Abstract
The most basic and unanimous statement made in scholarship on horror films is that horror films are ‘about’ fear: the primary purpose of horror films is to scare viewers. Based on horror films from the 1970s until the present in which child gangs play a significant part, this essay advances a new theory of horror film, namely, that horror films primarily seek to elicit not fear but guilt. The analysis focuses on four topics: themes, camera angles, horror’s cinematic casting of ‘abnormality’ and the rift, unique to the horror genre, between audience ‘alignment’ and ‘allegiance’.
Horror films are always about something being dismissed that needs to be taken seriously. Scholarship is virtually unanimous in its belief that something is fear: ‘if it is the movie’s aim to terrify, horrify or frighten, it qualifies as a horror production’. 1 To some extent, this is simply a tautology that confuses horror as an experience with horror as a genre: if ‘horror’ as an emotion can be defined as ‘what we feel when anything frightens us or promotes fear or terror’ (Jones, 2005: ix), it must follow, or so the argument goes, that horror as a genre is all about Creating and Marketing Fear (Hantke, 2004). Scholars of horror have differed widely on what kinds of fear the horror film evokes – the list here ranges from vague ‘fears of death and the unknown’ (Jones, 2005: 3) all the way to apocalypse anxiety – and they have investigated different reasons for viewers agreeing to expose themselves to such fears, from frisson to catharsis to sadism and masochism. But nobody has questioned the basic formula: horror (the emotion) = fear; ergo horror (film) evokes fear.
To me, the fear-theory has always seemed thoroughly dissatisfying, largely because it glosses over the central fact that we are the source of most of our fears: ‘ghosts, in the end, adopt the motivations and perhaps the very souls of those who behold them. If they are malevolent, their malevolence comes from us’ (King, 1991: 289). After all, we are the ones creating the potential for nuclear disaster, World War III or other forms of Armageddon. So long as our thinking about horror remains on the level of effect, the fear-theory will serve just fine. Digging for causes, however, quickly raises the suspicion that perhaps the horror film is seeking something else as well. This is, in fact, the main idea that I will advance in the course of this essay: that horror films, and in particular those showing gang violence, are more concerned with guilt than fear. They are not only, perhaps not even primarily, scary rides but also, and perhaps more importantly, guilt trips. 2
Four points specific to horror seem to me to provide adequate confirmation for my suspicion. They are as follows: the themes of horror, the normalisation of abnormality and the rejection of the future, the viewer’s alignment with Evil and the split between viewer alignment and allegiance.
The themes of horror
Horror films involving gangs of evil children address guilt thematically in a way that points directly at the guilty involvement of their audience.
To cite just a few examples: in Fritz Kiersch’s Children of the Corn (1984), the children in a small Midwestern farming community murder all adults for destroying the earth through pesticides and other forms of irresponsible farming. In Wolf Rilla’s iconic film Village of the Damned (1960), the English village of Midwich is in danger of losing its entire adult population to a cold-blooded killer gang of blond-haired, glowing-eyed children of dubious paternity (in fact, the film’s working title, The Midwich Cuckoos, suggests strongly that it is uncertainty of progeny that is the film’s real horror, not its overt theme of alien invasion). The town’s adults solve the problem by dropping the A-bomb on the barn in which the children have congregated, wiping them all out in one go. Village of the Damned has been read, and correctly I think, as an expression of atomic fears of the late 1950s, but never, to my knowledge, as the thinly veiled guilt trip for the attack on Hiroshima that it so clearly is.
Such links are unmissable in Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s rather ironically titled ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (1976), 3 which exists in two versions. One tells the bog-standard child gang horror story: a British couple arrives on a small island off the coast of Spain, planning to spend their holidays there, only to find the island ominously deserted. After their shock discovery that the entire adult population has been murdered by the island’s children, for reasons that remain of course unexplained, they fall victim to the killer kid gang themselves. The extended edition features the same narrative preceded by 8 minutes of documentary footage that answers the film’s title question, Who can kill a child? The footage shows 20th-century atrocities perpetrated against children in Auschwitz, India, Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam and Nigeria. Each segment is incongruously separated by a brief audio-only snippet of children singing and giggling, overlaid with statistical data showing the number of children killed in whichever war, genocide or ethnic cleansing is currently on display: 14 million children in the World War II, the total death toll of which has been estimated at 60 million; 1.2 million children – out of a total death toll of 2 million people – in the Indo-Pakistani war; over half a million children – out of a death toll of 1.2 million people – in the Korean War; 1.8 million children out of a total death toll of 3 million people in Vietnam; 390,000 children out of a death toll of half a million people in Biafra. More often than not, then, the statistical survival rate for adults in war, including that of soldiers in combat, is considerably higher than that of children. While the child gang’s motivation in Serrador’s film remains obscure without this documentary prequel, its inclusion obviously defines the film as a revenge flick on a grand scale.
Notably, all three films confront viewers with communal guilt (hence, we might suspect, the recurring gang-theme) that is untethered from individual deeds and for which, as a result, nobody assumes responsibility. This is, in fact, the horror film’s usual modus operandi, and it is also what makes its guilt trip as inescapable as original sin. We might think of this in terms of the hardwiring of built-in human imperatives versus the software of personal decision-making: the software we can re-write, the hardwiring we cannot. When horror films play nice, they focus on personal guilt and leave the audience out of it; when they do not, they hone in on universal sin or collective guilt, attacking the audience directly. A direct link between the horrors on screen and (someone else’s) transgression – a fisherman is run over by a bunch of drunk teens, knows what they did last summer, and comes back to slaughter them one by one 4 – does not directly implicate viewers. But when a horror film attacks human hardwiring, it goes for everyone’s jugular. Hard-wired convictions include truisms that are so universal as to be near-inescapable: families are the pillars of society. Children are innocent. Fighting for freedom is noble. Democracy is the best of all possible political systems. Kind-hearted capitalism is possible. The human race must survive at all costs. Individual sacrifice is acceptable, even noble, in order to save the community/the country/the world. 5 Guilt uncoupled from moral wrongdoing arises from an unquestioning faith in these hard-wired imperatives: the destruction of our planet, for example, is a direct result of human progress and development. We are simply keeping warm when our forebears could not. That we have the right to keep warm, the right to survive, the right to provide an even warmer place for our children, is part of the hardwiring that we find exceedingly difficult to question. The horror guilt trip is payback for our inability to see the destruction caused by our most dearly held convictions.
At times, horror films serve up guilt in the absence of a crime, which is another way of saying that they work purely on the level of hardwiring. In such films, nobody is, on the face of it, guilty of anything. While the horrors unfolding on the screen are explicitly linked to guilt, that guilt is not linked to any individual harmful decision. A good example is Moreau and Palud’s Ils (2006, Them), in which a gang of children terrorise and murder an adult couple because, as the film’s final line states, ‘They wouldn’t play with us!’ To take this literally – that is, to read this as a film about child neglect – would be a stretch. Until the final line, child neglect simply does not come up in the film, and the actions of the evil children are as incomprehensible to the audience as they are to the hunted couple. ‘They wouldn’t play with us!’ is sprung on the viewer at the very end, as a retrospective motivation for the entire story. In the narrative context of this particular film, the explanation is absurdly implausible. But read in the broader context of the horror tradition, the statement makes sense: guilt needs no concrete evil deed or justification to take centre stage in horror.
Most films, unlike Ils, do focus on concrete guilty deeds – it is, in fact, difficult to find a horror film that does not, in some form or another, send audiences on a guilt trip for crimes ranging from child rejection, child abuse, child rape, child abandonment, awful family interaction, greed, ecological, social, political and war crimes and above all, for the persistent denial of responsibility for all of it. But films like Ils, in which guilt, although it plays no part within the story, is motivated as the reason for the story, also show that the horror film proceeds on an a priori assumption of guilt. It is an undercurrent of the genre, festering in its damp cellars, simply, incomprehensibly and rationale defyingly there, just as it is simply there in the world of Kafka’s writing.
Normalising the abnormal, rejecting the future
Horror films portraying gangs of evil children normalise the abnormal by casting murder recognisably as child’s play, and they reject the future by denying that adulthood is the children’s future, thereby also denying that children and adults form part of the same race of humans.
Peopletoys (1974) features a gang of murderous children, including 15-year-old Sister Hannah – so called because she appears in a nun’s habit – 13-year-old vain and beautiful David, 12-year-old soldier boy Brian, pyromaniac 14-year-old Susan and 4-year old cutie Moe. The Fearsome Five are pitted against a group of adults in a snowed-in holiday chalet: arrogant and overbearing patriarch Papa Doc and his entourage consisting of his daughters Julie and Lovely, Julie’s partner and Lovely’s ex Rick, Papa Doc’s disgruntled employee Harvey, Harvey’s alcoholic wife Ruth and the mentally retarded Ralph, who serves the guests as handyman, cook and general dogsbody. Once the children are taken in by the adults, the rest of the film is given over to a predictable series of gory slayings.
A distinguishing aspect of the film is its explicit definition of all killings as communal child’s play, visualised precisely as described by child psychologists from Spencer to Montessori: as a means to expend superfluous energy, to train for survival in the adult world and to acquire new skills. The children entrap and kill Papa Doc with the help of an absurdly elaborate contraption such as only a child could devise, a chair swinging from the ceiling with a long sword-like stabbing instrument attached to its seat. Immediately after Papa Doc’s death, David and Brian quarrel over who deserves credit for rigging the murder weapon. In a subsequent scene, the children place Papa Doc’s corpse outside in a sitting position and build a snowman around it. Pyromaniac Susan sets Ruth on fire after Brian and David have set the stage by pouring petrol over her; afterwards all children dance merrily around the screaming and twisting bonfire that is Ruth. Little Moe, upbraided by Lovely for playing with her make-up, kills Lovely with Hannah’s help as Lovely is taking a bath: Hannah holds Lovely’s head under water, while Moe pours Papa Doc’s pet piranhas into the tub, giggling gaily at Lovely’s death throes. All killings are collaborative, the result of elaborate contraptions and planning; the impression one is left with is that of childish problem-solving akin to the building of a Lego castle or a model ship. The final scene shows all kids and corpses, their ‘peopletoys’, assembled in the living room, the corpses arranged in a circle in the way a little girl might arrange dolls for a tea party. The children interact with them as a child interacts with dolls, with the child speaking both the lines assigned to the doll and his or her own. When finally the decision is made to move on – ’Game’s over’, Susan announces bossily – little Moe cries inconsolably, wailing: ‘I don’t want to leave Julie!’, but Hannah soothes her with the timeless parental classic: ‘We’re gonna have some brand-new toys soon’. Mollified, Moe pecks dead Lovely on the cheek with a cheery ‘Bye, Lovely!’, exactly the way in which a little girl would kiss a favourite doll good-bye when Mummy puts her foot down: ‘No, you can’t take your doll into the bathtub’. The play-theme is so elaborately enacted that it practically trumps the terror the scene seeks to create: there is an ‘Aaaawwwww, how cute’ quality about it that contrasts absurdly with, but also quite overpowers, the visual reminders of the awful reality behind the game – gaping wounds, Ruth’s charred face, blood everywhere.
Peculiarly, the film makes absolutely no distinction between these deadly games and ‘normal’ kid behaviour. Although we must assume, particularly given the ending with its talk of embarking on a search for new toys, that the children plan to kill everyone the minute they set foot into the house, all killings are apparently motivated by anger at situations that are part and parcel of every child’s life – for instance, being shouted at for playing with things you are not supposed to touch, being belittled and being beaten at a board game. The film portrays no qualitative difference between these normal tantrums and gory murder. Thus, the film casts murder in terms of interaction not only among children but also between adults and children. Significantly, all children are ‘assigned’ an adult: Hannah latches onto Ralph, Susan willingly submits to Ruth’s mothering, David plays chess with Harvey and wants to be his ‘friend’ and Moe develops a very cuddly relationship with Lovely. But if this seems to imply, at least initially, a ‘normal’ child–adult relationship, with the adult in authority over the child and the child in training to become an adult, the viewer is soon disabused of this idea. All men in the film are defined by careerism and greed: Papa Doc, the film’s Alpha Male, brags tirelessly about his own achievements and riches; the other men are cast as little more than circling sharks, jockeying for position and hoping for offal from his table. All women are defined by sex: the wanton (Lovely), the willing (Julie), and the frigid lush Ruth who rejects Harvey’s increasingly desperate sexual advances in favour of her love affair with Jim Beam. There are no adults in this film who could serve as role models for children; if these characters are as good as it gets, adulthood richly merits rejection. Indeed, the ‘natural’ link between children and adults, and adulthood as the natural and inevitable future of childhood, is refused several times throughout the film. When Julie, for example, comments on the children’s strange behaviour, Rick offers an explanation: ‘Kids today’, he tells her, ‘are smoking pot at ten and a bong at twelve. So we’re not gonna be expecting them to be normal like us’. Kids, in other words, are not little adults-in-training, they are fundamentally different from adults, ‘strange’ in the sense of ‘abnormal’.
One of the most disturbing instances of child abnormality – and this would, at least in Rick’s judgment of ‘kids today’, apply not only to the Fearsome Five but to children in general – is the film’s premise that children, unlike adults, are fundamentally incapable of experiencing guilt. This, too, is expressed in the murder-as-a-game metaphor. In The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally, child psychologist David Elkind (2007), rejecting the definition of child’s play as training for adulthood advanced by Spencer, Groos, Montessori and Vygotsky, among others, has offered the simplest answer of all to the question ‘Why do children play?’: because it comes naturally and because it is fun.
Let us consider, for a moment, the scandalous consequences of applying Elkind’s insight to films in which the murder of adults is visualised as child’s play. Why do children in horror films murder adults? Because it comes naturally and because it is fun.
That is, of course, precisely how a horror film would portray it. Throughout Peopletoys, the children’s joy is clearly visualised through cheery dances around burning people, happy giggles while building snowmen around corpses or in the simple sense of achievement when a complicated murderous contraption turns out to work exactly as planned. But disturbingly enough, the joy of killing is not purely a diegetic issue. The idea that children experience the killing of adults as a fun game turns out to be a major issue for the makers of, and for the adult actors in, horror films that feature children killing adults. Interviews with adults involved in making such films tend to focus on intense antagonism, to the point of physical violence, on the set, and to link this directly with the violence portrayed in the film. In 2006, Peopletoys-producer Michael Blowitz reported that he and the film’s first director Sean MacGregor clashed so badly at a production meeting that ‘He took a swing at me and I put him through a plate glass window’. 6 Dawn Lyn, who played little Moe, remembered decades later that according to her mother, she fought with her brother more than usual while making the film. Her mother attributed this increased aggression ‘to the negativity of the roles we were playing, being murderers’. Lyn herself, however, denied both fighting with her brother and being in the least disturbed by the role she was playing. For adults involved in making the film, the diegetic violence was clearly traumatic to the point where it leaked out into the extra-diegetic world. But what of the children? Thirty-three years later, they still remembered how much fun they had. ‘It was like a vacation for us’, remembers Tierre Turner who played soldier boy Brian, ‘we were having a great time’. Disturbingly, all the ‘fun’ mentioned by the then-child actors is directly linked with the murders, seen either as a great lark or even, in Piaget’s (2004) sense, as exercises in autonomy. Turner, for example, remembered that ‘I was the person who made everyone else whack everybody else up, and I did this with great pleasure at twelve years old’ (the film, interestingly, portrays all killings as communal gang efforts and assigns no such leadership role to the Brian-character). And Dawn Lyn described, her eyes shining, the truly Freudian situation of killing Lovely (played by her real-life mother, Carolyn Stellar) by pouring real (albeit dead, or presumed-dead) piranhas into her bathtub, one of which actually latched onto her mother’s leg, wounding her.
Such radically diverging perceptions of violence – distinctly traumatic for adults, a hoot for kids – permeate the interviews of cast and crew members of other horror films as well, including films separated considerably from Peopletoys by time, space and cultural context. Take the 2008 British film The Children, for example, an authentic isn’t-this-fun kiddie slaughter-fest in which parents feebly try to defend themselves against a gang of murderous children (final score: kids 4, adults 3). Post-production interviews with the adults on the set reveal both that they experienced severe trauma watching scenes in which the children killed adults and that they presumed a similarly traumatic experience on the part of the children. Actor Jeremy Sheffield, who played the first father figure dispatched, describes that considerable effort went into minimising such trauma for the children: ‘We went through different games, exercises, play […] to make it very clear to the kids that it’s a game, it’s not real, whatever happens is not real, no matter how real it seems, it’s not’. 7 But Eva Birthistle, who played the last mother standing, seemed aware that such caution was unnecessary: ‘their confidence just grew, like in the first week, and then they were sort of … delighted that they were gonna kill us all [giggles]’. Jane Karen, Child Wrangler on the set, confirms this impression with reference to one particular traumatic scene:
We’ve got a little girl that has to stab her mother in the eye with a pencil, and she really likes it. She’s been really… good at that. They’re just much better at that kind of bang-bang you’re dead!-kind of games than you imagine, they’re quite gory in their playing, and so it’s not a big leap for them, whereas as adults we get very sensitive about [gasps] “How would you, you know, explain this,” and those kids go: “Oh yeah, yeah, I’m covered in blood, aren’t I, because I just stabbed Mum Di…”
Horror films in which children gang up on adults turn child psychology on its head. They take the entire idea of normalisation out of the hands of adults who, diegetically, uphold their fondest illusions of control by severely underestimating murderous children as ‘a little strange’, and extra-diegetically are at a loss to explain why playing at killing adults is so much fun. The gasps and the giggles indicate a considerable level of discomfort with the fact that the adults’ desperate incantations that these murders are ‘not real, whatever happens is not real’ are apparently completely wasted on the kids. Adults need the distinction between games and reality; children do not. Adults need to repay their ghastly deeds in coin of guilt; children do not. Guilt is thereby cast as something that adults own, that properly belongs to the adult world and only there. It is hardly a leap to read the narrative of horror movies involving child gangs both as metaphor and as manifesto: let’s bring home to adults that which belongs to them.
Viewer alignment with evil: The psychopathic moment
As guilt flicks, horror films focus our attention on Evil, not the battle between Good and Evil, and certainly not on Good. Unlike in other genres (detective, thriller), there is usually neither sympathy for the victims of Evil nor admiration for heroes opposing it.
Commenting on his novel Carrie, in which a teen is horribly bullied by a gang of classmates, Stephen King has famously said that every kid who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down would be able to sympathise with Carrie’s revenge: ‘in Carrie’s destruction of the gym […] we see a dream revolution of the socially downtrodden’ (King, 1991: 201). We might read this to mean that his novel – and de Palma’s film of the same name (Carrie, 1976) – are experienced entirely or predominantly from the viewpoint of the victim of bullying. Yet the film’s traumatic shower scene divides its point of view (POV) fairly evenly between the cowering Carrie and the attacking girl gang, thus visually aligning the viewer at least as much, if not more, with the bullies as with the victim. 8 To me at least, this makes some sense: the equal camera-attention on the gang’s and the victim’s POV seems to express that while the victim may lay claim to all of our sympathy, she does not command all of our identification. And indeed, why should she? The butt of the joke – the first girl in the class to get breasts; the fat boy; the kid with the thick spectacles; the kid cursed with a stammer or a harelip – is an exception, a lone individual: it only takes one, and there’s usually one in every class. Bullies, on the other hand, are everywhere; they stalk as individuals and run in gangs. Just so in Carrie, where bullying is a communal activity and bullies make up pretty much Carrie’s entire class. The moral imperative may move viewers to sympathise with the revenge of the bullied, as King says. But assuming that ‘identification’ is not entirely based on who we want to be, but also on who we are, it is more likely, on purely numerical grounds, that viewers are watching the shower scene from the mob’s perspective. If there is only one quarry to every pack of wolves, it should follow that most viewers of the scene can draw on hands-on experience as bullies, whereas relatively few actually know what it is like to have your shorts pulled down, or to be pelted with tampons in the gym shower.
My point here is simply that what film critics have termed ‘identification’ (more on this term and its complexities below) may not be wholly determined by ethical stances. The question of ethics and identification is a particularly hairy one in horror films where Evil is the real deal and the monster is the real hero (Wood, 2003: 97). Good, in horror, is limited to one of two guises: horror’s many victims – for whom viewers can hardly even muster sympathy – or, more rarely, an antagonist, a ‘zero hero’ (King, 1991: 441) who, like the victims, is hapless, dimwitted, laughably inadequate to the task and always at least 10 steps behind Evil. ‘Anyone in a horror movie who leans on the shoulder of a professionally qualified male rescuer is already as good as dead’. 9
My suspicion is that the horror film’s (and viewer’s) greater interest in Evil is more than a default position arrived at by the exquisite boredom caused by Good: it is a matter of identification. In claiming this, I am swimming against a strong current of scholarly consensus that assumes that although they may claim more viewer interest, Bad, and even more so Evil, are ineligible for viewer identification.
10
However, assuming, as I do, that horror is more about guilt than about fear, it becomes possible to read viewer identification with Evil as a way to overcome fear. Identifying with Evil may result in guilt, but at least it propels the viewer from the place of Fear, the victim’s position – always held by Good, in horror – and into a position of power. Some philosophers have, in fact, built a fundamental definition of Evil on this very dialectic. Fred Alford, 1997, for example, has argued that if the desire to combat fear is a natural impulse, then identification with Evil is not an aberration but simply a human trait, a ‘psychopathic moment’ that everyone experiences: The psychopathic moment is a virtually universal moment in all lives. When we are faced with intolerable, uncontainable dread, the natural tendency is to identify with the persecutor, becoming the agent of doom, as the only way of controlling it. Evil is the attempt to inflict one’s doom on others, becoming doom, rather than living subject to it. In this sense evil is bad faith, the lie that one could escape one’s fate by inflicting it on others. (p. 58)
Dragging Alford’s insights from the lofty heights of philosophy down to the damp dungeons of horror shows us why horror films concern themselves more with guilt than with fear. Horror films are fictionalised ‘psychopathic moments’ in which viewers are faced with the alternative between fear and guilt and the option to choose guilt as the safer route. To ‘identify with the persecutor’ is the only way to avoid being terrified. We pay for our rejection of fear (the victim’s position) in coin of guilt (by assuming the perp’s position), although guilt will hardly deter us: ‘most of us feel guilty, at least sometimes. Neither guilt nor empathy will change this tendency to inflict terror on others, however’ (Alford, 1997: 59). ‘Terror’, in Alford’s reasoning, shifts meaning, from fear (of Evil) to guilt (the terror of recognising ourselves as Evil): We do not feel terror and then identify with the aggressor, or at least that is not the whole story. The terror stems from the identification with the aggressor, his aggression suddenly our own, directed against those we care about and depend on, including ourselves and our values. (Alford, 1997: 59)
And that, I think, is the second central aspect of horror: not only does it showcase the ‘psychopathic moment’ when the viewer may choose guilt over fear, it also puts its finger on the gaping wound created by the viewer’s simultaneous alignment with Evil and presumed allegiance to Good.
The split between alignment (‘identity’) and allegiance (‘identification’)
Films assign to viewers a specific POV, which can be termed, somewhat muddily, an ‘identity’ or – to use Murray Smith’s (1995) more concrete term – an alignment (through, for instance, camera angles or voice-over narration). They also invite viewers to ‘identify’ (or, in Smith-speak, to form an allegiance), usually with the film’s hero or victim. In most genres (e.g. romantic comedies, thrillers and detective genres), alignment (visual ‘identity’) and allegiance (moral ‘identification’) are yoked together. Horror alone separates the two to a degree unusual and unworkable in other cinematic genres. Most often, horror films achieve this by forcing viewers into the visual perspective of the guilty party. Viewer allegiance is steered towards the victims of violence; visual alignment is linked with the victimiser through first-person POV camera angles. From the outset, then, horror places its viewers into an impossible viewing position: ‘the terror of the victim is supplanted by the delight of the torturer, which is being consciously shared by the audience: that is the source of horror’ (Morris, 2010: 51).
Horror films featuring evil children achieve this using visual alignment – most often POV shots – to assign guilt to the two least likely parties (in the viewers’ minds): children (within the film) and the audience (beyond the film). Possibly the best-known and certainly the most analysed example is the lengthy opening sequence of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), 11 which both communicates the obvious viewer allegiance – by motivating the viewers’ pity for the victim and their understanding of the parents’ shock at the discovery of little Michael with a bloody knife – and compels a diametrically opposed visual alignment, since it is shot entirely from the 6-year-old killer’s perspective. This forced visual alignment of the viewer with the killer through POV camera angles is one of the most prominent horror traditions of all. Film after film subjects us to first-person POV shots of the murderer pursuing his victim, knife drawn, gun cocked, hammer raised or chainsaw roaring. This visual perspective, ours as the murderer’s, may not dominate the film, but it often governs the film’s most traumatic scenes – as in the case of Halloween – and thus certainly gets itself noticed. Scholars have, in fact, grappled extensively with the meaning of POV shots. The most popular explanation is a pragmatic one: the killer’s POV affords the most titillating shots of the victim about to be dispatched. Still, we must ask, if horror films are all about fear, why not force the audience more often into the victim’s position rather than the killer’s? Why not, for example, POV shots from the victim’s perspective as she races up the stairs, looking back to see the killer catching up? Or a POV shot from inside the wardrobe where the victim is hiding, looking out fearfully to see whether the killer is in the room? Such perspectives would undoubtedly elicit fear, if that were the point. But in fact, where such perspectives occur – relatively rarely – they tend to get less screen time than the killer’s and are clearly established as mere reverse-shots to the killer’s POV (Hutchings, 2004: 196). The result is that our allegiance with the victim, mandated by simple ethics, is undercut by visual alignment.
Ethical imperatives aside, horror’s portrayal of its victims – and of Good in general, as I have argued above – is often so (deliberately?) inept, callous or contemptuous that it becomes fairly difficult for viewers to dredge up either tears for victims or cheers for Good. Does the blonde bimbo who runs upstairs when she should have run outside garner the viewer’s sympathy or scorn? 12 Contempt for the victim is so pervasive in the horror tradition as to be an assumed viewer position, parodied, for example, in the horror film spoof Scary Movie (2000), in which the victim, tearing out of the house, is confronted with two road signs: ‘Safety’ with an arrow pointing to the left, ‘Death’ with an arrow pointing to the right (after a bit of dithering, she chooses, to nobody’s surprise, ‘Death’). In films featuring minuscule murderers, such as the doll-sized killers of Puppetmaster (1989), Pet Sematary (1989) or the Child’s Play (1988)-franchise, do we really feel sympathy for all the victims who are so easily enticed down to the killer’s level, by bending over, falling down, offering hugs or crawling under the bed, as if they meant to make themselves as accessible as possible to a knife wielded by a one foot tall assassin? Our abiding contempt for victims is, of course, morally problematic because it deprives the victims of the nobility of suffering and denudes their deaths of all sense of tragedy (Derry, 2009: 6). But it is a sign of the way in which the horror film operates: our interest is engaged not on behalf of the victim but on behalf of the killer. What the horror film wants from us is not fear but an admission of guilt.
Let us consider one of the rare films in which victims are shown a bit more respect than is common in horror films and where viewer allegiance with the victims might be unusually strong, and see whether the disruption between alignment and allegiance still holds. Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2012) 13 is a send-up of the most clichéd horror set-up of all: five teenagers disappear into a cabin in the woods for the weekend, at least two of them with explicit sexual plans (the kind for which you are always messily dispatched in horror films). The five are promptly and predictably attacked by zombies. An hour later, the survivor count is down to two, the smartest boy, a pot-head and the smartest girl (the stereotypical ‘Final Girl’, to evoke the term coined by Clover, 1992, 1996). Those two discover what the audience has known from the start: that the story of their entrapment and deaths was engineered by a bunch of lab-coat clad bureaucrats (the film’s gang of bullies, if you like) who are watching their death struggles on a screen, drinking and eating, giggling and commenting, even betting on the youngsters’ survival chances. In one particularly repellent scene, the bureaucrats watch two of the doomed teenagers going off into the woods with explicit intentions (even these intentions are not entirely down to teen hormones, but manipulated by pheromones injected into the scenario by the lab-coated technicians) and take bets on whether the girl will have time to disrobe before the zombies get her.
What, if anything, could justify such despicable behaviour? The stated purpose of the slaughter is to ‘appease the monsters’: in the world of the lab-coated bureaucrats, despite its sterile appearance, every nightmare creature, from zombies to Dracula to Frankenstein’s monster, is real. The only way to prevent these monsters from destroying the world is through an annual blood sacrifice, which takes the form of the stereotypical horror flick. Pothead and Final Girl, the two surviving teens, manage to break through from the lab-engineered woods to the lab itself, unleashing the monsters on the bureaucrats, at which point the film turns into the unsurprising-yet-gratifying apocalyptic revenge flick. At the end of the whole mess, the Director 14 informs the two teenagers that the monsters will destroy the entire world unless the two sacrifice themselves willingly: ‘You can die with the world or for the world’, she informs her lab-rats. And here is the problem for the viewer: hardwiring compels us to believe that, to quoteStar Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’. But then we remember the lab coats making bets and rooting for a girl under death sentence to bare her tits, and the Director’s ethical repackaging of slaughter as noble sacrifice begins to stick in our craw. The surviving teens, too, will have none of it. And so the Director’s moral appeal goes down like a lead balloon, and the survivors decide that a world in which humans are capable of the deliberate slaughter of others, even in the ‘cause’ of human survival, should go down in flames. Apocalypse now, they say. ‘It’s time to give someone else a chance’.
And where are we, the audience, in all this? Obviously, our allegiance (‘identification’) is with the embattled teenagers, but equally obviously, we are aligned (‘identified’) with the lab-coated jerks behind the screen. Like these watchers, we are following, on a screen, the spectacle of teenagers being gorily killed. Like the watchers, we take bets on their survival chances and the order of their deaths (perhaps, some of us, too, are waiting to see whether the girl will bare all before being dispatched). But equally obviously, the alignment between the viewers of the film and the lab-coated watchers is not total since viewers of the film are observers of both scenarios, the one in the cabin and the one in the lab. The guilt question arises immediately: if viewers, somehow missing the rather obvious point that they – the watchers outside of the film – are aligned with the watchers within the film, treat these characters as distinct from themselves, they might not go so far as to examine their own complicity and guilt. But they would certainly still wonder why the watchers inside do not feel any. If these characters appear as too stupid and arrogant to feel fear before the monsters descend upon them, guilt is even less of an issue: they are absolutely and resolutely amoral, refusing to accept the ‘reality’ of the kids in the cabin just as viewers refuse to accept the ‘reality’ of the characters in a horror film. Viewer attitudes towards the watchers might well be determined by these two ‘lacks’: their lack of fear and their lack of guilt. We want them to feel fear, certainly: but this – wanting to watch their fear, wanting to watch them being punished – is a low impulse (which the film is happy to satisfy, in spades). Surely the more moral viewer impulse would be to want the watchers in the film to experience guilt: if fear represents mere punishment, guilt would be a moral response. If they (or we) cannot be made to feel this, then it really is time for the apocalypse, to ‘give someone else a chance’. A guilt-free world is not worth saving.
There are fleeting instances in the film that indicate alternatives to the sacrifice-scenario as a means of saving the world, and they all point towards this single item: guilt as a moral response. A white-coat expresses a brief moment of faux compassion for a girl being mauled by a zombie (‘It’s so strange, I’m actually rooting for this girl’, is his not-very-heartfelt comment). One black (!) man refuses to participate in the betting and looks a bit squeamish, but stops well short of protest or rebellion. A white (!) woman hesitantly places her bets and stalls the proceedings by pointing out repeated technical problems – her way, perhaps, of asking whether this is really the only way. (All White men in the film, incidentally, are completely untroubled by pangs of guilt or squeamishness, however transitory.) The obvious question to viewers of the film is whether we can do a bit better. To the guys in the white coats, saving the world means placating the monsters by blood sacrifice; to us, perhaps, saving the world would take just one person saying, ‘I feel guilty about this. Let’s call it off’, and acting on this impulse. But nobody ever does: in a gang culture, individual choices do not apply. And to the extent that the film aligns viewers outside of the film with the watchers inside, it clearly presumes that on the outside, whatever twinges of guilt the viewer might experience would also not amount to much. Like so many horror films do, Cabin simultaneously takes its revenge on viewers for not experiencing (enough) guilt – by aligning them with the film’s most despicable characters – and offers them a cop-out – by way of viewer identification (moral allegiance) with the victims.
Forcing us into the killer’s perspective invites us to enjoy the violence, which – if we do – makes us feel guilty. In other words, horror film forces us to experience a guilt in particular (guilt for enjoying the destruction of another human being) that we should be feeling in general (e.g. guilt for destroying the environment). Or, to turn this on its head, the horror film is payback for our failure to feel guilty for the social, economic, political and ecological horrors we inflict on the world and its inhabitants. For our failure to feel guilty about being social predators, the horror film forces us into the role of a physical one.
The way the horror film induces guilt is by splitting alignment from allegiance or, to use the more common terms, visual ‘identity’ from moral ‘identification’. The horror film is the only cinematic genre that routinely forces audience alignment with a character with whom most people cannot possibly identify – that of the killer – and locates identification, however half-heartedly, elsewhere, with either the victim or the hero. Watching horror films is like watching a reportage on the Iraq war while crying crocodile tears: if we voted for Bush or Blair, if we did not spend every moment of the second Iraq war on the streets protesting against it, we will most likely feel responsible for it, define ourselves, at least to some degree, as the guilty party, as the armchair perpetrators of that war. But our moral allegiance (‘identification’) with the victims sublimates our guilt to the extent that it can no longer spur us into action. 15
This is what the horror film does: it confronts us, simultaneously, with our guilt and our mechanisms of suppressing guilt sufficiently to avoid acting upon it. Alignment is the horror film’s method of showcasing our guilt; allegiance is the horror film’s version of crocodile tears.
Coda: Violence
Finally, a speculative question: is it possible to view the extreme violence of many horror films as the genre’s response to the fact that viewers tend to be understandably obtuse about their own guilty involvement?
Of course, violence can be shrugged off by pointing at the obvious delights of titillation (not exactly a cheery view of the human race, that). But reading horror films as guilt trips rather than fear-flicks might give us a different perspective on violence. If, as I suspect, the horror genre attempts to make us aware of a guilt we should be feeling but are not, it will clash constantly with our persistent determination not to go there. Clearly, a gentle hint will not do, and so the horror film hits us over the head with a hammer. Or a chainsaw. Or an axe. Or a machete. Or, in the classic kill-someone-else-or-die-ploy, with a timed iron mask-contraption that will rip your face open unless you unlock it with the key hidden in your cellmate’s digestive tract 16 – really, why stop there? Violence may well be the horror film’s way of hacking away at its audience to engage with guilt. Admit who you are. Admit what you did.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.