The Horror! The Horror!
Pitt professor Adam Lowenstein examines how horror films probe, reflect national traumas
“The son leads his mother through the thick darkness of a cemetery, narrowly avoiding the headstones in their path. His gait is lurching and uneven—he is dying. Or, more accurately, he is dying again, having been killed once already in the jungles of Vietnam as a young American soldier.
“Now, as his living dead life force ebbs, his body returns to its rightfully decomposed state. Skin peels, wounds bleed, eyes yellow. His mother clings to him, refusing to believe that he is truly dead. As the wailing police sirens drift closer, he stumbles and begins crawling toward his intended destination. He has led his mother to a grave he has dug for himself, complete with a self-fashioned headstone bearing the jagged inscription, ANDY BROOKS 1951-1972. He falls into the grave, desperately gathering the surrounding soil over himself, and gesturing for his mother to aid him with his burial.
“As the police arrive, the mother cries but finally capitulates, sprinkling dirt over her son’s mangled body. His hand reaches forward in one last spasm—perhaps some mixture of pain and gratitude—and then he is still. While his mother kisses his hand, a car explodes in the distance.
“The blast briefly illuminates the graveyard in the eerie glow of a war-torn jungle, closing the space between this death in the cemetery and the death in Vietnam.”
So concludes a little-known horror film titled Deathdream (also known as The Night Walk and Dead of Night), released in 1972. The plot summary is excerpted from Pitt professor Adam Lowenstein’s forthcoming book, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film, which Columbia University Press has scheduled for publication in October.
“It may seem puzzling or even disturbing to juxtapose a horror film with the weighty issues of Vietnam trauma,” Lowenstein writes, “but it is here, in a film like Deathdream, that we catch a glimpse of what I will call an allegorical moment,” a phenomenon that Lowenstein defines as “a shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined.”
Lowenstein argues that horror movies are rich in allegory and that moviegoers and critics alike have unfairly dismissed horror as a brain-dead genre incapable of saying anything important about such historical traumas as Vietnam, Hiroshima, and the Holocaust.
“As much as I can, I want to take horror out of the ghetto of genre exclusivity and bring it into places where it’s not usually admitted,” declares Lowenstein, an assistant professor of English and film studies.
Places like academe’s ivory tower?
“The ivory tower, yes,” Lowenstein replies, “but also to any other place where we try to make sense of what goes on in our world, our lives, and our culture. Rather than saying, ‘Horror has nothing to do with anything that’s really serious or important,’ I would argue the opposite, that there’s precious little we can consider in a serious way without thinking about how horror informs it.”
Lowenstein defines “horror” loosely as being anything that upsets, disturbs, frightens, or unsettles an audience. “I want to stretch the definition of horror as far as it can go,” he acknowledges, “because I feel like I’m combating the almost hermetically sealed idea of horror that most people have. I say ‘horror film,’ and most folks think of killers in goalie masks or Godzilla, but not any of the genres we consider to be high art, such as existentialism or surrealism, which, I argue, are in fact full of the elements of horror.”
Not that Lowenstein has anything against Godzilla, at least not the original Japanese version, a grim, black-and-white sci-fi thriller made in 1954 but not commercially available in the United States until recently.
“The version of Godzilla released in this country in the 1950s was a radically recut version of the original, in which they inserted sequences featuring Raymond Burr to make the film more palatable for an American audience,” Lowenstein notes. “One of the fascinating things to see in the Japanese version of Godzilla is how much more somber and contemplative the original film is. It couldn’t be more different from the Americanized version. And the original Godzilla itself is confrontational and frightening, not laughable or sympathetic as the monster would become in later films.”
The monster’s allegorical power also is more terrible (and obvious) in the original. Incinerating and crushing whole cities, Godzilla—evil, overwhelming, and profoundly alien—clearly is intended to embody nuclear warfare waged against helpless Japanese civilians.
In addition to introducing images of rampaging monsters (Godzilla, Gamara, Mothra, et al) trampling innocent Tokyoites, post-World War II Japanese cinema reflected a “pronounced shift” in national iconography, writes Lowenstein: Images of the militarized male were replaced with images of the blameless, self-sacrificing, maternal female, including the stock character of the “A-bomb maiden,” a tragic young heroine disfigured by atomic radiation.
Especially during the 1950s and ’60s, Japanese filmmakers deployed traditional gender roles “not only to provide a source of stability in the face of trauma, but to displace Japanese national responsibility for the trauma itself,” Lowenstein maintains. “In this sense, the figure of woman enables a historical narrative of forgetting, where victimization replaces responsibility for aggression.”
But some Japanese films have “blasted open” this self-serving sort of narrative, according to Lowenstein. In Shocking Representation, he writes at length about one such movie: director Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 Onibaba (“demon hag”), in which the title character is both the film’s central victim and aggressor.
Neither a masculinized monster nor a feminized victim, Onibaba is a manipulative old peasant woman who, in partnership with her daughter-in-law, survives in war-torn 14th-century Japan by murdering stray samurai and then selling their armor on the black market. To prevent her daughter-in-law from running off with a young man, the old woman dons a demon mask stolen from a fallen samurai in order to frighten the girl into staying with her. But, as Lowenstein writes, “the mask is cursed—it eventually fuses with the old woman’s face, and when it is finally removed, scars reminiscent of atomic radiation burns disfigure her skin.” (The resemblance is intentional, Lowenstein learned by interviewing the film’s director, who said he based the make-up design for the unmasking scene on photographs of maimed Hiroshima survivors.)
Onibaba, says Lowenstein, “explores a whole range of issues about Japanese national identity, Japanese imperial aggression prior to and during World War II, what it means to be a victim of Hiroshima, wartime trauma as either a masculinizing or feminizing experience. … It’s a deeply ambivalent film that provides no easy answers or comforting conclusions.” It’s also a fairly obscure film, as are most of the others that Lowenstein analyzes at length in Shocking Representation. They include:
• Georges Franju’s 1960 Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes without a Face), rife with allegorical allusions to the Holocaust and French collaboration during the German occupation;
• Michael Powell’s 1960 Peeping Tom, critically damned as being “sick” and “filthy” upon its release but now widely hailed as one of the towering achievements of British cinema, thanks largely to Martin Scorsese’s championing of Powell’s work;
• American Wes Craven’s 1972 debut effort as a director, the Vietnam-haunted Last House on the Left, perhaps best remembered today for its groundbreaking promotional campaign that urged audiences, “To avoid fainting, keep repeating: It’s Only a Movie … Only a Movie … Only a Movie….”; and
• Two films by Canadian David Cronenberg—his first commercial feature, the 1975 Shivers (about condominium dwellers infected by parasites that induce sexual dementia; in some ways, it was Canada’s answer to the Pittsburgh-filmed Night of the Living Dead, and it was similarly trashed by mainstream movie reviewers upon its release), and 1996’s Crash, which eroticizes car crashes while blurring the line that usually separates art films from horror.
“Just because a film didn’t make a dent in the national or international consciousness at the time of its release,” Lowenstein argues, “doesn’t mean that it’s unimportant or less worthy of critical attention than a commercially successful film. Of the films I look at in my book, probably the one that made the most money was Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, although that one didn’t come close to equaling the commercial success of Craven’s later movies, like Scream.”
Lowenstein regularly teaches a Pitt undergraduate course focusing on the work of Craven and Cronenberg. “I find that all of my students are familiar with Scream but hardly any have even heard of Last House. Even so, they tend to be moved and challenged by Last House in ways that they aren’t by Scream.”
In Last House on the Left, a gang of escaped convicts abducts, tortures, rapes, and murders two teenage girls. After their car breaks down, the convicts unwittingly seek shelter in the home of one of the girls’ parents. The parents eventually discover their guests’ identities and take bloody vengeance. According to Lowenstein, the harrowing Last House tapped into a nightmare world of Vietnam-era horrors: social upheaval, generational divisions, rape, and murder by a pack of Manson family-like killers who personify the counterculture’s dark side….
Newspaper advertisements for the movie featured a photo of one of the innocent young murder victims—kneeling, arms outstretched, with long dark hair and an open mouthed expression of horror—that recalled the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 14-year old runaway Mary Vecchio kneeling over the body of a Kent State University student killed when National Guardsmen opened fire on Vietnam War protestors.
“While Scream is a clever and well-made commercial horror film, Last House is a profound and challenging social and political document,” Lowenstein says. Craven himself called Last House “the primal scream of my cinema.”
From the psychosocial terrors of industrialization through two world wars, the Holocaust, Vietnam, and AIDS, horror films have explored the worst traumas of recent history.
But not Sept. 11, 2001. Not yet.
“It’s still too early,” says Lowenstein. “One thing that became clear to me in researching the movies I wrote about in my book is how long it takes for moments of historical trauma to make themselves available to cinema. A film like Eyes Without a Face, which I argue is very much about World War II, the Holocaust, and the German occupation, came out not in 1945, but in 1960. There’s a full 15-year gap between the events and their representation, and I think that tends to be the pattern.” But Lowenstein says that he did catch a whiff of 9/11 in The Grudge, a 2004 U.S. remake of a Japanese horror film.
“Rather than reset the story of The Grudge to the United States, which tends to be the pattern with American remakes of Asian horror films, it remains set in Japan,” Lowenstein points out. “And part of the horror of the film concerns the alienation and unease that Americans feel in Japan, not knowing the language, the culture, or the way that people there really feel about them. I think that’s very much a legacy of 9/11—this anxiety and fear and dread about what America’s place in the world really is, how vulnerable we are, and what people outside of our country really think of us.”
When filmmakers get around to exploring the horrors of 9/11 explicitly, don’t expect them to provide comfort or catharsis, Lowenstein warns. “Catharsis is about getting over, working through, putting behind, and moving on,” he says. “What horror films say, in contrast, is, ‘Wait a minute. Not so fast. You can’t work through and move on from events that don’t lend themselves to easy mastery.’ Horror films suggest that moving on itself is the problem—that we haven’t done the work that needs to be done socially, politically, or psychologically to fully reckon with these horrific events.
“Horror reminds us that traumas like the Holocaust are not alien to us or beyond or behind us. They’re with us, always. Horror won’t allow us to shove them in the closet or under the bed in the hope that they’ll simply disappear.” • Bruce Steele
|
