience, to interpret life plots (with a priest reading its open entrails), and to stimulate primal emotions in earthly spectators (with a bloody display and communal meal), the human body became the focus of sacrifice in theatre […] Prior to and during the invention of theatre as a distinct art form, Greek animal sacrifice involved many theatrical elements. Typically, the human participants wore symbolic costumes and ornamentation. Travel to the place of violence was staged as a choral procession with flute accompaniment (as in the theatre orchestra) […] [and] the major set piece was, of course, the sacrificial alter (Pizzato 2005, 22, 24) The Gallows offers an interesting spin on the notion of the theater as sacrificial alter. If the Greek etymology for the word tragedy, “tragoidia,” means “the song of the goat” (Lust 2003, 21), then The Gallows could have been subtitled “The Revenge of the Goat.” The film, which uses the now very commonplace found-​footage gimmick, opens on an amateur recording of a high school performance of the colonial

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period piece “The Gallows” 20 years earlier. At the climactic moment of the play, when character August Benjamin Rutherford is hanged, the student actor playing the role, Charlie (Jesse Cross), is accidentally killed after a prop malfunction. Twenty years later, the rehearsal for a revival of the play at the same school is also being recorded, this time by jock Ryan (Ryan Shoos) who ridicules the acting aspirations of his buddy, Reese (Reese Mishler). But as a typical horny teenager, Reese is actually far less interested in theater per se than in spending time with the lead actress, Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown). Peer-​pressured by Ryan and his girlfriend Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford), Reese agrees to play a prank on the drama club and destroy the set before the première. The trio enters the school’s theater late at night, ready to record their dismantlement of the carefully built gallows. But Pfeifer arrives before the deed is done, having noticed Reese’s car in front of the entrance. Deflated, the trio of pranksters decides to abort their mission and go home. But the doors are locked and the four students find themselves trapped inside the theater where, as would be expected, there is no cell phone reception. This is when strange things start happening:  the hangman’s rope mysteriously appears on the gallows; a television suddenly plays an old news report on the death of Charlie 20  years earlier; ungodly sounds are heard; menacing shadows lurk in the wings. More threateningly, an unseen force attacks Cassidy, and later Ryan, eventually killing them both. The old news report reveals that Charlie was originally cast to play the small role of the hangman, but had to step in and play August when the lead actor called-​in sick. That actor was Reese’s father. The news report also includes an interview with Charlie’s bereaved girlfriend Alexis (Alexis Schneider), bemoaning the unfairness of his death. In time, it becomes clear that the ghost of Charlie has been wreaking havoc. Near the end of the film, Charlie makes himself fully visible in his hangman’s costume and Reese understands that the vengeful monster wants him dead, even if he had absolutely no responsibility in the fatal accident that took place 20  years ago. As Reese stands on the gallows ready to be sacrificed for his father’s minor trespassing of missing the show, Pfeiffer starts frantically reciting her lines from the play. After Reese’s death, Pfeiffer is revealed to be Charlie’s daughter. As the police arrive, Pfeiffer is discovered with her mother Alexis (Melissa Bratton) watching the tape of her father’s accidental hanging. One police officer is hanged by an invisible force, while the other is about to be dispatched by Charlie-​the-​Hangman as the film cuts to black. Unlike Rue Morgue, The Flesh and Blood Show and Acts of Death, The Gallows is a supernatural thriller, and this is significant for it engenders a different evocation of the paradox of tragedy. While some of the scary apparitions in the theater could have been staged by Pfeiffer and Alexis as part of a plot to

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Figure 4.2  The final shot of The Gallows.

avenge Charlie’s death, the invisible force that kills Ryan, Cassidy and the cops is clearly not a human villain. The paranormal presence of Charlie’s ghost on stage suggests the original sacrificial purpose of theater as a medium to connect with another world, with “the divine audience.” In ancient practice, the killing of the scapegoat on the theatrical alter was meant to open up a door to the other side, to reach “gods and ancestral ghosts” (Pizzato 2005, 8–​9). Similarly, the killing of Charlie opened up a stage trapdoor that allowed the supernatural to infiltrate the performance area and add an element of the paranormal to the theatrical. Furthermore, also unlike in Rue Morgue and The Flesh and Blood Show, the victims in The Gallows are not all actors. Cassidy and Ryan especially have no interest in drama. But by entering the theater, the space of ritualistic sacrifice, they became fair game for Charlie’s unearthly revenge. The same way as Charlie had been irrationally sacrificed by the theater 20  years earlier, Ryan and Cassidy are also irrationally disposed of for no other reason than that they are on the stage-​as-​altar. Thus, behind its clichéd found-​footage gimmick and unconvincing acting, The Gallows does shed an innovative light on the paradox of tragedy. Here, it is not about the usual Apollonian impulse to suppress Dionysian anarchy, common to many horror films. Rather the film is about the dichotomy between the very tangible materiality of theater and the sublimation of the real through sacrifice, giving rise to what Pizzato calls “transcendental savagery” (25). At its most primeval, theater is a narrowly circumscribed, earthly form that nonetheless opens up to a boundless space of horror and shock that defy restraint. Not surprisingly,

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unlike the other films, The Gallows does not contain the monster at the end and reestablish stability through aesthetics. Rather, it closes on the death of two cops and an ominous close-​up on the unsettling mask of the Hangman (Figure 4.2). The films examined in this chapter explicitly use the theater as a locus horribilis par excellence to make the overt point that horror cinema is rooted in the paradox of tragedy. The purpose of this exercise has been to develop a heuristic strategy for further explorations of theatricality in horror movies that do not, at least on the surface, make any reference to the theater. In the next chapter, I will suggest that a wide range of horror films, from Dracula (1931, Tod Browning) and Frankenstein (1931, James Whale) to House of Usher (1960, Roger Corman), The Silence of the Lambs, Saw (James Wan, 2004) and It (2017, Andy Muschietti), do rely on theatricality—​even if they do not acknowledge it—​as a means to create their terrifying effects. In particular, I  will focus on how the theatricality of evil characters, the reliance on the three classical unities of drama and drastic stylistic departures from realism are used to generate the films’ tragic vision of carnal brutality, ghastly rigidity and mystical cruelty.

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Chapter 5 THE THEATRICALITY OF HORROR: CHARACTERS, UNITIES AND STYLES The masked killer, the isolated cabin in the woods, the time-​sensitive, narrowly focused plotline revolving exclusively around surviving the monster’s assault and the use of unsettling stylistic effects, those are all central components of the horror film, and not coincidently, these well-​known devices are rooted in theatrical traditions. Some elements of the horror film date back to ancient Greek tragedy, when spectators were first incited to imagine the ruthlessly vengeful Furies who materialize to haunt and torture matricidal Orestes at the end of Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers (458 BC): “They come at me! Hordes of them! Their eyes drip blood […] it’s horrible” (Aeschylus 2007, 112). This chapter will argue that the main elements of drama—​characters, the three classical dramatic unities and styles—​are central to the cinematic tale of terror and reflect the fundamental theatricality of the genre in a wide range of films that do not explicitly refer to the theater.

Characters Horror in ancient tragedy is commonly associated with the grotesque masks of the Furies: “when these dreaded creatures first rush on robed in black, with savage masks and snakes in their hair, there is a panic among the audience” (Baldry 2015, 140). While the mask in Ancient Greece could inspire terror, as in the case of the Furies, it was not its only function. As Agnes Schwarzmaier explains, ancient Greek masks “did not register fleeting emotions; rather, they conveyed the figure’s essential nature, his or her unchanging character and social status.” In comedy, there “were masks for slaves, cooks, parasites, flatterers, and others whose characters were obvious because of their masks.” The mask also served the very simple and practical purpose of making the characters “easier to see from the back seats of large Hellenistic and Roman theaters” (Schwarzmaier 2010, 44). Beyond these pragmatic uses on the ancient stage, the mask has always served multiple purposes in social practices, religious rituals and secular art.

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Citing numerous sources, not only from the fields of theater and film studies but also from anthropology, sociology, psychology and so forth, Sears A. Eldredge in Mask Improvisation for Actor Training & Performance (1996) reports that the mask has five major functions: the mask-​as-​frame, the mask-​as-​mirror, the mask-​as-​mediator, the mask-​as-​catalyst, and the mask-​as-​transformer. The mask-​as-​frame “marks off the boundaries for a separate and unique way of seeing and knowing.” It allows “the participants to step into the other reality of the frame. This requires a willingness to step out of the realm of the ordinary” (4). The mask-​as-​mirror reflects some element of reality, but “rather than mirror nature in a photographic sense, the mask confronts us with a portrait more or less removed from the world of reality” (5). The mask-​ as-​mediator serves “as a mediator between opposite worlds.” The mask “is the mediator par excellence between society, on the one hand, and Nature, usually merged with the Supernatural, on the other” (5). The mask-​as-​catalyst triggers transformation. “Masks appear in conjunction with categorical change. They occur in connection with rites of passage and curative ceremonies such as exorcisms” (5). Finally, the mask-​as-​transformer refers to the mask as “an agent of transformation [which] is the most recognized and discussed aspect of masks in literature.” Quoting ethno-​psychiatrist Werner Muensterberger, Eldredge adds, “man’s need to extend and transform himself must be seen as the prime motivation behind the invention of the mask and its wellnigh universal use in magical and religious ceremonies” (5). While these five functions demonstrate the wide differences among the diverse purposes of the mask, they all have one thing in common:  they all suggest that the mask serves primarily as a means to break with the commonplace practices of the ordinary world. In this sense, whether the mask distorts reality into a grotesque caricature for comedic purposes or creates a transcendental experience that transports the spectator into the realm of gods, it always plays a role similar to that of the monster:  it stands in opposition to the normality of the everyday. In other words, all masks are essentially monstrous. As Kenneth Macgowan and Herman Rosse generalize in their 1923 book Masks and Demons, “all masks have some curious and oppressive sense of the dead made living, the spirit given flesh, the god or demon brought into physical contact” (45). Similarly, for famed Argentine novelist and essayist Jorge Luis Borges “masks are terrifying not only because they hide one’s real features but because on them the expression of character is forever fixed. They are absolutes in a world of contingency and change” (Monegal 1988, 30). But the monstrosity of the mask does change over time, with certain epochs foregrounding its horrific potential more than others. For instance, “during the medieval period, the mask became increasingly associated with evil, sin, and the devil” (Roberts, 1998, 551). At that time, “the Devil was thought to be

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the pre-​eminent masker, hiding his evil wiles beneath an apparently beneficent mask. Masks thus were understood to be devilish in themselves” (Almila and Inglis 2017, 288). Given this link between Satan and the mask, “the Church’s condemnation of the mask as an artifice that plays upon and deludes people” does not come as a surprise (Roberts 1998, 551). By the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition, the mask had become the veritable embodiment of wickedness and malevolence. The Executioners of the Spanish Inquisition were purposefully costumed to petrify their victims. As one eyewitness has reported, The place of torture in the Spanish Inquisition is generally an underground and very dark room, to which one enters through several doors […] When the candles are lighted, and the person to be tortured brought in, the Executioner […] makes an astonishing and dreadful appearance. He is covered all over with a black linen garment down to his feet, and tied close to his body. His head and face are all hid with a long black cowl, only two little holes being left in it for him to see through. All this is intended to strike the miserable wretch with greater terror in mind and body when he sees himself going to be tortured by the hands of one who looks like the very devil. (Bergreen 2004, 145. Emphasis added) It could be argued that the late twentieth/​early twenty-​first century is one of those periods during which the mere appearance of a mask is certain to terrify its wretched beholder, as is evident in the recent trend of home invasion horror films. In The Strangers (2008, Bryan Bertino), You’re Next (2011, Adam Wingard), Torment (2013, Jordan Barker), Hush (2016, Mike Flanagan) and the aptly titled Home Invasion (2016, David Tennant), the intruders are not merely interested in breaking in to steal valuables. They wear creepy masks to purposefully unnerve the residents and create a sense of intense terror in the audience. The short film The Mask Maker (2017, John William Ross) literalizes the metaphor of the devilish mask, as Halloween paraphernalia violently clings to the faces of unwitting thrill-​seekers, turning them into disfigured monsters. This is an intriguing variation on the Canadian cult film The Mask (1961, Julian Roffman), in which an ancient disguise turns mild-​mannered Torontonians into sex-​crazed killers when they put it on. In Faces around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia of the Human Face (2012), Margo DeMello explores the terrifying power of “the masked character” in horror films. From the Lon Chaney classic Phantom of the Opera (1925, Rupert Julian) to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) to say nothing of the innumerable evil clown1 1

 And of course, clowns are scarier these days than they have ever been, given that most of the world seems to be led by clowns, very dangerous clowns.

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movies that have been produced between The Clown Murders (1976, Martyn Burke) and It (2017, Andy Muschietti), the horror film has used the mask to conceal and terrify at the same time. As DeMello writes: In Saw, released in 2004, a killer named Jigsaw kidnaps seemingly random strangers, locking them into a room together and forcing them to either kill each other, or cut off their own limbs, in order to escape. Jigsaw wears a mask of a pig’s face throughout the Saw films. Here again, the mask conceals his identity from his victims and serves to frighten them (and us). (DeMello 2012, 208) The reliance on masks in horror films is often much less literal than what we see in Halloween, You’re Next, Saw and other such movies; yet, even if characters do not explicitly wear masks, they can still look highly theatrical. In the teenage thriller Truth or Dare? (2018, Jeff Wadlow) the teens “possessed” by the juvenile party game don wicked smiles as they devilishly taunt their friends to live up to the challenge of telling the truth or performing a dare. The smiling faces are distorted just enough through cosmetic and visual manipulations to introduce an element of artifice and instill horror. But visual manipulations and makeup are not even necessary to create a “theatrical mask” that can terrify diegetic victims and audiences alike, as is evidenced by Jack Nicholson’s expert facial contortion as Jack Torrance in The Shining (1980, Stanley Kubrick). Beyond wicked grimaces, characters can also be theatrical in what they do, as much as in what they look like. Hannibal Lecter is a memorable example of a character who does not, on the face of it, look particularly “theatrical.” Nevertheless, he still stands as a patently theatrical character in the performance of his crimes. A brilliant psychiatrist who also happens to be a cannibalistic psychopath nicknamed the Chesapeake Ripper Hannibal appears in a number of Thomas Harris’s novels and their film adaptions as an incarcerated killer who is called upon by the FBI to help solve mind-​boggling cases. Like the Limehouse Golem, Hannibal Lecter is strikingly theatrical in the staging of his murders even if, unlike the Golem, he does not explicitly refer to drama in the execution of his crimes. One of the most arresting illustrations of his theatricality appears in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 adaption of Harris’s novel The Silence of the Lambs (1988). Having been asked to help track down the serial killer known as Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine), Hannibal is transported from the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to Memphis, Tennessee. As mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, his escape from the Memphis courthouse where he is held involves a strong element of performativity. Referring to the opening scene of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper), in which

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Figure 5.1  Theatrical crucifixion in The Silence of the Lambs.

a grotesque sculpture of body parts appears in the middle of a grisly cemetery, Brigitte Peucker explains how Hopkins’s Lecter theatricalizes the slaying of two prison guards: In this scene Demme again significantly diverges from Harris’s novel, in which the sculptural tableau that theatricalizes the murder scene in the film does not exist. In Demme’s film, the synesthetic effects of cheater preside over the perverse tableau in which Lecter arranges human material, with Bach’s Goldberg Variations functioning as background music. Here the murder scene as tableau is a crucifixion of sorts, perversely literal, including the body of one of the prison guards whom Lecter has eviscerated and suspended from the bars of the cell, with red, white and blue bunting forming outspread wings behind him. Lecter’s politicized arrangement suggests that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films are not far to seek in this scene. The allusion is confirmed by another grotesque detail that aids Lecter in his escape: he evades detection by participating in the tableau, wearing a mask fashioned from the second policemen’s face. (Peuker 2007, 184) In a more intricate way than Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, whose mask-​wearing reflects the theatricality of horror, Lecter does not merely illustrate the theatricality of the genre but also comments on it. He draws attention to the artifice of violence on screen—​in realistic terms, the crucifixion scene seems rather improbable—​and even showcases the intersection

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between film theater and other art forms, like music and painting; all this without having to overtly mention drama like the Golem does. Several other movie psychopaths, like “John Doe” (Kevin Spacey) in Se7en and “Uncle Eddie” (Don Harvey) in Anamorph (2007, H. S. Miller), theatricalize the scenes of their crimes to highlight the allegorical performativity of cruelty and violence. While “John Doe” stages his tortures and slayings as illustrations of the seven deadly sins, “Uncle Eddie” uses renaissance trompe l’oeil painting techniques to “create stage set at murder scene,” as the tabloid headlines read, that both conceal and reveal clues on his crimes. Both killers equally draw the detectives’ and the viewers’ attention to the nature of murder as a spectacular art form, to paraphrase De Quincey. “What sick ridiculous puppets we are, and what a gross stage we dance on…” as “John Doe” ponders in one of his 2,000 demented journals. In “The Theatricality of Violence in Thomas Harris’s The Red Dragon and Its Adaptations” (2017), András Berze further explores Lecter’s self-​conscious use of theatricality especially in the television series bearing his name, Hannibal (2013–​2015), in which the term “theatrical serial killer” is used, although this term never appears in the novels. Berze points out that, in the series, Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) does not only kill individuals but also cook their organs and serves them in elaborate meals to unsuspecting guests. This is a process of theatricalization which, as Berze writes, consists in the way the bodies are turned into tools of representation […] The Chesapeake Ripper is a theatrical serial killer, because he commits violence upon his victims even after their death by turning them from corpses into puppets that are only the traces of his forceful intervention on the murder scene, from which he is absent. To be a witness in such a scene is to be involved in the violence but in such a way that the witness is also violated. It is intuitively obvious that this reaction is reached because the “puppet” in the scene is a human body. (Berze 2017, 221) The puppet is a clear example of theatricality as it has been discussed in this book, being an obvious artificialization of the human form. Berze returns to the metaphor of the puppet to argue that this figure serves as a symbol of the distinction between the serial killer and a “normal” person. While the latter feels empathy for the suffering of fellow human beings, the former sees people as mere dolls to play with. By committing violence on the victim, a psychopath aims to become the puppeteer of the human being (whom he already sees as a sort of puppet). In the case of a theatrical serial killer, the display of the violated

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body—​the puppet—​is also a way of violating those who witness it. It is an extension of the physical violence through the (normal) operation of empathy. If violence towards the victims turns them into puppets, and the witness to the displayed victim is also violated, this means that the witness is also turned into a puppet. (228) In turning human beings into puppets or dolls, Hannibal resembles countless cinematic serial killers, found in films ranging from The Devil Doll (1936, Tod Browning) and Dr. Cyclops (1940, Ernest B. Schoedsack) to The Row (2018, Matty Beckerman) and Ghostland (2018, Pascal Laugier), who figuratively or literally turn their victims into creepy toys, transforming them into figurines, dummies or marionettes that they try to bend to their will. A literal example is Attack of the Puppet People (1958, Burt I. Gordon), in which deranged dollmaker Mr. Franz (John Hoyt) uses a machine to miniaturize his victims to the size of dolls that he keeps in figurine display tubes as entertainment when he feels lonely. A more sinister version of the display tube is found in The Cell (2000, Tarsem Singh), as serial killer Carl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) traps his victims in large glass enclosures filled with water, where he can observe them as they drown, and then bleaches them and makes them up to look like dolls. Not surprisingly, Stargher’s basement is filled with bizarre dolls, some mutilated, others adorned with animal skulls and birds’ heads. This all refers back to his childhood interest in playing with dolls, a practice for which he was severely punished by his abusive father. Variations on this theme appear in a number of psycho-​killer films. For instance, the 1960s Canadian film The Playgirl Killer (1967, Erick Santamaria) follows an insane artist (William Kerwin) who kills women and freezes their bodies to create an enormous tableau that is meant to give form to his recurrent nightmare. Another Canadian film Le Collectionneur (2002, Jean Beaudin) similarly shows a serial killer (Luc Picard) who creates a large sculpture from the body parts of his victims to represent the perfect family that he never had. A well-​known spin on this scenario can be found in Psycho, in which motel-​ owner-​cum-​taxidermist Norman Bates stuffs the body of his deceased mother and pretends that she is still alive and as domineering as she was before he killed her. The important point here is that the horror film often analogizes the serial killer’s lack of empathy through the uncanny theatricality of the doll or the puppet. The animated puppet is central to Freud’s understanding of the uncanny as an unsettling reexperiencing in adulthood of our now-​discarded childhood belief in animism. As Freud explains, for children who believe in animism, dolls are very much alive and there is nothing frightening about that. The

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uncanny feeling emerges only in adults when a once-​“familiar” phenomenon like a seemingly living puppet is made strange by calling into question the rational beliefs that have suppressed animism. “As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs, we get a feeling of the uncanny” (Freud 1955, 247). The animated puppet creates a cognitive dissonance between adult reason and the disconcerting display of phenomena that tear a giant hole in the fabric of science and rationality, and suggests the alarming possibility that childish fantasies might be true after all. Horror films are filled with uncanny marionettes that inexplicably come to life and perform evil deeds of their own volition. A typical scenario is to have a puppet possessed or otherwise animated by an evil force. In Child’s Play (1988, Tom Holland) and half a dozen Chucky sequels, a serial killer’s soul invades a doll named “Chucky” and uses its body to perform his evil deeds. In Annabelle (2014, John R. Leonetti), Annabelle: Creation (2017, David F. Sandberg) and Annabelle Comes Home (2019, Gary Dauberman) a doll possessed by a demon torments the living to snatch their souls. Ventriloquist dummies also have a tendency to be possessed. Whether it be Hugo from the final chapter of the omnibus film Dead of Night (1945, Alberto Cavalcanti), Hugo from Devil Doll (1964, Lindsay Shonteff) or Hugo from The Doll Master (2017, Steven M.  Smith), all ventriloquist dolls (especially if their name is Hugo!) somehow manage to dominate their “masters” and go on to perform evil deeds the way only uncanny puppets can. A particularly uncanny puppet is “Pinhead” from Puppetmaster (1989, David Schmoeller) and numerous sequels. While he is only about 18 inches tall and has a very small head, hence his name, Pinhead has human-​size hands, which creates a weird tension between the strangeness of his general appearance and the “normality” of his hands. In Puppetmaster, Pinhead is one of several puppets created in the late 1930s by puppeteer-​alchemist André Toulon, who used an ancient Egyptian method to give life to his dolls. Before Nazi spies can steal his puppets, Toulon hides them in a wall panel in the room of a California hotel and shoots himself taking his secret with him. Fifty years later, a group of psychics gathers in that hotel, where they believe a recently deceased colleague might have found the puppets. Unleashed, Pinhead, Blade who looks like a mini Gestapo assassin, the creepy little clown Jester and the other dolls, dispatch most of the main characters. Although the Puppetmaster might not be a masterpiece of the cinema, its depiction of evil puppets is an excellent illustration of the theatricality of the horror character, as it not only foregrounds the artifice of the villain but also evokes the history of horror. Indeed, while the direct ancestor of the horror film is the Théâtre du Grand-​ Guignol, the Grand Guignol itself had its origins in the late eighteenth-​century

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Punch-​and-​Judy-​type puppet show called “Guignol,” which mixed humor and violence (Gassner and Quinn 2002, 371)—​exactly like Puppetmaster. The theatrical heritage of horror is also manifest in William Castle’s Shanks (1974), in which the eponymous character played by famous French mime Marcel Marceau is a skillful puppeteer who finds a way to reanimate the dead and use them as marionettes to exact revenge on those who have exploited him. The theatricality of the vengeful doll is also central to Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987), in which the puppets play the role of retributive Furies that punish immoral people. The film opens with a severe storm forcing a group of people to take refuge in the Gothic mansion of dollmakers, elderly couple Hilary (Hilary Mason) and Gabriel Hartwicke (Guy Rolfe). In the prologue, Little Judy (Carrie Lorraine) is forced by her callous stepmother Rosemary (Carolyn Purdy-​Gordon) to throw away her teddy bear as they are walking toward the Hartwicke house after their car breakdown. Judy imagines her teddy bear transforming into a savage beast, devouring both Rosemary and her uncaring, cowardly father, David (Ian Patrick Williams). While the amusingly gory scene is just a fantasy, it immediately signals the righteously vengeful role that toys will play in the film. As the thunderstorm rages on, two hitchhiking punk girls, Isabel (Bunty Bailey) and Enid (Cassie Stuart), along with the man who picked them up, Ralph (Stephen Lee), join the group. Isabel and Enid immediately appear as selfish, boisterous brats who couldn’t care less about dolls, while Ralph comes across as a decent, albeit silly, guy who admires Gabriel’s craftsmanship. As the group settles in for the night, the dolls start attacking the more unpleasant guests. The first to be assailed is Isabel, the more brazen of the two hitchhikers, who snoops around the house to find valuables to steal. The dolls, laughing hysterically, grab Isabel by the arms and legs and repeatedly ram her head into a wall in a manner that is as bloody as its absurd. Rosemary suffers a gorier assault, with a dozen dolls biting her, beating her and stabbing her multiple times. Some dolls are even seen sawing her hands and feet. As Enid is being stormed by a group of puppets, she breaks a few dolls, revealing their abject little skeletons, thus magnifying their grotesque appearance and bringing them visually closer to the repugnant Furies, who are generally described as “ugly crones” (Fisher 2014, 294). All the attacks are highly theatrical as the powerful artifice of the vengeful dolls is always made manifest through close-​ ups on oddly sneering porcelain faces, freakishly high-​pitched voices and jerky stop-​motion animation. David is the last of the selfish adults to be attacked, this time by the Punch doll that Gabriel gave to Judy, who is angered by the father’s violent treatment of his daughter. David manages to destroy Punch, but in turn he, himself, is turned into Punch by Gabriel and Hilary in a scene vaguely reminiscent

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Figure 5.2  The righteously vengeful Punch in Dolls (1987).

of the famous lycanthropic transformation in An American Werewolf in London (1981, John Landis). When morning comes, only Ralph and Judy are still intact and they happily leave the Hartwickes to go meet the girl’s mother in Boston. A brief sequence shows that the four others, the guilty, self-​centered adults, have been turned into dolls who will have to learn to appreciate the value of childlike fantasy and innocence. As the credits role, the car of another unpleasant couple is seen getting stuck in the mud before the Gothic mansion. The couple argues and aggressively leads their two kids toward the house. With its overnight timeframe, old-​dark-​house single setting, and narrowly focused plotline about uncanny punishment, Dolls does not only utilize well-​ worn clichés of scary movies but also showcases another important element of the horror film’s theatricality: its reliance on the strict parameters of classical drama. Like so many other horror films, Dolls relies for its eerie effect on dramatic conventions that have their roots in Aristotelian tragedy, namely, the three classical unities of time, place and action.

Unities Over the past several years, the emergence of various digital platforms has triggered the return of the short film as a popular format. The short monster

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stories webcast on YouTube and specialized sites like Crypt tv are often extremely effective, for the limited resources available to emerging filmmakers compel them to focus on the unadorned fundamentals of horror. As a result, many of these shorts make manifest what is often implicit in feature-​length horror films: the centrality of the three dramatic unities of time, space and action in creating a concentrated tone of dread that can generate intense fear. David Sandberg’s remarkable three-​minute film Lights Out (2013)—​remade by Sandberg into a less-​than-​remarkable feature-​length movie in 2016—​is a perfect example of the unsettling power of the three unities to produce a petrifying sense of inescapable doom on screen, as a threatening figure gradually advances toward an increasingly terrified woman every time she turns off the lights before going to bed. Such narrative concentration makes the horror film a prototypical example of classical drama. Inspired by Aristotle’s Poetics, early modern theater theorists developed the notion that drama should respect three unities (Szondi 2002, 1): a play should have one action, with minimal subplots; it should occur over a period of no more than a few days, ideally less than 24 hours; and it should take place in a single physical space. To be clear, not all drama respects the three unities, far from it. Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries notoriously ignored the unities, and many modern plays cover broad distances and time periods. For instance, Caryl Churchill’s short play Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009), takes place over a 70-​year span. But since the seventeenth century, especially following the French neoclassical models of Racine and Molière, countless playwrights have seen value in writing plays that are highly concentrated on a specific action that unfolds within strict spatiotemporal parameters, for this “observance of the unities can yield plays of economy, intensity and formal strength” (Hodgson 1998, 415). From Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888) and John Millington Synge’s Riders to Sea (1904) to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944), Edward Alby’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), Sam Shepherd’s Buried Child (1978), Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother (1983), Margaret Edson’s Wit (1995) and Florian Zeller’s Le Père (2012), following the classical unities allows for the exhausting and unsettling experience of a “long day’s journey’s into night”—​to evoke Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece—​during which characters must face their demons and come out at the end either reborn or utterly devastated. Not surprisingly, several Grand-​Guignol plays strictly adhered to the classical unities, like Reginald Berkeley’s Eight O’Clock (1920), which depicts the last moments of a murderer sentenced to death and where “the inexorability of time structures the piece […] [until] the final stage direction informs us that, as the curtain descends, ‘the deep chime of the prison clock […] strikes eight o’clock, the hour of execution’” (Hand and Wilson 2007, 92).

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Short-​and medium-​length formats, such as YouTube videos and television series like Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960–​62) and Masters of Horror (2005–​2007), are conducive to observing the three unities. But, as we shall see presently, many feature-​length films also adopt the unities, at least in principle if not in actual fact, to create the sort of inescapable tension and focused dread that are the essence of the tale of terror. The Spanish feature film [Rec] (2007, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza), which uses the device of a live news report on strange occurrences in a macabre apartment building, is a good example of how the unities can create a sense of unavoidable doom. Similarly, the framing story of Saw, with two men chained in a small room, while interspersed with flashbacks that strictly speaking do not follow the unities, strikingly reproduces the horror of Aristotelean tragedy, where the unity of time, setting and, most importantly, action forms the basis for a tale of inexorable anguish whose predetermined conclusion is as agonizingly inevitable as it is pleasurably predictable. From Albert S. Rogell’s Fog (1933), in which a series of murders are committed on board a ship navigating through thick fog, to Frank Khalfoun’s P2 (2007), in which a young woman trapped in an underground parking lot on Christmas Eve must evade a homicidal psychopath, the unities of time, space and action have undergone a wide range of variations. But one particular setup has dominated the horror film: a small group of people, usually but not always young adults, are stuck in an isolated locale and spend a night of terror trying to fend off a malevolent presence dead-​set on killing them all. This brief description applies to an endless number of horror films, ranging from Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead to the straight-​to-​DVD Alone in the Ghost House (2015, Henrique Couto), that rely on the unity of time, place and action to create chilling drama. The description aptly applies to the 1961 Thriller episode “Pigeons from Hell” (Season 1, Episode 36, John Newland) in which two brothers, John (David Whorf) and Tim (Brandon De Wilde), driving through the “Fabled South,” get stuck in a swamp and must spend the night in an abandoned plantation mansion. While the incessant cooing of the pigeons that overrun the place is creepy enough, the young men soon discover that an evil presence haunts the house. It is the murderous Eula Lee Blassenville, a Southern Belle who acquired eternal life by being turned into a “Zuvembie” by an old plantation worker. Similarly, the first episode of Masters of Horror, “Incident on and off a Mountain Road” (2005, Don Coscarelli) follows the three unities, while also including a few explanatory flashbacks. The episode opens with Ellen (Bree Turner) driving on a deserted mountain road and suddenly crashing into another car. She soon encounters the deformed serial killer Moonface (John DeSantis), who captures her and imprisons her in the corpse-​filled basement of his isolated house of torture where another character, Buddy (Angus Scrimm), also seems to be held captive. Seemingly working

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together, Ellen and Buddy manage to free themselves, but Buddy betrays her. She manages to dispose of both Buddy and Moonface, and to return to her car. In a final twist, it is revealed that Ellen had killed her husband after he raped her. The episode closes on Ellen asserting her role as a double-​Final Girl: she killed the outlandish monster and got rid of the abusive husband. The Final Girl often finds herself in scenarios that adopt the three units for, by definition, she is an ordinary character who is (1) thrown into an unescapable space, (2)  where she must take drastic action against the monster, (3)  in a limited period of time. For instance, in the Norwegian horror feature Cold Prey (2006, Roar Uthaug) a group of friends who are on a snowboarding trip must take shelter in an abandoned hotel after one of them breaks a leg. They soon start feeling a presence in the hotel stalking them. It quickly becomes clear that a masked maniac inhabits the place and wants them dead. The madman violently kills all the young people, except for Final Girl, Jannicke (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal), who manages to kill him using his own pickaxe. The action of Cold Prey takes place over only a few hours, almost entirely in and around the abandoned hotel, and focuses primarily on the one action of dealing with the evil killer on the premises. Its typical slasher structure functions very well in building fear and tension as the narrative steadily moves to the inevitable moment when the Final Girl destroys the threat. Films such as Friday the 13th (1980, Sean S. Cunningham) and its sequels, Twisted Nightmare (1987, Paul Hunt), Suspicions (1995, Michael Sperrazza), the remake of House on Haunted Hill (1999, William Malone), Bloody Murder (2000, Ralph E.  Portillo), the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003, Marcus Nispel), Darkest Hour (2005, Dan Zachary), Waterfront Nightmare (2012, Clark Birchmeier), Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012, Jason Meye), the remake of The Evil Dead (2013, Fede Alvarez), Animal (2014, Brett Simmons), #Horror (2015, Tara Subkoff), The Ranger (2019, Jenn Wexler) and innumerable other titles have the same dramatic structure, where constricted space and limited timeframe support a teleological plotline intensely fixated on the systematic destruction of youth and the ultimate defeat—​or at least neutralization—​of the monster at the hands of our unassuming heroine. Minor variations in the narrative do not affect the basic scenario. For instance, in Don’t Blink (2014, Travis Oates) ten friends spend a weekend in a luxury lodge in the mountains. Soon individuals start disappearing without a trace: no blood, no sign of violence, no obvious culprit. Typically, only one young woman is left standing at the end, Claire (Joanne Kelly). However, she has not defeated the killer, or even encountered a knife-​wielding maniac. There are no ghosts or possessed dolls. Only an isolated space where, during the span of a few hours, individuals inexorably disappear “at the blink of an eye.” The only explanation given for the weird phenomenon appears as an existential musing on the part of Alex (Zack Ward), one of the dumber boys in

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the group, who actually commits the most extreme acts of violence in the film, attempting to strangle one character and shooting another in the knees in a vain attempt to extort from his victims an explanation for the disappearances. As he lights a cigarette, he contemplates the meaninglessness of life: “We’re all gonna disappear and then everything we’ve ever done—​it doesn’t matter […] Because we’re all going to be […] erased.” He then proceeds to shoot himself. His philosophical reflections are repeated at the very end of the film, when Claire is sitting in the back of a police car, as she tries not to blink. The recent rise in popularity of “escape room” attractions, where players must solve puzzles to break out of a small chamber within a set amount of time, has inspired filmmakers to use the three unities dictated by the game as a means to build extreme tension and anxiety. Two films from 2017 and one from 2019, all entitled Escape Room (Peter Dukes, Will Wernick and Adam Robitel, respectively), present a small group of people trying to get out of a restricted space by interpreting a series of clues. Of course, in all films the “game” turns deadly. In Peter Dukes’s take on the gimmick, the operator of an escape-​room attraction, Brice (Skeet Ulrich), acquires a mysterious box reputed to hold a demon and places it in the “Killing Room” to spice up the old decor. Once it is opened, the box demonically turns an actor dressed up as masked-​killer “Stitchface” (Taylor Piedmonte) chained at the back of the room, into an actual homicidal maniac. The four escape-​room players, Jess (Christine Donlon), Jeff (Randy Wayne), Ben (Matt McVay) and Angie (Ashley Gallegos), are then faced with an actual threat as the door remains locked until they solve all the riddles, and Brice remains unaware of the situation having lost the video feed, but choosing not to stop the game so as not to “ruin the experience” for his clients. As time runs down, they get killed off one after the other until only Jess is left. As tension rises with Stitchface’s chain growing longer every five minutes, Jess manages to solve the last puzzle and escape the room. In Will Wernick’s version there are six friends rather than four, and the attraction operator himself is the killer. Moreover, as opposed to just mindlessly killing victims like Stichface, this killer has a Saw-​inspired plan to teach these conceited young adults a lesson on the evils of being “narcissistic” (one of the words provided as a clue). But the general scenario remains the same, with only one female character still standing in the end, Christen (Elisabeth Hower). Her one act of redeeming bravery is to choose to save her boyfriend, Tyler (Evan Williams), rather than herself when the killer compels the two to make this life-​and-​death choice as part of the “game.” Tyler, for his part, chooses to save himself. Needless to say, he ends up dead! Some films push the respect for the unities to its logical conclusion by recording the action in only one take to ensure perfect spatiotemporal continuity. For instance, the Uruguayan film The Silence House (2010, Gustavo

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Hernández), like its American remake (2011, Chris Kentis and Laura Lau), uses the recording potential of digital cinema to follow in an uninterrupted take a young woman, Laura (Florencia Colucci), trapped in an isolated house with her father, Wilson (Gustavo Alonso), and another man, Nestor (Abel Tripaldi), as a supernatural presence haunts her. In the end, it is revealed that the haunting presence is a manifestation of Laura’s own psychological disorder following the trauma of sexual abuse from her father and Nestor. Both in form and content, The Silent House achieves the tour de force of sustained tension and suspense that was technically impossible at the time when Hitchcock shot Rope (1948) on film and needed to use camera tricks to give the impression of a continuous 80-​minute take. The tightly constrained space, strictly limited timeframe and a narrowly focused action work perfectly in The Silence House to create a plotline worthy of any Grand-​Guignol play, or Racine tragedy for that matter, where repressed memories, aching shame and gnawing guilt prove as oppressive as the closed setting in which the drama unfolds. Like The Silence House, a number of horror films aim to convey a deeper meaning behind their confined tales of terror. For instance, in The Ritual (2017, David Bruckner), in which five male friends decide to go hiking in Northern Sweden, and in The Descent (2005, Neil Marshall), in which six female friends go spelunking, the confrontation with monsters within the closed parameters of a dense forest or a dark cave allegorizes issues of guilt and shame. As is typical of such narratives, in both The Descent and The Ritual, characters are dispatched one by one until a single survivor, not always a Final Girl, is left for the film to crystallize its meaning. This last survivor is the one who must work out issues of guilt and shame about the death of a loved one for which they feel responsible—​a daughter for Sarah (Shauna Macdonald) in The Descent, and a close friend for Luke (Rafe Spall) in The Ritual. The descent into the bowels of the cave or the struggle through the darkness of the thick forest is meant to compel the main character to face their demons, quite literally, and come to terms with their self-​loathing and paralyzing anxiety. This replicates a common theme in neoclassical tragedy, which often revolves around characters having to assume responsibility for their actions in a modern world where absent or indifferent gods cannot be blamed. As Suzanne Gearhart argues in her chapter “Racine’s Iphigénie and Modern Tragic Guilt” from The Interrupted Dialectic: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Their Tragic Other (1992): “The central interest in Racine’s texts, as in Freud’s, lies in how [characters] deal with the ‘modern’ dimension of the problem of tragic guilt” (Gearhart 1992, 114). And for Kierkegaard, “the essence of modern tragedy is about the pain of anxiety, a sense of shared guilt” (Kierkegaard 2006, 151). Anxiety and guilt are at the core of “neoclassical” horror films like The Ritual, The Descent and many others.

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The guilt that surviving characters feel does not always precede the encounter with the monster. In films like Saw and Wernick’s Escape Room, the villain is the one who compels characters to make difficult choices that may cause lingering feelings of guilt after the fact. A complex example of this can be found in the horror sci-​fi Life (2017, Daniel Espinosa) in which the surviving character feels guilty for the potential death of millions. Life belongs to an intriguing horror-​ sci-​fi hybrid subgenre that includes the Alien series (1979–​2017) along with films like Star Crystal (1986, Lance Lindsay), Event Horizon (1997, Paul Anderson) and Pandorum (2009, Christian Alvart), which set the circumscribed tale of terror in space rather than in an isolated cabin in the woods, but still respects the principles of the three classical unities. In Life, the crew of a space station is attacked by an ever-​growing tentacular alien, named Calvin by school kids early in the film when the creature was but a small, inoffensive cell. The six-​ member crew is comprised of Dr. David Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), the medical officer; Dr. Miranda North (Rebecca Ferguson), the quarantine officer; Rory Adams (Ryan Reynolds), flight engineer; Sho Murakami (Hiroyuki Sanada), systems engineer; Dr. Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare) exobiologist; and Ekaterina Golovkina (Olga Dihovichnaya), mission commander. With each death of a crew member at the hands—​or tentacles—​of Calvin, the surviving members feel an increasing sense of guilt. For instance, after Adams and Golovkina are killed, Derry, the exobiologist who worked most closely with Calvin before it became dangerous, blames himself for the entire situation: “He was my buddy. It’s my fault. It’s all my fault.” “Maybe it was your fault, maybe it was my fault, maybe […] I don’t know, it doesn’t matter, does it?” responds Miranda to help alleviate Derry’s guilt. But he continues “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, because of all the …” as he expires. The most tragic expression of guilt, however, comes at the very end of the film. Halfway through the ordeal, David had suggested that the survivors should “escape in the lifeboats,” referring to pods designed for an emergency return to earth. His idea is initially dismissed by Miranda, because written rules stipulate that in situations like this one, nothing and no one can return to earth so as to not run the risk of bringing home entities that might cause a global catastrophe. However, when only David and Miranda are left, they resolve that the best course of action is indeed to use the pods. The plan is to lure Calvin into one of the lifeboats and then send it into deep space, while the other pod can make it back to earth. Since the lifeboat must be manually steered away from earth as its predetermined destination, and David as a pilot is the one qualified to perform this task, he offers to go in the pod with the creature, while Miranda can return home in the other lifeboat. In the end, Miranda’s lifeboat is damaged and veers off course toward deep space. Calvin manages to overpower David and to redirect the lifeboat back to earth. As the

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Figure 5.3  From normality to horror in Event Horizon (1997).

film closes, fishermen who have found the pod unwittingly free the creature despite David’s dying warning. At this point, David’s guilt for allowing Calvin to come to earth is patently visible on his petrified face, as he can foresee the global tragedy he has triggered. It could be argued that science fiction films like Life, Alien and Event Horizon are not truly horror films, for if we accept Wood’s defining statement about horror, that “normality is threatened by the monster,” it might seem that those films lack normality to start with. After all, it is not exactly “normal” for people to be floating in space endlessly. Yet, these films regardless of the extraordinary circumstances they depict, still endeavor to establish normality as the starting point of the narrative. All three films include convivial scenes early in the narrative where the crew has coffee, engages in small talk and interacts the way normal colleagues would in any ordinary work environment. But shortly after the convivial scene in each film, the monster gradually and then suddenly starts threatening “normality.” In all three films, the rising threat is expressed through a marked shift in style, from even-​paced, realistically shot images and nonintrusive audio track, to quicker editing, unsettling sound effects and striking visual depictions of the monstrous menace. This stylistic shift marks the intrusion of theatricality in an otherwise realist milieu, even if this milieu happens to be a spaceship the likes of which has never existed in reality.

Styles As was the case in the Théâtre du Grand-​Guignol, moments of horror on screen are achieved through a break from realism and an unsettling shift toward theatrical stylization. It is worth repeating Hand and Wilson’s description of this stylistic shift in the French theater of horror, “it is at these moments that any pretense of naturalism is finally abandoned and the full force of stylized melodrama is brought to bear on the performance” (Hand and Wilson 2002, 37). As has already been discussed in earlier chapters, this intrusion of theatricality upon realism generally takes two forms: radical stylistic departures

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through discontinuous editing and screeching sounds; or the appearance of an eerily artificial environment that differs markedly from the realistic setting of normality. While the former stylistic choice generally serves to produce sudden shocks of terror, the latter usually functions to create a lingering atmosphere of dread and suspense. Classic 1930s thrillers like Dracula and Frankenstein rarely relied on abrupt, disjointed editing to startle the spectator. Rather they tended to create mounting fear through an unsettling atmosphere generated by the evocative unreality of the set. The Gothic castle in shadowy ruins, the foggy cemetery with broken down tombstones and twisted gnarly trees, the decrepit cabin in the woods surrounded by the sinister detritus of grotesque depravation are only the most obvious examples of how the theatricality of set design infringes on the realism of the peaceful town where normal people live. Artifice transforms the familiar forest, graveyard or mansion into something strange that engenders an unnerving sense of pleasurable dread where surges of fright are mixed with shivers of delight. The revival of Gothic horror in the late 1950s and ’60s with Hammer Studio productions and Roger Corman’s “Poe Cycle” added color to the atmospheric aesthetics introduced in the black-​and-​white thrillers of the 1930s. Incidentally, as I have pointed out elsewhere, Hammer and Corman also added to the Hays Code–​ruled monster movies of classical Hollywood, the theatricality of the “buxom wench” whose bold femininity destabilizes repressive neo-​Gothic masculinity. I  argue that the spectacularly curvaceous figure of the feisty tavern maiden or the rebellious servant girl functions as a brazen display that clashes with the humdrum reality that surrounds her in a way that is not unlike the monster’s carnal disturbance of normality […] [H]‌ er brazenly protuberant breasts denote unruly otherness in a world of repressive nobility. Like the performance of monstrosity, looming architecture and the use of aberrant editing techniques, the display of flamboyantly heaving bosoms in horror movies is an instance of “cinematic theatricality,” where artifice stands in conspicuous difference from what is narratively presented as standard and normal. (Loiselle 2013,  48–​49) A focus on the artifice of primary colors, in combination with the theatricality of the set and the ostentatious sensuality of disruptive characters, creates in those films a strong sense of atmosphere where the aesthetic strangeness of the environment results from the amalgamation of the desolate beauty of ruins and vivid images of uncannily alluring fiends. Corman’s House of Usher (1960) is one of the best examples of that period, transforming Poe’s sensuously eerie text into a spectacle of harsh reds, blues

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Figure 5.4  The influential stylistic artifice of The House of Usher (1960).

and yellows illuminating a garish décor of Gothic theatricality. Paul Beckley of the New York Herald Tribune praised the film’s atmospheric style and aesthetic of artifice: “Poe’s classic horror tale has been fixed on film in fine style. Far above the humdrum gadgetry of most current movies in this category, it concentrates on atmosphere, makes no bones about its necessary artifices, and, most crucial, walks conscientiously in Poe’s stylistic steps” (Beckley 1960). House of Usher, along with other Corman films and Hammer Studio productions, had a great influence on filmmakers like Tim Burton, as is particularly evident in Sleepy Hallow (1999) (McMahan 2014, 72). Burton’s Corman/​ Hammer-​ inspired theatricality in Sleepy Hollow has been seen as a combination of expressionism and “stylized naturalism”: Working with production designer Rick Heinrichs, who has collaborated with the director on numerous projects, they took liberties with the Dutch colonial setting of 1799 upstate New York and made their own expressionistic Sleepy Hollow in Lime Tree Valley, England—​a form of “stylized naturalism.” Instead of using the existing nature in the countryside, they built their own forest, which held as its centerpiece the “tree of the dead” (Heinrichs describes it as “agony captured in wood sculpture”) the literal getaway between earth and the beyond. (Magliozzi and He 2009, 18) Many filmmakers like Burton have revisited the stylistic heritage of the Gothic horror films of the 1930s and 1960s to create a theatricality of terror that conceives of fear as an experience in atmospheric aesthetics. Sixty years after the Bela Lugosi’s famous incarnation, Francis Ford Coppola reinvented Dracula’s image as a passionate lover. But his vision remained closely tied to

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the artifice of the original. As Linda Badley writes: “Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), with Winona Ryder, Gary Oldman, and Anthony Hopkins, was both a ‘monster show’ and an ‘art’ film:  it was shot on a sound stage, with effects and costumes that heightened the artifice, plunging the spectator into the ‘cinematic realm of fairy tales, dreams, and myth’ ” (Badley 1995, 155). Similarly, Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves (1984) draws “attention to the artificiality of the medium of cinema itself; the deliberate staging, studio-​bound sets, otherworldly atmospheres and purposeful theatricality,” writes James Gracey “resist any interpretation of realism” (Gracey 2017, 29). In the past decade, filmmakers like Catherine Hardwicke with Red Riding Hood (2011) and James Watkins with Woman in Black (2012) have successfully adopted stylistic artifice as a means to create atmospheric horror. And of course, Guillermo Del Torro relies heavily on stylization to create the weird atmosphere of his films. But his oeuvre may or may not qualify as “horror.” Among contemporary filmmakers, Dante Tomaselli stands out as Corman’s most direct heir, as his cheaply made cinematic tales of terror consistently rely on stylized set pieces to produce creepy atmosphere. “A characteristic trait that occupies the work of Dante Tomaselli,” writes Matthew Edwards, “is his artistic visuals and use of atmosphere […] Both Desecration [1999] and Horror [2003] contain numerous visually stylized set-​pieces that reinforce the notion that horror cinema is at its most effective when combining these elements cohesively” (Edwards 2014, 116). His 2013 Torture Chamber opens on a foggy tapestry of primary colors that is immediately reminiscent of the credit opening of House of Usher. The film revolves around a possessed boy, Jimmy (Carmen LoPorto), who disappears before he was to be exorcised by his brother Marc (Richard D. Busser), a priest. Enlisting a number of deranged children from the mental institution whence he escaped, Jimmy commits a number of gruesome tortures against those he hates. Although a number of scenes are shot on location in a realist style, the “moments of horror” in Jimmy’s “torture chamber” are highly theatricalized generating a thrilling tension between the artifice of the scene and the extreme violence that it illustrates. Edwards argues that “Tomaselli’s aesthetic approach differs greatly from his contemporaries,” because of his preference for “stylizing sequences that are both visually arresting and heavy on atmosphere,” rather than using clichéd shock effects to exhibit “half-​naked women being stalked and butchered” (116). Indeed, rather than seeking to foster slow-​burning atmospheric dread, many contemporary scary movies rely on the facile gimmick of extremely quick editing and disturbingly sudden sounds, known as the “jump scare,” to jolt their audience into a screaming frenzy. But in spite of being rather formulaic, the jump scare remains an intriguing example of how an aggressive break

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Figure 5.5  The theatricality of torture in Torture Chamber (2013).

with realism can incarnate the monster’s threatening assault on normality. There are endless examples of scary movies, especially slashers, that rely exclusively on jump scares to excite their audience. As Peter Hutchings writes in the Historical Dictionary of Horror Cinema (2017): The jump scare or startle effect is probably the crudest sensation that horror can invoke inasmuch as it involves an automatic physiological response from the spectator. However, this has not stopped horror filmmakers from resorting to it with increased frequency as the genre has developed […] It was the slasher film of the late 1970s and early 1980s that turned the jump scare into a key horror convention. Repeatedly, characters wandered into dark and dangerous places where, inevitably, someone or something leapt out at them, with this moment often accompanied by a deafening crash of music. The extent to which this kind of overuse has diminished the effectiveness of the jump scare is not clear. (183–​84) Although the jump scare is generally the stuff of B movies, many respectable horror films have also used the combination of quick editing and bursts of sounds to make their audience jump. The sudden appearance of a demon behind Josh’s (Patrick Wilson) shoulder in Insidious (2010, James Wan); Danny’s (Danny Lloyd) sudden vision of the creepy twins axed to pieces in The Shining; the severed head of a fisherman sticking out of a hole in a boat in Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg); the alien bursting out of Kane’s (John Hurt) stomach in Alien; or Carrie’s (Sissy Spacek) hand reaching out from the grave to grab the arm of her friend Sue (Amy Irving) in the final dream sequence of Carrie (1976, Brian De Palma); all these are instances of jump scares that succeed remarkably in

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rupturing the flatness of an ordinary scene with a striking flash of nightmarish artifice. As such, this technique does represent an instance of theatricality, whereby the realism of normality constructed through transparent continuity editing is abruptly shattered by the ostentatiously sudden display of menacing otherness. At their best, jump scares transcend the crudeness of the startle effect and become instances of genuine montage. Montage, what David Thompson calls Eisenstein’s “demonic, baroque visual theatricality” (Thompson 1981, 176), is a powerful stylistic technique to interrupt the narrative and establish an immediate dichotomy between humdrum reality and spectacular horror. Psycho’s shower scene is probably the most famous example of this. The succession of quick stabbing shots combined with Bernard Hermann’s shrieking violins break drastically with the warm, comforting, normal images of Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) washing herself. This break could be considered a form of distantiation, almost in the Brechtian sense, insofar as the linearity of the plotline to this point is suddenly shattered and draws the spectator’s attention to a totally different narrative modality. The scene signifies the film’s shift from a mundane drama about adultery and robbery to the perverse melodrama of a neglected child and his ruthlessly vengeful mother. Indeed, the sequence is so effective in breaking with realism that “the montage tricks the viewer into seeing nudity that is not there” (Francis 2013, 19). This process of destabilizing the spectator’s perception of the narrative aligns montage with theatricality, at least according to some theorists like Stephen Heath. Nenad Jovanovic usefully summarizes this argument in Brechtian Cinemas: Montage and Theatricality in Jean-​Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, Peter Watkins, and Lars von Trier (2017): Heath’s discussion of the three broad strategies used to achieve distantiation in film—​(1) self-​reflexivity; (2) montage; (3) theatricalization (narrative references to the medium and the use of its stylistic conventions)—​collapses the distinctions between montage and the other two. The examples of self-​reflexivity he provides entail a process essential to montage: juxtaposing (the representation with its account of itself), and one of the definitions of theatricalization as “critical heterogeneity” (in other words, a montage of styles). (26) Jovanovic is not entirely convinced by Heath’s argument or by his Marxist agenda. But my interest here is less with the politics of distantiation than with Heath’s suggestion that montage serves as a form theatricality that breaks with realism and, in the process, unsettles the spectator, which results in an experience of horror. This is certainly the effect of the Psycho shower montage. As Nicholas Haeffner writes, “the montage of cuts in the Psycho shower scene

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or the bird attack at the gas station in The Birds are both examples of the ways in which Hitchcock employed editing to intensify the experience of horror” (Haeffner 2015, 38). Other examples make the use of montage even more obviously linked to theatricality as a technique that serves to enhance artifice and, in the process, increase horror. In Cry_​Wolf (2005, Jeff Wadlow) for instance, a couple of students, Dodger (Lindy Booth) and Owen (Julian Morris), decide to e-​mail false information about the actual murder of a female student to fabricate a fake serial killer and scare everyone at their preppie school. As their closely knit group of friends get in on the prank and imagine various “facts” about the killer’s modus operandi, quick inserts in high-​contrast digitized colors illustrate the “killer’s” murderous deeds. When the information goes viral, a split screen montage combines realistic images of individuals reading Dodger and Owen’s e-​mails to form an artificial image of the fictional serial killer nicknamed “the Wolf.” As Kevin J. Wetmore Jr. explains in Post-​9/​11 Horror in American Cinema (2012): [Owen and Dodger] invent a serial killer whose sole purpose is to be scary and to frighten their fellow students, or at least so Owen believes. Dodger, however, uses Owen in order to construct an environment of fear that will allow her to get away with the murder of the girl […] As they write, the text of the email Owen is composing is superimposed on the screen, the words literally superimposing themselves over the student’s reality. Certain words and phrases are highlighted. While Dodger and Owen speak, the word victims is in bold next to them, suggesting that they are both the creators of the Wolf, but they will also be his victims […] Cry_​ Wolf director Jeff Wadlow then features a montage that literalizes the metaphor. Two students receive the email and begin discussing it. The screen splits again and again, to show the spread of the email to other students, faculty and staff, like some sort of cinematic mitosis. Finally, all the images form the back and head of ‘the Wolf ’, his jacket and mask morphing out of the many conversations about him. The Wolf is literally created out of the images of people reading and talking about him. (183) The twist is that “the Wolf ” suddenly appears to be an actual killer who targets the pranksters. Thus, it would seem that the montage scene does not only signify a shift in the narrative but literally creates a different narrative, from a “mean-​girl” story about beautiful, rich teenagers who ridicule and exploit others at their prep school, into a full-​fledged tale of terror about a masked serial killer who murders young women and men one by one. When the

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Figure 5.6  Montage and viral gossip create the monster in Cry_​Wolf (2005).

“final boy” Owen discovers that philandering teacher Mr. Walker (Jon Bon Jovi) is the masked killer, he kills him. In a counter-​twist, it is revealed in the final scene of the film that Dodger used the other pranksters as pawns in her complex hoax about a “real” serial killer, devised for the purpose of getting revenge on Mr. Walker. Faking their own deaths, the pranksters fooled Owen into killing Mr. Walker, Dodger’s lover who had been cheating on her with another student, Becky (Erica Yates), whom Dodger killed at the beginning of the film. In the final moments of the film, Owen finally understands what took place and confronts Dodger about her scheme. As Owen speaks, a montage of flashbacks rehearses the gradual steps of her Machiavellian plan. The stylistic artifice of the montage sequence, which includes several visual manipulations, parallels the artifice of the narrative as a complex game of  chess. Early in the film, Dodger compares elaborate pranks to chess games, scorning her slow-​ witted fellow pranksters for not understanding the sophistication of her plan: “it’s like you’re playing checkers and I am playing chess.” The scene in which this line is spoken takes place in the crowded school cafeteria and is shot so that, while the other prankers are generally shot as part of a crowd, Dodger appears primarily in close-​up and visually isolated from the crowd. The shot-​reverse-​shot construction of the exchange suggests that Dodger is addressing not only the group inside the film but the audience watching the film. It comes across as a challenge to the spectators as to whether they can figure out the intricacies of Dodger’s conspiracy. This is common in what is often referred to as “the puzzle film, the complex narrative, the hyperlink film, the network narrative, and the mind-​game movie,” those films that appeal to a “niche audience seeking distinction from mainstream cinema [that] likes the idea of a challenge” (Newman 2011, 215). While Cry_​ Wolf is no Memento (2000, Christopher Nolan), it does challenge the spectator to question their own understanding of the intricate plot, which constantly oscillates between the realism of beautiful teenage bodies and the monstrous artifice of their gory inhumanity. By dislocating the realism of normality and inserting disconcerting theatricality into the narrative, montage sequences in Cry_​Wolf require spectators to rethink their perception of the characters, space

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and time being presented on screen, and reevaluate the function of the adolescent bodies that occupy the space of story. A  linear reading of the film would dismiss the characters too easily as either beautiful or monstrous. But the montage sequences compel the spectator to consider the characters as both admirable and despicable. “As part of the constitution of the film,” write Weaver and Britt, “montage challenges the spectator to participate in the world of the film and be enveloped into its body” (Weaver and Britt 2007, 31). Engagé filmmakers have long relied on the theatricality of montage to undermine realisms and foster the involvement of their audience in the body politic of the cinema. Celebrated Nouvelle-​Vague filmmaker Alain Resnais, for one, uses theatricality and montage as a conscious move away from realism: Let us say that I am concerned to address the spectator in a critical state of mind […] For that I need to make films that are not natural. If I turn to actors from the theatre it is undoubtedly because I am looking for a kind of realism that is not “realism” […] It is a style that draws from modernist techniques (juxtaposition, dissonance, fragmentation) and harkens back to the Soviet films of the 1920s and 1930s—​Vertov and Eisenstein—​in their montage aesthetic of composition. (Barker 2012, 143–​144. Emphasis added) Through the theatricality of montage and non-​realist acting, Resnais breaks with passive modes of spectatorship and encourages his audience to approach cinema from a critical perspective. Although it is not surprising for an art-​ cinema director like Resnais to use techniques that seek to involve spectators in a critical assessment of the material projected on screen, it would seem less likely that the director of a teenage thriller like Cry_​Wolf would have any interest in involving the audience in an interactive appraisal of the gory material exhibited before them. Yet, as anyone who has attended a public screening of a scary movie will know, fans of horror films are often deeply engaged and eager to actively participate in the construction of the film’s paratextual meaning. As will be discussed in the next and final chapter, active participation is often an essential part of horror spectatorship and contributes significantly to the overall theatricality of the genre.

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Chapter 6 CONCLUSION: THE THEATRICALITY OF HORROR SPECTATORSHIP  The previous chapters have argued that, in both form and content, the horror film relies on cinematic theatricality to challenge the realism of normality. Adopting and adapting dramatic practices that sometimes date back to ancient Greek tragedy, the theatricality of the horror film is instrumental in providing the audience with an experience of dread and fear that “may take us back to the defining moments of Western culture, when pity and terror were the crucial and cathartic responses to tragedy” (Kawin 2012, 16). Whether the horror spectator can actually achieve catharsis is debatable, but there is little doubt that the scary movie can engage the audience at a deeper physical level than any romantic comedy, docudrama or western ever could. More so than with any other genre, spectators ostentatiously interact with horror films, screaming at the screen and histrionically chastising characters for their foolish behavior in the face of monstrous threats. Much has been written on the way in which public screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975, Jim Sharman), with its rowdy spectators dressed up as campy monsters who insult the characters and sign along with Tim Curry, Susan Sarandon, Meat Loaf and the rest, break with the tradition of silent, absorbed spectatorship that characterizes conventional cinema-​going experiences (Dika 2003, 104; Staiger 2000, 45–​46). However, while Rocky Horror stands as a unique example of spectator involvement in the film-​viewing experience, it only represents a spectacular exaggeration of what happens at most horror film screenings. As Heather and Matthew Levy observe, “even after multiple viewings of the same horror film, someone will tell a character, ‘Don’t open that door!’ Has that participant really forgotten they are not watching a ‘real’ event? Has he or she really forgotten she is at the movies. Or, does the spectator engage in a simulation like a fan of Rocky Horror?” (Levy and Levy 2008, 99). The answer to this rhetorical question is clearly the latter. The spectator does not simply blurt out at the screen out of uncontrollable terror. Rather, this is a conscious engagement with the performance of fear that aims to add to the cinematic experience of fellow spectators. In this concluding

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chapter, I will suggest that horror spectatorship is imbued with a strong sense of theatricality whereby ostentatious spectator reactions are intended, to a large extent, to be seen and heard by other audience members and, in the process, enhance the theatricality of the cinematic text itself. As early as the 1930s, reviewers noted that much of the pleasure of watching thrillers, at least for young heterosexual couples enjoying a rare moment of intimacy in the dark, was for the spectators to perform stereotypical gender roles for each other. While the female spectator would play at being scared for her male companion, the boy could play at being brave for his date. As Rhona Berenstein reminds us, in his 1932 review of Doctor X, James E.  Mitchell describes the role that young couples play as they watch a mad scientist’s tale of terror: “Take the girl friend and by the middle of the first reel she’ll have both arms around your neck and holding on [sic] for dear life. And you’ll be giggling hysterically, too, trying to convince her you are not scared to death, either.” Mitchell’s direct address to horror’s male viewer not only relies on traditional gender dynamics—​women are terrified and men are called upon to be brave—​but confirms that gender traits can be performed. (Berenstein 2002, 137) This is reminiscent of the “snuggle theory of horror” proposed by Zillmann and Gibson in the mid-​1990s, but which might have been articulated first by the ancient Roman poet Ovid, who described how gladiator combat might be perfect for dating, as female spectators terrified by the horrors of the circus would cling to their suitors for safety (Zillmann and Gibson 2013, 21). The main point here is that snuggling is a conscious performance, where the young female spectator performs quivering femininity for her date while, in turn, he performs valiant masculinity for her. From the beginnings of the genre, therefore, horror has provoked audiences to enhance the theatricality of the ghastly spectacle onscreen with their own performance of fear, bravery, disbelief, suspicion, derision and perversion. Several critics have discussed the performativity of horror spectatorship. Ian Olney, for instance, has convincingly demonstrated in his book Euro Horror (2013) that the gory horror films that emerged from Europe in the 1960s are especially adept at engaging spectators in an interactive dialogue that gives them “the chance to try out different points of view and play with a range of often transgressive subject positions” (Olney 2013, 83). The idea here is that these films allow the spectator to perform various roles through fluid identification with a range of characters, often queering the spectator’s gaze by undermining conventional gender identification. For Olney, European

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filmmakers like Mario Bava, for example, encourage spectators to see characters “as masks to be tried on, worn for a time, and exchanged for others as we progress through the movie” (Olney 2013, 110–​11). This is a concept similar to what Adam Lowenstein calls “collaborative spectatorship” in his book Dreaming of Cinema:  Spectatorship, Surrealism and the Age of Digital Media (2015). Using André Breton’s appropriation of a line from Nosferatu (1922, F. W. Murnau)—​“When he had reached the other side of the bridge the ghosts came to meet him”—​Lowenstein defines collaborative spectatorship as “an opportunity for the media producer, the media consumer, and the media text to reach across the spaces that divide them, to enlarge their relations to each other in ways that bring the ghosts of fantasy to light” (Lowenstein 2015, 181). Though very productive in its challenge to the traditional perspectives on passive spectatorship proposed by Althusserian and Lacanian film theorists in the 1970s (Reinhard and Olson 2016, 4), this understanding of collaborative spectatorship or spectator performativity is limited to an interest in the relationship between the filmmaker and the film, on the one side, and the audience, on the other side. Indeed, this conception of spectatorship tends to ignore that movie fans do not only interact with films but also intentionally perform for one another. Olney does relate the phenomenon of lively audience participation during a midnight screening of Claudio Fragasso’s Troll 2 (1990), as spectators “spontaneously performed vignettes from the film, chanted dialogue in unison with the movie, and threw popcorn and bologna at the screen during the corncob sex and double-​decker bologna sandwich scenes” (Olney 2013, 77). However, this important recognition that spectators have an impact on the viewing experience of other spectators is only discussed briefly and the process by which fans consciously and deliberately act out for other fans is not explored in detail. Jessica Hughes in her study “The Festival Collective: Cult Audiences and Japanese Extreme Cinema” (2016) similarly recognizes that fans of Japanese horror, especially in the context of midnight screenings at specialized film festivals, are likely to indulge in “especially loud, exaggerated responses to the film’s extreme content” (Hughes 2016, 49). But like Olney, Hughes does not explore how individual spectators purposefully perform their exuberant fandom before the collective with the clear intention of entertaining their peers. Given this lack of detailed empirical research on the subject, one is left with having to rely on “evidence” provided by horror films themselves, as well as horror film trailers, that include the audience in their diegesis. The role of the audience as an integral part of the horror effect of scary movies was made most entertainingly vivid in the cult classic The Tingler (1959), directed by William Castle, the king of movie gimmicks. In this clever Vincent Price vehicle, a pathologist, Dr. Chapin, captures a parasitic creature,

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referred to as the Tingler, that grows from the shivers down people’s spines when they are terrified. Chapin’s theory is that the only way to control the Tingler’s growth is to scream as loudly as possible. Conversely, an inability or unwillingness to scream when one is scared allows the parasite to grow and ultimately destroy its host. The climax of the film takes place in a silent cinema where the Tingler has managed to escape its captor. Dr. Chapin then alerts the spectators in the cinema that the only way to contain the creature is to scream as loudly as they can. Meanwhile, the Tingler manages to infiltrate the projection booth, interrupt the screening and turn off all the lights in the cinema. At this point in the screening, Castle deployed one of his most inventive theatrical gimmicks:  Percepto. As Murray Leeder explains in his detailed analysis of The Tingler, during the first run of the film in 1959, vibration devices were prewired to certain seats (not all of them, thus encouraging patrons to attend again and again in hopes of getting the full effect) which buzzed at certain points in the film, giving the spectators in those seats the impression of being electrocuted (a theme in the film, which starts with an execution by electric chair). (Leeder 2016, 92) On the DVD release of The Tingler, Bob Burns, who attended one of the first screenings of the film, describes the experience as follows: The theater was just pandemonium for a few seconds, because it was totally in the darkness. That’s when they set these things off under the chairs, and they started hitting sporadically these different little vibrators […] and then finally a collective scream [came up] from about everybody. And by then the whole theater’s screaming and yelling all over the place. It’s contagious! Everybody’s laughing, I mean it was like a big party in the theater. (quoted in Leeder 2016, 93) Castle realized that the spectators can play a crucial role in intensifying the viewing experience. They do not only react to the film but also react to each other and perform for each other. Burns’s comment clearly suggests that the audience did not only react to Castle’s gimmick but indulged in boisterous histrionics to engage everyone in the “big party.” In the 1980s, when self-​ referential postmodernism became more common in mainstream cinema, a number of horror films capitalized on the theatricality of spectatorship by setting tales of terror in movie theaters. For instance, Lamberto Bava’s Demons (1985) and Bigas Luna’s Anguish (1987) both exploit the image of the terrified spectator to intensify the shock effect on the real audience watching the film within the film. Both Demons and Anguish show

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spectators of horror movies themselves becoming victims of horrific violence and mayhem. Not surprisingly, the two films are often shown as a double bill, as was the case in 2016 during the “Movies on Moviegoing” series organized by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Anguish is the more self-​referential of the two. As spectators are watching a film about a homicidal maniac named John (Michael Lerner) who is attacking spectators in a cinema as they are watching a horror movie, they too start being attacked by a maniac only referred to as “the Man” (Àngel Jové). Horror thus spills out from a horror movie within a horror movie onto the “real” audience in the horror movie. These imbricated images of terrified spectators looking at terrified spectators accentuate the theatricality of horror spectatorship as a critical element of the viewing experience. In his commentary on Luna’s film, Matt Watt stresses that such a reflexive film does not only encourage the audience to engage in performative spectatorship, it almost demands that actual actors be planted in the audience to achieve the full potential of the experience: If ever a movie was meant to be seen in a theater, it’s Anguish. Watching it alone on television can’t possibly have the same impact as seeing it “live,” adding that third element of audience participation and meta-​ reality. The movie begs for that extra layer (how wonderfully horrific would it be to have an actor leave his seat at the very instant John and The Man walk up the aisle?). As Richard Scheib pointed out in his review on Moria, “It is a shot where you cannot help but look over your shoulder and wonder if you cannot get a glimpse of an audience member watching you.” (Watt 2013, 34) While, as Watt claims, films like Anguish and Demons should be seen in a cinema for the spectator to fully appreciate their impact, Wes Craven showed in Scream that the theatricality of spectatorship still remains even if the space of the interaction has switched from the public movie theater to the private living room. About an hour into the film, Sidney (Neve Campbell), Tatum (Rose McGowan), Billy (Skeet Ulrich), Stu (Matthew Lillard), Randy (Jamie Kennedy) and the other young adults of the cast get together for a house party. At some point during the evening, a group gathers around the television to watch Carpenter’s Halloween. As Randy, the horror movie buff, tries to explain to his less-​enlightened friends the basic conventions of his favorite genre, the others scream, laugh and make derogatory comments about the sacred “rules” of the slasher. In an especially clever moment of parallel editing, the filmmaker shows the juvenile reaction of the group to the “obligatory tit shot” in Halloween juxtaposed to a shot of Sidney removing her T-​shirt before her lustful boyfriend Billy. Obviously, in this scene, Craven affectionately pokes fun

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at the genre he has helped develop. But more importantly, he underscores that the histrionics of horror fans that have always taken place in the cinema now happen at home, the new site of film viewership. To further emphasize the theatricality of audience responses, which are not just innocent and spontaneous reactions to films but are often intended to be seen and reacted to by other spectators, Craven shows the rowdy behavior of the teens watching Halloween itself being recorded, watched and commented upon by investigative reporter, Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and her cameraman, Kenny (W. Earl Brown). At one point, as Randy anxiously addresses the television urging Halloween’s Final Girl, Laurie (Jaime Lee Curtis), to look behind her where Michael Myers (Tony Moran) is lurking, Kenny similarly addresses his closed-​circuit monitor urging Randy to look behind him, where Ghostface has appeared. The irony is that Randy’s drunken performance of fear while watching Halloween for the thousandth times is then quickly replaced by Sidney’s “true” expression of terror as she sees Kenny getting his throat slashed. Another layer of audience performance has been added to Scream since the early 2000s, as fans have been sharing on YouTube recordings of their or their friends’ reactions to Scream, talking to the characters on screen the same way Randy addresses Laurie, and Kenny addresses Randy. In a slew of clips, ranging from the hilarious to the utterly boring, people are recorded “Watching Scream” (or one of its sequels), and displaying evidence of the theatricality of spectatorship as they purposefully act up for one another. The YouTube video “Emily Watching Scream” is a good example of this, as Emily and her friends speak directly to the characters through their laptop while never losing sight of their own interactions and the camera recording them. “BnF Watching Scream” is another good example, where a group of girls reacts to the film and to one another. Doubtlessly, there are some spontaneous reactions to the film that are not self-​consciously meant to impact other spectators—​such as in “Mary Watching Scream 4,” where the Mary in question seems oblivious to her surroundings as she is petrified by the suspenseful twists and turns concocted by Craven. However, in the overwhelming majority of instances, the spectators ostentatiously perform fear for each other, and in some cases, they also clearly perform for the YouTube viewership out there. This is the case in “Parents Catching Us Watching Scream” where the reactions of the “terrified spectators” are obviously staged for the amusement of the YouTube viewers. The idea of showing histrionic displays of terrified spectators on YouTube was quickly appropriated by the industry and transformed into a promotional gimmick whereby the image of real spectators expressing fear and shock is presented as evidence of the film’s ability to scare its patrons. In 2009, the trailer for the nationwide release of Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity started

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Figure 6.1  The terrified audience of Paranormal Activity.

the trend of showing audience reaction as a means to create a buzz around the effectiveness of the film’s horror sequences. Of course, this was not the first time that audience reaction was used to hype a horror film; one only needs to remember the tales of spectators fainting and vomiting that were disseminated to promote The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) back in the early 1970s (Golden et al. 2000, 79). But what was once a relatively rare publicity trick became common practice in the early 2010s; a trend facilitated by widely available night vision video cameras that could record the reactions of audiences in the darkened theater. Countless trailers used this device to attract spectators by showing “evidence” of how scary these movies were, including The Green Inferno (2013, Eli Roth), The Conjuring (2013, James Wan), The Gallows the remake of The Evil Dead (2013, Fede Alvarez) and other installments in the Paranormal Activity franchise. As Caetlin Benson-​Allott explains, “through editing and digital compositing, the trailer [of Paranormal Activity] seamlessly blends murky green reaction shots with nocturnal footage from the actual movie, obscuring the line between text and paratext” (Benson-​Allott, 2013, 188). Such trailers confirm that the audience’s performance of fear (voluntary or not) is recognized as an integral part of the horror-​film-​viewing experience and consciously sought after by other potential spectators. Potential spectators who react positively to such trailers might not be particularly interested in concepts such as “collaborative spectatorship,” “performative spectatorship” or what Carolyn Jess-​Cooke labels the “interactive spectatorship” of horror (Jess-​ Cooke 2009, 55). But what does appeal to them is the guarantee that the histrionic “communal sharing” of screams (Hutchings 2014, 250)  will be part of their experience.

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The trailer for the UK release of Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014, Christopher Landon) makes the point very clearly that histrionic spectator reaction is an expected part of the horror film. The trailer begins typically with a seemingly candid recording of audience reactions to the new Paranormal installment. But suddenly some “audience members” stand up in the cinema and mutter in unison, mindlessly controlled by the film’s evil spell. Other spectators are terrified by this irrational behavior from their peers and run to escape the “possessed” theater. The staging of audience response in the trailer is precisely what Watt hopes would happen during a screening of Anguish to achieve the full effect of collective terror and pleasure that is at the core of horror spectatorship. This trailer is a clear indication that the film industry recognizes the spectator as a central element of the theatricality of horror, comparable to the monstrous entity displayed on screening. These trailers, the YouTube videos discussed above and films such as The Tingler, Anguish and Scream confirm that images of “terrified” spectators partake fully of the theatricality of the horror film. Images of viewers being “scared” are purposefully included in these audiovisual texts to intensify the experience of the spectators, who consider both the movie and their fellow audience members in the cinema or in the TV room as a vital part of the experience of watching horror. If the role of the monster is to unsettle normality, then it could be argued that the role of the loudly interactive fans who make a spectacle of themselves during horror film screenings is to destabilize “normal” viewing practices. As such, the theatricality of horror spectatorship might have an “emancipatory” effect, as Jacques Rancière understands it. In The Emancipated Spectator (2009), Rancière proposes to apply to literature, storytelling and film the kind of active spectatorship that theater has often claimed to be its exclusive domain. Rancière presents his argument about emancipated spectatorship as follows: Faced with the hyper-​theatre that wants to transform representation into presence and passivity into activity, [the argument] proposes instead to revoke the privilege of vitality and communitarian power accorded the theatrical stage, so as to restore it to an equal footing with the telling of a story, the reading of a book, or the gaze focused on an image. In sum, it proposes to conceive it as a new scene of equality where heterogeneous performances are translated into one another. For in all these performances what is involved is linking what one knows with what one does not know; being at once a performer deploying her skills and a spectator observing what these skills might produce in a new context among other spectators. Like researchers, artists construct the stages where the manifestation and effect of their skills are exhibited, rendered

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uncertain in the terms of the new idiom that conveys a new intellectual adventure. The effect of the idiom cannot be anticipated. It requires spectators who play the role of active interpreters, who develop their own translation in order to appropriate the ‘story’ and make it their own story. An emancipated community is a community of narrators and translators. (Rancière 2009, 22). The histrionic horror spectator might very well be the perfect incarnation of the “active interpreter” who translates the idiom of the horror film from a seemingly static set of superficial conventions into a web of interactions “among other spectators.” These “heterogeneous performances” do not only undermine the traditional passivity of cinema going but also create communities that can appropriate the narrative, take it away from dominant discourse and translate it into their own grotesque story. Cult horror films are referred to as such precisely because they are the kind of exclusive “intellectual adventures” through which translators and narrators can self-​ consciously perform their own emancipation for the benefit of other spectators who aspire to cultivate the particular and peculiar knowledge and skills that engender their sense of belonging. The theatricality of horror spectatorship, like the theatricality of the genre as a whole, serves to destabilize societal normality as it is manufactured through hegemonic modes of surveillance. If normal society constantly observes and scrutinizes its citizens as a way to control them, then perhaps the only possible means of emancipation is exhibitionism; countering surveillance with theatricality. If omnipresent cameras are always observing, then might as well perform before their adoring gaze. The shocking horror film and its rowdy audience thus have the potential to subvert normality through a spectacular display of monstrous characters and outrageous spectators, whose redemptive exhibitionism might approximate the cathartic function of tragedy.

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Reinhard, Carrie Lynn, and Christopher J. Olsen. 2016. “Introduction:  Empirical Approaches to Film Spectators and Spectatorship.” In Making Sense of Cinema: Empirical Studies into Film Spectators and Spectatorship. Ed. Carrie Lynn Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson, 1–​16. New York: Bloomsbury. Richards, Jeffrey. 2001. “Tod Slaughter and the Cinema of Excess.” In The Unknown 1930s: And Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–​1939. Ed. Jeffrey Richards, 139–​ 59. London: I.B. Tauris. Roberts, Helen E. 1998. Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art. Chicago, IL: Fitzroy and Dearborn. Rose, James. 2014. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. New York: Columbia University Press. Rothman, William. 1990. “Virtue and Villainy in the Face of the Camera.” In Making Visible the Invisible: An Anthology of Original Essays on Film Acting. Ed. Carole Zucker, 28–​43. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow. Saal, Ilka. 2007. New Deal Theater:  The Vernacular Tradition in American Political Theatre. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Schechner, Richard. 1977. Essays on Performance Theory. New York: Drama Book Specialists. Schneider, Steven Jay. 2004. Horror Film and Psychoanalysis:  Freud’s Worst Nightmare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwarzmaier, Agnes. 2010. “Theater Masks.” In The Art of Ancient Greek Theater. Ed. Mary Louise Hart, 42–​45. Los Angeles, CA: Getty. Senn, Bryan. 2006. Golden Horrors: An Illustrated Critical Filmography of Terror Cinema, 1931–​ 1939. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simmons, Jerold. 1994. “The Production Code under New Management:  Geoffrey Shurlock, The Bad Seed and Tea and Sympathy.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22, no. 1 (Spring): 2–​10. Singer, Ben. 2001. Melodrama and Modernity:  Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press. Sinyard, Neil. 1986. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation. London: Croom Helm. Sipos, Thomas M. 2010. Horror Film Aesthetics: Creating the Visual Language of Fear. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Skal, David. 1990. Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. New York: W. W. Norton. Skal, David. 1993. The Monster Show: A Cultural Study of Horror. New York: W. W. Norton. Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts:  Embodiments and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Spiegl, Andreas, and Fiona Elliot. 2001. “A Conflict at the very Heart of the Identification.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry no. 3: 39–​46. Staiger, Janet. 2000. Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: New York University Press. Stebbins, Genevieve. 1977. Delsarte System of Expression. New York: Dance Horizons. Styan, J. L. 1981. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szondi, Peter. 2002. An Essay on the Tragic. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Taylor, Aaron. 2005. “Cain’s Homecoming: Villainy and the Cinema.” PhD Dissertation. University of Kent, Canterbury. Taylor, George. 1989. Players and Performances in the Victorian Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Telotte, J. P. 1995. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, David. 1981. A Biographical Dictionary of Film. New York: William Morrow. Travers, Peter. 2008. “Untraceable.” Rolling Stone. February 7.  https://​www.rollingstone. com/​movies/​reviews/​untraceable-​20080207. Accessed June 4, 2018. Turner, Peter. 2015. The Blair Witch Project. New York: Columbia University Press. Wagner, Jon Nelson, and Tracy Biga MacLean. 2008. Television at the Movies: Cinematic and Critical Responses to American Broadcasting. New York: Continuum. Walsh, Bridget. 2014. Domestic Murder in Nineteenth-​Century England:  Literary and Cultural Representations. Surrey: Ashgate. Watt, Mike. 2013. Fervid Filmmaking:  66 Cult Pictures of Vision, Verve and No Self-​Restraint. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Weaver, John A., and Tara D. Britt. 2007. “Experiencing Life through the Body of Film:  The Convergence of Phenomenology and Cultural Curriculum Studies.” In Curriculum and the Cultural Body. Ed.. Stephanie Springgay and Debra Freedman, 21–​38. New York: Peter Lang. Weaver, Tom. 1999. Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes: The Mutant Melding of Two Volumes of Classic Interviews. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Weber, Samuel. 2004. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press. Westfahl, Gary. 2007. Hugo Gernsback and the Century of Science Fiction. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Westphal, Eric. 1972. Toi et tes nuages, suivi de Pollufission 2000 et de Mozartement vôtre. Paris: Gallimard. Wetmore, Kevin J., Jr. 2012. Post-​9/​11 Horror in American Cinema. London: Continuum. Williams, Linda. 1984. “When the Woman Looks.” In Re-​Visions:  Essays in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed. Mary Ann Doan, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, 83–​99. Frederick: American Film Institute. Williams, Tony. 2004. “Wanted for Murder: The Strange Case of Eric Portman.” In Bad. Ed. Murray Pomerance, 157–​71. Albany: State University of New York Press. Williams, Tony. 2015. The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead. New York: Columbia University Press. Wilson, John Elliott. 1997. Playing the Orator, the Rhetoric of Villainy and Political Discourse in Shakespeare. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International. Winter, Douglas E. 1984. Stephen King, the Art of Darkness. New York: New American Library. Wood, Robin. 1979. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” In The American Nightmare. Ed. Robin Wood and Richard Lippe, 7–​28. Toronto: Festival of Festivals. Zillmann, Dolf, and Rhonda Gibson. 2013. “The Evolution of the Horror Genre.” In Horror Films: Current Research on Audience Preferences and Reactions. Ed. James B. Weaver and Ron Tamborini, 15–​32. New York: Routledge.

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INDEX #Horror (2015) 85 [Rec] (2007) 84 ‘night, Mother (1983) 83 “Incident on and off a Mountain Road” (2005) 84 “Pigeons from Hell” (1961) 84 A Vampire Story (2008) 37 Ackroyd, Peter 50, 53–​54 Acts of Death (2007) 67, 70 Aeschylus 50, 73 Albee, Edward 83 Alien (1979) 88–​89, 94 Alone in the Ghost House (2015) 84 An American Werewolf in London (1981) 82 Anamorph (2007) 78 Anderson, Maxwell 42–​43, 45 Anguish (1987) 102, 106 Animal (2014) 85 Annabelle (2014) 80 Annabelle Comes Home (2019) 80 Annabelle: Creation (2017) 80 Apollonian Control 8, 49, 55, 60–​61, 64–​66, 71 Aristotle 83 Artaud, Antonin 61–​62 Arthur, Karen 37 Artifice 4, 6–​7, 9–​15, 17–​18, 28–​29, 31–​32, 34–​35, 47, 49, 57, 59–​60, 64, 75–​77, 80–​81, 91f5.4, 90–​92, 94–​97 As Above, So Below (2014) 18 Attack of the Puppet People (1958) 79 Auerbach, Nina 29 August Underground (2001) 17–​18 Bad Seed (1956) 42, 43f3.4, 43–​44 Badley, Linda 92

Bataille, George 5 Bava, Lamberto 101–​102 Bazin, André 10–​12, 14–​15, 31 Beckley, Paul 91 Benshoff, Henry 4, 59–​60 Berenstein, Rhona 100 Berkeley, Reginald 83 Berze, Andráa 78 Blair Witch Project (1999) 15–​18 Bloody Murder (2000) 85 Bloom, Harold 40 Booth, Michael 31 Borges, Jorge Luis 74 Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960–62) 84 Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) 23 Brecht, Bertolt 18, 62 Breton, André 101 Brimstone and Treacle (1982) 34, 35f3.3 Brook, Peter 61 Brooks, Peter 21–​22, 33 Buffini, Moira 37 Buried Child (1978) 83 Burns, Elizabeth 6 Byzantium (2012) 37 Caldwell, Thomas 23 Cannibal Holocaust (1980) 16 Carpenter, John 75, 103 Carrie (1976) 94 Carroll, Noel 4, 18, 32 Castle, William 30, 81, 101–​102 Catharsis 49, 64, 99 Catto, Max 36 Cell (2000) 79 Chamber of Torture (2013) 92 Chaney, Lon 26, 75 Child’s Play (1988) 80

18

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Theatricality in the Horror Film

Children! Children! (1970) 40–​41 Churchill, Caryl 83 Cinematic theatricality 6–​7, 25, 32, 90, 99 Clark, Mark 26 Clover, Carol 4, 22 Cloverfield (2008) 18 Clown at Midnight (1998) 67 Clown Murders (1976) 76 Cold Prey (2006) 85 Collectionneur (2002) 79 Company of Wolves (1984) 92 Conjuring (2013) 105 Cooper, Giles 27, 39–​40 Coppola, Francis Ford 23, 92 Corman, Roger 71, 90–​92 Corrigan, Timothy 6 Cox, Constance 30 Craig, Gordon 33 Craven, Wes 25, 26f3.1, 75, 103–​104 Crimes of Burke and Hare (1931) 30 Crimes of Stephen Hawke (1936) 31 Cronenberg, David 5, 28 Cry_​Wolf (2005) 96f5.6, 95–​97 Currie, Gregory 11 Darkest Hour (2005) 85 Daughter of Darkness (1947) 36 De Quincey, Thomas 49–​51, 78 De Sica, Vittorio 11, 16 Dead of Night (1945) 80 Del Torro, Guillermo 92 DeMello, Margo 75–​76 Demme, Jonathan 18, 76–​77 Demons (1985) 102 Deodato, Ruggero 16 Derrida, Jacques 1 Descent (2005 87 Desecration (1999) 92 Devil Doll (1936) 79 Devil Doll (1964) 80 Dickens, Charles 22, 54 Dionysian Excess 8, 49, 55, 60–​61, 64, 66, 71 Doctor X (1932) 100 Doll Master (2017) 80 Dolls (1987) 81–​82 Don’t Blink (2014) 85 Donahue, Heather 16

Dr. Cyclops (1940) 79 Dracula (1931) 71, 90 Dramtic Unities 71, 73, 82–​84, 86–​88 Edson, Margaret 83 Edwards, Matthew 92 Eight O’Clock (1920) 83 Eisenstein, Sergei 12, 94, 97 Eldredge, Sears A. 74 Elliot, Fiona 12–​13, 27 Englund, Robert 25–​26, 26f3.1 Escape Room (2017/​2019)  86 Event Horizon (1997) 88–​89, 89f5.3 Evil Dead (2013) 85, 105 Exorcist (1973) 105 Expressionism 5, 14, 34, 59, 91 Face at the Window (1939) 31 Féral, Josette 6 Final Girl 22, 25, 85, 87, 104 Findlay, Roberta 9 Flag Lieutenant (1902) 30 Flesh and Blood Show (1972) 66–​67, 70 Fog (1933) 84 Foster, Jodie 20 Fragasso, Claudio 101 Frankenstein (1931) 71, 90 Freeland, Cynthia 18–​19 Freeman, Morgan 20 Freud, Sigmund 59, 79–​80, 87 Friday the 13th (1980) 85 Friday the 13th, Part III (1982) 25 Gallows (2015) 70f4.2, 67–​71, 105 Gates, Philippa 28 Gaudreault, André 2 Gearhart, Suzanne 87 Ghostland (2018) 79 Gibson, Rhonda 100 Gillis, Stacy 28 Gissing, George 51 Glass Menagerie (1944) 83 Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) 23 Gosson, Stephen 64 Gracey, James 92 Grand-​Guignol 3, 14, 24, 34, 55, 57, 59, 63, 66, 80, 83, 87, 89 Green Inferno (2013) 105

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Index Grosteque (2009) 59 Guercini, Maurizio 11–​12 Hallam, Julia 20–​21 Halloween (1978) 75–​76, 103–​104 Hammer Films 64, 90–​91 Hand, Richard J. 3, 34, 55, 83, 89–​90 Hannibal (2013-​2015)  78 Hardwicke, Catherine 92 Harris, Thomas 76–​78 Haunting (1963) 5 Heath, Stephen 94–​95 Hendershot, Cyndy 44 Henry V (1944) 12 Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) 9, 18 Hermann, Bernard 94 Hitchcock, Alfred 1 Ho, Elizabeth 53–​54 Home Invasion (2016) 75 Hopkins, Anthony 20, 23, 77, 92 Horrigan, Jack 40–​41 Horror (2003) 92 House of Usher (1960) 71, 91f5.4, 91–​92 House on Haunted Hill (1999) 85 Hughes, Jessica 101 Hush (2016) 75 Hutchings, Peter 93 Incredible Torture Show Bloodsucking Freaks, (1976) 58 Iphigénie (1674) 87 It (2017) 71, 76 Jack the Ripper 50, 53–​54, 78 Jackson, Chuck 44 Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI (1986) 4 Jaws (1975) 94 Jones, Duane 13 Jordan, Neil 37, 92 Jovanovic, Nenad 94 Julius Caesar (1599) 61 Kane, Carol 38 Karloff, Boris 5, 26 Kaufman, Lloyd 59 Keller, James 17 Kelly, Nancy 47

119

Khalfoun, Frank 84 Kierkegaard, Søren 87 King Lear (1606) 60 King, Stephen 8, 15, 101 Ladri di biciclette (1948) 11 Langenkamp, Heather 25 Le Père (2012), 83 Lee, Christopher 26, 37, 58 Leeder, Murray 102 Leno, Dan 50–​55 Leonard, Joshua 16 LeRoy, Mervyn 42, 45 Lewis, Herschell Gordon 58 Libation Bearers (458BC) 73 Life (2017) 88–​89 Lights Out (2013) 83 Limehouse Golem (2016) 7, 50, 52f4.1, 54–​55 London After Dark 1926 30 Lorre, Peter 7, 26, 55–​56 Lowe, Rob 42 Lowenstein, Adam 101 Lugosi, Bella 92 Luna, Bigas 102–​103 Macgowan, Kenneth 74 Mackenzie, John 39 MacLean, Tracy Biga 9 Mad Love (1935) 7, 55, 57, 60, 63 Mafu Cage (1978) 37 Maggiorani, Lamberto 11, 16 Magistrale, Tony 8 Mamet, David 23 Maniac (1980) 5 Mankind (c1470) 27 Marat/​Sade (1964/​1967)  61–​62 March, William 42–​47, 60 Maria Marten or Murder in the Red Barn (1935) 30–​31, 33f3.2 Marshment, Margaret 20–​21 Marx, Karl 51 Marxism 94 Mask (1961) 75 Mask Maker (2017) 75 Masters of Horror (2005–2007) 84 Mathijs, Ernest 1 May, Adrian 37 McCormack, Patty 42, 47

120

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Theatricality in the Horror Film

McKenna, Siobhan 36 Medina, Juan Carlos 7, 50 Melodrama 3, 9, 20–​24, 27, 29–​34, 36, 51, 54, 66, 90, 94 Metz, Christian 1n1 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 18 Miss Julie (1888) 83 Mitchell, James E. 100 Molière 83 Monstration 2–​3, 40 Montage 2, 12, 96f5.6, 94–​97 Morrison, Michael A. 8 Muensterberger, Werner 74 Müller-​Wood, Anja  64 Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971) 62–​68, 70 Myrick, Daniel 15–​16 Naremore, James 29 Naturalism 3, 34, 36, 89, 91 Neorealism 10, 31 Nicholas, Alexandra Heller 17 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8 Night of the Living Dead (1968) 7, 13–​14, 84 Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) 25 Nobody Gets Out Alive (2012) 85 Norman, Marsha 83 Nosferatu (1922) 101 O’Neill, Eugene 83 Oldman, Gary 23, 92 Olivier, Laurence 12 Olney, Ian 100–​101 Othello (1603) 66 Ovid 100 P2 (2007) 84 Pandorum (2009) 88 Paranormal Activity (2007) 17–​18, 105f6.1, 104–​106 Pavis, Patrice 6 Peeping Tom (1960) 18 Peli, Oren 17, 104 Perkins, Anthony 1, 2f1.1 Peucker, Brigitte 77 Phantom of the Opera (1925) 75 Phantom of the Opera (1962) 64 Phillips, Kendall R. 14 Pinedo, Isabel Cristina 4, 7, 14

Pizzato, Mark 49, 68, 70–​71 Playgirl Killer (1967) 79 Poe, Edgar Allan 63–​64, 90–​91 Pomerance, Murray 28 Portman, Eric 28 Potter, Dennis 35n1, 34–​36 Price, Vincent 30, 49, 59, 101 Psycho (1960) 1, 2f1.1, 10, 18–​20, 27, 79, 94–​95 Puppetmaster (1989) 80 Racine, Jean 83, 87 Rancière, Jacques 106 Ranger (2019) 85 Realism v, 3–​4, 6–​7, 9–​25, 27, 29, 31–​36, 47, 59, 71, 89–​90, 92–​95, 97, 99 Red Riding Hood (2011) 92 Resnais, Alain 97 Richards, Jeffrey 30–​31 Riders to Sea (1904) 83 Ritual (2017) 87 Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) 99 Rogell, Albert S. 84 Romero, George A. 7, 13, 28, 84 Rooker, Michael 9, 18, 19f2.2 Rose, James 25 Rosse, Herman 74 Rothman, William 27 Row (2018) 79 Sánchez, Eduardo 15–​16 Sandberg, David 83 Saw (2004) 71, 76, 88 Scary Movie series (2000–2013) 5 Schechner, Richard 6 Schneider, Jay 59 Schwarzmaier, Agnes 73 Scream (1996) 75, 103–​104, 106 Se7en (1995) 20, 78 Senn, Bryan 32 Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009) 83 Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror 30 Shakespeare, William 12, 60, 64, 83 Shanks (1974) 81 Shaviro, Steven 28 Shepherd, Sam 83 Shining (1980) 76, 93

12

Index Shiraishi, Koji 59 Shklovskii, Viktor 18 Shyamalan, M. Night 5, 9 Silence of the Lambs (1988) 76 Silence of the Lambs (1991) 18–​20, 23–​24, 71, 77f5.1 Silent House (2010/​2011)  87 Singer, Ben 33 Sinyard, Neil 59 Sipos, Thomas 23 Skal, David 4, 29 Slater, Christian 40, 42 Slaughter, Tod 30–​32 Sleepy Hallow (1999) 91 Sobchack, Vivian 28 Spiegl, Andrea 12–​13, 27 Split (2016) 5 Staiola, Enzo 11, 16 Star Crystal (1986) 88 Stoker, Bram 29 Strangers (2008) 75 Strindberg, August 83 Sumner, Gordon (Sting) 34 Suspicions (1995) 85 Sweeney Todd The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936) 31–​32 Synge, John Millington 83 Take Me Naked (1966) 9 Taylor, Aaron 27–​28 Telotte, J.P. 57 Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) 25, 76 Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) 85 Thatcher, Margaret 53 Theatre of Blood (1973) 7, 59–​62 Theatre of Death 57–​58 Theatricality v–​1, 3–​4, 6–​10, 12–​14, 18–​20, 23–​29, 31–​35, 37–​38, 40, 47, 49, 52, 54–​55, 57–​60, 62, 65, 65n1, 71, 73, 76–​82, 89–​92, 93f5.5, 93–​95, 97, 99–​100, 102–​104, 106–​107 They Walk Alone (1938) 36 Thompson, David 94 Tingler (1959) 101–​102, 106 Titus Andronicus (1593) 60 Toi et tes nuages (1971) 37 Tomaselli, Dante 92

121

Torment (2013) 75 Tragedy 7–​8, 11, 21, 47, 49, 54–​55, 57, 60, 64, 67, 69–​71, 73, 82, 84, 87, 89, 99, 107 Travers, Peter 66 Troll 2 (1990) 101 Truth or Dare? (2018) 76 Twisted (1986) 40, 42 Twisted Nightmare (1987) 85 Uh-​Oh Show (2009) 58 Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971) 27, 39–​40 Untraceable, (2008) 66 V/​H/​S (2012) 18 Visit (2015) 9 Vogel, Fred 17 Wagner, Jon Nelson 9 Waits, Tom 23 Walsh, Bridget 34 Waterfront Nightmare (2012) 85 Watkins, James 92 Watt, Matt 103 Weber, Samuel 1, 6 Welles, Orson 11 Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) 25, 26f3.1 Westphal, Éric 37 Wetmore, Kevin J. Jr. 95 Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) 28 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) 83 Williams, Michael C. 16 Williams, Tennessee 83 Williams, Tony 13, 28 Wilson, Michael 3, 34, 55, 83, 87, 89–​90, 93 Winter, Douglas E. 15 Wit (1995) 83 Wizard of Gore (1970/​2007)  58–​59 Wizard of Oz (1939) 5 Woman in Black (2012) 92 Wood, Robin 1 You’re Next (2011) 75–​76 Zavattini, Cesare 11 Zeller, Florian 83 Zillmann, Dolf 100

12