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Horror films and the attack on rationality

Christopher Hauke

Why does horror attracts people as it does? Why spend several pounds

on a film or book that you know is going to terrify you? Thomas Ligotti, a

modern horror writer, presents a pessimistic philosophy, noting through

his reading of H. P. Lovecraft a general distrust of the value of human

consciousness and its place in the world. This view could be associated

with Jung’s critique of a dominant conscious rationality and his own

Nietzschean scepticism about the achievements of rationality since the

Enlightenment.

For Jung ‘...reason and the will that is grounded in reason are valid only

up to a point. The further we go in the direction selected by reason, the

surer we may be that we are excluding the irrational possibilities of life

which have just as much right to be lived....’ (Jung, 1943 orig.1916,

para.72).

The attraction and use of horror and the Gothic for interest and

entertainment parallels a postmodern Jungian distrust in the

achievements and place of human consciousness in Nature. In

encountering and enjoying horror what is being sought is a

transcendence of the limits of rational consciousness and an experience

of the sublime. At its core, the horror genre sees our humanness and

consciousness not as an enhancement or culmination of Nature but an

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aberration. A mistake. In horror we may be seeking a route past such

limitations.

“Through our senses we experience the known, but our intuitions point

to things that are unknown and hidden, that by their very nature are

secret. If they ever become conscious, they are intentionally kept secret

and concealed, for which reason they have been regarded from earliest

times as mysterious, uncanny, and deceptive. They are hidden from man,

and he hides himself from them out of religious awe, protecting himself

with the shield of science and reason.” (Jung, 1930: para 148)

The popular growth of Gothic horror

From a psychoanalytic point of view it has been said that, “The Gothic

arises out of the immediate needs of the reading public to escape from

conventional life and articulate…. the turbulence of their psychic

existence. We may see Freud as the intellectual counterpart of this

process....The Gothic . . . acclimatised the culture to the types of ideas

Freud was to present as truth by presenting them as fiction.” (Day,

1985:179). Schneider (2004) in his introduction to Horror Film and

Psychoanalysis, follows this with, “….one of the key tasks is…

translation, …. writing and rewriting the Gothic novel’s ……ideas and

constructs in terms that are more explicitly Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian,

Lacanian, etc” (Schneider, 2004, pp 11-12).1

1 Another, very different, example is Julian Hoxter’s look at how, in the Italian giallo
horror films of Dario Argento, the “complex, shifting connection between individuals
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Jung makes it quite clear that the material and technological benefits

brought about by scientific rationality over the last five hundred years

have come at great cost to the human psyche itself. In objectifying our

orientation towards nature so as better to examine and exploit the world

we have cut ourselves off from that world. As Edelglass puts it ‘If we

systematically think of a world in which human beings do not exist

(except as the detached observer), we should not be surprised to find

ourselves creating a world in which they can’t exist’ (Edelglass et al.,

1992: 19). And just as we have cut ourselves off from the outer world of

nature, so we have also cut ourselves off from our inner nature - the

unconscious psyche. The danger of this, as Jung realised, is that

unconscious contents get projected outside us so that, humankind

gradually inhabits a world of shadows - projections that fall far short of

the ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ which Enlightenment thinking believed it

had achieved (in Jung, 1943, paras.72-75). “The ordered cosmos he

believes in by day is meant to protect him from the fear of chaos that

bests him by night - his enlightenment is born of night-fears!” (Jung,

1930: para.148)

It is no coincidence that Gothic horror literature began just as a

dominant style of consciousness described as Enlightenment rationality

became established in the late 18th century. After Walpole’s seminal

and . . . the world of objects which they inhabit” (1998: 99) exemplifies certain key
principles of Kleinian object-relations theory.
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The Castle of Otranto (1764) came Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) “whose

famous novels” H.P.Lovecraft writes, “made terror and suspense a

fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre

and fear-inspiring atmosphere” (Lovecraft, 1927). After this period we

enter an era of horror fiction more familiar to modern times, largely due

to the way cinema has turned to such narratives for popular films. Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus (1818) was followed

by John Polidori’s story The Vampyre; Edgar Allen Poe (1809-49) took

the genre to further heights in the 19th century followed by Capt.

Marryat (The Werewolf , 1839), and Robert Louis Stevenson with his

seminal The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

All these lead up to the stories of H. P. Lovecraft himself (1890-1937)

who, convinced of the pre-human, archetypal roots of supernatural

horror wrote,

“No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite

annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood….there

is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous

tissue which would make them obscurely operative even were the

conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.” (Lovecraft, 1927:

2)
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Writers of horror literature from H.P. Lovecraft to Thomas Ligotti 2 have

long emphasised that we live with a barely concealed awareness of the

insignificance of human life in a meaningless universe. It is this sense of

ourselves that is stirred up and confirmed in the horror story. 3

“Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to

be unselfconscious of what we are, hunks of spoiling flesh on

disintegrating bones.….we need some fabulous illusions….life is a

confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not …[find

ourselves] stripped of our defence mechanisms and standing stark

naked before the silent staring void.” (Ligotti, 2012: 28-9).

In the void experience what we lose is a sense of self, or rather a

meaningful relationship between self and world. (Hodson, 2004: 1) This

is the Other of non-ordinary reality, which brings with it the fear of death

and the terror of going mad. We often find in the horror literature of

Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft how entering death or madness may

seem an attractive way to resolve the gap between everyday

consciousness and non-ordinary realities. A fear of death or madness

may function more as an emotional metaphor in this case, to help the

subject keep a psychological grasp on the otherness experienced as

alien to ‘normal’ consciousness.

2 Throughout his book, Ligotti acknowledges the influence of Norwegian pessimistic

philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe and his monograph The Last Messiah
3 As Ligotti states, “Because of consciousness, parent of all horrors, we became
susceptible to thoughts that were startling and dreadful to us, thoughts that have never
been equitably balanced by those that are collected and reassuring”. (Ligotti, 2012: 27)
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Quite apart from the sublime imagery of horror literature and the terrible

disturbances of the world it depicts, for the last ninety years it has been

through the medium of film that horror that has grabbed and disturbed

our imaginations. As Barbara Creed writes, “The horror genre is also

radical in that it explores the formation of human subjectivity, the

conditions under which subjectivity disintegrates, and the subject’s

fascination for and dread of ….death.” (Creed, 2004:192).4 The divided

and displaced self is often a theme for horror movies - many such as

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel 1956) and The Thing (Carpenter,

1982) depict the breakdown of identity; others the breakdown of

difference between the living and the dead (vampire and zombie films).

Such splits in reality and in the integrity of human identity can be found

in Freud’s case history titles such as ‘The Wolf Man’ and ‘The Rat Man’ .

Jung admired The Student of Prague (1927) for its accurate depiction of

the archetypal Shadow. In this 1927 film a penniless student makes a

Faustian pact that results in him losing his soul; the horror of his

condition is brought home at the start of this clip, when he finds he has

no reflection in the mirror and his doppelganger appears at the window

showing how his identity has been taken over completely.

A modern doppelgänger movie is Triangle (Smith 2009) - a horror drama

which holds many of the elements I have referred to - and which works

4 Creed also writes: ““Like Freud’s dreams and case histories, the horror film was quick
to explore the nature of perversity. Themes of castration, bestiality, masochism, sexual
abuse, and animal phobias all made early appearances…….” (Creed 2004: 189)
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on our imaginations in a way that disturbs the viewer and challenges

what rational consciousness has always thought inviolate. The film

begins with a mother and child under stress and a mysterious ring on her

doorbell. Finding no one there the young woman proceeds to join friends

on a sailing trip. One friend is told that her child is at school but another

points out it is Saturday, there is no school so this cannot be true.

The four friends sail off and get caught in an unusual storm which results

in them calling for help from their upturned boat. A gigantic liner hauls

into view and thinking they see someone beckoning them from the deck

they climb board. The ship appears to be deserted. This is where the

horror starts and the rational ends. Up to this point we have been

watching a tense but not irrational dynamic between four friends with a

bit of mystery about one of them. As events on the boat progress our

protagonist experiences her friends being shot at by a masked character

and escapes to the bowels of the ship where she finds dozens of

scrunched up notes reading “IF THEY BOARD KILL THEM ALL”. She tries

writing one herself and confirms they are all in her own handwriting.

“She” has been here before. This theme is reinforced when she arms

herself to continue her search and, in the mirrored ballroom comes

across her doppelgänger - who appears exactly the same but without a

gun. “You are not me” our protagonist mutters in terror - even though it

is her who holds the weapon. But who is the “her” we know? Our sense

of assuredness in knowing the identity and place of the character we

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have been following is disrupted. More events follow that reveal we are

in a cycle of repeated events and endless time. This is a horrific

multiverse and not the secure singularity we assume of our own lives

and we had assumed of hers. Through our identification with the

protagonist we are offered a glimpse into the void. As Nietzsche wrote,

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a

monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes

into you.”5 (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil aphorism 146)

Our willingness to experience horror through film, games or literature,

goes beyond current understandings in psychology and film cognition.

Perhaps it is an effort to engage with transcendent experience -

achieved in other traditions through ritual, epiphany, prayer or

meditation? But not only are these side-lined in modernity, they are also

long-haul activities requiring practice, faith and a belief in the authority

of the institutions that support them. Plugging into horror gives an

experience that transcends assured realities in its own way. Like the

instinct for religion, maybe we have an instinctual need know that our

conscious experience is not all there is to reality. Plugging into horror

through watching the horror movie offers an experience that transcends

assured realities without actual harm to ourselves.

5 trans Hollingdale
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und
wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
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References

Creed, Barbara (2004) in Schneider, S. J., ed. (2004) op cit

Day, William P. (1985). In the Circles of Fear and Desire: A Study of

Gothic Fantasy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Edelglass, S., Maier, G., Gebert, H., Davy, J., 1992, Matter and Mind;

Imaginative Participation in Science, Floris, Edinburgh.

Hodson, Peter (2004)” ‘The Void’ A Neurobiological Approach”, in

Ashton, Paul W., ed. Evocations of Absence. Multidisciplinary

Perspectives on Void States New Orleans: Spring Journal Books

Jung, C.G.,

1930, ‘Psychology and Literature’ in The Spirit of Man, Art and

Literature. CW 15.

1931, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man CW 10

1943, ‘On the Psychology of the Unconscious’ CW 7

Ligotti, Thomas (2012) The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. The

Contrivance of Horror . New York: Hippocampus Press

Lovecraft, H. P. (1927) ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ Collected

Essays Vol. 2: Literary Criticism Hippocampus Press

Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil trans. Hollingdale London: Penguin

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Schneider, Steven Jay (2004) Horror Film and Psychoanalysis. Freud’s

Worst Nightmare. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press: