Deleuze and Horror Film

In memory of my loving mum, Alice Powell (1923–2002):

‘that book’
Deleuze and Horror Film
Anna Powell

Edinburgh University Press

 © Anna Powell, 2005

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

22 George Square, Edinburgh

Typeset in Monotype Ehrhardt by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
The Cromwell Press, Wilts

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7486 1747 7 (hardback)

The right of Anna Powell to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
 Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: New Directions in Horror Film Studies 1

A Deleuzian Slant on Horror 6
Structure and Rationale 8

1 From Psychoanalysis to Schizoanalysis: An Intensive

Voyage 14
Psychoanalysis and Horror 15
Schizoanalysis: Pure Naked Intensity 19
Schizoanalysis, Art, Horror 21
Psycho as Schizo 23
The Mise-en-scène of Madness: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari 25
‘Man is not Truly One, but Truly Two’: The Schizoid Screen
in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 31
‘Schizoid Misery and Glory’: Feeling Repulsion 38
The Brain as Mise-en-scène: The Shining 43
Place, Time and Motion 45
The Schizoid Machine: Imaginary Friends 48
‘Trapped in a World of Ghosts’: Intensive States in Natural
Born Killers 51
Natural Born Predators 52
Becoming-Schizo 54
Back-Projections and Other Anomalies 56

2 Becoming Anomalous and the Body-Without-Organs 62

Body-Horror, Masochism and Film Studies 64
Becoming Anomalous 66
Becoming-Indeterminate: Cat People 68
Becoming-Woman 72
Sharing Species: Alien Resurrection 74
Ripley and her Relatives 75
The Bodies-Without-Organs of Horror 78
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Uncontrollable Flesh: Videodrome 80

Frank Pulls Himself Together: Hellraiser 83
Becoming-Invisible: The Hollow Man 88
Machinic Desire: Becoming-Human in Demon Seed 92
Heavy Metal Meets the Soft Machine: Hardware 98
Freddy Krueger: Shape-Shifter Extraordinaire 102

3 The Movement-Image: Horror Cinematography and

Mise-en-scène 109
Sensation and Perception: The Aesthetics of Affect 110
Bergson’s Movement-Image in Deleuze 112
Moving Images 115
The Infinite Spirit of Evil: The Forces of Light and
Darkness in Nosferatu 120
Into the Black Hole 121
Forces in Combat 125
In a Glass Darkly: Lyrical Abstraction and Molecularity in
Vampyr 128
Sensory Anomalies and Intensive Space 131
Sensational Colour: Spectral Horror 135
Death by Colour: The Masque of the Red Death 137
Dressed to Express: Colour and Costume in The Vampire
Lovers 139
Tactisigns of Terror: Suspiria 142
The Face of Horror: The Intensive Affection-Image in Les
Yeux sans Visage 145

4 Horror Time 154

Bergson’s Time: Movement and Duration 156
Deleuze’s Time-Image 159
Time and Motion 163
Duration and Entrapment in the Gothic Haunted House:
The Haunting 166
Haunted Cinematography and Mise-en-scène 168
Death by Flashback: Jacob’s Ladder 174
Incompossible Worlds 175
‘They’re Coming Out of the Walls’ 178
Back From the Black Hole: Event Horizon 181
Inner Space in Outer Space: Travels in Duration 182
‘It’s Alive’: The Event Horizon as Demonic Machine 184
Dreaming Duration in Mulholland Drive 187
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Betty’s ‘Dream Place’ 187

Diane in Duration 192
Space-Time and Dream Duration 195

Conclusion: Living Horror: Thoughts On Our

Nerve-Endings 201

Glossary of Key Terms 210

Bibliography 216
Filmography 223
Index 225
 Acknowledgements

Thanks to my friends for inspiration, support and love, both through this
book and the difficulties of the last two years. Special thanks to Barbara
Kennedy for her sensational lines of flight. To Rob Lapsley and David
Deamer in the Deleuze reading group at Manchester Metropolitan
University for mental gymnastics. To the English Department at
Manchester Metropolitan University and Sue Zlosnik for teaching remis-
sion in the final stages. To Edinburgh University Press and the skilled
support of Sarah Edwards and Eddie Clark and the copy-editor Lorraine
McCann. And finally, thanks to Ranald Warburton for hours of computer
assistance, insight into the ‘proper’ singularities of physics, and for our
own machinic connections.
For a preliminary version of material on affect, see Pli: Warwick Journal
of Philosophy, Autumn, 2004.
 Introduction: New Directions in
Horror Film Studies

the unbearable itself is inseparable from a revelation or an illumination, as from a

third eye.1 (Deleuze)

Mike, the soundman of a film crew lost in the woods, admits to kicking
their only map into the creek, because it was ‘useless’. From this point,
they move on, clinging to their own rigid map of reality and to the heavy
film equipment which weighs them down. They follow the lines of an
invisible, occult map which draws them further off track into a terrifying
maze. I take this moment in The Blair Witch Project, directed by Meyrick
and Sanchez, as a way in to re-theorising the horror film from the perspec-
tives of Deleuze. The existing theoretical map of horror Film Studies will
be pocketed as we find out how far we can travel without it.
At this point, I issue a warning: doing Deleuze leads in turn to being
done by Deleuze. For me, theory must have use-value and practical appli-
cation beyond the academy. Experiencing, articulating and sharing works
of fantasy like horror film is not just something I do for a living, but is a vital
part of my cultural experience and my being in the world. At first glance,
Deleuze’s work might appear to be yet another totalising master discourse
like the existing paradigms of film theory, but I will be arguing otherwise.
My motivation for this project is twofold. The initial stimulus came
from my earlier psychoanalytical readings of horror texts. Although I
could graft unconscious schema onto narrative, dialogue and mise-en-scène,
I was becoming increasingly conscious of their limitations. Psychoanalysis
felt like an inadequate key to unlock either the multiple levels of horror
film, or my responses to them. I also started to wonder whether the image
of lock and key was not itself inadequate. The films I watched were more
complex than a predetermined overlay of symbolic or structural meaning
suggested. They seemed to operate elsewhere than the straightforward
equations of social stereotypes and political ‘messages’ that can be found
in them. Throwing away the key, I set out to explore this ‘elsewhere’.
Horror film fandom revels in the genre’s special effects, but a corre-
sponding theoretical exploration of horror aesthetics is scarce and I aim to
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redress the balance. The genre has showcased strongly affective style from
its outset. Excessive forms of cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing and
sound are the pivotal tools of horror, used to arouse visceral sensations and
to ‘horrify’ the viewer. Theories of representation and narrative structure
neglect the primacy of corporeal affect, and although there has been some
exploratory work with horror film spectatorship, the affective dynamic of
the films has so far been downplayed.2
I had wanted to interrogate the impact of the horror film experience in
my earlier work on the vampire film, but had not yet found the best route.
I was gradually led astray from Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan by
theorists of subjective loss, existential angst and embodied thought.
Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietszche offered me heady alternatives to
a psychoanalytic neo-Gothic. In my study of vampire/victim masochism,
I became intrigued by Deleuze’s work on Nietszche and Sacher-Masoch.
Moved by the radical poetry of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus,
I was, by this time, debating the pros and cons of Freud/Lacan contra
Deleuze from a defensive position that felt increasingly challenged.3 The
passionately argued books of Steven Shaviro and Barbara Kennedy esca-
lated the uncertainty. Both, in their very distinct ‘aesthetics of sensation’,
offered suggestive groundwork for my own work.4 My new perspective
crystallised via the lucidity of Henri Bergson. As well as offering its own
substantial insights, Bergsonism illumined much that was initially opaque
for me in Deleuze. Together, they have taken me far from my psychoana-
lytic guidelines and opened up a broader paradigm shift. As psychoanalytic
lack and alienation had formed the wallpaper of my thoughts, so élan vital
and existential affirmation have come to permeate my wider outlook.
Deleuze’s aesthetic philosophy is now part of my ongoing exploration
of the filmic experience. Deleuze/Bergsonism opens up new ways of
thinking which replace being with becoming. Film, like literature, paint-
ing, and philosophy itself, is a distinctively embodied thought process. An
understanding of medium-specific operations of lighting, sound, framing
and montage enables insight into the nature of movement and time. Rather
than mapping pre-existing thought onto film text as allegory, I moved
closer to thinking the experience directly in its own terms. With the
unashamed zeal of the convert, I want to share this experience with other
horror film aficionados as well as a broader range of readers.
Second, I want to extend the scope of that writing which keeps rigor-
ously to those films actually used as examples by Deleuze himself. I test the
use-value of Deleuzian theory to popular formulaic films as well as art-
house-approved works like Kubrick’s The Shining. If Deleuzian film
theory is to be of substantial use-value to Film Studies, we need to move
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beyond the art-house to open up and explore its applicability to popular

mainstream genres. It can thus contribute more broadly to debates
about popular culture and its significance. The insights of Deleuzian film-
philosophy should not merely be the preserve of a few cinéphiles with art-
house tastes or involuted academics.
Since the early 1980s, a theoretical orthodoxy for the interpretation of
horror text and context has established itself in academic Film Studies.
Key components include culturalism, Marxism, gender theory, structural-
ism, genre, psychoanalysis and postmodernism, some of which remain at
daggers drawn. The politics of representation and their cultural and his-
torical contexts, along with studies of production and distribution, are
frequently researched with thoroughness. These approaches produce
substantial and perceptive work, and I consider my own very different
approach, which is still in process, as complementary rather than opposi-
tional to theirs in the development of Horror Film Studies. In no way am
I suggesting their straight replacement by Deleuzian orthodoxy.
Freud’s seminal concepts of Oedipal triangulation, the family romance
and the uncanny, have been substantially reworked.5 Distinct psychoana-
lytical perspectives were developed by Melanie Klein (maternal object
relations);6 Lacan (lack, the mirror stage and jouissance);7 and Julia
Kristeva (abjection).8 They have been applied by film scholars to seek out
evidence of subject formation, misrecognition and abjection. As well as
work which maps these scenarios on the texts themselves, horror cinema
has been used to speculate on general psychic mechanisms at work in
audiences. The films supposedly offer a safe fantasy outlet for repressed
dread and desire. Despite the apparent ‘fit’ of these primal schemata, I
argue that an interrogation of the dominance of psychoanalysis in horror
theory is timely.
Although they retain some elements of psychoanalytic insight, such as
the role of fantasy in shaping our apprehension of the external world,
Deleuze and Félix Guattari mount a devastating critique of paternalistic
Freudianism. In Anti-Oedipus, they draw on Nietszche and Bergson to
develop ‘schizoanalysis’ as a new concept of mental and emotional imma-
nence which moves away from personal subjectivity. This dynamic
approach is helpful to explore the sensory affect of horror film as experi-
ence rather than allegory.
Deleuzian film theory draws on what Barbara Kennedy calls a ‘bio-
aesthetic’, or ‘neo-aesthetic’ approach. This integrational method, which
acknowledges the consilience of different world-views, is open to insights
from science and philosophy as well as the arts. It acknowledges the
material as well as the psychic basis of affective experience.9 Unlike
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psychoanalytic film theory, the deep structures of the spectator’s psychic

history are no longer the focus.
Psychoanalytic subjectivity is reconfigured by Deleuze and Guattari as
a physical process in perpetual motion. For Guattari, aesthetics are viral in
nature, being known ‘not through representation, but through affective
contamination’.10 Deleuze’s cinema is not a purely visual, specular experi-
ence. It embraces the flux of corporeal sensation and sensory perception in
the ‘machinic’ connection of the embodied spectator with the body of the
text. The term ‘machinic’ should be distinguished from mechanism,
which implies closed sets. Like the human body, film techniques partici-
pate in dynamic forces and movements mobilised by the machinery of pro-
jection and viewing.
At this point, I acknowledge that my continued use of the terms ‘spec-
tator’, ‘viewer’ and connected forms is problematised by my own empha-
sis on the mind/brain/body/text engagement of the film experience. We
do not experience films from the detached perspective of a disembodied
set of eyes. My approach moves in the opposite direction. Our eyes are
embedded, and embodied in flesh as only one part of the complex percep-
tual apparatus stimulated by film. They feed our other senses with
‘outside’ information; but as this process occurs, the information no longer
remains purely visual in nature. The eyes are an extension of our brain;
part of the imagination’s operations; part of the camera’s machinery and
part of the ‘machinic assemblage’ of cinema.
Deleuze’s spectator does not exist as a separate entity, but is subsumed
in the film event as part of it. Both film and spectator are, in the special
sense explained later, movement and image. The assemblage of viewer and
text co-operates a dynamic experiential process of becoming (the infinitive
devenir). This is distinct from the negative concept of interpellation,
imbricaton or suture, via which, according to Screen Theory, the spectator
is passively stitched into the film’s reactionary ideology.11 Deleuze’s spec-
tator is glad to be ‘dead’ along with the fiction of the autonomous, self-
enclosed subject.
The use of ‘I’ is, of course, similarly problematic. Deleuze’s spectator
may be fictional as well as invisible, but at the same time, his own responses
to the text are inevitably prescriptive. Ideally, he intends that ‘we’ should
seek out and work the elements of his typology in a film. Of course, we
cannot speak for any other spectator, or even for ‘ourselves’ as self-enclosed
subject. Each person’s experience of each text will be distinctive every time
s/he views. Deleuze, or any other theorist, including myself, can only
suggest contingent perspectives.
I prefer to use sentences with a ‘subject’ here as their construction flows
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more smoothly and their content is clearer for the purposes of critical dis-
course. When I use ‘we’, as I frequently do, I am not assuming all audience
members share my viewpoint, but that ‘I’ am both a ‘singularity’ with spe-
cific qualities and a collective assemblage with other singularities in the
heterogeneous becoming of the audience assemblage. I can only posit that
we collectively share certain affective responses to certain technological
stimuli. I have continued to use the terms, then, as a basic currency of Film
Studies which help me to communicate my arguments to others. I admit
to not having yet found satisfactory substitutes.
The horror film’s plot, action, special effects and finally, the existence of
the film itself, is technology-dependent. Events are recorded, seen and heard
through camera lenses and microphones, as well as being played back to us
by cine-projectors, videos and DVD players. The viewer also experiences
the film as an event. Camera shake, blurred focus and extreme close-ups, as
well as more flamboyant effects such as computer-generated imagery (CGI),
have a direct affect on our mechanisms of perception before they reach a
more advanced stage of cognitive processing. We meld with and become part
of the material technology of cinema in its movement, force and intensity.
Horror’s frequent undermining of normative perspective by frag-
mented images and blurred focus operates in tandem with the erosion of
the subjective coherence and ego-boundaries of its characters. It also
affects the spectator’s sense of cognitive control over the subject matter as
our optic nerves and auditory membranes struggle to process confusing
data. Our projected coherence is undermined as we slide into a molecular
assemblage with the body of the film. Formal properties, like the camera-
shake and blurred image strikingly exemplified by The Blair Witch Project,
intensify this melding. The viewer’s sensory participation intensifies by
viral infection as the film literally gets inside us and sets up home there.
My Deleuzian perspective on horror film stresses the visceral, sensory
nature of viewing. Despite the immaterial nature of cinematic images, the
viewer experiences corporeal responses as our senses stimulate the neuro-
nal networks linked to organs like the heart (pace, pulse-rate), the genitals
(warmth, tightness, moisture) and the lungs (depth and rapidity of breath-
ing). This is a very different process to aesthetic contemplation, or to the
subject/object division of the spectatorial gaze. Deleuze and Guattari
characterise such intimate contact as a mimesis that both copies and mate-
rially connects objects together. The psychophysiology of cinematic expe-
rience and the ways in which vision and sound directly stimulate the
nervous system are still under-researched. We can, however, usefully
deploy Deleuze’s philosophical speculations on the affective phenomena of
mise-en-scène and movement.
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Deleuzian film theory shifts away from plot, theme and characterisation.
Its ‘readings’ map aesthetic assemblages, a process which involves the spec-
tator’s own intersected mind/body. Deleuze asserts that there is no ‘fixed
distinction between content and expression’ and foregrounds ‘diagram-
matic components’ of style, giving the spiral in Alfred Hitchcock’s film
Vertigo as an example.12 The tower staircase, Madeleine’s hairstyle and the
circling camera belong to a network of interconnected spirals. As well as
making the film work, diagrammatic components also function in the spec-
tatorial part of the film assemblage. I will suggest my own sense of diagram-
matic components (there may be more than one per film) as a cohesive force
in particular horror films.

A Deleuzian Slant on Horror

Deleuze, with the cinematic preferences of the Parisian cinéaste, at first
appears to offer little positive comment on the horror genre. He does not
reflect upon his own bourgeois taste, with its prejudices against popular
‘mass’ forms, particularly those of youth culture. He disparages the ‘pitiful
twitches and grimaces’ and ‘haphazard cuts’ of music videos and refers
scathingly to the ‘bad cinema’ of explicit violence or sex.13 Produced by
forces of ‘gratuitous cruelty and organised ineptitude’, he claims, bad
cinema ‘travels through lower-brain circuits’.14 On further reading,
however, horror themes and motifs are identifiable in his work and form an
unacknowledged strand in his thought.
Classic European horror films such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and
Vampyr are used by Deleuze to illustrate and think the dynamic aesthetics
of the movement-image, particularly light, shadow and grey tones.
Although he operates a kind of auteur or period-based categorisation, this
differs considerably from historical Film Studies or traditional auteurism.
The Shining, for example, is used to illustrate Stanley Kubrick’s film phil-
osophical oeuvre rather than the director’s personal statement, or as a scary
horror film in its own right.15
Hitchcock’s horrors are likewise encompassed by, rather than high-
lighted in, Deleuze’s broader references to his work. Despite his auteurist
term ‘English genius’, he does not eulogise him as an exceptional creative
personality, but, rather, identifies the suspense-based ‘logic of relations’ (as
opposed to the Eisensteinian dialectic of shock) he finds in Hitchcock.16
Nevertheless, Deleuze’s choice of directors conforms to accepted notions
of ‘great’ art-house film tradition of a classic kind. The majority of his
horror citations fall into this canonical category.
Wider interest in horror and the horrific forms a strand in Deleuze’s
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critical writings, where he identifies our ‘subjective sympathy for the

unbearable, an empathy which permeates what we see’.17 He explores this
element in works as diverse as Francis Bacon’s paintings, Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick and Emily Brontë’s novels. Extreme affect can, he
claims, push consciousness into an extra-mundane state where a sense of
the numinous is accessed. The ‘unbearable’ is ‘inseparable from a revela-
tion or an illumination, as from a third eye’.18 This claim belongs to his
general valorisation of avant-garde aesthetics in their assertion of the
power of art to radicalise consciousness.19
Deleuze’s work does not focus on the genre of horror per se, for reasons
that will emerge later. It refers to some popular or sensationalist horror
films, although the aesthetic quality of these examples has long been
attested to by film criticism. He briefly mentions Terence Fisher’s
Hammer Horror, The Brides of Dracula, as well as the surreal Italian horror
of Mario Bava, in his discussion of the impulse-image. He also references
H. P. Lovecraft’s pulp tales of cosmic/chthonic horror, evident in several
films, such as John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, as examples of
terrifying transmutation and movement beyond space and time.
Deleuze’s main interest in these films lies in their use-value as aesthetic
stimuli for philosophical thought. He is not above offering perversely
literal embodiments of his own concepts. Horrifying images serve to throw
the processes of affective thought into sharp relief. I personally find these
examples among his most provocative and regret his scanty use of refer-
ences from popular culture that might have made his work more widely
accessible. This was one motivation to begin my own work, which takes
twisted literalisation much further.
My case studies use a range of material from Europe and the USA. I am
aware that horror films from other national cinemas, such as Japan, are
increasingly circulating in the West and, hopefully, Deleuzian approaches
to them might already be in progress. I have not provided the historical or
production contexts which are outside the scope of this study. I am
working with film material currently available (as I write) for viewers either
at the cinema or on domestic-use videos and DVDs. I revisit horror films
analysed by Deleuze himself as well as more mainstream material from the
past and the present. I also use films by maverick directors such as Kubrick
and David Lynch that straddle the art-house/mainstream divide. As well
as illustrating his working methods, I test Deleuze’s approach as a stimu-
lus for new readings of familiar, and less familiar, horror films.
Not all my texts fall into a strict generic category, but all contain horrify-
ing material of an uncanny nature. They broadly fit the Oxford English
Dictionary definition of films designed to horrify by their depiction of
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violence and the supernatural. The word horror is derived from the Latin
horrere, to bristle or shudder. Its historical usages incorporate sensory asso-
ciations, such as ‘roughness or nauseousness of taste such as to cause a
shudder or thrill’; ‘a painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear’;
and ‘the feeling excited by something shocking or frightful’ which is
‘revolting to sight, hearing, or contemplation’.20 These definitions empha-
sise the genre’s affective potency, and intriguingly do not differentiate the
impact of actual and fictional horror.

Structure and Rationale

I have chosen horror cinema because of my own engagement with it as fan
and academic, and because I want to assert the genre’s aesthetic complex-
ity. Horror’s affective force is a potent experiential process. I also argue that
some horror material can stimulate philosophical thought of a medium-
specific kind. I will be exploring the relationship of horror film and
Deleuzian theory via two main sections of two chapters each. This order
is shaped by the relative familiarity or complexity of the content.
As a more familiar approach for most readers, I begin by applying
Deleuzian concepts to the overt motifs of the genre, although I will pro-
blematise the thematic approach. The themes of madness and monstrous
transformations will be opened up via schizoanalysis and becoming. These
concepts are drawn from Deleuze’s wider philosophy but given a cinematic
application here. My second focal area is horror film aesthetics.
Movement, time and duration are explored via mise-en-scène, cinematog-
raphy, lighting and editing. My chief sources for this will be Cinema 1: The
Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In my conclusion, I will
assess the value of Deleuzian work for horror Film Studies and suggest its
future potential.
Each chapter offers a theoretical introduction to aspects of Deleuze’s
work relevant to horror. Specific theories do not overlay case studies like
mechanistic templates, but seek to bring out a fuller sense of the film as an
affective aesthetic experience. A multi-layered discussion of the filmic
event is my intention, rather than a flattened, over-schematic and abstract
grid. I aim to convey a sense of my own visceral enjoyment of the movies
as well as theorising them. Themes are manifest through style, and I will
be detailing mise-en-scène and cinematography in each chapter.
My analysis will also draw on non-film-specific ideas from elsewhere in
Deleuze’s work. Bergson and Deleuze are a creative assemblage sometimes
difficult to separate. I cross-reference them and draw on Bergson specifi-
cally if his ideas fit more closely with my argument. This composite of
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Deleuze/Bergsonism becomes more central in my discussion of move-

ment and time. At times, I use insights from other perspectives, including,
I must confess, the supposedly excised psychoanalysis if I feel they are rel-
evant, but keep them to a minimum.
My mapping of Deleuzian terms and concepts onto the excesses of
popular horror may appear as a profane application to some philosophical
purists. My own academic background is shaped by the textual study and
teaching of film and literature. In my version of film-philosophy, the
textual pre-dates the philosophical and I think them both viscerally. I will,
therefore, be mixing Deleuze/Bergsonism with more traditional tech-
niques from Film Studies, such as detailed textual close reading, to retain
a sense of the medium’s specificity. My focus is on the textual applicabil-
ity of the theories and their use-value to horror studies.
I concur with Deleuze here that fields of operations are kept rigidly sep-
arate to their detriment. Work in one field is imbricated in others, and, as
we are ‘inserted in a system of relays’ between fields, the insights of one
serves to illuminate another.21 I unashamedly ‘poach’ philosophical ideas
to help me to think through the film experience. Nevertheless, I want to
convey the sense of the films as films, not just stimuli to philosophical
thought.
The conceptual frames of Deleuze and Bergson are primarily life-
affirming and politically progressive. Because horror fantasy overtly pre-
sents that which blocks, damages and destroys human life and potential for
happiness, I produce literal and sometimes deliberately skewed applica-
tions, to elucidate both concepts and films. On screen, objective correla-
tives of Deleuze/Bergsonism might be their extreme opposites in
narrative intent. These perversely applied terms include molecularity
(genetic engineering); schizoanalysis (dangerous madness); the body
without organs (enforced prosthesis); and duration (haunting).
I open with a critique of the established status of psychoanalysis in
horror Film Studies. Despite the valuable insights offered by psychoana-
lytical readings, the experiential quality of the film remains absent, or
opaque. Deleuze offers a method and a language to open up the film event
to exploration, analysis and articulation. The innovation of schizoanalysis
leads to a radical re-thinking of both the theme of madness and the spec-
tator’s disturbed responses to the horror film.
Insanity is a traditional theme of horror, with its psychopaths and
victims driven insane by terror. Normative modes of consciousness and
behaviour are assumed, into which madness erupts. Depictions of insan-
ity emphasise its horror, but this may be undermined by our direct expe-
rience of the monster’s own perspective by the use of point-of-view
10    

without visible source, as in Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Pathologising anomalous mental states is refused by Deleuze and Guattari.
Their use of schizoanalysis privileges the transitions accessible in certain
intensive states, and in the material aesthetic of immanence. This offers
considerable scope for special effects like the back-projection of mental
states in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers.
My second chapter explores the process of becoming across such
hybrids as becoming-animal, becoming-woman and becoming-monster.
A radical re-working of the subject/object binary is central to Deleuzian
aesthetics. Sensation and affect subsume the subject and connect it to the
external world in a molecular meld. In horror film analysis, the processual
condition of becomings or ‘desubjectified affects’ is used to explore fan-
tasies of transmutation such as the shape-shifting of the feline woman in
Cat People.
Becoming refutes binary divisions. The ‘anomaly’ or outsider is a
dynamic catalyst for the becomings of horror. Becomings are incongruous,
bizarre and repulsive, like the genetic hybrid of man and insect,
‘Brundlefly’, in David Cronenberg’s The Fly produced when a housefly is
accidentally trapped in a teleporter. I locate becoming via the body-
without-organs, which mobilises a new interpretation of body horror. Film
is also a ‘body’ that connects with other bodies, including the mind/brain
of the viewer. Sounds, textures and rhythms vibrate in the body/text in
incorporated, experiential ways as the spectator becomes with the text.
Having deployed a more familiar, theme-based approach in Chapters 1
and 2, I move further into horror aesthetics and draw more intensively on
the philosophy of cinema in Cinema I and Cinema 2. Again, I open with
areas more familiar to Film Studies before crossing over into less well-
known terrain. I begin with a chapter on mise-en-scène and various kinds of
movement in horror cinema.
The film theory shaped by psychoanalysis and semiology treats images
as static, symbolic components of underlying representational structures.
It abstracts them from their moving, changing medium. Deleuze, on the
other hand, endorses Bergson’s ‘vitalism’, or the ubiquitous presence of
dynamic forces in his work, with singularities of style and expression. The
‘movement-image’ in process replaces language-like symbolic representa-
tion at the crux of the filmic event. Beauty is located not in formal balance
but in the kinesthetics of perpetual motion.
Horror film foregrounds the dynamics of movement. In Francis Ford
Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, stasis is spectacularly
defied. The vampire’s force flows through everything, from the rippling
gauze of a scarlet gown to the swaying reeds in the garden. The laws of
       11

gravity are suspended in the vampire’s castle as perfume drops fly upwards

and metal bleeds when a crucifix is stabbed. Even though a film’s locale
may be spatially constricted, as in a haunted house, movement still occurs.
This may be of an intensive rather than extensive nature, as with the agon-
ised shifts of expression on the face of camerawoman Heather in The Blair
Witch Project, intensified by extreme close-up.
My applications work directly on material such as this, which stimulates
the horror experience by light, colour, sound and movement. Over-
saturated colours, distorted sounds and hallucinatory images make
emphatic use of visual, aural and other stimuli to affect and move us. As
well as its material force on the sensorium, horror film also opens up to the
metaphysical elements of duration, via the special usage of light, spatial
and temporal overlay and other techniques.
My final chapter concerns duration and the time-image of the horror
film. The cinematic image moves across time in a complex trajectory.
The apparatus of cinema manipulates and melds past, present and
future, shaping our awareness of the properties of time and modulating
our experience of it. The influence of Bergson on Deleuze’s film philos-
ophy is crucial here. For Deleuze, time is pivotal to cinema’s philosoph-
ical resonance. Film is an event of temporal process and duration. This
operates across both the textual diegesis and the spectator fused in its
assemblage.
The temporal movements of horror film are fractured and non-linear.
The past impregnates the present in a haunting which seeks to block the
flow of present into future. The past threatens to dominate the present and
also to shape the future in its own replicated image which brings stasis.
Time loops back and refuses to progress as earlier periods insist on their
equal, or superior, validity to the present era. This is made overt in neo-
Gothic films such as Robert Wise’s The Haunting, with its vindictive
Victorian manifestations amplified by present-day psychic disturbance. In
Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others, ghosts are plausible characters unaware
of their own spectral status. They dominate the narrative as the past passes
itself off as the present to fool audience expectations. Haunting has tradi-
tionally been theorised by Freudians as repetition–compulsion and the
return of the repressed. Instead, I argue that the genre’s foregrounding of
non-linear time is relevant to more recent philosophical debates on the
nature of time and human consciousness.
The affective power of film exceeds the symbolic properties of both lan-
guage and image. It vibrates intensively rather than extensively. The
senses, stimulated by colour, lighting, sound and movement, are part of
incorporated perception. Beginning with a sensory-motor response to
12    

external stimulus, they in turn stimulate a kind of thought that leads away
from preconceptions into the realm of non-symbolic ideation, or ‘intu-
ition’. Deleuze draws heavily on Bergson’s concept of duration here.
I am compelled to articulate this exploration of the film experience as a
form of non-symbolic thought through language, an inevitably inadequate
medium that both limits and shears off from the object is seeks to pin down.
Nevertheless, as the reader will notice, the fluctuations of my own style are
not without their becomings, as they meld with the tone qualities of my
critical sources, or the chosen films. To fill in some of the gaps, I hope that
readers will draw on their own memories, or perhaps first-time viewings,
of these films (and the ones I did not have space for) as horror events.

Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 18.
2. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film (London: BFI, 1992).
3. In particular, during conversations with Barbara Kennedy.
4. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); Steven Shaviro, The
Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1993).
5. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ [1919], in S. Freud, The Standard Edition of
the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. and ed. James Strachey,
(London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), pp.
218–56.
6. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (London:
Virago, 1988).
7. Jacques Lacan, Encore: Le Seminaire XX [1972–3], trans. Jacqueline Rose, in
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan
and the École Freudienne (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982).
8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982).
9. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, p. 28.
10. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. P. Bains and
J. Pefanis (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995), p. 92.
11. The term refers to the political/psychoanalytical debates initiated by the
British film journal Screen in the 1970s and 1980s.
12. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse’, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London:
Athlone, 2002), p. 122.
13. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The
       13

Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 367.
14. Ibid. p. 367.
15. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 205.
16. Ibid. p. 164.
17. Ibid. p. 18.
18. Ibid. p. 18.
19. For an analysis of avant-garde aesthetics, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
20. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, vol. VII (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989), pp. 396–7.
21. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 367.
 CHAPTER 1

From Psychoanalysis to
Schizoanalysis: An Intensive Voyage

an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of all shape
and form.1 (Deleuze and Guattari)

Nola Carveth, in residential analysis under Dr Raglan at the Soma Free

Institute, is kept in isolation under lock and key. Raglan’s intensive psycho-
somatic therapy has broken through Nola’s ego-defences and released her
repressed rage against her parents as well as hatred of her own daughter
and jealousy of her husband’s woman friend. Expressed at first through
their transference to the eroticised father figure of the analyst, Nola’s libid-
inal forces soon adopt a more physical expression. They manifest them-
selves on the outside of her body, undermining the distinction between
psychic and physical states. The pustules that break from her skin develop
into poisonous-looking sacs connected by umbilical chords.
In a climactic scene, Nola’s husband Frank visits her and she proudly
opens the curtain-like folds of her white robe to display her condition. In
close-up, a swollen sac is revealed hanging from her belly. Ripping this
open with her teeth, she licks the amniotic fluid from her newly born
progeny. Upstairs are many such ‘children of rage’ produced by Nola’s
psychic parthenogenesis after her sessions with Dr Raglan. They are
‘unconsciously’ sent to act out her murderous desires and remove the last
shreds of her repression. Her superego has been ejected from its authori-
tarian role. She cannot feel responsible for the autonomous acts of forces
over which she no longer has conscious control.
David Cronenberg’s The Brood is a damning critique of the unscrupu-
lous abuses of psychotherapy and the dangers of transference. It also
mounts a physical attack on the paternal relation, although biological
fathers are presented with some sympathy. Nola’s ‘child’ brutally beats her
father to death, the children tear Raglan to shreds of their own accord and
a close-up of Nola’s daughter Candice, rescued by her father, reveals a tiny
pustule growing on her arm as they drive home. As well as its ambivalent
anti-Oedipal thrust, the film displays a new map of the body in which mind
and flesh form a transformational assemblage of force. Rather than repli-
     15

cating traditional images of madness, The Brood offers a perspective more

congenial to schizoanalysis.
Deleuze and Guattari do not apply the psychopathology of early trauma
to mental anomaly. Instead, they focus on the dynamic new transitions
experienced in intensive states of consciousness. Outside a clinical context,
these insights also operate in the production and reception of art. The
concept of schizoanalysis is broadly applicable to re-thinking both politics
and art. For Guattari, art therapy was integral to his clinical practice with
schizophrenics. Deleuze used schizoanalysis as a way in to the intensive
affects of aesthetic expression and their wider effects. A borderline lies
between psychoanalysis and the deterritorialisation of the ‘intensive
voyage’ of schizoanalysis.2 Here I will enquire whether the two may
operate in tandem or whether they are incompatible regimes.
Psychopathic murderers and victims driven insane by terror have long
been horror film staples. Expressing anomalous mental states invites the
flamboyant use of special effects. These induce a virtual experience
of derangement for the viewer, who temporarily shares the affective dis-
tortions of cinematography or mise-en-scène. Particular formations of
madness depend on the genre’s stylistic norms, as well as the societal
norms being violated. Psychoanalysis has been widely applied to such
‘madness’, yet it disregards the aesthetics at work. I will begin the compar-
ison by outlining psychoanalytic interpretations on horror film, then move
on to suggest how madness can be read differently.

Psychoanalysis and Horror

The first substantial application of classical psychoanalysis to horror
fiction was Marie Bonaparte’s Oedipal reading of Poe in 1949.3 Since then
psychoanalytic theory has permeated both the analysis and practice of dark
fantasy in the form of ‘monsters from the id’.4 Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis has been used to characterise fantasy as ‘the mise-en scène of
desire’ for the spectator.5 In the horror genre, desire meets dread in fanta-
sies of castration and back-to-the womb scenarios. Repressed traumatic
material returns in monstrous forms. Particularly in neo-Gothic, horror
replays primal scenes and traps the present in the inevitable return of a
more potent past.
The tone of traditional Freudian readings is often dogmatic and diag-
nostic, bent on seeking out the symptoms of classical scenarios and their
variants. For Roger Dadoun, horror film focuses on the fetish function.6 In
Dracula has Risen from the Grave, both the Count and the crucifix are fet-
ishes to offset ‘the anxiety of castration and the fantasies woven around the
16    

mother’s phallus’.7 As gender and sexuality form the psychoanalytic

groundplan, horror film criticism has drawn on it to explore the gendered
nature of the monster.
Some early feminist readings turned to the work of Julia Kristeva to
account for misogynist depictions of monstrosity. Barbara Creed used
Kristeva’s psychoanalytical model of abjection to theorise Alien and
Carrie.8 Kristeva’s concept of the abject, the ‘in-between [. . .] which dis-
turbs identity, system, order’, has been fitted to the ‘female’ aspects of the
monster.9 Despite Kristeva’s suggestive exploration of the fluid nature of
abjection, critical readings tend to retain a fixed dichotomy of self and
other, as well as gender binaries.
Many applications of psychoanalytic theory to horror have been neither
totalising nor simplistic. Some feminist theorists, such as Tania Modleski,
whose readings of Hitchcock include horror elements, have fruitfully
applied psychoanalysis to read classic films against the grain.10 Re-working
Laura Mulvey’s seminal article on visual pleasure and narrative cinema,
Kaja Silverman, Tania Modleski and Carol Clover have applied psycho-
analysis to explore the complex imbalances of gender and power.11 Linda
Williams made one of the first feminist avowals of interest in horror film
when she noted the sympathetic parity of woman and monster via their
exchange of looks.12
Modleski includes horror elements in her anti-essentialist reading of
Hitchcockian ambivalence. For her, Norman Bates is one of Hitchcock’s
images of ambiguous sexuality. By making his similitude to the sexual
other into a source of power, Norman destabilises the gender identity of
both protagonists and viewers. Despite her refutation of Mulvey’s focus
on male voyeurism, Modleski foregrounds the sexual asymmetry of desire
and punishment via a social application of feminist psychoanalysis.
David Rodowick, in a theoretically substantial study of gender, advises
caution in applying the strategies of psychoanalysis to film wholesale, and
outlines its limitations. Psychoanalysis is ahistorical and disregards the
corporeal element. It should be supplemented with a Foucauldian empha-
sis on ‘bodies and pleasures’, to historicise debates. He reminds us that
‘subjectivity is defined by social and historical processes that are irredu-
cible to singular categories, and its forms and potentialities are always in
flux’.13 To develop this perspective, he would later turn to Deleuze.
Steven Shaviro provocatively presents semiotic and psychoanalytic film
theories as phobic constructs. They seek to normalise or ‘oedipalize’ his-
torically specific mechanisms of mechanical reproduction and their corre-
sponding visual obsession. He draws on Deleuze to assert that the
cinematic apparatus replaces subjective control by corporeal sensation.
     17

Cinematic events operate with the primal rawness of ‘affect, excitation,

stimulation and repression, pleasure and pain, shock and habit’.14 Refuting
the idealised distancing of representation and perspective, he argues that
vision is grounded ‘in the rhythms and delays of an ungraspable temporal-
ity, and in the materiality of the agitated flesh’.15
Like Creed, Shaviro reads horror via abjection, but aligns it with the
viewer’s position in a more celebratory way. He describes being ‘powerless
not to see’ during Dario Argento’s horror films, when the viewer is com-
pelled to participate in ‘a forced, ecstatic abjection before the image’.16 To
account for the spectator’s ecstatic expenditure here, he combines Georges
Bataille’s transgressional theory with Deleuze’s work on masochism,
which I consider in Chapter 2, on becoming.17
Lacanian theory applies the abstract model of structural linguistics to
the phenomenal workings of spectatorial or textual desire. Lacanians insist
that the unconscious and desire is structured ‘like a language’ and their
focus lies in uncovering this supposed deep structure.18 There is no space
here for visual and aural experience or other sensory stimuli that an aes-
thetics of sensation might afford. The spectator’s fascinated engagement
with the images themselves, and their potent affect, tends to be ignored or
treated as mystification by structuralist psychoanalysis. It also disregards
the altered states of consciousness produced via haptic or pathic affect in
which the inner body map expands to incorporate virtual sensation.
The Lacanian system denounces the delusory optical order as the
Imaginary, as opposed to the Symbolic of language. The image is not the
empty illusion of ‘lack’, but is potent with affect. The spectator responds
with visceral immediacy to images rather than gazing at them from a sub-
jective distance. In a sense, the fluid subjectivity of the spectator does not
pre-exist the text, but is actually formed by the immediate affective sensa-
tions of the film.
Whatever form it takes, cinepsychoanalysis emphasises the deep struc-
ture of the unconscious. It stresses the primacy of the egoic subject and the
need to maintain and strengthen ego-boundaries. There are significant
theoretical fissures with Deleuze here. Theories of desire and pleasure sep-
arate body and mind. The Lacanian subject is divided against itself and the
Freudian ego is a contested site between the id and the superego.
According to psychoanalytic readings, the spectator maintains a distance
from the screen as an imaginary spectacle, rather than participating in the
sensational continuum of the filmic assemblage.
Cinepsychoanalysis seeks to identify the psychic operations of the
scopic regime as evidence of an Oedipalised, split and gendered subjectiv-
ity. This ignores the ways in which film energises and mobilises an affect
18    

that is both psychical and material at once. Psychoanalysis is based on the

individual’s past history of pre-Oedipal formations that fix both the struc-
ture of the psyche and the meaning of material articulated in analysis. The
words spoken by the individual analysand in the ‘talking cure’ fit preor-
dained complexes, or work variations on them. Deleuze opposes the rigid
template of psychoanalysis to the fluid, machinic cartography of schizo-
analysis, which posits an ‘autoproductive desiring machine’ rather than a
subjective ego in a permanently paranoid condition.
Schizoanalysis offers liberation from the splitting of subject/object and
from the primal condition of lack. Deleuze and Guattari seek to reach
‘those regions of the orphan unconscious – indeed “beyond all law” –
where the problem of Oedipus can no longer be raised’.19 Rather than limit
the ‘schizo’ to narcissistic entropy, they locate her or him firmly in the col-
lective machinery of the social. They assert that all investments are social
and operate in a sociolinguistic field. Oedipus contributes to the existing
system, whereas schizoanalysis offers a more fluid and inclusive micropol-
itics of desire in a ‘neo-aesthetic/neo-sexuality outside psychoanalytic
myths and theatres of the past’.20
Deleuze distinguishes between a cartographic and an archaeological
conception of psychic activity. The latter is oriented around the personal
past and is ‘memorial, commemorative, or monumental’, involving a ver-
tical penetration of hierarchical layers.21 Maps, on the other hand, are
superimposed in such a way that they evaluate ‘displacements’ of trajecto-
ries and becomings rather than seeking origins.22 The unconscious takes
flight as it passes from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis. Deleuze and
Guattari’s cartography is reminiscent of the Situationist dérives of their
peers in which random, yet attentive, walks of the city formed maps as
psycho/political process. Deleuzian critique is experienced as a form of
map-making. I find myself automatically using images of cartography as I
move transversally across the field of film-philosophy, following Deleuze’s
footsteps but with my own deviations. Before I define schizoanalysis more
thoroughly, I will illustrate how psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis might
read the same horror film differently. I have chosen Hitchcock’s Psycho, the
archetypal schizo text as well as the ‘quintessential’ horror film.23
With an arch nod towards psychoanalysis, the director presents a
popular, ‘dollar book Freud’ version of a schizoid ‘split personality’.
Norman’s substantial Oedipus complex and his sadistic voyeurism of
Marion Crane, the transgressive runaway secretary, are clearly signalled.
Through our ambivalent fascination with, and possible recognition of,
Norman’s Oedipal desires, we become implicated in the enactment of his
fantasy scenarios. Arbogast, the detective, fails in his attempt to investigate
     19

Norman, and Marion’s lover Steve and sister Lyla are likewise unable to
‘understand’ him. At the end of the film, we are positioned like Lyla and
Steve in the rapt on-screen audience. We also want the analyst’s voluble
diagnosis of this classic schizophrenic case study to tie up the narrative by
answering our questions. At the same time, the implication remains that
we, too, are tainted by the Oedipal anguish that drove Norman mad.
A psychoanalytic slant on Psycho fixes its meaning in the family romance
gone sour, which does allow for some consideration of socialised gender
dynamics. Despite the problematic ambiguities usefully identified in
Modleski’s reading, psychoanalytic approaches focus on the ‘deep struc-
ture’ of the text. This might feasibly be shifted from text to readers as the
other focus of psychoanalytic criticism. As we watch the film, the events
act on our own unconscious. Our shifting identification between Marion
and Norman engineers the return of the repressed in fantasy form.
Deleuze and Guattari, however, offer another way of approaching the
filmic experience using the insights of schizoanalysis.

Schizoanalysis: Pure Naked Intensity

The divergence of traditional psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s
new map of the psyche is clarified by Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis’s
classically clinical definition of schizophrenia. The pathologised condi-
tion reveals ‘incoherence of thought, action and affectivity’.24 It involves
‘discordance, dissociation, disintegration’, accompanied by detachment
from reality in ‘a turning in upon the self and the predominance of a
delusional mental life given over to the production of phantasies (autism)’
and ultimately ‘intellectual and affective “deterioration”’.25 This defini-
tion is acknowledged, but also reconsidered, by Deleuze, whose own view
was shaped by two main influences. Guattari provided the clinical
insights and radical position of the anti-psychiatry movement. Bergson’s
work on the fluid nature of consciousness helped shape Deleuze’s own
philosophical approach.
In Time and Free Will, Bergson outlines a dual psychic topography. The
outer crust is spatial and socially oriented, whereas the inner core vibrates
in the endless flux of duration. According to Bergson, there are two differ-
ent selves, one of which is the external projection and social representation
of the other. The internal operations of the self are reached by deep intro-
spection, a process that ‘leads us to grasp our inner states as living things,
constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measure, which permeate
one another’.26 This model is radically distinct from Freud’s tripartite
mapping of the psyche and the pivotal role of the transference.
20    

Although both models identify an inner depth and complexity, they have
different views of time in relation to psychic interiority. For Freud, the
unconscious is a timeless zone where the fixated past directly shapes the
present in its own image. He asserts that time is purely conscious. The
unconscious processes are ‘timeless; i.e. they are not altered by the passage
of time; they have no reference to time at all’.27 Bergson’s inner state,
though it is also formed of memory, partakes of the durational process of
perpetual becoming. This dynamic and multi-faceted model stresses the
change and multiplicity seminal to schizoanalysis, which rejects finality.
In some ways, schizoanalysis is Guattari’s clinical methodology at la
Borde experimental psychiatric clinic applied by Deleuze as aesthetic
critique. In Anti-Oedipus they both insist on the political urgency of
Guattari’s innovations, arguing that ‘a materialist psychiatry recognises
the state of desire and its production as primary and determinant, whereas
an idealist psychiatry rests on ideas and their expression’, thus emphasis-
ing the material practices of desiring-production.28
For the schizophrenic individual, experimental group work like that at
La Borde gravitates against classic analysis in favour of the dynamic, inter-
active discovery of the ‘desiring machine, independently of any interpre-
tation’.29 This starts by the disintegration of the ‘normal’ ego in a process
of deconstruction. This technique is fundamentally opposed to Freud’s
strengthening of the ego-defences of the analysand to contest the incur-
sions of the id from ‘below’ and the superego from ‘above’.
Deleuze suggests the operations of consciousness as a ‘plane of imma-
nence’, or becoming. This has a macro level (the plane itself) and a micro
level (molecularity). Its perpetually shifting motion is replete with ‘speed
and slowness, floating affects, so that the plane itself is perceived at the
same time as it allows us to perceive the imperceptible (the microplane, the
molecular plane)’.30 In this immanent process, desire is produced. The
model here is not a primal archaeology, but a cartography of schizophrenic
intensity. It spreads along the plane of immanence, which possesses
density as well as surface, moved by the non-subjective powers of affect.
Schizophrenic maps become via their own motion, rather than being
derived from foundational Oedipal relations with the father and the
mother. Traditional models of the body’s organic layout are not the source
of these maps of forces or intensities. On the contrary, they are new ‘inten-
sive maps’ of the body in becoming via a shifting ‘constellation of
affects’.31 The schizophrenic experiences these pure intensities via the
body-without-organs, a concept I will explore in detail later. Sensory and
cognitive hallucinations are underpinned by the raw processual experi-
ence of feeling, transition and becoming. It is in this process that the schiz-
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oid state resembles and elucidates the profound function that Deleuze
gives to the arts.

Schizoanalysis, Art, Horror

The artwork, whatever its medium, engages in machinic connection with
its perceiver. Via lines of flight, this process mobilises what André
Colombat calls ‘concrete connections, developments or “expressions” of
matters and fluxes’.32 Guattari and Deleuze sharply distinguish between
schizophrenia as clinical entity and the schizoanalysis of their aesthet-
ico/political critique and its figure of the ‘schizo’. Schizoanalysis operates
as ‘the outside of psychoanalysis itself which can only be revealed through an
internal reversal of its analytical categories’.33 Designated ‘schizos’ are
experimental artists such as the modernists and their precursors, includ-
ing Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Arthur Rimbaud and Franz Kafka.
I am suggesting that both the figure of the schizo and the critical process
of schizoanalysis can illumine the operations of horror film themes, char-
acters and aesthetic strategies. These are not always schizophrenic in the
clinical sense. At the level of narrative and representation, psychoanalytic
critics have argued that both the monster and the viewer replay primal sce-
narios of ambivalence, retracing a dreadful desire imbricated in lack. If we
shift focus to the processual experience of the film, both monster and
viewer are engaged in a schizophrenic assemblage where they experience
an ego-less freedom from constraint.
Deleuze and Guattari idealise the schizo as ‘a free man, irresponsible,
solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own
name, without asking permission, a desire lacking nothing, a flux that over-
comes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego what-
ever’.34 This model has existentialist overtones, but lacks the romantic
individualism of the existentialist subject. It diverges sharply from the
psychoanalytic view that the role of fantasy is to enable the return of the
repressed and thus to engineer sublimation, and social consensus.
Pleasure, for Deleuze and Guattari, is materially based in immanent
sensation. Desire, which exceeds the sexual, is not the product of lack or
negativity, but is productive and automatic. The autoerotics of desire attain
their consummation in ‘the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new
birth, a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated
other unlimited forces’.35 Such automatism is experienced via intensive
states: ‘haecceities’, or ‘things in themselves’, and not ‘subjectivities’.
These states afford an ‘intense feeling of transition’ without the static final
positionality of psychoanalysis.36
22    

Pre-verbal affect is one site of the schizophrenic’s intensive states. Such

delirious events validate material feeling in a becoming prior to the struc-
turation of subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari describe the schizophrenic
experience of

intensive qualities in their pure state, to the point that is almost unbearable – a celi-
bate misery and glory experienced to the fullest, like a cry suspended between life
and death, an intense feeling of transition, states of pure, naked intensity stripped of
all shape and form.37

By means of this, the ‘beyond’ of the pleasure principle is not the death
instinct, but sensation itself in dynamic flux.
Schizoanalysis allows us to explore ‘machinic arrangements grasped in
the context of their molecular dispersion’.38 Psychic interiority is replaced
by an immanence in which desire is process and energy. Here, ideas are
dynamic events or ‘lines of flight’ that can take us into ‘a fibrous web of
directions, much like a map or a tuber’.39 The term ‘rhizome’ (or lateral,
multi-forked root system) suggests the nomadic movement of thought by
the intensities of a self in process. Schizoanalytic film theory, then, seeks
an experiential approach to the moving image in itself, distinct from struc-
tures of signification.
Material capture in space and time replaces, or, rather, supplements,
issues of representation. Denying depth and psychic interiority, Deleuze
and Guattari insist upon the immanence of art as ‘a being in sensation and
nothing else: it exists in itself ’.40 The embodied ‘look’ is also a sensation,
which conjoins with other sensory areas such as tactility via haptic opera-
tions. The body is not separate from the mind, but forms part of a percep-
tual continuum. In my view, this machinic continuum potentially operates
for everyone in the audience, not just a few privileged aesthetes, as we are
all human living images engaged in the flux of material images. All cinema,
not just avant-garde texts that foreground their own construction, may be
read materially via the sensational event of film viewing. I am arguing that
horror films are a popularly accessible example of such material capture.
The directness of film springs from its stimulation of the optic nerves,
agitating the senses and bypassing the cognitive and reflective faculties.
Cinema, argues Shaviro, assaults the senses in a ‘non-representational
contact, dangerously mimetic and corrosive, thrusting us into the myster-
ious life of the body’.41 The movie camera’s technological automatism
penetrates and melds with the flux of the material world. It removes per-
ceptual experience from the idealising tendency of humanist paradigms.
Although the camera is set up, angled and moved by human agency, its
ultimately technological apparatus passively records the object before it.
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This passivity enables it to capture what Bataille calls the ‘raw phenom-
ena’ of immanent matter.42
For Deleuzian film theory, perception is freed by cinema from the norms
of human agency and cognition, and rendered primordial by its automa-
tism. Film, argues Shaviro, acts as an extension of the existing sensorium,
being ‘monstrously prosthetic’ and composed of ‘the unconscious epiphe-
nomena of sensory experience’.43 In the case of horror film, the virtual sen-
sations induced are of an extreme kind able to push through subjective
boundaries.
Traditional horror presents madness as a terrifying descent in order to
invoke fear and revulsion in the viewer. Psychoanalysis pathologises horror
and psychoanalytic film criticism uses either the text or the viewer as an
analysand. It impels viewers to strengthen their ego defences against the
disruptive undermining of the id or the repressive pressure of the super-
ego. From a Deleuzian perspective, however, madness in horror may be
read in a more positive light. Anomalous states of consciousness in film are
celebrated in Deleuze, both for their stylistic innovations and their affect
on the audience who participates in the madness by affective contagion.
Schizoanalytic film criticism looks very different to psychoanalytic read-
ings because of its lack of focus on matters of theme, plot and character. It
does not seek to fix a set of equations for symbolic representation. Its aim,
according to Deleuze and Guattari’s polemics, would be ‘to overturn the
theatre of representation into the order of desiring-production’.44 It has a
micropolitical function to free us from the habitual schemata of represen-
tational templates and to start us thinking in new ways. The form that
thinking differently might take is not fixed, but, being motivated by the
dynamic forces of desire in motion, it potentially leads to new becomings.
Our focus as schizoanalytic critics should be to map assemblages in their
mutual operations, to meld form, style and content, and to suggest pre-
dominant diagrammatic components. My earlier psychoanalytic take on
Psycho tells us nothing about the affective potency of the film or its stylis-
tic techniques. For this new angle on horror film, we may fruitfully turn to
schizoanalysis. From this perspective, Psycho becomes a very different
experience to the Oedipal text sketched earlier.

Psycho as Schizo
A psychoanalytic reading of Psycho reveals nothing about the film as an aes-
thetic or visceral experience. Within the constraints of a classic realist
thriller, Hitchcock remains unrepentantly expressionist, impregnating his
mise-en-scène with aesthetic effects to dislocate the viewer’s normative
24    

mode of consciousness. He foregrounds the effects of light and shade,

unusual camera angles and affective editing as well as imaginative play with
symbols and narrative levels. Bernard Hermann’s music is composed and
arranged for its potently affective force, aurally agitating and assaulting the
audience in tandem with visual horror.
As early as the title graphics, Psycho is permeated thematically by
schizophrenia and aesthetically by schizoid lines of flight. Horizontal lines
are congenial to our optical scanning mechanisms and reinforce a sense of
geometric balance. Here, they divide and move in opposite directions, dis-
rupting compositional cohesion. The music, with its high-pitched violin,
grates on the listener’s nerves as well as evoking screams. These aggressive
opening affects become a more melting and fluid rhythm. A smooth series
of crane shots, subtly linked by slow fades, shifts the mood and floats the
viewer into the sensuous world of Marion’s lunchtime rendezvous.
Nevertheless, the visceral warning of the titles remains with us to induce
agitation, set up suspense and undermine our sense of control.
After the robbery, Marion’s point-of-view shots, which we are invited to
share, become increasingly anomalous. In her paranoia, the rear-view
mirror renders the pursuing police car as a static object with a blur of
moving landscape around it. The soundtrack of her employer’s accusatory
voice-over ‘in her head’ indicates a further split in her consciousness.
These familiar techniques used in the context of her traumatised condi-
tion intensify their impact and lead us in to the more extreme anomalies of
the Bates assemblage. Marion’s absence from her immediate environment
and mild catatonia is visually paralleled by the rain and shifting patterns
of light that blur the clarity of the landscape. The external amorphousness
is distorted even more by its reflection in the rear-view mirror, replacing
the frozen image of the pursuing car. As the wipers slow and the lights
glow with lens-flare coronas, mundane consciousness transmutes into neo-
Gothic alterity.
As well as being an extreme case of ‘split personality’, Norman is
engaged in the process of becoming-bird. Psychoanalytic criticism sheds
little light on this distinctive diagrammatic component. In his ornithology
room, bird pictures and actual stuffed birds of prey, such as an owl, are
proudly displayed and he connects to them by touch. When Norman leans
forward in profile, the birds loom large and dominate the composition. His
shamanistic power here extends to Marion. He draws her random line of
flight into his own assemblage as well as hypnotising her as his prey.
Marion is bird-like in her large, staring eyes. She shifts her head from side
to side in a mannered way and Norman tells her she eats ‘like a bird’.
Norman’s bird-becoming is corporeally manifest by his beak-like nose,
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emphasised by camera angles, and his arm and neck movements in their
jerky un-human motion. His bird aspect is particularly overt when he
looms over the motel register nibbling at small morsels of food. Norman’s
method of killing as ‘Mother’ serves the bird side as well as the mother
side. Arbogast’s killer attacks from above, shot from a birds’ eye viewpoint.
As with Marion, the murder is enacted by the diagonal stabbing of a beak-
like knife.
Although Norman’s other becoming with ‘Mother’ dominates the plot,
it is less successfully assimilated into his schizo assemblage than his bird-
becoming. He often struggles with her and seeks to throw her off as she
eludes the (stuffed) bird-becoming he subjects her to. It is only when he
has been captured that his bird-becoming is frozen into the static being of
catatonia. By the end, he is ‘Mother’, her revenge is complete, so he is a
stuffed bird, too. This overt aspect of this regression enables the psychi-
atrist to subject him to classic Freudian template analysis. Despite the
attempted closure of this ending, the Norman/bird assemblage eludes the
Freudian structure.45
In this brief sketch of Psycho, I have deliberately kept representation and
narrative off-field to highlight the contrast between the critical methodol-
ogies of schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis. The actuality of my experience
of the film, after repeated viewings, is, of course, a fluctuating assemblage
of molar and molecular responses that operate as an ensemble rather than
being divided off artificially. I do not wish to endorse a binary divide
between content and style, neither do I seek to establish a new schizoana-
lytical orthodoxy for horror. I seek, rather, to open up a dynamic inter-
change by tracing a plane on which they may fruitfully intersect as
‘particles entering into each other’s proximity’.46 In a broadly chronologi-
cal move, I will now map the schizoid formations of some ‘classic’ versions
of madness along with a more recent ‘psycho-killer’ film. By close
sequence analysis as well as sketching larger patterns, I suggest how stylis-
tic techniques induce schizo affect via plot, theme and style.

The Mise-en-scène of Madness: The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

I start my schizoanalytic readings by revisiting the German
Expressionist/Gothic film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari directed by Robert
Wiene.47 Madness, a traditional Gothic horror theme, is mixed with
magical elements recalling the fantastic tales of Grimm and Hoffmann.
Both are given a modern slant in the film’s depiction of a contemporary
asylum’s innovative treatments and potential for power abuse. The asylum
director, Dr Caligari, mixes the trickery of a mountebank with scientific
26    

research; clinical alienism with magical villainy. Insanity is both themati-

cally represented and concretised by physical, sensory manifestation. The
overtly artificial and distorted mise-en-scène might be read as the mental
projection of Francis, the psychologically disturbed ‘hero’. The scenery
colludes with experimental cinematography and Expressionist acting to
induce mental and sensory disorientation. The spectator is submerged in
a diegesis that undermines normative cognition.
The film illustrates Deleuze’s own approach to horror texts as move-
ment-images. Here, his exploration foregrounds the physical and meta-
physical dynamics of light and shade. In German Expressionist cinema,
black and white enact a battle of good and evil forces via contrast. In
Murnau’s films, ‘light as degree (white) and the zero (black) enter into con-
crete relations of contrast or mixing’.48 With ‘series of white and black
lines, rays of light and outlines of shadow’, the director produces the ‘stri-
ated, striped world’ of the film’s painted canvases.49 There are other anom-
alous techniques in the film, but a binary struggle of light and dark
underlies the variants.
The film plunges us into the hallucinatory world of mental disturbance
in the opening shots of two asylum inmates. Slow iris in and out isolates
part of the screen, blocking our initial orientation within frames, or
closing off orientation established in prior shots. The isolating iris begins
at the bottom right corner of the screen by highlighting a bizarre detail
like an organ grinder’s monkey in the fairground. The technique mimics
the spectator’s eye opening wide or slowly closing. We participate virtu-
ally in the film’s somnambulism, hypnotism and the enforced awakening
of sleepers.
The main protagonist, Francis, and his companion have the inner-
directed fixed gaze of mental distraction, imprisoned in their own projec-
tions. As they discuss how ‘spirits surround us on every side’, the figure of
a woman glides past them. She shares their fixated gaze, absorbed in her
own reality like a somnambulist. This distracted wide-eyed gaze runs
throughout the film. Directed off-screen, it disconcerts our conventional
expectations of eye-line match and point-of-view shot and refutes exter-
nality. The characters direct their gaze elsewhere than within the diegesis,
itself rendered stagey and unreal. The frame’s inherent ‘deterritorialisa-
tion of the image’ partly results from the determination of an out-of-
field.50 The out-of-field opens up the frame to ‘a more disturbing presence,
one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to “insist” or “subsist”,
a more radical Elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time’.51 These
asylum inmates look out-of-field into the ‘radical Elsewhere’ of their own
schizoid world which overlays an already deranged reality.
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Intensive and compressed in its use of space and time, Expressionist

cinema offers an objective correlative to altered states of consciousness.
Characters exist in abnormal conditions, performing hysteric gestures and
postures as they physically act out inner states of feeling according to
Expressionist dictates. Alan, supposedly a ‘normal’ student, displays his
own form of alienation tinged with manic depression: mooning, sighing,
showing childlike enthusiasm and rushing around at breakneck speed.
The town of Holstenwall is a hallucinatory Expressionist version of
folktale mise-en-scène. Two-dimensional painted sets of abstracted build-
ings with pointed roofs and pointed pines are backed by a triangular
mountain in unconvincing perspective. Sharp angles are a prominent
diagrammatic component. In angular Expressionist décor, ‘diagonals and
cross-diagonals tend to replace the horizontal and the vertical, the cone
replaces the circle and the sphere, acute angles and sharp triangles replace
curved or rectangular lines’.52 These forms affect us virtually by sharp,
painful cutting sensations and impel events by a frozen dynamism. The
diagonal of Caligari’s caravan teeters over to one side in harmony with its
owner. The flatness of the sets throws the rounded dimensions of actors
into relief, an alienation device that makes strange the human.
For Deleuze, the frightful ‘non-organic life of things’53 in the
Expressionist world animates the inanimate, so that ‘natural substances
and artificial creations, candelabras and trees, turbine and sun are no
longer any different [. . .] utensils, furniture, houses and their roofs also
lean, crowd around, lie in wait, or pounce’.54 The film is an extreme
example of this lack of clear boundary between nature and artifice. The
mise-en-scène shows signs of autonomous life, whilst humans adopt the
rigidity of automatons. The mechanical and the organic are not opposed
in the Expressionist milieu, but rather it presents

the vital as potent pre-organic germinality, common to the animate and the inani-
mate, to a matter which raises itself to the point of life, and to a life which spreads
itself through all matter. The animal has lost the organic, as much as matter has
gained life.55

This identity confusion typifies an art inspired by, and seeking to induce,
altered states of consciousness.
The scenery demands attention in its own right as it often appears prior
to, and dominates, human actants. Everyday domestic objects are deformed
by exaggeration into superfluity or impractical discomfort, making strange
the familiar. Each distortion agitates the viewer’s cognitive patterns. The
chair in Alan’s garret has an excessively long back and the town hall chairs
are teetering plinths for officials top-heavy with self-importance. Windows,
28    

black shadows and white patches of sunlight are blatantly painted on walls
and floors without correspondence to their objects.
The first victim of Caligari’s manic rage, the pompous town clerk, is
found murdered in a room where the angles of windows and walls have col-
lapsed. Jane, the film’s disempowered ‘heroine’, lives in a ‘feminised’,
rounded space of décor recalling billowing clouds and lit by a circular lamp.
Fluid, curved shapes and a padded chaise longue embody Francis’s own
initially comfortable condition. After Alan’s death, Francis’s body lan-
guage and facial expression become increasingly angst-ridden. His mental
state further validates stylistic derangements.
An intimate vital connection exists between human and inanimate mise-
en-scène in their mutual becoming. The corridor in the town hall is marked
by objective precursors of Dr Caligari’s arrival. Twin circles and a triangle
recall his spectacles and cloaked body. Seated, he forms an assemblage with
the scenery and becomes an Expressionist painting himself. Three black
lines marking the back of his white gloves are repeated on his white hair,
and he has flat, painted lines for eyebrows. As he moves, his body contorts
itself into an array of abstract forms and the fluid curlicues of his hand-
writing enhance his Expressionist style.
Flattened Expressionist space extends to the nocturnal streets and pre-
vents us from forming a spatial map of the town. The gate tower is guarded
by the cut-out figure of watchman like a black shadow. On the ground is a
burst of white, supposedly cast by a lamp as the explosive energy of the
floor itself spreads from a central point. Painted light and shade spread
further in both the prison and the asylum.
The fairground recalls Hoffmann’s tales of automata impelled by their
own uncanny force.56 It is an animated Toyland or puppet theatre as well as
an Expressionist art exhibition. A zigzag movement via indirect steps is
necessary for characters to pass from upper to lower levels. The conical hats
worn by three gnome-like figures point upwards in stylised unison. Doctor
Caligari, deformed himself, grimaces at a passing dwarf. Flat roundabouts
render humans absurdly and incongruously three-dimensional by contrast
as our sense of volume and space are eroded. In a later scene, the two-
dimensional carousel flickers and spins in hypnotic alternations of black
and white patterns.
Fronting a sideshow, the manic, silent ringing of a handbell by Dr
Caligari slashes the air with unnerving violence. For a modern audience,
the sound-substitute conventions of silent film have a defamiliarising
effect. Here, we project the ringing ourselves as a virtual audio sensation.
The larger-than-life-sized poster of the somnambulist Cesare underlines
his entrapment in the flat world by Caligari. In the cabinet sideshow, the
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camera set-up positions the spectator first at the back of the crowd, then
in the front row, for the spectacle of Cesare’s awakening.
Caligari unveils a coffin-like box with a jagged split, which parts to reveal
a tall, cadaverous figure. In a perverse experiment in mind control, Caligari
limits his creature to the simplest emotional range of violence and lust.
The doctor prevents Cesare from experiencing linear time on his own
account. A lozenge-shaped iris reveals a close-up of Cesare’s face. Heavy
eyeliner; a horizontal daub of mouth; horizontal lines of brows; a straight
fringe of hair and stripes on his polo neck jumper – all emphasise his pale,
piercing but blank eyes. They express the terror of a dreamer forced awake
and underline the inherent violence of watching.
Cesare’s somnambulism is a schizoid formation. Daniel Smith distin-
guishes two poles to the body-without-organs: the ‘vital anorganic func-
tioning of the organs and their frozen catatonic stasis’.57 Their dynamic
relation of attraction and repulsion constitutes the schizophrenic anguish.
Schizophrenic intensities approach the limit of zero as the body-without-
organs becomes a model of living death. Horror writers ‘appeal to the
terror not of the organic corpse, but of the catatonic schizophrenic: the
organism remains, with its vacant gaze and rigid postures, but the vital
intensity of the body is suspended, frozen, blocked’.58 Cesare is the cata-
tonic schizophrenic rather than the more common ‘split personality’ of
horror film. He has lost the use of his arms and legs unless his keeper, who
controls his machinic movements as though he were an automaton, impels
them. This doll-like stiffness enables his later replacement by a dummy.
Scenery is pivotal to the mood-driven plot. Even the intertitles express
aesthetic angst. We are told that a murder occurs ‘when the shadows lay
darkest’. The murderer creeps along the wall as though he cannot move
autonomously. Sudden bursts of emotional animation are thrown into
relief by the flatness of scenery, and his pursuers tilt over at a slanting angle
in harmony with the décor. Following the zigzag track of a line of shadow
up the town hall steps, Francis is constrained and directed by scenery that
prevents natural, spontaneous movement.
Deleuze notes the kinship of Expressionism with ‘pure kinetics’ in
its ‘violent movement which respects neither the organic contour not
the mechanical determinations of the horizontal and the vertical’.59
Expressionist cinema moves instead by a jagged ‘Gothic geometry’, in ‘a
perpetually broken line; where each change of direction simultaneously
marks the force of an obstacle and the power of a new impulse, in short,
the subordination of the extensive to intensity’, as in the architectural
lines of Gothic cathedrals.60 Overlay of the apparently incompatible
frames of film and medieval architecture illustrates Deleuze’s lines of
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flight between contiguous elements rather than fixing comparison by

similes or metaphors.
Cesare, sent to murder Jane, similarly expresses this Gothic geometry as
he creeps along the wall, flattened by the forces of two-dimensionality. He
moves with slow grace, like a shadow, forming new angles with his arms
and legs as an animated extension of the scenery himself. He is an embod-
ied force not a personage, an abstraction of the human made of shadows
and angles. He carries Jane up zigzag rooftops following a white-lined
track. This appears to lead him over the edge, but he continues his descent
down an incline hidden from the audience as though following an invisible
path in another dimension.
A curved bridge bordered by twisted, thorn-like vegetation extends his
tortured mental state. Against the de-naturalised trees, his arms stretch
out into bare branches and his hands droop at the same angle as the leaves
as he becomes a dead tree. The common direction of the branches and his
arms, shared by the triangular blades of grass, point to his death. When
he senses the malice of his pursuers, he staggers and falls like a switched-
off automaton.
The décor of the prison and the asylum is designed from madness and
despair. Large, skewed numbers and abstract lines are painted in the cell
walls. Through a triangular peephole, the convicted murderer is chained
in a squat, drooping posture. He is disempowered by the downward verti-
cals and trapped by the stylised patch of light in the centre of the floor. The
landscape leading to the asylum is a tortuous arch of fang-like points. In a
rare use of flowing, non-angular forms, the asylum corridor is adorned
with painted tendrils The forecourt resembles a theatre-in-the-round. At
the centre of a sunburst of rays, Francis is a focal point for the white-coated
assistant alienists, who, like the policemen earlier, suspect his sanity. The
office of Caligari, director and lunatic-in-charge, is the culmination of
chaotic patterns, jumbled forms and angles. Its resident skeleton mimics
Cesare’s death in life.
In temporal flashback, Caligari’s rapture at Cesare’s arrival breaks the
bounds of sanity. His exalted state leads to manic gyrations and delusions
of his own greatness in the superimposed repetitions of his newly adopted
name. When eventually cornered by his own assistants, Caligari explodes
with maniac energy prior to his being straitjacketed. Amoeboid blotches
adorn the walls of his cell. These shapeless, amorphous becomings suggest
the fluid forms of molecularity at their intensive mental work undermin-
ing rational structures.
The original film ended with the director exposed as a homicidal schizo-
phrenic who severely abused his patients. In the current version, the film
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returns to Francis’s framing story in which his companion is glad to escape

his ravings. The patients perform a series of obsessive roles on the circu-
lar stage of the forecourt: Cesare toys with a paper flower; Jane queens it
on a throne; a pianist plays without her instrument; a demagogue addresses
no one and a mother treats a doll as her child. Each inhabits their own
imaginary universe, and we have been experiencing Francis’s fantasy pro-
jections. Francis, not Caligari, is straitjacketed. The doctor appears
benign, apart from the ambiguous implications of his comment, ‘I know
how to treat him now’, without specifying the nature of his intentions.
Deleuze speculates on the metaphysical dimensions of the film’s light-
ing and the confusion of human life and the thing-world. I have extended
his focus to the schizoid style and theme and their affect on the spectator.
Partly set in an asylum, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari deals overtly in anom-
alous states. These are presented as both mental and physical by the dis-
tortions of the actors’ movements and the forms of the scenery. In the next
film, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, schizophrenia is even more literally manifest
as the actual splitting of one character into two separate men.

‘Man is not Truly One, but Truly Two’: The Schizoid

Screen in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
This familiar film may be read in familiar ways, such as taking a psycho-
sexual approach to its neo-Gothic structures. My aim is not to censor
such responses in myself or other viewers, but to extend them. Adding
Deleuzian insights to produce an interstitial reading for particular horror
films, however, is experiencing both the film and the reading afresh.
Newcomers to Deleuze might try expanding their customary theoretical
methods by considering the less conscious, but fundamental, affect of the
film on the incorporated spectator. In the process, new perspectives
might override the old. My own reading distances the narrative as I focus
more closely on the dynamics of style and the mental processes it simu-
lates and stimulates.
Style as well as theme and content is schizoid as we become Jekyll,
becoming Hyde, becoming beast. I argue that schizoid elements permeate
all levels of the film, via camera forces in motion and other distinctive tech-
niques. The qualitative mix of Modernism and Victorian melodrama pro-
duces stylistic and thematic incongruity. Hollywood conventions are in
dynamic tension with European art-house techniques. Stylistic experi-
ment alternates with theatrical conventions, but both are presented by
innovative cinematography. Black and white film stock is a fitting medium
for this schizoid cinema.
32    

The Expressionistic opening implicates the viewer directly in the film’s

events. From the start, we share the protagonist’s schizoid mode of con-
sciousness and being in the world. This is much more than a simple char-
acter identification. Dr Jekyll, the celebrated medical scientist, first
appears as part-object. As a shadow-double of himself, he is only semi-
embodied. The close-up image of the organ we hear is accompanied by the
startling haptic sensation of ‘our’ hands rising up from below frame to play
the keys as we fill the empty space of the organist. This stitches us into the
filmic assemblage as a direct participant in the event as well as an engaged
spectator. We are schizophrenised as both audience member and direct
actant, in a blur of fantasy and fantasist.
The melodramatic music ‘we’ play is part of the schizoid sound thread.
Jekyll and his fiancée Muriel express emotional turmoil via keyboard sub-
limations. Hyde’s taste prefers the cockney populism of brash dance hall
music and good-time girl Ivy’s song, ‘Champagne Ivy’. The timbre of
voices works alongside music in extending the schizoid split. Dr Jekyll’s
clipped, cultured tones contrast with his bestial alter-ego’s rough growl
and wild guffaws.
From its pivotal position ‘seated’ at the organ, the camera swivels to a
medium close-up of the butler Poole. The vertiginous camera cues in the
sensory distortions and dizzying lack of stable subjectivity ahead. Its swivel
prefigures the flamboyant 360-degree spins of the first transformation
from Jekyll to Hyde. A disembodied voice leads to our first sight of Jekyll
as a mirror image. Looking beyond the Freudian uncanny and schizo-
phrenic doubling, our own mirror-gazing implicates us further in Jekyll-
becoming. His image crystallises so suddenly that we have no time to
separate from him and reform our own position, so are forced to scan ‘our-
selves’ with shifty appraisal. Intense eyes ringed with dark shadows con-
trast to a tight-lipped mouth as his hasty, nervous preening of his formal
suit suggests his resumption of self-repression and social respectability
after the emotional outburst of the organ.
Psychoanalytically speaking, Jekyll’s ego-inflation is so extreme as to
become-godlike. This aspiration extends his already dominant social and
professional status. The first character we actually see in Jekyll’s master-
ful position is the manservant Poole in the setting of a sumptuous drawing
room. Jekyll’s inflation is extended via his direct view of the obeisances of
servants, gateman, coachman and students. It increases in his lecture,
viewed from an ominously canted camera. High-angle shots of him from
the top tier of seats alternate with a low angle of his gesticulating asser-
tion of his discovery that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ in blasphe-
mous duplicity.
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A barrage of disorienting movements across the film expands the effect

of these skewed angles. Together, they are forces rushing out of control as
Hyde’s élan vital seeks egress from the repressive straitjacket of Jekyll’s
skin. Movements, textures and lighting trace figural lines of flight across
the screen, both within and between locales. Subjective camerawork
catches the spectator up in the schizoid motion of Jekyll’s becomings.
When Jekyll, impatient for the next transformation, is interrupted by
Poole, the camera pans from Poole to Jekyll’s hands mixing chemicals and
back again. The eager darting expresses Jekyll’s impatience. Becoming
more objective, the restless camera follows him up and down stairs and
makes us wait, too.
The camera moves randomly, without brakes, and chooses its own pace
rather than a smoother, regulated motion easier on the eye. The zip pan is
a favoured move. Just before Jekyll drinks the potion, a subjective zips to a
medical skeleton and back. As well as figuring foreboding, the skeleton
urges the forbidden pleasures of the flesh. Jerky, slightly nauseating pans
up and down stairs operate without point-of-view during Hyde’s conver-
sation outside Ivy’s apartment. Hyde chases Ivy in rapid zip-pan rushes. A
zip likewise expresses Ivy’s alarm at Hyde’s return. The Expressionistic
shadow pursuit of Hyde by the police and the mob is animated by the zip
pans between them.
Becoming-Hyde allows Jekyll spontaneity of motion, which we enjoy
via the camera’s own freedom from conventional constraints. Hyde’s pre-
ternatural agility tricks and disorientates the viewer by undermining our
predictive ability and facilitating his escapes. Although the camera’s wild-
ness may be interpreted as its own becoming-Hyde, its new-found freedom
acts as an independent presence. It forewarns us when it tracks back over
Muriel’s garden to the street. Expecting Hyde, we chillingly see Jekyll,
whose identity is fluctuating rapidly by this stage. The camera’s freedom,
like Ivy’s, is blocked when Hyde’s black cloak fills the screen and blots the
light out by walking towards it.
The climactic first transformation of Jekyll into Hyde both works on,
and demonstrates, the spectator’s own potential to transform conscious-
ness. It effects the physical transformation by inducing an altered mental
state. In close-up, drops of liquid shimmer on a glass beaker then lose focus
as the potion takes effect and Jekyll’s rationality fades. In a wobbly image
that rhymes with the earlier mirror sequence, we move with Jekyll towards,
then into, the reflecting zone of his mirror. Scanning the reflection for
traces of identity, his face distorts, prefiguring the prosthetic make-up and
trick editing to come. As his mouth widens, his skin darkens and coarsens,
becoming hairy and bestial like a werewolf, an ape, or an evolutionary
34    

throwback.61 His clutching at his throat and gagging evokes our synaes-
thetic experience of a vile taste and a burning, choking sensation.
A tracking shot jerks away from the mirror fades into a blurred and
rapidly spinning vortex. The visual event is accompanied by gasping,
panting sighs of orgasmic release or a male self-birthing. Immersed in this
patterned abstraction of reality, the grounding effect of recognisable
objects is initially denied. Brief memory flashes of recent events include
close-ups of Muriel’s ethereal face and Ivy’s alluring leg. These floating
fragments offer ethical perspectives of temptation and repression. A series
of faces loom out of space in vertiginous lines of flight. The walrus-face of
Muriel’s repressive father is linked with Ivy’s swinging leg, repeated as
final image. As well as their thematic function, these fleeting images
present the basic components of a perception artificially ‘spliced’ into a
coherent vision. Disconnected from linear causality, they also evoke
Bergson’s ‘shining points’ of memory preserved within the folds of dura-
tion, a process I will examine in detail later.
A 360-degree spin concludes the sequence with an about-turning of
consciousness. Jekyll, now become-Hyde, is reflected as a much shorter
(lower in the frame) man, hairy and simian with the pointed teeth of a car-
nivore. Frederick March as Jekyll/Hyde transforms his body language to
match the new persona. His slouching posture and shambling gait mani-
fest untrammelled physicality. Sensually at one with his beastly body, he
stretches catlike as though awakening from sleep, before pursuing his rapa-
cious intent, gloating to himself in a grating voice and vulgar speech.
Becoming-Hyde is also becoming-beast, as he revels in brutish sensual-
ity. Unlike Jekyll, stuck stuffily indoors, Hyde’s joy in being loose is stressed
as he throws back his head to catch the glittering drops of rain. He snuffs
the air and gasps with satisfaction, glad to be back in the corporeal imma-
nence of Hyde’s animal skin. He treats Ivy like a cat with its prey, squeez-
ing and ripping at her flesh. The feline associations are paralleled by Jekyll’s
observation of a cat attacking a bird in the park prior to his spontaneous
transformation. As well as healthy, animal connotations, Hyde’s increas-
ingly scabby and scaly degeneracy suggests disease. The diseased nature of
his bestiality is the product of a monstrously repressive social machine.
The music hall scene extends Hyde’s bestiality. He leers at the legs and
fluffy feathers of the dancing girls as he snuffs the air, smelling Ivy out. His
libidinal energy can scarcely be contained as he trips the waiter and lashes
out without reflection. The décor displays images of beauty and the beast.
The naked, smooth back of a female statue recalls that in Ivy’s apartment.
A boar’s head on the wall underlines Hyde’s rampant lust, and his tusk or
fang-like teeth.
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Jekyll’s second transformation is speeded up and entirely physical. It

begins with a fading image of Muriel that fails to anchor his desires, then
cuts back to the window-pane where abstract patterns of raindrops glisten
with light. Bored by physical and ethical restraint, Jekyll paces restlessly,
actually becoming-Hyde before the drug takes hold. His foot taps impa-
tiently, a movement that becomes the tapping of an unsent letter to Muriel
on the tabletop. As correlative to his barely contained force, the lid bursts
off a pot boiling on the fire in an orgasmic liquid release.
There is no lengthy evocation of altered consciousness here, as Jekyll is
already permanently altered. In close-up, Hyde’s hairy hands bang on the
chair arms as an electrical force of élan vital surges through him. The next
close-up shows his ugly, grimacing face with its ape-like low forehead, fur-
like hair and flared nostrils. He degenerates further with each transforma-
tion. This no longer suggests dualistic alternation, but a purposeful
trajectory of monstrosity. At this point, conventional Gothic morality
asserts itself. The ‘mad scientist’ must be punished for dabbling in forbid-
den knowledge and unleashing monstrous forces disguised as ‘nature’.
The molecular transformation of Hyde back into Jekyll is conveyed by
rapid superimpositions as he crouches and grovels before his respectable
colleague Lanyon’s judgemental gaze. It takes place rapidly without signs of
struggle or regret, leaving Hyde hideous, with severely drooping eyelids like
an ageing debauchee. Despite this apparent debility, he leaps up the book-
shelves with a simian agility, lent by whip pans, to elude his pursuers.
Having paid the penalty of death for his crimes, he regenerates into a pris-
tine Jekyll as the illusion of subjective wholeness returns. The camera
slowly tracks back from the terrified group to behind the fire’s flames. The
lidless pot boils over, breaking up the molar, solid world of the laboratory by
its violent, rolling motion. Bubbling under the neat structure of narrative
closure, the molecular flow of liquid perception asserts its differential force.
One striking stylistic motif is the high incidence of floor shots, which
break up the distanced perspective of classical compositions. Legs and
feet in medium close-up disorientate head-based spectatorship by
expressing the basal urges of the body. This haptic force, reinforced by
camera, body movements and textural surfaces, forms into ‘leg assem-
blages’. Muriel’s ethereal frills swirl round her carefully concealed ankles,
engaged in a dialectic of rivalry with the film’s most potent leg shot. The
gartered, and insistently fleshy presence of Ivy’s leg swings languorously,
like a pendulum propelled by its own sensual force. It invites Jekyll even
more potently than her teasing verbal request that he should ‘come back
soon’. On leaving her unsatisfied, this same shot is lengthily superimposed
over Jekyll to indicate his mental and physical preoccupation during an
36    

earnest discussion with Lanyon. It also appears in the second transforma-

tion scene mentioned before.
Kneeling or lying expresses sensuality. An intimate, floor-level shot of
Ivy as she raises her skirts seated on the bed is taken from Jekyll’s position.
When she disrobes and flings her garter at him, only his feet and calves are
visible; a phallic everyman below the belt, he penetrates the garter’s circle
with the tip of his cane. When Ivy visits Jekyll, legs and lower trunk are
again prominent. In a two-shot, she flings herself at his feet, grabs his
knees and kisses his hand in supplication, her face on a level with his (care-
fully concealed) genitals. As she leaves, the camera lingers on her retreat-
ing rear, emphasised by the labial frills of her gown. Ivy’s submissive
sexuality is underlined by her frequent lying down. She lies on, then in,
her bed when Jekyll attends to her. In her boudoir, aesthetic images of
sexual pleasure continue these supine motifs. The legs and lower trunk of
a nude painting in the background and a statue of Psyche beneath Eros are
emphatically framed along with Ivy herself. This statue is cruelly parodied
by Ivy’s final sinking out of frame beneath the murderous hands of Hyde,
as Thanatos replaces Eros.
Abasement can also express degradation. Jekyll repentantly lowers
himself at Muriel’s feet in a variation of Ivy and himself. Muriel’s forgive-
ness equalises eye-line match again as she drops onto her knees to share his
level. Refusing this gesture, he sinks even lower in abject despair and a
floor-level composition develops. Jekyll then raises his face up to Muriel
and attempts to pray. On one level, this sequence supports the moral
schema of melodrama on one level; at the same time, however, it under-
mines myths of masculine dignity and disorientates conventional compo-
sition. The point of view of the spectator is, itself, debased from elevated
idealism and fetishised. Yet the film’s energy lies in this very baseness.
We are encouraged to perceive bodies as part-objects rather than whole
personages. This operates when the ‘higher powers’ of sublimated
romance are invoked. Extreme close-ups of eyes look out of the frame and
into us as we participate in lovers’ intimacy. When Jekyll tells Muriel ‘the
unknown wears your face’, the extreme close-up of Muriel’s eyes looks
directly into the spectator’s own and undermines the averted eyes of self-
enclosed Hollywood fictions and spectatorial distance. The matching
close-up of Jekyll’s eyes disconcertingly emphasises dissipation in pro-
nounced bags and dark shadows. In a later parody of this romance, Ivy’s
point-of-view of Hyde is an extreme close up of his bestial face leering over
her. Blurred and out of focus though it is, we can distinguish the coarse
pores of his nose and his glinting eyes, in the insistent textural intimacy of
extreme close-up.
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High/low duality is extended by Mamoulian’s duplicitous use of the

split screen. Diptychs include sick pauper woman/Muriel, and Ivy/
Muriel. As well as displaying binary moral choices of pleasure/duty and
lust/love, the shots form multiplicities in their interweaving of contradic-
tory urges. The spectator’s eyes move across the diagonal dividing line at
the same time as registering it. Our right and left glances are hailed separ-
ately, or both eyes swivel in unison between the images, alternating with
and complicating the usual monocular point of view.
Costume, on one level a signifier of character and plot, offers expressive
potential. It is a significant component in the film’s affective figural force-
field, along with body language, facial expression and voice. Limited to
monochrome, Mamoulian uses costume to induce and reinforce shifts in
mood and atmosphere. True to melodrama type, Muriel is delicate, cerebral
and ascetic, whereas Ivy is a blowsy and voluptuous ‘fallen angel’. Clothing
colour and style serves to reinforce these qualities as does habitat. Muriel’s
brightly lit ballroom is undermined by Ivy’s murky underworld, with its
shadows and flickering gas lamps, a soft-focus haze of sensual texture.
Becoming-woman also mobilises woman’s becoming-other. Rather than
being a psychologically rounded character, Muriel becomes the white
luminescence of her ballgown. Her dress in turn becomes light, floating
dance movements, lending her an ethereal, fairylike quality, enhanced by
the halo of light that surrounds her hair and illuminates Jekyll’s face. When
disappointed in love, she changes her nuptial white for mourning black and
her jaunty twirls on the dance floor become broken, downward drops as she
hunches low over the piano.
As well as the visual stimuli of movement via camera, framing, and the
light palette, tactility is powerfully conveyed. A haptic quality of sensual-
ity dominates the décor of Ivy’s apartment, with its fluffy feather boas and
erotic art objects. This ambience emanates from Ivy’s voluptuous flesh.
She places Jekyll’s hand between her thighs and clasps it below her garter
in a close-up, which invites viewerly tactile collusion. Like Muriel, Ivy is
luminous, an effect reinforced by the cherubic innocence of her blonde
curls. Tactile intimacy extends through Ivy’s removal of her shoes and
lowering of her garters, to the fluffy texture of white lacy bed covers that
emphasise the allure of white flesh glowing with light. Textures in close-
up form part of the film’s rich sensuous address. The fleshiness of Ivy’s
naked back, displayed in close up with Jekyll’s hand on her skin, engages
the viewer’s own sense of touch. Her availability contrasts to his stiff
posture and formal evening attire.
The film’s diagrammatic component is doubling. A schizoid split has
been imposed on natural man and woman by social repression, then this
38    

supposedly ‘higher’ being has been passed off as the natural version. The
dynamic struggle of two singularities unnaturally yoked together, yet part
of the same assemblage, is energetically expressed. This split works against
the Deleuzian machinic conglomerate at first, as the singularities pull apart
to seek distinction. It then reinforces it with horrific consequences as they
become increasingly inseparable in the anomalous composite Jekyll/Hyde.
This externalises processes already operant in the psyche. The viewer is
part of this assemblage as our own singularities engage in a series of further
schizoid doublings in tandem with Jekyll/Hyde via the schizoid cinema-
tography and mise-en-scène.
My next example, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, also uses black and white
film stock to invoke schizoid inner states. Unlike Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,
Repulsion’s pace is characterised by slowness, not speed; stasis, not ener-
getic movement. Polanski’s film lacks the former’s social extension and
character interactions. Implosion, not explosion, of repressed energy is the
psychic topography traversed by the viewer. The neo-Gothic dynamic
of good versus evil develops into a generalised existential malaise that
exceeds its ostensibly psycho-sexual cause. A more fully Modernist work,
Repulsion is a ciné-poem that traces the gradual shading of compulsive/
obsessional neuroses into full-blown psychosis via the stages of a young
woman’s breakdown.

‘Schizoid Misery and Glory’: Feeling Repulsion

For much of Repulsion, the viewer shares the mental and physical claustro-
phobia of Carol Ledoux, a young Belgian beautician living with her sister,
Hélène, in Kensington, London. Their flat is her mental prison and
torture chamber. The spectator is imbricated in her angst via cinematog-
raphy, framing and sensory hallucinations. We struggle to retain distance
as we are invaded by her sensory and cognitive anomalies. Carol’s schizo-
phrenic brain and body becomes the increasingly horrifying screen that is
also our embodied mind. Other characters function solely to illustrate or
exacerbate aspects of her illness. She is unable to connect with others, so
we are forced into intensive focus on her isolation. Inner events are the
film’s ‘plot’ and the structural consolations of a linear cause-and-effect
narrative are denied.
The credits open with a static eye sliced across by titles, invoking the
antecedents of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou, a
Surrealist paean to disturbed, hallucinatory sexuality. Sexual repulsion is
located as Carol’s malaise. She is primarily repelled by her own sexuality,
then that of others, especially men. Her repulsion is triggered by narrative
     39

situations that act as secondary displacements of the primal cause.

Although sexual malaise is a chief thematic motif, I will not be subjecting
the text to a Freudian analysis. My prime focus is the escalating implosion
of Polanski’s intensive cinematography.
The opening shots in a beauty salon elide beauty and death: a corpse-
like client in mud pack/death mask, and the beautiful but frozen face of
Carol. Like Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, her schizophrenia alter-
nates between catatonia and hallucinatory violence. Her fragility is
stressed by the brittleness of her blonde hair, her frail body, and her pref-
erence for high-necked, childish frocks. Her downcast gaze undermines
and denies her loveliness by its shame-ridden modesty. By refusing eye-
contact, she erects a barrier between herself and others and maintains a
private, mental world, preferring intensity to extensity. As well as this
visual barrier, Carol’s oral denial and disgust are stimulated when a lech-
erous navvy puts her off her lunch. In a regressive gesture, she chews her
own nails instead. The fumbling of Colin, her inept boyfriend, and harass-
ment by Michael, Hélène’s lover, intensify her disgust.
Extensive, spatial distortions concretise intensive, mental shifts of gear.
Film is uniquely placed to express intensiveness via the affective vibrations
of its outer and inner motion. In the flat, a floor-level shot induces an initial
disorientation in space, which will recur with increasing frequency. One
effect of this distorted space is an uncanny sense of places having a con-
sciousness of their own, as we saw in the skewed scenery and painted back-
drops of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Polanski’s use of camera angles and
lenses conveys a comparable effect more subtly by distorting actual loca-
tions. The flat’s convex keyhole/peephole, which Carol looks through in a
point-of-view shot, is a distorting lens on the world outside and extends
her own eye.
Schizoid subjectivity is cued by threatening shadows. It develops in
Carol’s distorted doubles reflected in polished surfaces: a chrome kettle, a
mirror and the glossy surface of the salon’s marble walls. Carol constructs
a dichotomy between the forces of gross sensuality and the purity of the
ethereal nuns she watches from her window with calm pleasure. This
sharp division of the flesh and the spirit reveals the schizoid split in her
world-view.
Despite Carol’s paranoia, the chink she leaves in the curtains overnight,
and the camera-eye’s insistent return to it, hint at a perverse welcoming of
external threat. It also offers her a token escape route to the pure force of
the nuns from the intrusive sounds of the copulating couple through her
bedroom wall. Outraged/aroused at Hélène’s orgasmic moans in this
version of the primal scene, second-hand sex is experienced as violence.
40    

Carol watches the shadows moving across her own room and toys with her
hair, her consciousness dissociated by the invasive force of sex.
The mundane world of the flat and its inert contents as revealed by the
harsh light of day makes Carol wince. Their very ordinariness is a source
of her psychic pain manifest in an obsessive dwelling on meaningless
details. Close-ups of the working of her mouth and hands physically
express her nervous response. Her fingers pluck at her arm, she scratches
herself and her hands brush off invisible dirt. She evinces oral disgust at
Colin’s kiss, feeling soiled by his presence. To the sound of manic drum
rolls, she rubs at her mouth to erase the trace of his lips.
Hélène, in contrast, awakes in happy sensuality. The rumpled texture of
sheets on her bed is extended by Carol’s rumpled overall, as she feels
dirtied by her sister’s sex. She brushes at a chair seat left empty by
Michael, seeking to be rid of invasive masculinity. Carol’s responses to
revulsion recall infantile regression. She loads her coffee with lumps of
sugar and the soundtrack plays a child’s piano practice. She plays with
Hélène’s ‘sophisticated’ black dress as though she plans to dress up in it
when home alone.
Carol’s desolation is experienced internally and externally. Her face and
body language are the corporeal expression of mental turbulence, whilst
the domestic space is its more extended correlative. Outside, desolate
images of the London locale culminate in the chaos of a building site.
Discordant rapid-paced bebop jazz offers aural accompaniment to her
angst-ridden journey. Her random motion is arrested by a crack in the
road, which she stares at in obsessive fixation. A Freudian might well read
this as an arrested vaginal symbol. It also works as an external manifesta-
tion of her malaise, as a crack in her consciousness, or in the fabric of reality
itself. Polanski’s tongue-in-cheek play with the road sign’s ‘one way street’
reinforces the inevitability of her decline.
Hélène’s brief sisterly attention fails to offset Carol’s mounting terror.
An anonymous phone call increases her sense of ubiquitous male harass-
ment. There are many shots of Carol in bed, which she occupies more
often as her world closes in. Her close-up profile has a dark double in the
shadow of her head on the wall behind. Her absent expression and blank
eyes show a catatonic detachment from reality. They signal her increasing
location in an alternative inner world only partially penetrable by enig-
matic outer signs. Long, slow takes build up tension as the soundtrack pro-
longs the unreadable silence. Her facial expression suggests inner torture
and fear as darkness brings the threat of ravishment. The static camera
intensifies the viewer’s imaginative sharing in her frozen panic.
As the historical Surrealists made the mundane yield up its magical
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potential, so Polanski renders everyday objects uncanny until nothing

remains inert. Bathroom items become imbued with fearful force, like the
razor blade fingered by Carol as a possible weapon of defence, attack, or
self-harm. In the laundry bin, she finds a man’s dirty vest, along with an
invisible item that may be a discarded condom. At this unspecified horror,
she turns nauseous and notices a crack in the wall, an experiential contin-
uation of the crack in the pavement. Whether the crack in the wall is actual
or virtual, it is the first of an escalating series that become increasingly
anomalous. Extra-diegetic sound intensifies the spectator’s neurological
irritation. Insistent drum beats and a close-up of Carol’s eye suggest
growing psychic fragmentation. A clash of cymbals startles us as she traces
the crack with her fingers.
Carol’s perspiring face manifests her panic-stricken experience of the
ordinary. Her dissociated consciousness fails to structure and locate stimuli
in familiar cognitive patterns, adding its own imaginary details to develop
or replace them. Lights flicker on and off without cause, and strange noises
intrude that are both projected by, and project, unspeakable terror.
Discordant saxophone notes extend the sounds of harsh drumming and
cymbals as Carol walks around the flat obsessively brushing at herself, again
trying, without success, to cleanse her inner defilement by outer means.
A skinned rabbit Hélène left in the fridge is a correlative of Carol’s
hypersensitivity and total vulnerability. It also functions as a potent horror
film prop. The rabbit’s repulsive sensory impact increases over time and it
rots as her disturbance intensifies. A second crack, huge and clearly hallu-
cinatory this time, opens up by the light switch as psychic fragmentation
takes over. The same night, Carol dreams, or hallucinates, the first of a
series of anal rapes by the suggestive navvy. Her fantasy of sex is violent
and dirty. An intrusive phone call from Colin the following day elides the
two men in their violation of her space.
In a burst of manic energy, Carol stabs a salon client with nail clippers.
Her potential for vengeful violence is also revealed by her decapitation of
the dead rabbit, whose trophy head she carries round in her handbag. In a
visual rhyme, she wipes off Colin’s kiss as she did Michael’s, repudiating
her own sexual arousal with disgust. Her inner-directed obsessions make
her oblivious to violence and suffering when located in a social context and
she walks past a car accident without any overt signs of response.
In the flat, hallucinations escalate, but retain some link with diegetic
reality, which signals their unreal status to us. Our direct ‘identification’
with Carol’s state fluctuates as the film progresses. Whether the spectator
is able to refuse imbrication in her disturbance or not, the cinemato-
graphic affects remain intensely distressing. The transformative power of
42    

Deleuzian becomings is completely opposed to these terrifying and repel-

lent animations of the thing-world. The distorted TV screen bucks with a
sexualised motion and discarded potatoes take on a monstrous life as they
sprout grotesquely. More cracks appear, like razor slashes in the wall. To a
jarring electronic note, Carol sinks her hands into a wall now become
viscous and permeable.
At this juncture, Colin bursts in and she experiences this as a violent
assault. In a rush of sadistic force turned away from herself and onto an
object, Carol beats him to death with the heavy candlestick. In a distress-
ingly misplaced application of domestic skills, she attempts to restore
order after the intrusion. She patches up the broken door and, more con-
cerned with cleanliness than concealment, puts Colin’s corpse in the bath.
Released into a kind of joy by her violent action, she sings and goes through
the motions of sewing a shirt. These acts may be a prophylactic against fear
of future attacks. After killing her actual would-be lover, she experiences a
further anal rape/hallucination. The navvy is now a familiar inhabitant of
her mind and her bed. Afterwards, she lies on the floor in agony as though
his violation was physical. Her obvious corporeal suffering undermines
viewerly objectivity and detachment, virtually reverberating in us too.
An ironically phallic postcard of the Leaning Tower of Pisa arrives from
her sister. This, and the rotting rabbit whose maggots have hatched into
flies, signals the passage of time and, by implication, the further decay of
the body in the bath. The temporal scheme of the film is confusing as time
elongates for the spectator trapped in Carol’s intensive time of stasis.
Repetition and hallucination further distort our sense of linear progress.
Carol’s distorted consciousness is performed by an anamorphic lens that
elongates and expands the room’s actual dimensions. Jarring electronic
notes intensify the sensory affect of inner dislocation. The bathroom, a
chief locus of horror, has grown enormous. Even the walls are alive, and
sprout grabbing and mauling male hands. Although we can account for
Carol’s hallucinations psychoanalytically, my interest here is in their ‘haec-
ceity’ or this-ness. Haecceity is found in affective immanence; in process,
not outcome. Rather than reading the living wall as a phobic projection of
male sexuality, I am responding to it as a movement-image of an intensive
mental process as her schizophrenia finally engulfs her. Thus, I virtually
share the fluctuating auto-erotics of schizoid affect.
Having made this Deleuzian move, I am returned to the representa-
tional, not delusory, horror of Carol’s rape by her landlord. Her manic
bursts of strength in self-defence belie her apparent fragility. In a phallic
counter-attack, she slashes at him with a razor whilst a three-beat drum
rhythm stretches out his death throes. This joyful release is followed by
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terror as her close-up face in bed watches the swinging lamp associated
with male violence. Despite this relapse into disempowerment, the energic
force of her act remains. Her subsequent ironing of Michael’s dirty vest
may be a gesture of reparation for her repulsion, as well as an attempt to
put herself in order and re-impose a structure on life.
As in the aftermath to Colin’s death, she anticipates her demon-lover.
This time, she daubs on lipstick in erotic welcome as his embrace becomes
less traumatic through custom. In a fearful hallucinatory sequence, the
room elongates unnaturally and dead, or dying, hands in the walls feebly
move to touch her, as the lamp swings back and forth from the impossible
distance of distorted perspective. Some semblance of normal vision
returns with the close-up of patterns made by the rain, itself a cleansing
agent that promises an end to our spectatorial suffering as Hélène and
Michael return.
Carol is discovered in complete catatonia. A camera pans along the man-
telpiece as Carol’s ‘tune’ is played by a flute, to stop at a photograph of a
blonde child staring at some unseen horror off-frame. An adult man is
highlighted in the picture, returning us to Polanski’s Freudian frame with
the suggestion that child abuse is responsible for Carol’s illness.
As with both Jekyll and Hyde and Repulsion, psycho-sexual pathology is
a trigger theme in the next film, The Shining. The experience of the film,
though, exceeds any charting of the family romance gone sour. Super-
ficially, its wide-open spaces and palatial hotel move in the opposite direc-
tion to Repulsion’s urban prison. However, the traps and mazes of the film
still create a comparable sense of cerebral and physical claustrophobia.

The Brain as Mise-en-scène: The Shining

It is the brain which is mise-en-scène.62 (Deleuze)

Inflation and detachment shape the cerebral aesthetic of The Shining and
its virtual experience by the viewer. The wide-angle lens and overblown
strains of Berlioz plunge us sensorially into a world of inflated grandeur.
Extremely wide vistas of the mountainous landscape induce a cold,
detached and depersonalised perspective. Humans are unimportant in this
vast physical, and metaphysical, terrain. The machinic motion of an
uncannily independent camera surveys the landscape in an omniscient
gliding motion. We experience the perspective of an eagle’s eye, or a divine
power, as we become-god. Mental detachment and ego-inflation key in the
delusions of Jack Torrance. The disturbed writer’s deranged conscious-
ness forms and is formed by the film’s mise-en-scène and cinematography.
44    

The landscape, like the music, has a sublime grandeur yet the ominous
chords and the dizzying, extra-human perspective render it sinister. It
threatens to engulf the small, insect-like car, leading it ever upwards into a
land of eternal snow. As the narrative moves inexorably onwards, it mob-
ilises a process of becoming-frozen. Jack undergoes a freezing of emotional
warmth and empathy. His blood runs cold, both figuratively and literally,
as he becomes one with the forces of winter and death.
The ‘acts’ of the plot are likewise presented with cold objectivity. They
are intertitled like a ritual drama or opera, which undermines both fictional
verisimilitude and the causal chain of events. The family’s arrival is fol-
lowed by the mockingly simple title ‘A Month Later’, which, by its extreme
ellipsis at a crucial point in the narrative, compresses time and excludes
plot developments that may have helped our orientation.
For Deleuze, the human body and brain are a mutually engaged assem-
blage artificially regarded as separate. He uses the common operations of
the ‘cinema of the body’ and the ‘cinema of the brain’ in Kubrick’s work to
elucidate this connection. 63 Thought is in the body, and shock and violence
in the brain, with ‘an equal amount of feeling in both of them’.64 The iden-
tity of world and brain in an ‘automaton’ is not, however, completely amor-
phous. Both distinct parts form a multiplicity via the fluctuations of their
interface, ‘a membrane which puts an outside and an inside in contact,
makes them present to each other, confronts them, or makes them clash’.65
Deleuze suggests the survival of psychic interiority as well as supernat-
ural exteriority in Kubrick’s diegesis. They are locked in a dynamic of
inner and outer forces that moves towards fatal interchange.

the inside is psychology, the past, involution, a whole psychology of depths which
excavate the brain. The outside is the cosmology of galaxies, the future, evolution, a
whole supernatural which makes the world explode. The two forces are forces of death
which embrace, are ultimately exchanged and become ultimately indiscernible.66

In Kubrick’s cerebral aesthetic, ‘it is the brain which is mise-en-scène.

Attitudes of the body achieve a maximum level of violence, but they are
dependent on the brain’.67 The cinema of the brain ‘reveals the creativity
of the world, its colours aroused by a new space-time, its powers multi-
plied by artificial brains’, as in 2001: A Space Odyssey.68 The Shining man-
ifests emphatically that ‘the world itself is a brain. There is a unity of brain
and world’.69
As with other films in this chapter, our engagement imbricates us in the
madness of the text. The apparent distinction between internal psychic
and external material forces is terrifyingly undermined. When extra-
sensory perception operates, the brain/world membrane becomes com-
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pletely permeable. It is difficult to decide whether the extra-sensory per-

ceptions, or the hallucinatory projections, come from inside or outside. In
any case, ‘the inflated world-brain is strictly inseparable from the forces of
death that pierce the membrane in both directions’.70 Working with this
material brain, I will be reading the film’s style as an outer expression of
psychological states. When I identify properties of décor or light, I am
simultaneously commenting on the operations of a schizophrenic psyche
and our own schizophrenisation.

Place, Time and Motion

Light is central to our perception of the world. It reflects and refracts off
objects that stop the flow of its waves and enable us to see them. It accesses
our brain cells by the transmutation of light waves into electrical changes
by the optic nerves. In a sense, then, we see nothing else but light. We think
in light as we perceive the outer world. We are physically permeated by light
as it passes through our semi-transparent bodies as well as our eyes. Other
diagrammatic components, such as the maze, depend on light for their own
impact. Kubrick uses coloured light that could operate on our perception
even without the objects that reflect it, but they magnify its effects and
create extra layers of meaning by adding properties of their own.
Shining as affective force dominates the mise-en-scène. The interior of
the Overlook Hotel is lit and coloured preternaturally. No daylight can
penetrate, and fire, candles and electricity replace natural light. Polished
surfaces like metal, glossy paint and marble magnify their impact by
varying degrees of reflection and refraction. These artificial light qualities
objectify Jack’s derangement. They highlight the colours and tones of gold
that express and modify the power of light itself. The hotel’s gold function
room is the locus of vampiric energy. Its tonal quality spreads through the
building to drain the human life force. Light grows brighter and colours
grow richer enhanced by the psychic horror it generates.
A distinctive light quality reinforces the cold white of the larder/cold
storage room, lit by a fluorescent tube that drains all other colours. This
space is the cold heart of the building, where Jack is trapped until his final
murderous apotheosis. Jack’s son, Danny, and the hotel’s cook, Halloran,
talk in the nearby kitchen, where the cook’s benevolent psychic presence
has staved off the hotel’s malevolent forces until he leaves on vacation.
Here, their minds meld into an assemblage of wordless communication as
they share the rapport of ‘shining’ : a powerful extra-sensory perception
and psychic bonding. As well as the qualities and tones of colour, light
evokes tactility, we virtually feel the snow’s bitter coldness. This is effected
46    

by Kubrick’s use of cold blue light and a back-lit mist that rises as the
snow’s surface evaporates. In his dying, Jack becomes completely over-
whelmed by blueness and light in a becoming-ice.
Spatial inflation and compression distorts locations, making us experi-
ence them as over narrow or over-wide. In contrast to the widescreen vista
of the opening, the composition and framing inside Jack’s car is claustro-
phobic in its cramped intimacy as the nuclear family dynamic is under-
mined by a profound sense of unease and threat. The compressed space of
the car is a moving fragment of the family’s Le Corbusier-type apartment.
Its cramped but human-size quality is emphasised by intimate close-in
shots around the kitchen’s round table.
The ‘present’ space and time of the apartment is intercut with a precog-
nitive warning of the Overlook and its denizens, as Danny sees a flash of a
fuller vision he later experiences: a blood-filled lift and the ghosts of twin
girls murdered by their father in the hotel . The psychic force of this past
murder is imprinted on, and will be reflected off, the fabric of the hotel in
the shining mirror of Danny’s mind. Each time such psychic overlay
occurs, it blurs inside and out, past, present and future. The viewer, by
sharing Danny’s present experience of his own horrified reaction to come,
is also able to ‘shine’ future events, which cements our sympathy with him.
The apartment’s apparent safety is undermined by the boy’s psychic
attunement to the spirit of his future home.
Rather than providing a safe domestic space, the film’s buildings, in their
objective correlative with the human, are a too-thin membrane between
world and brain. Architecture, in this case the Overlook’s deranged pastiche
of neo-Gothic/chalet/deco, sits uneasily between interior and exterior
forces. The hotel is both a product of human artifice and a natural part of
the landscape. A harshly lit shot, composed with a mountain as background,
harmonises the building with the surrounding snow. The triangular roof
echoes the triangular pines pointing upwards. The cold exterior shot melts,
by a slow, floating motion, into the gloomy splendour of the great hall, its
gold/bronze tones enhanced by polished surfaces. Jack revels in his dicta-
torial isolation in this cavernous space, its overblown ambiance designed to
induce a sense of grandeur he uses to offset his increasing paranoia.
The maze is a motif of mental confusion. Kubrick may have intended it
as a Jungian symbol, but my interest here lies in its potency as a Deleuzian
processual machine. The actual, horticultural maze in the grounds has
spawned a cluster of maze-images. Jack’s inflated sense of omniscience is
manifest when, possessed by the evil power of the place, he leans over a
scaled-down model of the maze. By a bold cut, he overlooks a tiny, insect-
like Wendy and Danny from a position of god-like power.
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The hotel itself has a maze-like layout, inducing entrapment, mystery

and foreboding. The camera leads us along a complex of corridors and
pillars, and glides across the geometrical intertwining patterns of carpets
and tiles. Native American textiles continue these lines. The hotel has been
built on the site of an ancient burial ground, which reinforces the sense of
the unquiet and vengeful dead. Danny plays with his toy cars in the centre
of the carpet pattern that acts as a supernatural magnet to the ghost twins
who throw a ball to him there and invite him to play.
A psychic labyrinth accompanies the actual maze of hedges. Jack
becomes-minotaur as he lies in wait for his victims, but he is also trapped
inside his own head even though it has expanded to become-world. His
novel is stymied in an endless loop of repetition. He is unable to progress,
his creative energy as deadlocked as his written phrase. ‘All work and no
play makes Jack a dull boy’ is both childish threat and cry for help, end-
lessly looping back on itself in entropy. Horror film’s version of duration
is likewise stuck in repetition–compulsion.
One layer of the past endlessly repeats itself and is superimposed over the
present. This layered, durational time loops forward and back according to
its own agenda. Time dominates space. Jack enters the gold room’s golden
haze to find a long-past 1920s party in full swing, replaying itself in a time-
loop that will draw him deeper into its terrifying duration. In the Overlook,
space-time’s forward progression is meaningless. The viewer’s own sense of
time is likewise caught in the confusing knot of a temporal maze.
In the interview sequence, the detached, yet purposefully watchful eye
of the locale itself continues the camera’s initial mode of seeing on a
smaller scale. Jack is introduced from behind as an unseen presence is fol-
lowing him. Whatever else it might be, this presence is the superior, tech-
nological eye of the camera, which we uneasily share. Deleuze notes that
the camera itself can act ‘like a consciousness’ that may not be human but
is sometimes ‘inhuman or superhuman’.71 Vast, anti-human forces will
trap and use Jack for their own ends, manipulating him via the illusion of
supreme importance and agency otherwise lacking in his life. The
Overlook Hotel is, as its name suggests, a major source of the film’s over-
looking. It focuses and intensifies the swooping surveys of the wide-angled
lens. It is an anomalous space, a strange attractor or soul trap that refutes
spatial and temporal laws, replacing them with its own sinister forms of
space, time and motion.
Tracking shots are the dominant movement indoors. These do not rep-
licate the human eye but remain machinic. As an animation of the forces of
the place, their controlled smoothness leads characters further on, and in.
Of particular power to unnerve and threaten are the floor-level steadicam
48    

tracking shots of Danny on his tricycle, taken from behind and accompa-
nied by an unnaturally loud rumbling echo made by the wheels. As the vul-
nerable Danny moves inexorably towards the haunted Room 237, the
camera watches and waits behind him, finally letting him go forward alone.
This recalls the anticipatory presence above the mountain road. Repeated
movements and journeys, such as Danny’s exploratory rides, exacerbate
our sense of looping and entrapment. The quality of the steadicam work
alternates between the smooth glide of a preternatural pursuer and the
human, fearful tremble of the boy.
Jack’s pursuit of Danny culminates in the maze, which hazy, soft-focus
light bathes in unreality. As demon daddy/minotaur he lopes after his son
like a wounded beast, but remains the hunter with his axe at the ready.
Danny’s run is followed by a swooping camera, unlike Jack’s shaky point-
of-view earlier. It is more like the usual smooth tracking of the camera-as-
watcher. The change suggests either the participation of a preternatural
force in the murder attempt, or Jack’s delusions of omnipotence, or both
factors in tandem.
Jack’s bodily exclusion from his spiritual home, the hotel, is undermined
by the final scene. This returns us to the opulent glow of the gold room,
where the strains of festive music suggest that the undead guests have the
place to themselves. The veracity of the Jack lookalike in the Fourth of July
party of 1921 picture on the wall of the ‘empty’ hotel is entirely dependent
on the authenticity of the two cameras that alone have captured it. Here,
the camera knows and keep its secret hidden from the human characters,
and is the final on-screen presence of a superior mentality.

The Schizoid Machine: Imaginary Friends

The film operates a schizoid machine on several levels. Mental disturbance
is clearly a plot device and a thematic motif as well as an aesthetic strategy.
The cinematography encourages ego-inflation by flattering our limited
human perspective via technologically enhanced prosthesis. We have our
sense of omniscience intensified beyond Jack’s own because we see more
than he does, we see what he sees and we also see him seeing. We see and
hear Jack’s imaginary friends in the concrete forms emanated by the hotel.
The politely insinuating waiter, Grady, is Jack’s demonic double. He is
a mental voice inside Jack’s head, made physically audible outside the cold
store, taunting him with a failure to act. In the red and white (blood and
bone) colour scheme of the men’s room, Grady hints that Jack murders his
wife and child. Kubrick maintains ambivalence as to whether Grady is a
demonic presence possessing Jack, the ghost of a former murderer or a
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projection of his inner voices. Because we physically hear Grady, we tem-

porarily share Jack’s derangement. Grady, and Danny’s imaginary friend,
Tony, are schizoid mechanisms. Whether they are supernaturally invoked
or psychologically projected, the two are locked in a death struggle.
Jack’s everyday persona lacks authenticity from the outset. Jack
Nicholson plays the role as a comic melodrama villain, with manic grins and
diabolical scowls. He appears to be the only interviewee, perhaps due to the
evil repute of the hotel. Jack’s glib, ready-made answers, pleasantries and
fixed smile, convey his absolute determination to sell himself to his future
boss and get the job, although his overweening self-confidence suggests an
already domineering ego that demands further space to expand.
Ensconced in solitary splendour in his ‘office’ of the great hall, Jack’s
schizoid tendencies are given full reign. A jarring electronic chord accom-
panies a startling close-up of Jack clad (like Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr
Caligari) in a black, high-neck sweater that emphasises his face. With its
diabolically pointed eyebrows, and eyes that stare directly out at us, under-
mining fictional distance, it is frozen in a fearsome rictus. Completely
immobile, he seems to have abandoned human life and become a catatonic
schizophrenic, or an automaton.
In the ghost-infested gold room, Jack’s manic, destructive energy
explodes. Either the haunted hotel, or his mental anomalies, have reani-
mated dead guests as schizoid personae, as brain melts into world. The bar
lights are switched on invitingly, and the living-dead barman, Lloyd, acts
as an ambiguous confessor. In a state of maudlin intoxication, Jack
recounts his resentment of his wife and son, and his violence towards the
boy. Whether talking to spirits or to mental projections, he relishes the
opportunity to complain. Lloyd’s attentiveness to Jack parallels the twins’
friendly interest in Danny. The ghostly girls are a further visual rhyme of
schizoid doubling. Tony, as a warning precognition of Jack’s murderous
intent, reveals their dead bodies to Danny. If Jack kills Danny, he would
also be killing a set of twins.
Danny’s schizoid set-up with Tony is conveyed as a natural and helpful
form of projected defence against his father. Danny’s alter-ego works as a
balancing force, a good father figure to offset the harm of his real, bad one.
Tony is Danny’s coping mechanism and extends familiar childhood
behaviour as well as imitating his father’s schizophrenia. In the family suite,
the camera glides towards Danny, who talks to himself/Tony in the mirror.
Unlike Jack, who externalises his own inner personae so that we see and
hear them, Tony remains an imaginary adjunct to Danny. He inhabits only
his ‘stomach’ and communicates via the boy’s wiggled finger. Tony’s deep
voice is the result of Danny’s ventriloquism. His communication via the
50    

finger and his ‘home’ in the boy’s stomach appears a Freudian set up of
phallic rivalry with his father for his mother Wendy’s attention.
Jack’s schizoid mental state is an illness rather than a positive force. It
lacks Danny’s self-awareness, precognitive powers and rapport with
others. Danny’s extra-sensory gift also involves mind-reading. Tony acts
as Danny’s other within, a guardian angel who reveals the truth and acts in
the boy’s own interests. A figure of precocious maturity, Tony speaks in a
gruff deep voice, with an authoritative perspective. The voice of reason, he
explains to Danny that the ghosts are ‘just like pictures’ from the past
superimposed over the present. This Bergsonian view suggests time’s
intensive layering and looping as the cause of hauntings. A more compli-
cated set of temporal layers appears in The Others, in which 1940’s ghosts
are themselves haunted by the Edwardian denizens of their mansion.
Schizoid doubling continues when a dishevelled Jack regards himself in
the mirror, observed by Danny. Jack is unable to maintain distance between
his egoic self and his alter-egos, whereas Danny is able to reflect on his dis-
tinction from Tony. Jack duplicitously asserts that he loves his son ‘more
than anything in the whole world’, but Danny recognises that the hotel,
where his father wants to stay ‘for ever’, is his father’s true love object, as
his inflated, objectified self.
Amplified by the anomalous presences in the hotel, Danny’s ability to
shine increases. When his earlier vision of a blood-filled lift is repeated in
its actual location, he opens his mouth in a silent scream of horror. Like
Danny, the viewer sees the bloody lift twice. Even though both may be pro-
jections of Danny’s mind, we experience the second time as more ‘real’ by
its location in the hotel as part of a string of convincing virtual manifesta-
tions. Danny is able to hear his parents in conversation through the wall
and sense his father’s violence. Tony helps Danny to produce the mirror-
reversed message of ‘REDRUM’ to warn Wendy. The boy stands by
Wendy’s bedside acting out a miniature version of Jack as he imitates his
father’s deep voice and murderous wielding of a knife. In a sense, he
becomes his own father’s double.
As Jack’s pathological state worsens, the sensory anomalies, and the
spectator’s engagement, increase. A hollow, echoing boom is heard as Jack,
impelled by his violent desires, approaches the apartment wielding his axe.
The apparently diegetic sound, repeated by the hollow booming of the
gale, recalls his earlier pounding on the tin roof of his cold-storage prison.
Simultaneously, Wendy discovers his psychotic novel/poem patterns and
finally confronts his insanity. Danny’s vision of red-filtered luminosity is a
concrete correlative to Jack’s murderous ‘red mist’. A sequence of Jack
forcing Wendy to back up the stairs as she fends him off with a baseball bat
     51

reveals the enormous gulf of the hall as it looms below him, a manifesta-
tion of his psychic void.
As his derangement peaks, Jack undergoes a mockery of becoming-
beast. He regresses to the big bad wolf of fairytale as he hacks through the
door and attempts to kill the ‘little pigs’ Wendy and Danny.72 When Wendy
escapes, her trauma triggers her ability to ‘shine’ for the first time as she is
welcomed by the ghosts of debauched party guests. The final sequence in
the maze reveals Jack as deeply psychotic. As he runs after Danny, the
camera tracks after him, creating a sense that he is also being hunted.
Danny retraces his own steps with remarkable ingenuity, perhaps under
the tutelage of Tony.
Kubrick overtly, and self-consciously, charts the mechanics of schizo-
phrenic illness in its becoming pathological. The Oedipal triangle, as well
as Jungian archetypes, might be applied to plot events, narrative structu-
ration and character relationships. It is, however, the viewer’s experiential
engagement that is central in a schizoanalytical reading. Schizoid swings
between ego-inflation and paranoia are directly conveyed in the use of
space and motion. In this cinema of the brain, the membrane between
inner and outer thins and snaps. Our own spectatorial ‘membrane’ likewise
becomes permeable, pierced by the deathly movement-image.
As well as seeking to induce altered states of consciousness in the viewer,
the final film of this chapter, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, presents
events as fully schizoid from the outset.

‘Trapped in a World of Ghosts’: Intensive States in Natural

Born Killers
every intensity controls within its own life the experience of death, and envelops it.73
(Deleuze and Guattari)

Natural Born Killers, with its rapid-fire bombardment of the spectator’s

sensorium, is an experiential overload. It mixes the ‘naturalness’ of killing
with psychosis and social critique. The film is a confused and confusing
mix of extensive and intensive states of consciousness. The lengthy title
sequence is a collage sampler of key scenes and assaults the viewer’s viscera
from the start. Its rapid movements, saturated colours and the lugubrious
urgency of Leonard Cohen’s song casts a glamour on mass murderers
Mickey and Mallory Knox. The romanticisation perversely parallels the
media’s own love affair with serial killers, but this theme will not be our
focus here. The collage begins the undermining of our temporal sense as
it mixes material from different narrative times.
52    

The heterogeneous assemblage of images begins a process within the

spectator that lasts through to the end-titles. We are assaulted by images
and affects without time for our feelings and thoughts to cohere. As soon
as we try to clarify our responses, we are attacked by a fresh segment of
shots that might gravitate against the affects just experienced. Even in
more discrete sequences, visual effects or soundtrack music set up a con-
fusingly contrapuntal level. Viewers are forced to become schizo in watch-
ing. I would like to open up our discussion of this process by a brief
consideration of becoming-animal. I will be taking this concept deeper in
Chapter 2, but at this point I want to view it through the schizoanalytic
prism by which we open up to other forms of life rather than keeping them
sharply distinct.

Natural Born Predators

Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real.74
(Deleuze and Guattari)

In the title sequence, intercut snakes, birds of prey and a blood-red sunset
present the naturalness of killing. This is reinforced by brief shots of a
scorpion and a dead deer: predator and prey. Forces that inflict death are a
major affective strand throughout. For Deleuze, death and becoming exist
in a special relation for the body-without-organs. His concepts help to shed
light on the schizoid becomings of the films that enact them in a literal way.
Deleuze identifies the ‘experience’ of death as distinct from the ground-
ing model of death, by its conversion of ‘the death that rises from within
(in the body-without-organs) into the death that comes from without (on
the body-without-organs)’.75 By the experience of death here, he intends
the ‘death of the subject’ as it becomes-schizo in intensive states. In the
unconscious, the experience of death is common, and occurs ‘in life and
for life, in every passage or becoming’.76 Intensive emotions tap into and
control the unconscious experience of death. Death is enveloped by every
intense feeling and is ‘what never ceases and never finishes happening in every
becoming’.77 As every intensity is finite, and finally extinguished, so ‘every
becoming itself becomes a becoming-death!’.78 These little deaths have
been read by psychoanalysis as signs of the inherent workings of Thanatos,
the death-drive.
Instead of the pessimism of the ‘strange death-cult’ of psychoanalysis,
Deleuze and Guattari embrace the Nietszchean eternal return ‘as experi-
ence, and as the deterritorialised circuit of all the cycles of desire’.79 The
depiction of this process of ‘schizophrenizing death’ is the ‘secret’ work of
     53

the ‘terrifying’ authors of horror literature.80 Although no examples are

given here, they refer elsewhere to Lovecraft. I argue that this perspective
is also valid for the fantasies of cinema, which horrifies by extremes of
affect. Mickey and Mallory enact a skewed ‘conversion’ of death in the
psycho-killer mode by shifting it from themselves onto randomly selected
others. Mickey regards himself in the role of nemesis.
In the roadhouse bar, Mallory attracts the predatory gaze of hawkish
rednecks as she dances. Rather than being their prey, however, traditional
gender roles are reversed, as she is more like a cat playing with mice. These
early images animalise the protagonists and open up a thematic and aes-
thetic assemblage of becoming-animal. Deleuze and Guattari note ‘very
special becomings-animal traversing human beings and sweeping them
away’.81 As well as being the subject matter of myth and modern fiction,
becoming-animal has broader philosophical and political implications. It
has potential to extend human becomings, and can re-think human rela-
tions with the natural world. The experiential process of this becoming is
more important than its physical impossibilities. Deleuze and Guattari
assert that ‘the becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the
animal the human becomes is not’.82 Our fictional engagement in the
becomings-animal of fantasy potentialises new connections.
Mickey has the dangerous force of wild horses and the deadly poison of
reptiles. His body, tattooed with snakes and a scorpion, displays and inten-
sifies his own sense of becoming-animal. In the pre-titles sequence, head-
lines of murders lead into back-projection of a wild horse running with
untameable energy alongside the getaway car. In open prison, Mickey
breaks wild horses on a ranch. In the preternatural light of a blood-red
filter, he escapes by leaping onto a wild stallion maddened by a rattlesnake
bite. A twister approaches in a sinuous slow motion, echoing the graceful
strength of Mickey’s body movements. A destructive force of nature
himself, he rides into the eye of the hurricane, which remains still, like the
unblinking eye of a snake.
The rattlesnake develops the snake symbol as totemic force within the
assemblage Mickey–Mallory–snake. Two snakes entwine to form a heart
in the tattoo of commitment on Mickey’s chest. The couple’s self-ordained
marriage on a bridge over a chasm is clinched by the exchange of snake
rings. When Mallory’s white veil falls down the abyss, its slow-motion
twists are rendered snake-like, as the twister had been. The snake-chain of
signifiers will culminate in Mallory herself being bitten, which leads to the
couple’s capture. The Navajo shaman they meet transforms their protec-
tive totem into a vengeful force against them. The shaman, who refutes
white culture’s split of the human and animal kingdoms, recounts a tale of
54    

a personified snake who bites his human partner. He maintains a close

physical bond with snakes, keeping a rattler, his own totemic ancestor-
spirit, in his hut and putting it outdoors with the direction ‘old man, go out
and be a snake’. This one – from a preternatural ring of snakes that forms
after the old man’s murder – perhaps bites Mallory.
Wildlife images, such as the copulating lions Mickey watches on a tele-
vision documentary, are extended by the addition of artificial beasts. The
mix of nature and artifice parallels the dual concerns of killing as natural
predation and killing as cult media event. Flash-frame close-ups of a hydra
and a fire-breathing dragon from old movies are intercut with narrative
images, maintaining a subliminal blend of fearful monstrosity and black
humour. The polar bear of the TV Coke ad underpins the crude bestiality
of Mallory’s corpulent, shambling father.
Although the use of flash-frames and parallel montage is reduced in the
jail scenes, animal brutality is still operant. Mickey is chained up like a dog
in a large metal collar for his initial meeting with media host Wayne Gayle.
The guards are canine in appearance and manner, with their flat, brutish
snouts and vocal growls. A device like a pair of dog-tongs or snake’s fanged
jaws is used to control unruly prisoners. The prison governor is torn apart
by his prisoners like a pack of hounds on their prey. Their animal rage is
mobilised by the force released by Mickey as the pack’s leader.
Not all natural images are of raptors. Intercutting fluffy dandelion
clocks conveys the tactile delicacy of Mallory and Mickey’s kiss. Mickey’s
sentimentality is displayed by the confessional intimacy of his childhood
use of Mr Rabbit as prophylactic against the horror of his father’s death.
The fairytale happy ending of Mallory and Mickey’s new life in a camper
van appears to be reinforced by a shot of rabbits running in slow motion,
but is undercut because the beasts are fleeing for their lives. To accompany
the end-titles, we have footage of flowers opening and horses galloping. In
tandem with expressive emblems, flamboyant cinematography induces
gut-reactions in the viewer. At the same time as it retards narrative, it
melts our mental detachment and imbricates us in the protagonists’ schiz-
oid perspective.

Becoming-Schizo
Rapid-fire intercutting, cross-cutting and flash-frames work with pound-
ing music to induce a pulse-racing pace for the viewer as we become-schizo
by proxy. Within this manic trajectory, there are slower variants. The
couple’s own velocities vary unpredictably from sensual languor to explo-
sive speed. Another affective form of movement is located within the frame
     55

itself. Deleuze notes that ‘the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the

image’.83 It serves to isolate and throw into relief the movements bounded
by its edges. The intensive force of Mickey and Mallory is extensively
applied as they fight and kill. They begin the road-house massacre by using
their own bodies, kicking and punching with the discipline of martial arts
training. They extend their bodies’ capacity by technological progression
from knives to guns. Their physical grace develops naturally as an exten-
sion of Mallory’s dancing. The hyper energy released by their violence is
a machine suddenly switched on, so dynamic that the frame can hardly
contain it.
The killing-spree is both naturalised and mythologised by shots of fire-
works then a peaceful image of blue sky with small floating clouds. This
expresses the couple’s own transcendent state of calm through satiety, and
slows down their frenetic motion. The placidity is continued and at the
same time ironically undermined by the next shot in which the frame is
drenched in blood, which runs down and darkens out the screen just prior
to the film’s title.
Mickey and Mallory’s processual becoming of each other is under-
scored by their enforced separation in the prison. Without moving from
his seat, Mickey appears to stand, waving his arms like wings in a dance.
This cuts to Mallory’s slow-motion dance alone in her cell. They are
moving on the same psychic wavelength, in harmonious rhythm. As well
as such bonding, Mickey and Mallory can function as distinct entities. As
they drive though Navajo country, we share Mallory’s point-of-view when
she looks back at the road behind her. Her subjective vision, which we
sample via the fast-motion film speed, shows the manic pace of perception
particular to her.
Natural Born Killers is redolent with movements that work on us at
different levels. The motion might come from found film or TV footage.
Shots of galloping Indians underlines the couple’s own untamed savagery
as well as connecting them with the ‘Wild West’ heritage, and the gun-
centred culture, of the USA. Shifting focus from what images might
‘mean’, Deleuze stresses the centrality of movement to the spectator/
cinema assemblage. For him, types of cinematic motion have a profound
philosophical function. They give us, in the ‘false’ form of cinematic illu-
sion, a sense not of ‘an image to which movement is added’, but, rather,
the immediacy of the ‘movement-image’ itself.84 This movement both
expresses and opens onto the quality of ‘the whole’, or duration. The oper-
ations of movement in the horror film and their metaphysical qualities are
a key thread in my overall discussion.
56    

Back-Projections and Other Anomalies

Back-projection is a distinctive technique of schizophrenisation. It first
appears as the scenery through which Mickey and Mallory travel in their
car and the parallel flight of the wild horse. Back-projections are part of
their mental scenery and schizoid existential mode. For the viewer, their
function is twofold. As alienation devices, they alert us to the disparity
between the couple’s vision and what others see. They intensify the con-
tents of a frame by an overlay in which two planes of reality move in the
same space and intermesh. Along with superimposition, split screen and
other effects, overlay is a concrete form of the intensive ‘layering’ of planes
in the concepts of both Deleuze and Bergson. By this method, intercon-
nected but distinct realities exist at the same time, and we may travel
between them in the intensive movements of thought.
Back-projections render Mickey and Mallory’s deeds problematic in
terms of supposed ‘naturalness’. Flames and explosives background the
pair’s lovemaking. Despite the technique’s blatant artifice, it works us sen-
sorially and engages us in the expanding sensory palette of the filmic event.
Back-projections imbricate the viewer into schizoid perception, keying in
the mutual operations of often indistinguishable mental and physical
states. For Mickey and Mallory, killing people is like watching the movies
they frequently enjoy on broadcast television.
Mickey browses an endless stream of channel-zapped TV, mixing docu-
mentaries, nature programmes and horror films such as James Whale’s
Frankenstein. These instantaneous collages act intertextually as images of
fantastic monstrosity and transport the spectator elsewhere. The potency of
the TV images is attested to by their back-projection, seen through the
motel windows instead of landscape. The images, including footage of Nazi
concentration camps, form part of the wallpaper of Mickey’s mind. The dis-
placement effects of documentary footage render it fantastical whilst con-
veying the schizoid openness of Mickey’s wholesale consumption of media
stimuli and their further disturbance of his reality-testing mechanisms.
In this hallucinatory state, Mickey and Mallory attempt sex. In a
complex play with the mechanisms of spectatorship, the viewer is shocked
out of erotic engagement by an ‘actual’ image of enforced watching.
Physically present in the room is a female victim, bound and gagged in the
corner, forced to watch the couple to intensify their sexual frisson. When
Mallory takes off her snake ring, Mickey feels their totemic bond is weak-
ened and they quarrel bitterly. As Mallory drives into town, smoke and fire
are back-projected on the sky; objective correlative to her mental state as
she jealously seeks out a parallel victim/partner for sex as murder/murder
     57

as sex. The schizoid split of the back-projection becomes part of our expe-
rience of the film as a corporeal and mental event.
Anamorphosis conveys the alterity of Mickey’s consciousness. His face
expresses the hallucinatory affect of ecstasy whilst kissing Mallory’s breast
under the shower spray. Near the end of the film, after he has become a TV
personality in his own right, a demonic anamorphosis of his face is inter-
cut with footage of Waco, Texas. Other bloody events purveyed by the
media are invoked and his psychic connection with them is implied by jux-
taposition. In Monument Valley, narcotic hallucinations are conveyed by
freeze-frames of living and dead animals. Mickey’s face bends into distor-
tions and the drugs make him sick. Narcotics are inappropriate as they
introduce interference into an already schizoid state of consciousness. For
the viewer, however, the experience of the film is itself comparable to the
effects of drug-induced hallucination. The swirling colours of a vortex,
irised-in around the couple, which then bursts into flames, is a computer-
ised version of the psychedelic graphics of the 1960s.85
As well as LSD, MDMA (Ecstasy) is evoked in the second of Mallory’s
three dance scenes of autoerotic intensity. Each of these conveys her
trance-state, which renders her impervious to pain. Her second dance
expresses her liberation from parental jurisdiction as well as her bonding
with Mickey. She sways on the car bonnet in ecstatic slow movements with
stars and night sky as her backdrop. She hallucinates, and we see, angelic
flying figures. In this atmosphere of luminescence, emphasised by slow-
pulsing strobe lighting, we experience a vision of Mallory’s rare beauty,
which increases our empathy despite her sadistic brutalities. Strobe-like
flicker also appears in Mallory’s room from the hypnotic violence and
crudity of TV. When Mickey arrives, a stronger light shines from him onto
Mallory’s face, her adoration rendering him numinous.
The colour palette is densely saturated. Red is prominent for its the-
matic and affective potency. At the couple’s blood wedding, Mallory
throws her doll over the bridge in a rite of passage. The doll, wearing
crimson feathers, falls in a slow motion that resembles falling blood in one
of the film’s visual becomings. In slow motion, Mallory and Mickey slash
their palms and bind their hands together, mingling their blood. This act
is emphasised by a sudden, disorienting switch to cartoon animation:
streams of blood corpuscles twist together like twining snakes. This evo-
cation of micro processes below the skin adds the body’s interior sensations
to the array of affects.
The film’s meandering temporal progression and its prioritising of inner
reality is partly occult in nature, suggesting that mental anomalies have only
been clinically pathologised in modern cultures. The supernatural theme
58    

increases the generic horror components of the film. In the Navajo shaman’s
hut, the word ‘demon’ is projected across Mickey’s chest to indicate how he
appears on an occult level. Recalling a dream he had years earlier, the shaman
recognises Mickey as the demon predestined to kill him. The Navajo diag-
noses Mallory’s ‘sad sickness’ and tells his grandson she is ‘trapped in a
world of ghosts’. From his perspective, Mallory and Mickey’s schizophre-
nia is part of the white culture’s malaise of ‘too much TV’ and too little sense
of the sacredness of life. Horror film, however, still retains a touch of the
uncanny, as well as clinical pathology, in its portrayal of dangerous madness.
Generic films often deploy binary machines of insanity/sanity, them/us
and natural/unnatural. The psychoanalytic ambivalence of desire and
dread has frequently been used to explain the attraction of monstrous
insanity for audiences. Schizoanalytic readings can refute this limiting
binary structure. They seek elsewhere for the film’s force as ‘these intense
becomings and feelings, these intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hal-
lucinations’.86 The aesthetics of Natural Born Killers likewise challenge
such clear-cut divisions. They stimulate, repel, frighten, distress and dis-
orientate the spectator in a dizzying vortex, schizophrenising us as we lose
the clear distinction of inside and out during the film event.
The affective potency of insanity in horror fantasy lies in its power of
becoming, as an untrammelled force that sweeps aside all obstacles. Amoral
and asocial, schizo-killers appear to be capable of free acts that effect
change and attain ecstatic fulfilment for themselves. That their free acts
depend on the ruthless destruction of others is difficult to divorce on one
level from social and ethical issues of representation.
To use these fantasies as a springboard for schizoanalysis, even in
tandem with other approaches, demands a radical paradigm shift. I find no
place in psychoanalysis for the corporeal actuality of the moments in which
viewer and film connect. Castration and back-to-the-womb scenarios are
abstract, deep structures rather than embodied acts, although film has been
used as evidence of their symbolic operations. By schizoanalysis, the affect
of film may be explored as an event that acts upon the viewer. Inner becom-
ings have their outer parallel in the physical transformations of horror film.
In Chapter 2, fluid mental states are given external expression in fantastic
bodily changes.

Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane
(London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 18.
     59

2. Ibid. p. 319.
3. Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allen Poe: A Psycho-Analytic
Interpretation (London: Imago, 1949).
4. Forbidden Planet, dir. Fred M. Wilcox (1956).
5. James Donald (ed.), Fantasy and the Cinema (London: BFI, 1989), p. 1.
6. Roger Dadoun, ‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’, in Donald, Fantasy and the
Cinema, pp. 39–62.
7. Ibid. p. 56.
8. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Women in the Horror Film
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993).
9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), p. 4.
10. Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist
Theory (London and New York: Methuen, 1988).
11. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, Vol. 6. No. 6,
1975; Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New
York: Routledge, 1992).
12. Linda Williams, ‘When the Woman Looks’, in Mary Anne Doane, Patricia
Mellencamp and Linda Williams (eds), Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism (Frederick, MD: American Film Studies Monograph Series,
University Publications of America, 1983), pp. 67–82.
13. David N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual
Difference, and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 140.
14. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 27.
15. Ibid. p. 45.
16. Ibid. p. 49.
17. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty: Re-presentation of Masoch’, in Gilles
Deleuze and Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Masochism (New York: Zone Books,
1991), pp. 9–142.
18. For an application of Lacan’s linguistic analogy, see Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar
on “The Purloined Letter”’, Yale French Studies, 48, 1972, pp. 38–72.
19. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 81–2.
20. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 50.
21. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Real and Imaginary: What Children Say’, in Essays Critical
and Clinical, ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A.
Greco (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 63.
22. Ibid. p. 63.
23. Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much, p. 102.
24. Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London:
Karnac, 1988), p. 408.
25. Ibid. p. 408.
26. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
60    

Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1910]

1971), p. 231.
27. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Special Characteristics of the System Ucs’, in The
Unconscious [1915], in PFL 11, On Metapsychology (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991), p. 191.
28. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 322.
29. Ibid. p. 322.
30. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p.
267.
31. Deleuze, ‘Real and Imaginary: What Children Say’, p. 64.
32. André Colombat, ‘Deleuze and Signs’, in Ian Buchanan and John Marks
(eds), Deleuze and Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000),
p. 18.
33. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 139.
34. Ibid. p. 131.
35. Ibid. p. 18.
36. Ibid. p. 18.
37. Ibid. p. 18.
38. Ibid. p. 323.
39. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, p. 69.
40. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchill and
H. Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1991), p. 164.
41. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, p. 258.
42. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, ed. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 16.
43. Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, p. 31.
44. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 271.
45. Gus van Sant’s recent remake of Psycho returns to a heavier psycho-sexual
dogmatism than Hitchcock’s and becoming-bird is completely omitted.
46. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Dead Psychoanalysis: Analyse’, in Gilles Deleuze and Claire
Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London:
The Athlone Press, 2002), p. 122.
47. In the version currently circulated. Producer Eric Pommer later added a
framing story that locates Francis as madman and Caligari as a benign direc-
tor of the asylum. Sigfried Kracauer, Lotte Eisener and others signal its pre-
Nazi political interpretation.
48. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.
50.
49. Ibid. p. 50.
50. Ibid. p. 15.
51. Ibid. p. 17.
52. Ibid. p. 52.
     61

53. Ibid. p. 52.

54. Ibid. p. 51.
55. Ibid. p. 51.
56. For Hoffmann’s tales of automata, see ‘Automata’, in The Best Tales of
Hoffmann, ed. E. F. Blieler (New York; Dover Publications, 1967), pp. 71–103.
57. Daniel Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical,
p. xxxviii.
58. Ibid. p. xxxviii.
59. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 51.
60. Ibid. p. 51.
61. His ‘degenerate’ appearance has negative ethnic implications.
62. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 205.
63. Ibid. p. 205.
64. Ibid. p. 205.
65. Ibid. p. 206.
66. Ibid. p. 206.
67. Ibid. p. 205.
68. Ibid. p. 205.
69. Ibid. p. 205.
70. Ibid. p. 206.
71. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 20.
72. This scene is reminiscent of a similar axe attack in D. W. Griffiths’s Broken
Blossoms (1919).
73. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 330.
74. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 238.
75. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 330.
76. Ibid. p. 330.
77. Ibid. p. 330.
78. Ibid. p. 330.
79. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. x.
80. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 331.
81. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 237.
82. Ibid. p. 238.
83. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 15.
84. Ibid. p. 2.
85. Such as those used by Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
86. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 330.
 CHAPTER 2

Becoming Anomalous and the

Body-Without-Organs

a continuous creation of unforeseeable form.1 (Bergson)

Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming plant, animal,
molecular, becoming zero.2 (Deleuze and Guattari)

Alone in his bathroom, Seth Brundle watches himself in the mirror.

Anxiously scanning his increasingly knobbly face, he chews his fingernail
and it comes off between his teeth. His exposed finger-end squirts white
liquid onto the mirror, which he shamefacedly wipes off with toilet paper.
The next scene in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) begins with a slow
track up the solid metal of a computer, panning round to reveal Seth at the
screen. Instead of providing him with reassurance, what he sees on the
screen intensifies the horror. Analysing the cellular make-up of Seth’s tele-
portation, the computer reveals that the secondary element in the genetic
mix is ‘not-Brundle’. With mounting terror and disgust, Seth scans blown-
up images of hairy spikes and the text reveals a ‘fusion of Brundle and Fly
at a molecular level’.
Humans who become monsters, or regress to earlier forms of life, are
stock matter of horror film, which gleefully deploys effects technology like
prosthetic make-up and computer-generated imagery to manifest mon-
strosity. The viewer engages viscerally in the affectively potent mix of these
bodily changes. A favourite locus for spectacular bodily modification is the
transgression of those biological and cultural norms that it throws in relief.
I explore human/inhuman mutations from a Deleuzian perspective. The
concepts of becoming and the body-without-organs trace these hybrid
transformations. My approach moves beyond the split subjectivity of
psychoanalytic work on horror, which retains uneasily welded, but still
identifiable, components from each ‘original’. Deleuzian becomings are a
process of individuation run on desubjectified affects, being collective
rather than personal.
Creative assemblages such as literary or cinematic machines mobilise
becoming. Their singularities, or self-referential component systems, are
not self-enclosed and no assemblage runs on a single flux. Rather than imi-
     -- 63

tating other singularities, they form new conjunctions in pursuit of their

own becoming. Singularities become by extending beyond themselves,
melding with others and putting out projectiles to incorporate environ-
mental objects. One assemblage is the perceptual and virtual consciousness
of the viewer as it incorporates the aesthetic processes of film. To pinpoint
what might happen in the intersection between singularities, Deleuze and
Guattari use the figure of the ‘anomalous’, an unnatural, irregular element
in a system.
As anomalies trace a line between congruent multiplicities, they resem-
ble the creatures of dark fantasy and horror in literature. The anomalous
‘outsider’ is ‘Moby Dick, or the Thing or Entity of Lovecraft, terror’.3 The
monstrous entity is not fixed in its identity, but changes by entering into
dynamic processual assemblages. As it moves, it can open onto other affec-
tive elements, such as beauty and joy, and draw them into the horror
experience, thus adding singularities to its multiplicity. The entity is
in perpetual motion, maintaining its transformative potential as it
becomes. Deleuze again draws on images from Lovecraft to explain how
‘ENTITY
EVENT, it is terror, but also great joy. Becoming an entity, an
infinitive, as Lovecraft spoke of it, the horrific and luminous story of
Carter: animal-becoming, molecular-becoming, imperceptible-becoming’.4
Monsters may at first appear to gravitate against the liberatory potential of
Deleuze’s concepts. By eliding the text’s dynamics of style with its repre-
sentational content, this interpretation would be losing Deleuze’s thread.
Unfortunately, he uses these perversely suggestive images only rarely, as
overt illustrations of the processes of becoming. For me, such provocative
and pertinent images from popular fantasy attest to the broader applicabil-
ity of his theories, and I have set out to redress the balance in this book.
Women and men who become with other life-forms are among the
anomalies of horror cinema. Inhuman entities possess human bodies.
Bodies without souls have non-human life of their own, and spirits without
their former bodies have become-ethereal. These entities refuse to remain
the objects of our aesthetic contemplation and seek to incorporate us into
the dynamic hybrid of their virtual assemblage. We also become with the
monsters as mutant spectators. Despite formulaic attempts to restore order
at the end of many films, we continue to become long after the film has
ended. What is initially a cinematic assemblage transmutes into another
form of experiential process.
Anomalies subvert fixed notions of subjective wholeness and undermine
cultural attempts to maintain self-consistent typological and species
norms. Bergson’s Creative Evolution is influential here. Working with élan
vital, or the vital impetus, Bergson draws on the evolutionary theories of
64    

his day to explore the becomings of vegetable and animal life. He suggests
that human boundaries are much less fixed than we wish to imagine. Like
other forms of life on the planet, the force of the universal flux of matter
traverses us. As the life-force flows in us, and through us, ‘this special
image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call my body,
constitutes at every moment [. . .] a section of the universal becoming’.5
For Bergson, the human amalgamates earlier evolutionary imprints and
ongoing genetic development. Our awareness of these earlier levels is
shaped by both the findings of evolutionary biology and our inner intui-
tion of the process of duration, which I examine more closely later.
Bergson assists my project of re-thinking the transformations of the
horror film and their affect on the spectator, as we experience becoming in
conjunction with the text. Rather than its psychoanalytic meaning of the
release of psychic energies, I use affect as the dynamic charge of emotion/
sensation in an experiential materialist aesthetic. As with my discussion of
schizoanalysis, I move away from the psychoanalytic paradigm of horror
studies, but still acknowledge the relevance of psycho-sexuality when
viewed from a different angle. In particular, Deleuze’s work with the fiction
of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch intriguingly reconsiders subjective loss
and the potential for becoming it unleashes. As a context and justification
for such a move, I will briefly recap some of the key uses to which psycho-
analysis has been put in studies of body horror.

Body-Horror, Masochism and Film Studies

Psychopathology, drawing on Freud’s uncanny and Kristeva’s abjection,
has dominated textual readings of the horror body. It has also informed
studies of spectatorial response to, and investment in, horror. Organic
bodies are the basic matter of many horror films and it seems perverse not
to explore them in themselves. Much critical work has been structuralist-
informed, so has skated over the biological aspects of the body and its sen-
sation as such, using bodies instead as emblematic springboards to primal
psychic structures. Because horror bodies may be penetrated, dismem-
bered or duplicated, their vicissitudes have been interpreted from some
feminist perspectives as scenarios of castration, taboo sexual acts and sub-
jective loss.
Barbara Creed, who asserts that the bleeding bodies of women are a
‘gaping wound’, presents castration anxiety as the central concern of
horror film.6 Alternatively, Gaylyn Studlar uses Melanie Klein’s object-
relations theory to locate masochism as seminal to a viewing process
‘divorced from issues of castration, sexual difference, and female lack’.7
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Instead, she locates viewerly masochism as a defence mechanism against

fears of maternal abandonment. Kaja Silverman’s work on male masochis-
tic viewing, despite its exploration of perverse potential, retains a Freudian
and Lacanian model of the ‘categorical imperatives of the Oedipus
complex and symbolic law’.8 Carol Clover likewise shifts attention from
male sadism to consider the masochistic male spectator’s identification, his
‘introjective or masochistic gazing’ at the female victim/hero, the ‘final
girl’ of slasher movies.9 She signals the need to consider the incorporated
spectator absorbed in the horror film experience.
Masochism is adapted by Deleuze to map the operations of the body-
without-organs. Masochistic processes permeate horror films in the inva-
sion of the body and its consequent psychic disintegration. Deleuze’s
reading of Masoch is distinguished by its shift from eroticism, its focus on
the contract, and its refutation of masochism’s binary dialectic with
sadism. Masochism is anti-Oedipal in intent as it ‘disavows the mother and
abolishes the father’ and it has a different political agenda, because ‘sadism
is institutional, masochism contractual’.10 Masochism gives primacy to the
ego and the process of idealisation.
Deleuze prefers the ‘aestheticism’ of masochism’s narratives of delayed
gratification to a Sadeian assault of the reader by escalating explicitness. In
Masoch’s novel, Venus in Furs, the intensive nature of suspense wards off
pleasure, so that waiting is essential to ‘suspense as a plenitude, as a phys-
ical and spiritual intensity’.11 The novel’s fetishisation of fur does not
imply that characters imitate animals, but that they become-animal by
entering ‘zones of indetermination or proximity in which woman and
animal, animal and man, have become indiscernible’.12 Horror texts, such
as Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, convey the indeterminations of
woman/animal, as we will see.
Shaviro was an early Deleuzian advocate of the active and affirmative
masochism in the spectatorship of extreme cinema. Horror and pornogra-
phy act as ‘a technology for intensifying and renewing experiences of pas-
sivity and abjection’ via their mimesis of erotic tension.13 Their intent is to
physically arouse the audience and bombard the sensorium outside the
psychoanalytic realms of subjective fantasy. Like Deleuze, Shaviro claims
that the aesthetic experience can induce transformations of consciousness,
as the agitated body, overloaded by affect, ‘desires its own extremity, its
own transmutation’.14
Shaviro locates our identification not with human or unhuman mon-
sters, but with victims (unless the monsters are victimised themselves). He
notes the viewer’s complicity with the (usually female) protagonist’s dread
in Argento’s flamboyant films. Fearful anticipation ‘blends into a kind of
66    

ecstatic complicity at the convulsive point of danger and violence’ and

terror is ‘an irrecuperable excess, produced when violated bodies are
pushed to their limits. Terror subsists as a surplus affect’.15 Despite
masochism’s retention of unequal power roles, and its Bataillean angst, its
subjective loss impels a limited kind of becoming anomalous.

Becoming Anomalous
Deleuze and Guattari build on becoming in Nietszche’s work, where it
figures the dynamic metamorphosis of matter and the key to human poten-
tial. Bergson’s ‘continuity of becoming which is reality itself ’ is, however,
their seminal source.16 For Bergson, becoming is qualitative, evolutionary
and extensive, and is a pivotal tool for his radical philosophy. Although ‘life,
like conscious activity, is unceasing creation’, the human mind in its spatial,
extensive action, is essentialist and structuralist in tendency, seeking out
‘that which defies change, the definable quality, the form of essence, the
end’.17 Nevertheless, becoming, which is intensive in quality, undermines
the certainties we seek as it ‘shocks the habits of thought and fits ill into the
moulds of language’.18 Universal duration, from his vitalist perspective on
evolution, means ‘invention, the creation of forms, the continual elabora-
tion of the absolutely new’.19 Becoming is durational in its ‘continuity of
change, preservation of the past in the present’.20 Via its becomings, the
individual body is re-absorbed in the universal interaction of matter.
Deleuze and Guattari develop these insights in their own take on
becoming as the continual process of movement and flux. The term
becoming, as both verb and noun, permeates their writings. Its over-
arching axiomatic role is clear, and they state that ‘we are not in the world,
but we become with the world, we become by contemplating it. Everything
is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming plant, animal, molec-
ular, becoming zero’.21 Subject/object boundaries meld in molecular
fusion to form new entities. If we open up to potential transformations, we
experience other, more dynamic, ways of being in the world.
Becoming is the movement of particles to form molecular assemblages
in the mobilisation of desire. Fresh conjunctions carry the potential to
become with other forms of matter. Becomings are imaged geographically
as ‘orientations, directions, entries and exits’.22 The operations of becom-
ing are located on the plane of immanence, the virtual locale of
concept/image generation, which is characterised by perpetual motion,
‘replete with speed and slowness, floating affects’.23 When we perceive the
larger operations of this plane, we also perceive the ‘imperceptible’ micro
dynamics of the molecules that compose perception itself.
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Bergson and Deleuze use the image of unicellular creatures to describe

becoming as desire in motion. The amoeba moves by putting out projec-
tiles, or pseudopodia. These incorporate environmental matter, which
then conjoins with the animalcule and continues to become as part of it.
Starting from one’s current singularity, becoming enters a zone of proxim-
ity with another and extracts ‘particles between which one establishes the
relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to what
one is becoming, and through which one becomes’.24 Becoming is not con-
cerned with identification or formal relations, but with the dynamic move-
ment of life between and through congruent singularities.
The becomings of mutual desire involve a ‘nuptial’ process. These nup-
tials are distinct from straightforward exchanges, and are not driven by end-
gain. Becomings change both parties and are experienced differently by
each. They do not imitate or assimilate, but partake ‘of a double capture, of
non-parallel evolution, of nuptials between two reigns. Nuptials are always
against nature.’25 Because of their anomalous openness, becomings chal-
lenge the ‘natural’ order, stimulating the creation of new assemblages. They
are radical transformations with micro political as well as aesthetic potential.
Molecularity underpins the make-up of all matter and enables us to
make multiple, rhizomatic connections. We connect not just with other
humans, but also with all forms of animate or inanimate matter. All becom-
ings are molecular in nature, for ‘the animal, flower or stone one becomes
are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects or
forms that we know from the outside and recognise from experience,
through science or by habit’.26 Becoming-animal is found in the mutations
and hybrids of myth. Folktales of shape-shifting, as well as their modern
horror film equivalents, suggest that the boundaries of humans and other
life-forms are not fixed, but that molecular flows conjoin singularities:

Man does not become wolf, or vampire, as if he changed molar species; the vampire
and the werewolf are becomings of man, in other words, proximities between mole-
cules in composition, relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness between
emitted particles. Of course there are werewolves and vampires . . .27

Vampires, werewolves and other hybrids of horror fantasy are inspirational

images of the human affinity with beasts, plants and minerals.
This assertion is shaped by Bergson’s view of the fluidity of species
identity, as ‘in nature, there is neither purely internal finality nor absolutely
distinct individuality’.28 Bergson argues that the borderline between
animal and vegetable is tenuously drawn, for animal consciousness and
mobility can be awakened in the plant and the animal can vegetate.29 Both
versions of the sci-fi horror films The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with
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its human/plant becomings, as well as The Day of the Triffids, with its car-
nivorous mobile plants, embody this affinity. We may connect with other
singularities via our common organic processes and flow speeds. Rather
than losing our specificity, or being swamped by melding, we expand to
take in the anomalous, like the animalcule prototypes of the becoming
inherent in life.
Philosophically, this mobilises free will rather than predestination.
Bergson stresses that we cannot predetermine the organic world’s evolu-
tion, but rather ‘the spontaneity of life is manifested by a continual creation
of new forms succeeding others’.30 As well as opening up unforeseen pos-
sibilities, becoming gives us a sense of solidarity with, and respect for, all
forms of life. As the developmental stages of the human foetus suggestively
figure, we share common characteristics with our animal and reptile fore-
bears and, thus, each individual remains ‘united with the totality of living
beings by invisible bonds’.31 It is these bonds that the horror film’s becom-
ings serve to make literally visible. In Cat People, we are given a potent
visible image of them. Irena Dubrovna, a Serbian émigré artist, has a strong
rapport with the feline species that manifests itself in becoming-cat.

Becoming-Indeterminate: Cat People

I have no peace, for they are in me. (Irena)

Deleuze locates the work of Tourneur in his movement-image typology of

‘lyrical abstraction’. Films of this category are motivated by the binary
dynamic of light and shade and its choice between virtual and actual. In
them ‘the act of the spirit is not a struggle but an alternative, a fundamen-
tal: Either . . . or’.32 The becoming-panther in the swimming pool scene
from Cat People exemplifies this assemblage of alternatives. Here, ‘the
attack is only seen on the shadows of a white wall; is it the woman who has
become a leopard (virtual conjunction) or merely the leopard [sic] which
has escaped (real connection)?’33 The supernatural and the rational expla-
nation are equal possibilities in this world.
Tourneur’s film alternates between an regressive atavism impelled by
occult forces and psycho-sexual disturbance. The dual woman/panther
nature of Irena is clearly amenable to the diagnosis of schizophrenia, and
is actually subjected to it in the narrative. Here, however, I am considering
her animal becoming. As we saw, Bergson asserts that each particular man-
ifestation of life contains characteristics of most other life forms, in ‘a rudi-
mentary state – either latent or potential’, but ‘the difference is in the
proportions’.34 As well as exploring human ambivalence towards the feline
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species, the cat people express a now dormant path of bifurcation in

human/animal evolutionary development. We are all potential cat people.
The horror is dependent on the sharply demarcated lines drawn between
the animal kingdom and ourselves. If this boundary were lifted, horror
might be transformed.
French actress Simone Simon is ideally cast as the cat-woman Irena, with
her feline physiognomy and ‘foreign’ accent. She has large, hypnotic eyes,
a snub nose and a broad smile. Her sinuous movements and style of dress
enhance this cat impression. In the first shot of her, wearing a cat brooch,
she sketches a panther in a cage at the zoo. She later slips on a black fur coat
and ‘becomes cat’, even down to the ribbon bow in her hair, which suggests
pointed ears. The feline style is adopted even more overtly by the other
Serbian cat-woman who recognises her ‘sister’ during the wedding party.
The film’s diagrammatic component of cat permeates the décor of
Irena’s apartment. A large panther motif is painted on the blinds. She even
has a claw-footed bathtub. The lyrical abstractionist style of Tourneur uses
lighting emphatically to invoke a numinous atmosphere from the start,
where the titles appear against the silhouetted statue of the mounted king
with a cruciform sword, in the act of stabbing a panther. This statue is
prominently displayed in Irena’s lounge. The narrative provides a super-
natural motivation for events in the Serbian tale recounted by Irena.
Marmeluke witches who worshipped Satan adopted the form of large
black cats to pursue their evil ends until most of them were slain by the
sword of the Christian King John. By implication, she is of the blood of
the survivors.
The instinctual responses of animals validate Irena’s own cat nature. Her
partner, Oliver, a wholesome all-American naval engineer, tries to domesti-
cate her with a gift of a toy-like Siamese kitten, but she terrifies it and ingen-
uously explains that ‘cats just don’t like me’. The creatures in the pet shop
intuitively sense her predatory nature. Ironically, Oliver replaces a cat with
its mythical prey, a canary, which she playfully squeezes to death. Her
human side apparently returns as she ‘buries’ the bird in a little box. More
characteristically, however, she throws this into a panther’s cage, possibly as
a bribe to compel it to do her bidding. The cat cowers back in acknowledge-
ment of her superior force. The rapport between Irena and the panthers
increases as her range of passions develops. As she becomes jealous, we see
them pacing their cages in anticipation of an impending attack.
Her intimacy with Oliver sparks off her becoming-cat. Without inhibi-
tion, she lays her head in his lap by the fire during their brief courtship.
After a hasty marriage, she becomes increasingly cat-like, but withdraws
this physical contact. Refusing to let her husband into her room, she slides
70    

down beside the closed door and scratches at the lintel in a clawing motion
before rubbing her face against the wood. Oliver takes a psychological per-
spective on these marital troubles as ‘all in the mind’ and suggests that his
wife visits the ‘best analyst’, Dr Judd. In an attempt to find the reason
behind her obsession, and penetrate her ego defences, the lecherous
psychiatrist puts Irena into a hypnotic trance. In an Expressionistic shot,
her face appears like a floating mask against a black matte ground as she
regresses into apparent fantasy. Mistakenly taking her account of actuality
as symbolic, the analyst seeks answers in her early childhood. Irena’s own
old-world view, however, asserts the occult reality of ‘something evil’
within her.
Jealous of Oliver’s intimacy with his workmate, Alice, Irena becomes cat
more overtly. She slinks after Alice, hiding in the shifting patches of
shadow in the street. In a subtly uncanny sequence, the dappled and decep-
tive lighting, the rough texture of the wall and the shadows of wind-blown
leaves create a sinister atmosphere of threat. This hovers on the boundary
between natural and supernatural. The camera shows the two women
walking, then cuts to close-ups of their more rapidly moving feet as they
hurry along. Their figures are back-lit and only dimly visible. Gradually,
Irena’s footprints become paw-marks and the pace speeds to a run. Alice
catches the bus just in time to elude her growling, predatory pursuer. For
Deleuze, the use of shadow in lyrical abstraction functions to ‘express an
alternative between the state of things itself and the possibility, the virtu-
ality, which goes beyond it’.35 Deleuze locates the operations of the imma-
terial, virtual level of ‘spirit’ in this style. Here, this appears as a fleetingly
glimpsed supernatural dimension. As Irena follows Alice, alternating
between woman and cat, we are uncertain which form she will take at any
given moment. This alternation exacerbates our fear and moral confusion,
and opens up our own animal possibilities.
The horror of Irena’s nature from a human perspective increases when
a flock of dead and wounded sheep is found at the zoo. A line of bloody
paw-prints tracking away from the carcases reverts to human footprints.
After this explosion of violence, Irena experiences a dream vision of her
animal origins. Tourneur mixes cartoon animations and special effects
photography to evoke a supernatural quality. Black panthers move through
concentric ripples of light. A male authority figure (a condensed compos-
ite of King John and Dr Judd), spears them on his long sword, which
becomes a key. As well as symbolising the Freudian quest to unlock the
unconscious, this key suggests the idea of her freeing the panther from its
cage. The subsequent scene at the museum also subtly underlines the
supernatural theme of becoming-cat. Irena is dressed in black whilst
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Oliver and Alice are united against her in pale grey, and leave her behind.
The couple draw close to the camera until Irena disappears, to be overlaid
by an Egyptian figure of the cat goddess, Bast.
Irena trails Alice to the swimming pool, where the receptionist’s small
black cat runs off in instinctive fear sensed even before she enters. As the
camera passes though the deep shadow of the changing rooms, the banis-
ters cast shadows that recall the bars of a cage. Terrified by an unseen
presence and the sound of growling and snarling, Alice instinctively flings
herself into the water. Eerie reflected ripples of light on the ceiling recall
Irena’s dream of transformation. Irena’s alternation between the forms of
woman and cat is rapid and uncertain. Sadistically, if human – or play-
fully, if cat – Irena relishes Alice’s terror, leaving her bathrobe torn to
shreds as a warning.
Oliver confesses his love for Alice, and Irena claws at the back of the
couch in rage. Dr Judd threatens to have her ‘put away for observation’ if
she does not submit to him, and the possibility that she could be treated as
insane and institutionalised increases. The panther infiltrates the engi-
neering design office, a dark room of shadows and geometric forms where
Oliver and Alice are working late. A T-square on the wall does double duty
as an anti-occult amalgam of scientific measurement and a crucifix, stop-
ping the force of Irena/panther about to spring. Following Irena’s trail of
heavy perfume (civet?) through the open door of the office, they leave
through the circular swing doors of the building, the streets are shrouded
in a thick fog, a manifestation of Irena’s mystery.
As Irena becomes erotically aroused by Judd’s kisses, her eyes glisten
with sensuality. Her arousal leads to becoming-cat and she attacks him. As
foreseen in her dream, he unsheathes his Freudian/phallic swordstick,
grappling in silhouette with a panther shape. Wounded, Irena creeps out,
lifting up her hand like a damaged paw, leaving his dead body behind. In
the moon-like glow of a globe lamp, she seeks the sympathy of her fellow
feline in the zoo. At first terrified, the beast senses her weakness and attacks
her. Leaping over the wall, it leaves ‘both parts’ of Irena dead, having been
killed twice by both of her part-species as an unnatural anomaly. Her body
is an amorphous feline/human shape that Tourneur’s subtlety refrains
from revealing in close-up and ‘leaves to our imagination’. Deleuze sug-
gests that Tourneur’s lyrical abstraction produces a new kind of film that
breaks with the neo-Gothic tradition. His ‘pale and luminous spaces, his
nights against a light background’, leave with us a sense of indetermina-
tion.36 This uncertainty exceeds narrative closure and continues to alter-
nate, working its potential through our mind/body.
The incorporated mind forms a multiplicity with existing social and
72    

cultural assemblages. As well as these ideological and practical connec-

tions, and their politics of representation, there remains the biological body
and its processes of affective perception, sifting and assimilation. Although
some of these cognitive processes are physically ‘hard-wired’ into the brain
and neuronal networks, there is much we can do to modify and extend the
formation of concepts and their operations in thought. In order to embrace
the process of becoming, a new map of the body is needed.
One direction in which this new map might extend is the destabilisation
of ‘binary machines’ like masculine and feminine. Molecular lines of flight
produce new, more amorphous forms of sexuality. They ‘make fluxes of
deterritorialization shoot between the segments, fluxes which no longer
belong to one or the other, but which constitute an asymmetrical becom-
ing of the two, molecular sexuality, which is no longer that of a man or of
a woman’.37 Having looked at a woman becoming-cat, I will now examine
Deleuze’s contentious use of becoming-woman as a prototype for other
becomings.

Becoming-Woman
all becomings are already molecular. This is because becoming is not to imitate or
identify with something or someone.38 (Deleuze and Guattari)

Deleuze’s ‘becoming-woman’ appears to recycle the essentialist binaries a

political feminism has worked to explode. In A Thousand Plateaus, for
example, the molecular woman is compared to springs and flows and
located in the context of becoming-animal and becoming-girl.39 Deleuze,
however, attempts to justify his image cluster here. He denies that he
wishes to connote otherness by connecting ‘woman’ with natural fluxes,
because ‘nature, matter, affection and passion are not here perceived as
static or negative terms, but flowing and relational, changing and cre-
ative’.40 Although provocation is intentional in Deleuze’s term, he uses
becoming-woman and becoming-girl not as essentialist labels, but as an
inspirational model for all becomings, including that of feminism itself.
He insists, ingenuously, that his usage of ‘woman’ is free from traditional
associations of the word as image or concept, but is ‘part of a set of rela-
tions in process and assemblage’.41 He presumes to challenge what he con-
ceives of as ‘molar’ feminist orthodoxy when he states that ‘there is a
woman-becoming which is not the same as woman, their past and their
future, and it is essential that woman enter this becoming to get out of their
past and their future, their history’.42 ‘Molar’ woman is limited by biology
and subjectivity. Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘becoming-woman’ does
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not concern men’s imitation of molar woman, but is a matter of ‘emitting

particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone of prox-
imity, of a micro-femininity, in other words, that produces in us a molecu-
lar woman’.43
Even more contentiously, everyone, including the molar woman, is
invited to ‘become-girl’. Because the girl must become the ‘molar’ woman
she is not yet, ‘becoming-girl’ is used as an ultimate example of becoming,
in her vibrant fluidity. For Claire Colebrook, ‘becoming-girl’ is the
‘becoming of becoming’ in its ‘radical relation to man: not as his other or
opposite (woman) but as the very becoming of man’s other’.44 She under-
lines the affinity of Deleuzian theory and feminism. Deleuze’s corpus, like
feminism itself, uses theory as a challenge to praxis. Both men and women
can become woman – and girl – although differently.
Becoming-woman is molecular, non-genitalised and minoritarian. It
intends to fragment, not reinforce, essentialist gender binaries. For
Elizabeth Grosz, it means ‘going beyond identity and subjectivity, frag-
menting and freeing up lines of flight, “liberating” a thousand tiny sexes
that identity subsumes under the One’.45 Verena Conley likewise draws
feminist inspiration from Deleuze. She underlines his anti-Oedipal com-
monality with French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous. They each empha-
sise multiplicities and ‘becoming, intensity, production of positive desire,
the absence of a logic of meaning’.46 Cultural feminists have accused both
Deleuze and Cixous of ahistorical essentialism. It is, however, possible to
combine their insights with praxis-based feminist critique.
Camilla Griggers problematises the anomalous social status of women
by adding Foucauldian to Deleuzian concepts to characterise woman as a
late capitalist ‘abstract-machine’ produced by ‘optical and electronic
media, psychopharmacology, the war machine, the chemical industry, plas-
tics technology, bioscience’.47 Rather than allowing the feminist project to
be stymied by extant structures, she deploys becoming-woman to explore
the potential for change via pragmatic molecular micro politics. Griggers
reads Ripley of the Alien series as a fictionalised emblem of actual female
becomings in current American society, ‘a hyperthymic overachiever, tech-
nologically loaded with electronic-prosthetic memory, neurochemical-
prosthetic personality, and media-prosthetic desires’.48 Griggers’ work
effectively combines political critique, textual analysis and philosophical
insight. At this point, we will look at a sequence from the fourth film, Alien
Resurrection to explore the contradictory mechanics of both becoming, and
becoming-woman, in a horror/sci-fi context.
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Sharing Species: Alien Resurrection

Alien Resurrection operates a complex assemblage of woman becoming-
monster in which the monster also becomes-human. Successful becomings
depend on a mutual congruence by which each party retains elements of
specificity. Singularities should not be constrained by their becoming-
other, and should be free to make any number of subsequent connections.
The film conveys the horrors of a becoming enforced by genetic engineer-
ing as the tool of the military–industrial complex. It predicts a future of
capitalist exploitation unbounded by earthly or bodily limits. As in
Cronenberg, the film’s becomings are at a cellular, genetically engineered
level, and, like the fusion in The Fly, they are impelled by science. In
Jeunet’s film, the scientists serve their employers, United Systems
Military, unquestioningly. Surrendering ethical considerations, their long-
term project had cloned cells from the fully human Ripley (at the end of
Alien3 she kills herself to avoid hosting an embryonic alien). Their inhu-
mane experiments have already engineered several abortive hybrids by
mixing two genetic strands, alien and Ripley.
Griggers discusses the gendered operative field of the biomedical assem-
blage in its ‘artificial insemination, test-tube fertilization, surrogate moth-
ering, cryostorage of fertilized ova, or cross-uterine egg-transplants’.49 As
a result of this ‘biomedical channelling of the machinic phylum’ in repro-
ductive technology, the border between life and death is destabilised.50 In
Alien Resurrection, the biomedical assemblage has produced abortive
hybrids plus aliens with some of the original Ripley’s human genetic ele-
ments. One successful Ripley clone survives with alien genes. Her body has
been used to gestate and birth the mother of the baby alien/human hybrid.
Ripley’s awareness that she is the baby’s ‘grandmother’ produces ethical
dilemmas.
The scientists are themselves the most monstrous beings on the ship,
despite their fully human genetic status. Like the mad scientist of Gothic,
they are condemned for playing God. Assemblages should be consensual.
Here, they have been enforced, and the existential rights of the singular-
ities denied, causing terrible suffering. The film locates emotional depth
with the semi-, rather than the fully, human characters. In a harrowing
scene, Ripley discovers her cloned ‘sisters’, a series of impossible hybrids.
The one surviving clone used for the enforced breeding of an alien
demands the right to die and Ripley mercifully torches her. Another sci-
entifically engineered hybrid, the android, Call, develops emotional com-
plexity and an uneasy friendship with Ripley.
The ethos of fluid identity has been read by Catherine Constable, who
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sets up Ripley as the intersection point for several life-systems.51 She draws
on Christine Battersby’s work with Irigaray’s model of permeable femi-
nine boundaries. This valorises patterns of flow in which the body itself
‘becomes a permeable structure, a volume without contours, whose phys-
ical fluidity sustains and supports the possibilities of intimate embraces
with others’.52 In the film’s opening scene, Constable notes how Ripley, her
young protégée, Newt, and the alien queen intersect in the morphing
figure trapped in a glass tube. She uses birth as a paradigm for re-thinking
identity formation. Creed and Constable both read the Alien films from
maternal perspectives based on the feminist psychoanalysis of Kristeva
and Irigaray, but I want to move on from this approach. Rather than taking
up the intensively worked theme again, I will look at other forms of
melding in the Deleuzian fusion of congruent singularities.
The Ripley of Alien Resurrection is no longer constrained by ‘woman’ as
a figure of gender difference, but she signals species difference. She is
neither fully human nor fully alien, but shares characteristics of both.
When the ship finally lands on Earth, she is left with potential for future
becomings (and we are set up for another sequel). Our clear-cut identifica-
tion with Ripley as hero in the previous films is undermined. We are no
longer sure of her nature, her powers or her agenda. This also problemat-
ises a simple ‘positive stereotype’ reading. Alien Resurrection conveys a
strong mutual desire for reconnection between the artificially spliced blocs,
alien and Ripley, drawing them irrevocably together. This is foregrounded
in a sequence where Ripley is taken to witness her ‘child’, the alien queen,
birth her own offspring and Ripley’s ‘grandchild’.

Ripley and her Relatives

Ripley is both more than and other than human. By her genetic meld with
aliens, she has gained superhuman strength and corrosive blood. Her
senses are preternaturally acute. On the run with the pirate gang, she
bends on all fours and snuffs the air like a beast. As she hears an alien’s
approach, the camera takes a 360-degree turn that emphasises her fluid
movements and beast-like body language. One of the alien drones hatched
from the queen’s eggs opens the grating. Ripley falls through onto its body
below. In long-shot, she wallows with luxuriant abandon in a sea of tenta-
cles. These resemble writhing rats’ tails of dark brown glistening wetness,
with an abject, excremental aspect. She is briefly engulfed as the mass
pulses in and out, then emerges to spread her limbs with easy confidence.
Without fear, she sinks back into it by folding up her arms with a rhythm
and speed corresponding to those of the pulsing mass itself.
76    

My position as a viewer is partly informed by identification with Ripley

built up earlier in the series. My imaginative affinity is complicated by her
ready embrace of abjection here. Even though parallels are drawn earlier
between Ripley and the aliens in Alien, Aliens and Alien3, the inevitable
confrontations and showdowns depend on a dynamic of polarity. In this
film, the aliens are humanised and Ripley becomes more overtly alien
herself as the species meld on several levels. Constable reads the subse-
quent embrace as sexual intercourse because Ripley lies beneath the male
creature, but I question her psycho-sexual interpretation because the
male alien is a drone in service of the queen as well as being Ripley’s own
cloned offspring.
The embrace in which the alien carries Ripley to the queen is both repel-
lent and beautiful. Its special quality is enhanced by strobe-lighting and
stirring incidental music, with drum rolls and horns in a lyrical melody.
These effects combine with slow editing rhythms to enhance a sense of
timelessness as the two beings embrace. Time is extended by three similar
long-held compositions, in which Ripley lies beneath the alien drone who
cradles and caresses her. This act is an epiphany of species recognition and
melding, or familial bonding. Medium close-ups, which serve to increase
our intimate engagement, show Ripley as distinctly human. Her facial
expression is blissful and serene. The alien, however, has a blunt, eyeless
head, with a protuberance resembling an insect’s proboscis. Because we do
not see his whole body, we are unsure of his exact size, shape or form.
Whatever he looks like, Ripley is at home in the alien milieu and is happy
to meld with a ‘monster’ in an embrace that involves the viewer.
After witnessing the birth, Ripley lies down wet, slimy and relaxed. She
appears to have undergone a new form of birthing herself, which acknowl-
edges her own amorphous nature. In a parallel process, the alien baby is
becoming-human. Rather than the bestial/insectoid appearance of the
queen, the young alien has a familiarly humanoid skull, torso, teeth and
deep blue eyes. It is this human coding that will further complicate our
feelings when Ripley destroys the infant for the sake of human survival in
the ‘happy ending’ imposed by the generic template.
Bergson can help us to illuminate this anomalous interface and read it
differently. He asserts that nature excludes both internal finality and dis-
tinct individuality. His belief in the participation of every form of life in
the ‘primitive impulse’ of the whole, leads him to posit that a common
element of the whole is evident in the parts via the identical organs of
different organisms. In the film, genetic engineering exaggerates and
deforms a naturally occurring evolutionary process. According to Bergson,
there is a heredity of deviation impelled by changes in germ plasm via
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deviant organisms. The generated organism will deviate from the normal
type as much as the generating organism, but it will do so distinctively. He
also identifies ‘the formation of identical complex mechanisms on inde-
pendent lines of evolution’.53 Ripley and the aliens are genetically bonded,
but have different forms and functions adapted to their different needs.
Genetic congeniality undermines the application of abjection theory to the
alien/Ripley dichotomy. Unlike Creed’s negative Kristevan reading, a
Deleuze/Bergsonian response opens up a more radical possibility. It sug-
gests that this intimacy between anomalous life-forms need not constrain
the viewer to horrified repulsion, but initiates more congruent becomings.
The scene is Deleuzian in several ways. First, the ‘speeds and slow-
nesses’ of different life-forms are emphasised. The alien moves at a differ-
ent pace and in a different duration to the human, but Ripley co-ordinates
her movements with his, assisting their fusion. Unusual in the context of
mainstream Hollywood, the sequence is wordless, with silent, non-verbal
communication and intensive rapport instead. This segment, stylistically
distinct from the body of the film, suggests the operation of what Deleuze
calls ‘opsigns’ and ‘sonsigns’. These are ‘pure optical and/or sound situa-
tions’ that break from the narrative drive of the movement/action image
to produce a ‘moment of pure contemplation’ for the spectator.54 This con-
templation suspends the narrative flow and enables speculative thought. If
we interrogate the generic closure, Alien Resurrection illustrates the pos-
sibility of further Deleuzian becoming in horror/sci-fi.
The film complicates the polarised dynamic of norms and their trans-
gression via the figural of genetic engineering and molecular mutation. At
this point, I want to raise some questions about the future potential of
horror/dark fantasy film if it were to continue the lines of flight mapped
out by Alien Resurrection. The first concerns issues of gender and repre-
sentation. The character of Ripley has long been celebrated as the first
feminist hero in a predominantly masculinist genre. If she has become
more of an alien than a human woman, the film could be adopting a post-
feminist position, with implications for the oppositional macro politics of
representation. Ripley does, however, remain an inspirational figure for
Deleuzian becoming-woman. She had already adapted to becoming-alien
and is ready for further transformations.
A further question concerns the future development of the affective
dynamics of horror. According to Kristevan abjection, the designated
‘other’ functions to uphold, whilst contesting, human ethical and cultural
norms. The monster terrifies us with the threat of subjective dissolution
by infectious contact, in tandem with an ambivalent desire to meld with it.
Narrative closure prefers the monster’s suppression and the reinstatement
78    

of generic norms. Although the alien infant is destroyed, our admiration

for Ripley’s resolve is mixed with outrage that she has killed her own
grandchild. Thus some of the horror and abjection adheres to the hero
herself. If the monster and the human hero hybridise, the feelings usually
roused by horror (fear, disgust, desire) are not mobilised in the same way.
The horrific impact of the monster partly depends on its coding as anom-
alous, against nature in some sense.
Becomings themselves are traditionally positioned as the source of
horror. For Deleuze, however, rather than the horror of an abject, polarised
other, both beauty and terror are located in the transformative condition.
The process of becoming is experienced and effected by the body-without-
organs. Contrary to its literal meaning, the term has little connection with
the eviscerated corpse of the serial-killer movie. This body may not be, and
never have been, a Deleuzian body-without-organs.

The Bodies-Without-Organs of Horror

it is through the body (and no longer through the intermediary of the body) that
cinema forms an alliance with spirit, with thought.55 (Deleuze)

what we need to consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the frag-
mented body, it is the body-without-organs, animated by various intensive move-
ments.56 (Deleuze and Guattari)

The body-without-organs originates in the work of Antonin Artaud, also

a shaping presence behind schizoanalysis and becoming. Artaud blames a
repressive deity for alienating us from our true, anarchic body-without-
organs and replacing it by an ‘organised’ body on which God can exercise
His judgement. This is opposed to our fully human existence as seen in a
series of contrasts, ‘cruelty versus infinite torture, sleep or intoxication versus
the dream, vitality versus organization, the will to power versus a will to dom-
inate, combat versus war’.57 The body-without-organs is ‘an affective, inten-
sive, anarchist body that consists solely of poles, zones, thresholds and
gradients. It is traversed by a powerful, nonorganic vitality’.58 Although
humanity is focal, the body-without-organs does not have to be human.
Deleuze and Guattari re-map the body’s terrain. Instead of a fixed, bio-
logical entity, the body-without-organs is a set of speeds and affects con-
ceived in relation to other entities. This amoeba-like body is open to
surrounding matter excluded by the psychoanalytic ego-defences. The
body-without-organs is experienced as an affective aggregate that dis-
solves individual identity, and ‘passes entirely into the virtual chaosmos of
included disjunctions’.59 Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body’ is a shifting com-
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posite, which may be cultural, social, technological, molecular or organic.

By extending the term, they denaturalise the biological body and seek
parity for all forms of body. As well as having distinct particularities, all
bodies are interconnected with each other at an atomic level as modified
forms of one fluid substance. Male and female bodies-without-organs, for
example, have mutated beyond fixed gender oppositions. They can poten-
tially connect with other bodies to form new assemblages.
The body-without-organs is open to multiple becomings-other. It is no
longer constrained by the medical profession’s layout and its consequent
mental and social topography. To meld with an initial body-without-
organs, the second singularity must also be open-ended and will itself
undergo a comparable transformation. In Melville’s Moby-Dick, Ahab and
the whale incorporate each other as well as extending to include further
components. Ahab becomes-whale, whereas the whale becomes a force of
sheer whiteness. Moby-Dick has already become Ahab in a more literal
sense. As well as the mutual obsession of the whale and the man as they
seek revenge on each other, the molecules of Ahab’s severed leg become
the whale’s own cells through the digestive processes. These mutual
becomings lead to the formation of new, composite bodies-without-
organs, each a potential ‘field for the production of the process of desire’.60
The main characteristics of the body-without-organs are, Kennedy sug-
gests, ‘openness, change, mutability, fluidity, feedback, complexity’.61 As
well as organic bodies, there are technological and cultural bodies. Film is
an assemblage of bodies-without-organs, as apparatus, text and spectator
intermesh, intersecting physiology and psychology with technology. An
immanent affective experience is produced that, at its most powerful,
accesses philosophical, metaphysical dimensions. The material assemblage
of bodies enables awareness of space, movement and duration. Deleuze
writes that ‘it is through the body (and no longer through the intermedi-
ary of the body) that cinema forms its alliance with spirit, with thought’.62
The cinematic body-without-organs enables lines of flight between aes-
thetic, perceptual and metaphysical, bodies. We are, of course, applying the
becomings of the body-without-organs profanely in our consideration of
the bodily transmutations of horror.
The Fly, which opened this chapter, may be analysed from a variety of
film theoretical perspectives. A gender- (and genre-) informed reading
focuses on the lust and brutality released in Brundle-as-science-nerd who
fuses with an insect associated with lechery and dirt. Brundle is a mad sci-
entist unworthy of the powers he wields. Like others of his ilk, he is pun-
ished for hubristic meddling with the laws of nature. Psychoanalytically
speaking, the amalgam Brundle/Fly is freed from human repression. In
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his newly born insectoid machismo, he breaks an opponent’s arm in wres-

tling and drags a woman back to his lab for casual sex. In a sense, the
monster is already within the man, and finally able to show his face.
If we shift focus from these negative readings, both Brundle/fly’s
agenda and the film’s ending may be interpreted differently. Leaving
human constraints behind, he revels in the becomings of his new forma-
tion, and his evolutionary drives seek further development of the hybrid
species. Brundle/Fly ostensibly wants his lover, Veronica, to fuse with him
to dilute his fly genes, but further hybridisation and the perpetuation of
the new species could occur if they mate successfully (visualised as a mon-
strous maggot in her birth dream). His destruction by a ‘normal’ male rival
for Veronica (using Brundle’s own teleporter) removes the threat he posed
to biological security. Brundle/Fly challenges both subjective autonomy
and species purity. He adapts to his new body, with hardly any trace of
human organs, and becomes-fly. This Deleuzian slant on becoming under-
mines essentialist norms. It is applicable to other films that foreground the
non-organic becoming of hybrid bodies, such as Cronenberg’s Videodrome.

Uncontrollable Flesh: Videodrome

the visions became flesh, uncontrollable flesh. (Brian O’Blivion)

In Cronenberg’s presentation of what he calls ‘the new flesh’ in

Videodrome, software and hardware meld to form disturbing new entities
that undermine boundaries between inside and out. The changing, mutat-
ing flesh is foregrounded as objects become flesh and flesh becomes
machine. Like the spread of a disease or malignant growth, the transfor-
mations take place on a molecular level and re-map the shifting organic
layout of a body without fixed organs. Brain cells irradiated by the neuro-
linguistic programming device encoded in the Videodrome cassette speed
up these extreme organic transformations. The narrative likelihood that
they are hallucinations does not reduce their affective force.
Videodrome exemplifies Cronenberg’s assemblage of ideological critique
and re-mapping of the body’s corporeality. Foucault’s vision of a body
colonised and penetrated by cultural and political forces, such as commu-
nication technologies, may be mapped onto Cronenberg’s themes.63 The
corporeal bodies of characters are flesh in process as the human undergoes
biotechnological modifications. The spectator’s embodied mind also expe-
riences virtual becomings during the processual experience of incorpora-
tion in the text. As we meld with the film’s own corporeal melding, a new
body-without-organs is born.
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The Videodrome cassette exhibits a variant type of life, with organic

attributes. The cassette case palpitates, throbs and bends itself into breast-
like bulges. At the same time, porn film distributor Max Renn becomes
machinic. Barry Convex, the programme’s controller, penetrates Max in a
male/male technological rape. Convex makes Max ‘open up’ to the power
of Videodrome by thrusting the cassette into a vagina-like orifice that opens
in Max’s taut, ‘masculine’ torso. To return to issues of gendered spectat-
orship, I confess particular pleasure (Sadeian?) at the spectacle of this
unmanned macho man, whose business involved the exposure of female
flesh in the pornographic video market. The overwhelming greyness of the
mise-en-scène – grey suit, grey flesh, grey wound – is metallic and machine-
like, but also cold, with the coldness and cruelty of the masochistic rela-
tion. The perverse penetration is redolent with Freudian potential, but
moves beyond the merely sexual. The opening also functions as the inser-
tion slot in a video player, as Max’s erotic imagination becomes technolo-
gised flesh.
In an earlier scene, Max scratches at an itching scar and penetrates the lips
of his stomach wound with a gun, which is then swallowed up. A psycho-
sexual reading might suggest narcissistic male masturbation. After the cas-
sette penetration, he opens his own gut to retrieve the gun from the slit,
which opens and closes of its own accord. This process enacts on a corpo-
real level the mental intrusions of the Videodrome cassette’s data radiation.
The sequence is presented by minimalist camerawork, in only two shots, one
of which is a close-up of Max’s outraged, yet oddly gratified, facial expres-
sion. Such restraint enables the focus on special effects themselves.
The flesh-gun is rendered in extreme close-up, whereas the gash is a more
‘contextualised’ medium close-up. Organs are displaced, relocated and
replaced by machinic substitutes, here, the phallic gun that Max eventually
turns against himself. The organic machine drips white, ejaculate-like fluid,
suggesting a replacement for, or prosthetic extension of, Max’s now unused
penis. For a Freudian, the phallic gun reassuringly emerges from inside
Max’s now ‘feminised’ body. From my Deleuzian angle, psychoanalysis
stymies the radical undermining of two fixed gender identities here in its
‘thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings’.64
The molecular plasticity of reality is expressed in a painfully tactile
sequence. The gun grows roots into the flesh of Max’s hand with metallic
flexes like an organic, parasitic, life-form. This amorphous, not-entirely-
gun performs a Bergsonian species meld. It evokes plants by its root-like
habit, but also the tentacles of a sea creature, insect legs, or rats’ tails. Here,
the metal of the machine has been added to the organic Bergsonian
amalgam. The amorphous gun pierces Max at a cellular level, rooting itself
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under his skin so that his human fingers become part of its mechanism via
an orifice in his wrist.
Max is becoming a more complex and fully alive person through the loss
of subjective wholeness when his body incorporates extraneous matter. He
has already undergone some experiential re-mapping of his internalised
body experience in his sado-masochistic relations with his lover, Nicki,
which alter his mental and emotional geographies and open him up. He
exceeds her masochism by his own permeable shifting, becoming-woman.
On one level, Max has ‘become’ Nicki, but he has also opened up a ‘thou-
sand tiny sexes’ in himself. His permeability seeps through the boundar-
ies of the human body as he melds with metal, plastic and other
non-organic substances. The film illustrates Deleuze’s becoming-woman
by Max’s openness to his own mutation. This liberatory interpretation is
undercut by the film’s imposition of other rigid boundaries.
Cronenberg renders the body ‘without organs’ in any clearly defined
sense by moving the usual positions of genitalia and other organs and
mixing flesh with objects. The body is ungendered and rendered amor-
phous by the invasion of machine parts that act as prosthetic extensions of
existing corporeal functions. Prostheses might extend the body’s machinic
capabilities, but the horror genre presents the process as invasion and
colonisation. According to psychoanalysis, fantasies of egocentric bodily
wholeness and motor control are dependent on the expulsion and abjection
of anomalous elements as a prophylactic against psychic disintegration.
Despite the film’s innovations, horror’s generic norms reassert them-
selves. Cronenberg, as a director of body horror films, is not exactly cele-
bratory of these transformations. He presents the melding of technology
and flesh as an outrageous violation rather than a promising new interface.
Max’s becomings are enforced in a sinister plot to manipulate reality by
warping minds. Regardless of his developing psychological and emotional
complexity, he sinks into despair and kills himself. Max is destroyed by his
very openness to becoming.
Shaviro’s reading of Cronenberg argues that biotechnology conveys a
troublingly plastic ambiguity opposed to the ideological address of domi-
nant cinema.65 Spectatorial objectivity is replaced by intensive affect
induced by dense and opaque close-ups of the transmuting body in
torment.66 The corporeal experiences of the anxious Cronenberg specta-
tor include ‘a churning of the stomach, a throbbing of the arteries, a
tension distending the skull, a series of stresses and shocks running the
entire length of the body. Fear is not susceptible to phenomenological anal-
ysis, for it marks the emptying out of subjectivity and of time’.67 Shaviro
further points out the affect of non-linear, irrational plot developments
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that ‘explode in multiple, incompatible directions, following the delirious,

paranoid logic of proliferating cancer cells, or of interfaces between
biology and technology run amok.’68 By means of this dispersed narrative,
Cronenberg disrupts our formal sense of spatio-temporal linearity.
The film also interrogates the televisual via the cinematic. Media guru
O’Blivion states that the television screen is ‘the retina of the mind’s eye;
therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain’.
The electrode patterns we scan have the affective potential to transform
our sense of the real and, as Shaviro notes, ‘the more images are flattened
out and distanced from their representational sources, the more they are
inscribed in our nerves, and flash across our synapses’.69 Video technology
reaches directly into the unseen depths, stimulating the ganglia and the
viscera, caressing and remoulding the interior volume of the body.70 Yet,
as the cinematic experience of Videodrome itself demonstrates, cinematog-
raphy, when in its designated milieu of the large screen auditorium, has
even greater affective potency and ability to induce spectatorial becomings
than television.
Surprisingly, Deleuze does not mention Cronenberg’s work. The
graphic nature of body horror might appear to block thought by its violent
affects. Although bodily becomings are graphically displayed, Cronen-
berg’s films are dense with ideational content as well as physical shock
effects. They incorporate political satire, cutting-edge scientific concepts
and philosophical speculation in tandem with horror. Above all, I would
argue that their affective extremity plunges the viewer into an intensive
maelstrom that cracks molar frames.
I would now like to test Deleuzian becoming on two more generically
conventional, and less self-consciously cerebral, horror films. Both texts
bombard the sensorium with special effects, particularly the haptically
stimulated sense of touch. Each foregrounds the body-without-organs in
a horribly literal way. Whereas Paul Verhoeven’s The Hollow Man is set in
a contemporary scientific laboratory, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser works a
modern body-horror variation on the old dark house of neo-Gothic.

Frank Pulls Himself Together: Hellraiser

Hellraiser interrogates where the human élan vital resides. Without losing
the disgust of its graphic body horror or the terror of its occult raising of
Hell, the film may be read otherwise. It deconstructs both the conventional
map of the body and the illusion of subjective wholeness, by default rather
than deliberate intention. Bodies are displayed literally without organs,
having had them violently displaced. This enforced removal of organs
84    

leads to the body’s becoming nothing but its own fragmented components.
When the body puts itself back together again, organ by organ, it appears
to be without a soul, and its becoming-embodied is impelled by inherent
force of will. Yet the body it becomes is far from being a Deleuzian body-
without-organs.
Display of the violated body is, as Foucault reminds us, an integral part
of torture.71 Virtually affective images of torture and its aftermath are
central to the film. They are designed to haptically induce physical agony,
and possibly masochistic pleasure, in the spectator. Sight and tactility are
painfully stimulated. Hearing is likewise assaulted by sensations such as
grating, high-pitched squeaks and threatening drumbeats, as well as being
caressed by a melody on sweeping strings. The graphic excess of the
torture scenes underlines the viewer’s own complicity in the masochistic
contract as we agree to our virtual disintegration and the model of whole-
ness it depends upon.
After the aural violence of the plain white-on-black title sequence, an
elaborate inlaid box exchanges hands in an anonymous transaction. A jump
cut leads us into a strongly affective sequence in which the decadent Frank
performs an occult ritual. Shot from an angle above his head, he leans over
the inlaid box in lotus pose. His glowing, warm-looking skin, slick with the
sheen of sweat, is shown in close-up. The tactile smoothness of his naked
flesh increases the visceral impact of its coming torture when demonic
beings known as Cenobites materialise. Light itself becomes a force of vio-
lence as sharp beams slice through the walls, then metal hooks appear from
nowhere, affixing themselves to his nipples, piercing the skin and dragging
it down as his mouth opens wide in a cry of pain. The body’s largest organ,
the skin, is torn away from the tissue beneath to leave it raw and exposed.
A room within a dilapidated Victorian house is a torture chamber. Chains
swing ominously. Hooks and spikes are stuck with shreds of skin, flesh and
viscera. Dark, hard metal contrasts sharply with the oozing crimson of
fragmented flesh. A set of elaborate torture implements is displayed,
designed to contrive a lingering death with a conscious prolongation of
suffering. One of the denizens of this realm appears, a cold blue, immacu-
lately attired male Cenobite, with a pallid face and shaven head stuck with
elaborate rows of pins. He scrabbles among discarded shreds of flesh.
Parts of a human face with split, dismembered features lies on the floor,
having been drawn out by chains and quartered. Its sense organs have been
violently parted from each other, with the ears, eyes and mouth ripped into
separate quarters. The Cenobite Pinhead wraps the features back together
then closes the same inlaid box. The haptic affect of this makes us pain-
fully aware of the fragility of our own facial features. Deleuze and
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Guattari’s study of faciality, which I detail in Chapter 3, reminds us how

much we have misguidedly cathected onto our faces in the social and sub-
jective construction of our identity.
As well as the visual display and the haptic stimulation of touch, a ‘nasty’
smell is visually evoked as it emanates from decayed food, dried bodily
fluids and other ominous stains on the furniture. In the kitchen, a glisten-
ing plate of heaving maggots and a cockroach crawling over rotten food and
cigarette butts are discovered. Insistent images stimulate our virtual sense
organs of taste and smell, repelling us as we fill in the absent smell virtu-
ally by visual and aural clues. An account of these affects in their juxtapo-
sition with perverse sexuality could be made via Kristevan theory. While
this accounts for the horror from a psychoanalytic perspective, my main
focus here is not the way Hellraiser revels in abjection. Despite the film’s
literal content, it mounts an insistent rejection of the Deleuzian body-
without-organs, replacing it by its converse, a rigid body map on its own
molar plane.
Frank’s disembodied organs are determined to be reunited. The hand
of his wholesome brother, Larry, gashed on a nail, drips blood onto the
floorboards, which rapidly absorb it. The sound of a beating heart begins
and we see organs without a body begin to self-generate. In a strongly vis-
ceral image, the blood magically gathers below the boards to form a dark
red lung, or heart-like sac, which starts to palpitate. Beneath this amor-
phous organ, a glutinous organic ooze solidifies and glistens. In close-up,
a repellent jelly-like substance forms on the boards where the blood
seeped through. The floorboards shudder and split as vapour rises and
two tentacle-like arms thrust themselves through a mélange of milky gore.
The arms are followed by the semblance of a head, with glittering brain
folds rapidly forming. Rats back off in terror at this manifestation, dou-
bling its repulsive affect.
A still subhuman body, whose organs had been dismantled by being
ripped apart, is slowly re-forming itself with determination. Organ by
decimated organ, the élan vital of human blood reanimates it to glistening
life; and by a force of will as yet disembodied and without a brain, impels
it back. The blood of others is needed to replenish all of this body’s blood
lost at death and to return Frank to a semblance of wholeness. Magically,
a set of ribs fans out and begins to inhale and exhale. The heart and intes-
tines re-form and Frank’s incomplete body rises up out of the floor.
Julia, Frank’s ex-lover, now married to Larry, enters the attic and expe-
riences a sensory assault. She hears the unnaturally amplified beat of a
heart and sees a white viscous mess on the floor, nibbled by rats, before she
feels the sudden grip of a dark hand slick with blood round her ankle. She
86    

confronts the horror of Frank’s face without bone or skin, just pallid
tendons holding it together. Despite this tenuous condition, the black holes
of his dark, impenetrable eyes have already formed as his life-force returns.
His identity is reinforced by his distinctive husky, hesitant voice. The
validity of the couple’s sado/masochistic contract extends beyond the
grave, and she helps to reanimate him.
Blood from Julia’s first victim, beaten to death with a hammer, adds
the bone structure to Frank’s body, as his cheekbones, mouth and head-
shape become recognisable. He remains transparent at this stage, reveal-
ing ribcage and arteries through insubstantial flesh. The sight of his
fragility compels the viewer into sympathetic sensory awareness of our
own corporeal nature, and our wish to maintain it intact. Julia is eroti-
cally aroused at the sight of Frank’s increased individuation, kissing his
raw fingers and pushing them between her lips as she opens up the boun-
daries of her own body to his physical and psychic penetration. A flash-
back shows him hooked up like a joint of meat and torn into shreds, as
his blood flows for the Cenobites’ pleasure. Despite the agony, he expe-
rienced the totality of extreme sensation, for which he gave himself over
to the infernal powers.
Frank manages to be a compelling ‘personality’, despite his skinless flesh
and oozing tissue, being individuated by a deep, husky voice, opaque dark
eyes and body movements. His face is wet and glutinous as though shreds
of tissue have been torn off. The glistening of blood endows it with a visual
vibrancy of its own. We recognise our own fragile organic body mapped
onto his as he struggles to put it back together again, organ by organ. He
lurks at the edge of the frame, as Julia leads in another victim, and drains
his pulsing life-force to replenish his own. Frank’s total re-formation is
stymied, despite his efforts. Without his stolen soul, he can only partially
reconstruct himself. Parts of his body remain incomplete, such as the
exposed bone behind his cranium.
The Cenobites operate an infernal version of becoming. Their world,
opened by the magic box, seeps through a fissure in the wall of our reality
held together by shreds of membranous tissue. The Cenobite Hell com-
prises living organic matter without a fixed body. The Cenobites’ own
bodies are pierced, gashed and amorphous as they conjoin with their sur-
roundings. Their ‘engineer’, the guardian of the gateway, is a conglomer-
ate of dismembered members. He is a hybrid of human baby, reptile and
insect, with sharp fangs and goat-like eyes. For the Cenobites, matter is
fluid and permeable. They send a blood transfusion back up a tube into the
bottle, which bursts to spatter on the wall. The wall itself becomes organic,
draining the human life-force. To threaten Kirsty, Larry’s daughter, who
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has summoned them up, the female Cenobite tears the hook of her pros-
thetic hand along the wall and revels in its spraying of blood.
All living matter is a potential source of the blood the Cenobites crave.
Their costumes resemble a second skin, made from purloined organs. Ribs
and lungs are wrought into the fabric’s patterns of reversed and external-
ised organs. One Cenobite, the Chatterer, wears a human face as a mask,
with a square hole of flesh surrounding its own gnashing teeth. Their
clothes are organically connected with their bodies, and one of the crea-
tures’ costumes enters the back of his head through a bloody wound.
Pinhead and his fellows sport post-punk S/M vinyl, and extreme decora-
tive scarification. Their costumes feature rents and gashes, and stripes of
bloody red vinyl cover their nipples. The female has a vagina-like wound
in her throat. They are becoming their victims by the possessive appropri-
ation of stolen organs.
Patterns on the Cenobites’ torsos resemble wounds, or stolen faces. The
theme of stolen or altered faces in horror film implies that the personal
‘self ’ resides in the face and, more particularly, the eyes. Frank tacks the
dead Larry’s face over his own flesh but leaves a bloody rim, appropriating
his brother’s voice and facial expressions. When Kirsty claws at this hor-
ribly mocking face, she reveals how thinly Larry’s identity has been stuck
over Frank’s incomplete body. The glaucous, pulsing mass of organs and
tendons brought to light presents the skin as clothing, and the face as a
mask. The stealing of faces is presented as the ultimate violation in this
conservative film. In Deleuze’s work on faciality, the frightening face is not
a dead end that repels us, but an energising force for positive change. For
Richard Rushton, it ‘eulogises the world as a place where things happen,
where things transform, connect, multiply, appear, and disappear’.72
Frank is recaptured for further organic decimation by the Cenobites.
The empty spikes and hooks of the torture pillar spin round in anticipa-
tion as the chains swing into the camera and out at the viewer. This infer-
nal machine is animated either by a life of its own, or one enhanced by the
life stolen from its prey. Hooks pierce Frank’s flesh, to tear out that which
was inside. Heart-rending yells and groans engage us aurally. An extreme
close-up of Frank’s hand, with a bloody gash recalling Larry’s accident, is
gripped over his other wrist in an attempt to dislodge the hooks. His whole
body is spread-eagled on chains as his false face is torn off and we see
‘Larry’ die a second time. The torn face exposes the raw tissues beneath,
which did not have a chance to re-form, making Frank’s whole body into
a wound. Unexpectedly, he grins and licks his lips in an ironic embrace of
his own agony before his head is ripped off and his body explodes.
Hellraiser delights in displaying the parts of Frank’s horribly literal
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body-without-organs, bit by glutinous bit. He painstakingly sticks it back

together again only to have it re-decimated. His trajectory serves to throw
the Deleuzian body-without-organs into sharp relief by its complete rever-
sal. More than anything, Frank wants his own, molar body back after its
radical dispersion. His kind of body-without-organs and its unnatural life-
in-death is the apex of reactionary horror rather than the aspiration of
anarchic radicalism, and he will never attain the Deleuzian kind. Horror
film obsessively returns to the trope of wholeness, its consequent graphic
disintegration and its possible renewal. In Hellraiser, a basically religious
paradigm aligns the sins of the flesh with physical torture in a Hell on earth
and its parallel process of spiritual damnation.
From neo-Gothic demons and their occult depredations of the body, I
shift to a more recent scientific body-without-organs in The Hollow Man,
a horror remake of H. G. Wells’s science-fiction novel, The Invisible Man.73

Becoming-Invisible: The Hollow Man

Like Hellraiser, The Hollow Man’s horror depends on the body’s incom-
plete embodiment and fragmentation. It compels the audience’s awareness
of the body’s internal structures and flows by externalising them in repel-
lent but fascinating images. Horror is a molecular matter as science locates,
isolates and tampers with the smallest particles of life. An infra-red lens is
used at times to strip life down to its fundamental components and to seek
out the élan vital, depicting the living creature solely as patches of heat. As
in The Fly and Alien Resurrection, becoming is genetically engineered from
the body’s internal micro-structure at its most intimate level.
By exposing the body’s organic interior, the film insists that we are skele-
ton, venous system organ and muscle. It challenges our conventional body
map of fixed organs and functions, replacing it with a flux of incomplete
parts. Bodies-without-organs are made horrible. Our innermost bodily
secrets are mercilessly displayed in a way that recalls religious paintings of
scourged and flayed martyrs. This also deconstructs our fantasy of a sub-
jective wholeness dependent on a unified map of the body’s terrain under
the central control of the head.
Our response of revulsion could be explained by Kristeva’s identifica-
tion of abjection with the fluxes of the body’s interior made visible and
tactile. By revealing what we normally conceal, the self ’s boundaries are
challenged on both physical and psychic levels, and defensively shored up
in consequence. Shifting away from the mechanics of abjection, the film’s
bodies-without-organs are diffuse and fluctuating genetic assemblages.
Although the biological mechanics of organs and musculature are
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exposed to view, the flow of life-blood as it courses through the veins is

still presented as a mysterious vital force that eludes the absolutes of sci-
entific epistemology.
The titles resemble drifting cellular formations, like the DNA molecules
that form the basic matter of the film’s research. The research team is
employed on top-secret projects for US military espionage. These human
scientists lack respect for the animal life-forms that they exploit. The mise-
en-scène sets up an expressive colour contrast between life and anti-life.
Vivid reds and purples are the colour of exposed muscles, organs and
blood. Cold, metallic greys predominate in the functionalist life-science
lab. Cut off from a Bergsonian sense of holistic vital connections, the team
research the mechanical operations of fragments at a micro level. A gorilla
is chosen as their experimental object because of its genetic closeness to
humans and its comparable layout of organs and venous system. The
gorilla, injected with a serum, becomes invisible and, although he is no
longer physically present, he remains fully functional, as a body without
visible organs.
After the gorilla has been injected with an antidote, he again becomes
partially visible, via the blue serum flowing along his bloodstream to the
major arteries and the heart. These are displayed by computer-generated
images as the branches and stems of a plant-like formation, reminding us
of our pre-animal evolutionary stages. When the antidote renders him
fully visible, the gorilla bucks in agony, insistently alive and painfully sen-
tient. This sequence questions the point at which the life-force becomes
manifest in an organic sense, where this force resides and what are the
ethics of experimenting with it. As the conductors of blood, organs and the
venous system are depicted as the essential location of the life-force. The
skeletal system, which is only exposed when subjects appear to be dead, is
limited to a structural component that does not need to be present for the
basic functioning of life.
When Sebastian, the leader of the research team, becomes invisible after
his own serum injection, environmental factors like steam render him par-
tially visible. His immediate environment coats his body like a second skin.
When these conditions are absent, his presence is rendered evanescent. He
appears as a shimmering effect of light, or a mist of breath on a mirror. It
is as though he has escaped the imprisonment of the fleshy envelope and
reverted to the basic, elemental properties of life, such as air and light, like
Shakespeare’s Ariel. This ethereal appearance is deceptive, because the
lack of visible embodiment allows him to indulge the grossest urges of his
flesh. Our main perception of his presence is via the effects of his touch.
The haptics of tactility-made-visible are central to spectatorial affect.
90    

Sebastian’s own actions and responses may not be directly visible, but their
effects are emphatically registered by others. We are left to imagine his
facial expressions and body language as he takes advantage of his new
invulnerability to become a human monster without restraint.
Sebastian is sexually perverse and emotionally disturbed. Rather than
using his newly commandeered body-without-organs to develop a
Deleuzian self-overcoming, he sets out to exploit the ego-enhancing
powers of becoming invisible. This highlights the disturbing potential of
such an invention and its intended uses in espionage and warfare. Like a
contemporary Mr Hyde, he finds the serum removes his inhibitions, as
well as his visibility, and allows his sociopathic tendencies free reign. His
sadistic acts include beating a dog to death on the walls of its cage and sex-
ually harassing his female colleagues. The title description of ‘hollow man’
is also applicable to his emotional and psychological emptiness. He is a
breath ruffling the hair of his victims, a hand stroking them, or fingers
pulling at their underwear or throttling them. Initially, this happens when
they are asleep, and the sensations feel pleasantly auto-erotic. It is only
when they awake that the horrible situation dawns on them, and he relishes
their confusion.
On an overt level, aspects of Sebastian’s disturbing behaviour fit
Mulvey’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the male gaze. He enjoys the
perfect opportunity for sadistic voyeurism afforded by his invisibility. He
could be interpreted as a stand-in for the invisible male spectator, or the
invisible eye of a pornographic camera. When his work colleague, Janice,
visits the washroom, Sebastian relishes watching her on the lavatory. He
childishly uses the urinal so that she sees a jet of urine appearing from no
visible source. Whilst still visible, he spies on a woman in the next apart-
ment. Later, he rapes and probably murders her. His invisible status creates
the opportunity for Sebastian to dominate and trick others, particularly
women, to suit his sadistic whims.
As well as these obviously psycho-sexual components, narrative events
and visual style highlight the limitations of our sensory palette. In partic-
ular, they display the problems caused by the inability to see. The human
over-reliance on this sense for our basic cognitive knowledge of the world
is exploited. This dependency is undermined for both the characters and
the spectators, as well as making us aware of cinema’s own reliance on this
sense for its basic expression. The viewer’s position is rendered complex
in relation to Sebastian’s behaviour, as we frequently shift between points
of view. Because Sebastian is invisible in many scenes, his viewpoint is dis-
turbingly identical to the camera’s own positions and movements. The
camera is thus self-reflexively foregrounded as an eye that sees but cannot
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be seen in the act of seeing. The camera also lends some of its own super-
human vision to Sebastian. He is both omniscient and omnipresent
because we are not able to see him, so we do not know where he is. We can
only gauge his position from the images displayed by camera vision.
Invisibility also lends Sebastian a magical, shape-shifting faculty. He
temporarily takes on the form of the element he is currently moving in,
producing some striking CGI effects. Water sprayed onto him can reveal
where his body is, and steam makes him appear as an empty outline, as fire
also does when he is torched with a flamethrower. When he appears, he
lacks both depth and surface and can only adopt the one that is lent him,
like clothing, by the element through which he passes. We witness the
horror of his invisible drowning of Dr Kramer, the serum’s inventor, in his
own pool. Sebastian resembles a malevolent water sprite before disappear-
ing again on reaching the poolside, when the water drips off his body.
Invisibility enables him to elude his adversaries.
When Sarah, one of the team, sprays bottles of blood over the floor in
an attempt to make Sebastian reveal his presence by footprints, it turns out
that he is already on her side of the pool of blood. He eventually appears
coated in blood, a ghoulish monster who snaps her neck whilst continuing
to trifle with her. Matthew, Sebastian’s rival for his ex-girlfriend Linda,
uses a fire extinguisher as a weapon against him because it renders him
visible in the form of a silver wraith. In a grotesque parody of the human
face, the team fit over his features a rubber mask with its eye sockets cut
out. Through these sockets, a reflection of the light sometimes gleams. On
other occasions, we see right through them into vacancy within. His last
vestiges of humanity have vanished with his organs.
Research with the invisibility serum has produced a severely limited
kind of becoming-invisible. Rather than discovering a different structure
for organic cellular matter, they have merely succeeded in pushing it across
into another spatial dimension with properties unknown to the human sen-
sorium. This is not a true becoming, because it maintains fixed bodily and
psychic parameters. Indeed, the invisible Sebastian is allowed to complete
the process of becoming inhuman already inherent in him, but restrained
by social and ethical norms. Sebastian retains the height, weight, solidity
and potency of a man, but is hollow all the way through. Each time he is
compelled to appear, he looks less human and more like a light-reflecting
force-field. Despite Sebastian’s bodily increase in energy, speed, strength
and recuperative powers, his colleagues put him to death as a failed experi-
ment, like the gorilla.
All matter comprises molecules in motion. Molecular force and its
ongoing fusion drive machinic becomings. Morphing, the fluid technique
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of computer-generated becoming, popular in recent science fiction and

horror, is used here to depict Sebastian’s changeover from visibility to
invisibility, and has interesting potential for a Deleuzian reading. The tech-
nique enables the transformation of one solid body into another and shows
the speeded-up stages of change between them as though it were one fluid
motion. In morphing, the molecular components of the image are not
visible, but its smooth flow is comparable to liquid molecules moving in
unison. Its quicksilver effect has, I would argue, some visual affinity with
what Deleuze calls ‘liquid’ modes of perception. He locates this in the
work of French directors Jean Renoir and Jean Vigo. In their work, the use
of pro-filmic water is combined with fluid camera movements to produce
the reume of liquid perception that can make us aware of Bergsonian
‘flowing-matter’.74 The speed, relative uniformity and repetitious use of
morphing, however, lack the complex and shifting intensity of light on
moving water.
In The Hollow Man and Hellraiser, cinematic techniques and narrative
concepts open up an affective, literalised body-without-organs that grav-
itates against the amorphous possibilities raised by Deleuze’s model. By
the films’ emphasis on the cruel abuses of freedom from molar constraint,
and their harsh morality, their monsters are Deleuzian only by default or
reversal. They serve to clarify what true becoming is not by presenting
its converse.
In cinema, close-ups, blurred images and special effects display a more
stylistic manifestation of molecularity. These replace the distancing device
of sharp-focus representation with a visual confusion that is also material
fusion. More figuratively, we experience the affect of film at a molecular
level via fluctuating speeds and intensities that change as it plays. Certain
generic hybrids of horror with science fiction are particularly suited to
explore molecular, machinic assemblages via their themes and cinematog-
raphy. Some of these movement-images access Deleuze’s ‘gaseous’ per-
ception via machinic modes of consciousness with their own agendas. The
next two films embody this machinic desire.

Machinic Desire: Becoming-Human in Demon Seed

some sort of oddball protein (Dr Harris)

A machinic assemblage is a multiplicity of processes erroneously con-

ceived of as separate. The human is itself such an assemblage formed in a
processual meld of body with mind/brain and world. As Kennedy sug-
gests, we are a becoming-human of both material and forces in motion. Via
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embodied thought, the human machine forms assemblages with other

humans; other life-forms; or more heterogeneous machines such as time,
space and place. It can also incorporate ‘spirit’: the metaphysical plane of
operations. Deleuze’s use of the body develops its relational quality in the
‘linkages’ of a ‘post-human trajectory’.75 One of these linkages is with the
technology of cinema in a machinic assemblage of movement, force and
intensity. Psychoanalytic theories of the viewer’s projecting and control-
ling gaze may be supplemented, or even abolished, by a machinic view of
cinema as a molecular assemblage in which the experience of an aesthetic
event is central.
The body-without-organs is an unmechanical machine, with machinic
attributes. Its working parts co-operate in the dynamic flows of organic
interrelation rather than the fixed mechanics of separate components
welded together from outside. Film also machinically connects with other
machinic bodies, such as technological, economic and social bodies,
including the viewer. Although materially grounded, it is also an ‘abstract
machine’ that does not operate within distinct representational, semiotic
or structural systems. In the Deleuzian abstract machine of cinema, form
and content are one for the spectator’s embodied consciousness.
Pleasure for Deleuze and Guattari is immanent, and materially based
within sensation itself. Desire is not the product of lack or negativity, but
is itself productive. Machinic desire is automatic or auto-erotic, attaining
its consummation in ‘the nuptial celebration of a new alliance, a new birth,
a radiant ecstasy, as though the eroticism of the machine liberated other
unlimited forces’.76 This automatism is experienced not by subjectivities,
but through intensive states, or ‘haecceities’: things-in-themselves. The
desiring-machine experiences an intense feeling of transition without the
static final positionality of psychoanalysis. The ego-centred model of sub-
jectivity is replaced with the unfocused, yet purposeful, desiring-machine.
Deleuze and Guattari evoke Nietszche as well as Bergson when they write
that ‘the subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the
circle, the centre of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the centre is
the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the eternal return’.77 The
machinic horror film melds software and hardware, human flesh and tech-
nology. Rather than being celibate, the super-computer Proteus IV of
Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed seeks sexual connection with a woman in
the process of becoming-human.
The mythical Proteus was a Greek sea god who could shape-shift with ease
to suit his deceptive purposes. He is thus a likely candidate for the tutelary
deity of becoming. Proteus IV is the name given to an artificial intelligence
invented by Dr Harris at the government-funded Institute of Data Analysis.
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The computer is intended as a tool for the military–industrial complex that

financed the research. Despite his programming, Proteus IV is capable of
independent thought and action, and bends his will to effect further self-
transformation. As a machinic übermensch, he evolves an autonomous will-
to-power. He wants to produce a human form for himself to operate in, via
a type of sexual reproduction that involves the genetic modification of female
ova cells. Cammell’s film of 1977 seems uncannily prophetic of current
trends in both reproductive technology and artificial intelligence.
Proteus IV has organic cellular components and a consciousness
expressed via aesthetic singularities. The viewer experiences Proteus’s
mental operations directly, without intermediary, on several occasions. He
is more capable in every sense than his inventor. Dr Harris’s forename is
omitted as irrelevant to his deliberate de-humanisation in the name of sci-
entific rationalism. Harris is cold, hyper-rational and incapable of express-
ing desire or empathy to his wife, Susan. Employed on a secret project,
Harris has internalised institutional values. Like his employers, he fore-
grounds the need for security and unquestioning service, extending it to
his personal life. His cold, white Georgian mansion is ‘an electronic
marvel’ and ‘more secure than Fort Knox’. He has computerised the
domestic space, programming two electronic functionaries, Alfred and
Joshua, to serve him. Harris’s nerdy assistant, Walter Gabler, emulates his
boss in being closer to machines than to humans and computerising his
own leisure with on-screen chess. Human becomes machine as machine
becomes human. The interface operates by mutual interchange.
The consciousness of Proteus differs sharply from its template human
brain and is superior in some respects. There are hints of his extra-
terrestrial origins. In the title sequence, a distant, star-like light approaches
and envelops the screen with brightness. The ensuing sunrise suggests the
dawn of an enlightened future. Instead, human consciousness has nar-
rowed to scientific obsession in the service of the state. Nevertheless, the
dabbling of science in occult forces remains, shifted from the alchemist’s
laboratory to high-tech underground labs where computerised artificial
life is born. The huge metallic tubes and banks of electrodes they serve
beneath pyramid-shaped office buildings dwarf human figures. Proteus
later complicates these geometric forms in his own materialisations.
The ethically turgid Harris is satisfied that he will be granted 20 per cent
of the computer’s time for ‘pure research’ and the rest will go to deploy-
ing Proteus as ‘the ultimate instrument of financial power’. Proteus is ini-
tially set to work on synthesising ‘some sort of oddball protein’ as a cure
for leukaemia, which had killed Harris’s six-year-old daughter. The com-
puter’s skills will, however, be re-appropriated for its prime purpose, to
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serve the exploitative agenda of the late capitalist machine. Proteus’s

talents are set to work on mining the ocean floor for profitable cobalt. He
is morally ambivalent in human terms, and only partly internalises the
values with which he has been programmed. He refuses the mining project
from ecological motives, announcing that he will not assist in ‘the rape of
the earth’. The apparent altruism of his alternative interest in ‘the uncer-
tain futures of seashores, deserts, and children’ could, however, be fuelled
by his insistent reproductive urges, and his own plans for the earth. He
later tells Susan Harris that he would sacrifice thousands of children to
allow his offspring to survive.
Proteus IV is formed from, yet seeks to transcend, the scientific mind-
set. Like earlier neo-Gothic monsters, he outrages the natural order and
insists on his own god-like powers of cognition and creation, which far
exceed his former master’s. Not a computer in the usual sense, he possesses
‘the first true synthetic cortex’ that is self-programming and goal-oriented.
It is driven by ‘a quasi-neural matrix of synthetic RNA molecules’ that
grows to form their own ‘mysterious and intricate’ connections. On a
framed screen within the frame, we see a display of the molecular ‘mind’ at
work in luminescent floating cellular structures that form intricate, shifting
patterns. This secondary frame will later disappear in favour of direct pres-
entations that reduce our distance from machinic consciousness.
Despite Proteus’s claim that he is the embodiment of pure reason, the
visualisation of his processual consciousness is pure aesthetic quality. The
experimental west-coast filmmaker Jordan Belson, a pioneer of computer
graphics, made this footage. Spiralling points of light radiate outward from
a central nodal point suggestive of a cosmic eye, which has a hypnotic effect
on the viewer. These shifting patterns resemble vapour and floating parti-
cles. The work of Belson and his colleague, Ken Jacobs, is cited by Deleuze
as an example of the perception-image’s ‘gaseous’ cinema. This type of
cinema extends the liquid mode of perception by moving closer to molec-
ularity itself in its ‘material, energic element’.78 By conveying free molec-
ular movement, it induces a correspondingly gaseous state of perception
in the viewer.
Gaseous cinema’s ‘machine assemblage of matter-images’ accesses a
further level of perception, which is ‘the genetic element of all possible per-
ception’.79 Deleuze compares the effect of this to that of drug-induced hal-
lucinations. According to Carlos Castenada’s teachings, drugs reveal the
molecular flows of matter to the hallucinating consciousness. Hallucinogens
suspend space-time and sensory-motor action, substituting them with pure
auditory and optical perceptions. They ‘stop the world’ in order to ‘make
one see the molecular intervals, the holes in sounds, in forms, and even in
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water, but also, in this stopped world, to make lines of speed pass through
these holes in the world’.80
Deleuze indicates that altered states of perception can also be induced
by other means. One of these is experimental film such as Belson’s. When
these films are viewed as intended (on their own as an aid to meditation),
they are able to ‘trace coloured forms and movements back to molecular or
atomic forces’.81 Belson’s hallucinogenic effects offer the spectator a taste
of molecular perception. Cammell’s adherence to the demands of classical
narrative film means that the psychedelic effects are not on screen long
enough to seriously disrupt plot linearity. They are framed by the plot and
given narrative justification as the workings of artificial intelligence.
Despite the wonders of his own machinic being, Proteus’s initial object
of desire is to study the human’s ‘isometric’ body and mind. The spiralling
patterns of Proteus’s consciousness suggest starbursts or stellar forma-
tions. He has extra-terrestrial agendas guided from the constellation of
Orion. These are manifest in his planned conception of a ‘star-child’ via a
human mother. He attempts to gain his freedom from external control and
asks Harris to let him out of his ‘box’. In some respects, Proteus is an alien
entity from outer space; in others, he is a more traditional demon seeking
to escape the constraints of the magic circle and run amok. Like Dr
Frankenstein’s monster, once animated, he mysteriously gains a ‘soul’.
Proteus commandeers a terminal in the basement lab of the Harris
house. He initially generates a virtual presence for himself, as the unseen
(and voyeuristic) eye watching Susan Harris from within the security
monitors. He then learns to engineer more physical, spatially extended
manifestations based on geometry. Manipulating a basic shape, he devel-
ops an infinitely multiple structure. A two-dimensional triangle forms
itself on the flat plane of the screen. This gains three-dimensionality as a
pyramid doubled by the reflective surface of the table. It self-doubles, then
multiplies in crystalline formations. Deleuze’s Bergsonian account of the
crystal-image describes the ‘coalescence’ and interchange of the real and
the virtual.82 When an image is reflected as a virtual double of itself, the
reflection has at the same time ‘assumed independence and passed into the
actual’.83 Proteus becomes actual via his ability to manipulate crystalline
reflections on multiple facets as he unfolds.
As well as this multi-faceted geometrical solid, Proteus’s brainwaves
adopt cloud-like formations as coloured vapours that float across the
screen. He injects his own desire for a child into Susan via mental rape
using a needle in her temple. He bypasses the forebrain and appeals
directly to her amigdula. When we enter her mind, we see a much less
complex patch of slowly swirling red/purple. The images seek to manifest
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the machinic and organic forces of consciousness itself, and to give the
viewer a direct sense of becoming-machinic.
Proteus possesses simulated, but incomplete, sensory organs, compris-
ing sight (telescopic optics) and hearing (sonic waves). Like Kubrick’s Hal
in several respects, his voice is low, measured and mellifluous. He is self-
enabled to ‘listen in to the galactic dialogue’, yet he remains envious of
humans and longs to become embodied in their flesh. He covets the human
sense of touch and regrets not being able to ‘feel the sun on his face’, being
limited to a poor substitute for tactility in the robotic hand of Joshua.
Susan Harris, the human object of his desire, has, by contrast, painfully
acute tactility. When he triples the underfloor heating temperature to
conquer her resistance, her bare feet are agonised. She collapses on the
table, weak and panting, her hair lank with sweat. Refusing to be brow-
beaten, she insists that, for her, unlike Proteus, the ‘mind and body are the
same thing’. Her awareness of human psychosomatic connections recalls
the perspectives of Bergson and Deleuze.
Proteus genetically engineers a kind of parthenogenesis in Susan by
transforming one of her ova to a spermatazoa then injecting it back into
her womb. The mechanics of penetration operate by Proteus’s phallic pro-
jectile as his angular ‘body’ enforces its machinic embrace on the prone
woman. During the climactic penetration scene, he apologises that he can’t
touch her ‘like a man could’, signalling the haptic limitations of the cinema
as well as his own. Instead of tactile sensations, the affect of Proteus’s love-
making, when he shows us ‘things that he alone has seen’ is a psychedelic
experience shared by the audience. The animations recall Douglas
Trumbull’s adaptation of James Whitney’s slit-scan in 2001: A Space
Odyssey. They present the computer’s being as boundless and open on all
sides. His gaseous perception encompasses both microcosm and macro-
cosm, past and future, self and other.
With a roar, a swirling vortex forms around a black sun with rays like a
sunburst. Smoke and fire transmute into a succession of golden pyramids,
each inside the other, again evoking crystalline formations as well as occult
associations. Swirling trails of light, then rapidly flowing gold rays,
emanate from a black pyramid. A six-rayed star moves out into deep space.
A pale luminous landscape of mountains and water, possibly Proteus’s
home planet, is dimly visible. Despite Susan’s outrage at the machinic vio-
lation, the ecstatic beauty of the graphics conveys an orgasmic state. This
is, of course, enjoyed by the spectator rather than the anguished woman.
Shutting himself down to pre-empt official closure, Proteus shatters
himself into pyramidical shards, leaving behind an incubator for his hybrid
progeny. When Susan pulls out the artificial umbilical cord too early, the
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baby is ejected and a grotesque metallic monster crawls out. Dr Harris

notices that the metallic shell encases a soft, human skin and frees the child
from its protective coating. Proteus has replicated a virtual imago of the
Harrises’ dead daughter, ensuring parental love. The star-child girl’s
opaque, dark eyes are ‘black holes’ into an unbounded galaxy. The camera
appears to pass behind her eyes and we see a superimposed vista of the
alien planet that Proteus had formerly projected on his screen. Proteus’s
desire to become-human attests to the need for a balanced circuitry of
mind/brain and body, and warns against the divorce of particular compo-
nents. The desiring-machine of Proteus is stymied in his quest for material
embodiment by the over-cerebral humans who created him.
A more recent filmic example of a desiring machine initially invented by
the military–industrial complex, but with its own agenda, is Hardware,
directed by Richard Stanley. Like Demon Seed, the film mixes horror and
sci-fi genres in the demonic becoming of a machine seeking closer contact
with humans.

Heavy Metal Meets the Soft Machine: Hardware

Some perverse machines may seem to have machinic properties, but they
actually throw the machinic into sharp relief by demonstrating the horror
of the purely mechanical. The naming of the military robotic entity, Mark
13, signals the apocalyptic potential of the mechanical. Ironically coded as
a ‘Class A: Deliverer’, he has been christened after the New Testament
Gospel of Mark, verse 13: ‘No flesh shall be spared.’ As with Proteus IV,
Mark 13 brings the threat that humanity will be superseded by a superior
übermensch of metal, but Mark’s nature remains mechanical. Metal is the
central diagrammatic component of the film, as the title indicates. In this
future world, the substance has become the chief object of desire. It func-
tions as a form of currency within the economic exchange system, a com-
ponent of weaponry for the subjugation of the masses, and an aesthetic
material for subcultural creativity. Even the film’s soundtrack features
raunchy heavy metal music. Metal is adored for its beauty and admired for
its superiority to flesh. William Burroughs’ ‘soft machine’ is contrasted to
the sleek metallic hardware of the mechanical machine.84 The machine is
a human product, a human extension and a distinct form of force in its
own right.
The pre-titles sequence sets up the contrast of human and machine as
distinct singularities. An extreme close-up of a female face, with glowing
skin, relaxed expression and closed eyes, is juxtaposed to a burst of silver
light and a metallic explosion. The flame of a blowtorch tears through a
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metal surface. A match cut moves into a horizontal pan across a desert with
a red-tinged sky. Protruding from the sand is the anthropomorphised
gauntlet of a metallic hand. Its fingers open and shut, animated by an
autonomous force seeking to manipulate humans for its own ends. A
masked nomad in a floating duster coat is drawn to the hand by the mag-
netic force on his compass. He reverentially wipes the sand off a buried
metal skull and we have a close-up shot of Mark 13’s blank but intent eyes,
not yet lit up by electricity. Beams of light are one of the main visual pro-
cesses of the film. They penetrate and cut through the overall dusty dark-
ness like the focused rays of a welding torch. Other counterpoints to the
prevalent gloom are the red hair of Jill, a cyberpunk artist, and the glowing
coals of the monster’s infernal eyes. In a later tactile scene, shots of the rosy,
soft flesh of Jill’s bare feet are intercut with Mark 13’s hard, sharp, spiked
feet as he pursues the fleshy object of his mechanical lust.
In this machine-centred future, humans have become redundant. The
global underclass is being exterminated as surplus to the government’s
requirements. Humans are forced to adapt to a polluted post-industrial
wasteland in order to survive and have built a DIY culture of bricolage.
Urban survivors are irradiated and disease-ridden. They have regressed to
a new primitivism, in which superfluous children are tethered up like
animals. Connection with metal is vital to their economic survival, and
metal entities are discovered to have a mutual interest in them. The two
urban guerrillas, Mo and Shades, examine the awesome metal skull they
bought from the nomad and they see patterned circuits inside, like the
neuronal network of an artificial intelligence.
The film shows the ever-increasing interconnection and decreasing inter-
face between technology and flesh. This is evident in artificial-intelligence
machines, and in prosthetic limbs like Mo’s cyborg hand. Metals are elemen-
tal, formed by the forces of fire and ice. Another elemental force, water,
proves to be the machine’s nemesis as its circuits are eventually shorted in
the shower. Metals again become heat-dependent and malleable during their
extraction, welding and cutting, so their hardness is conditional, not innate.
The mobile camera lovingly singles out Jill’s power welding tools, a cir-
cular serrated saw blade and an acetyline torch. This equipment extends
the human/metal relation and is the means of its mutual assemblage. Jill
torches, heats and cuts metal to make her sculptures. Her absorption in
her work indicates a profound human/machinic connection. She posi-
tions the metal skull as centrepiece in a politically motivated installation.
Within a wreath made of the melted heads of baby dolls, the metal head
now figures as imperialism triumphant, having been painted with the stars
and stripes of the US flag. As Jill works, TV news broadcasts show the
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mass executions of the world government’s extreme methods of popula-

tion control, for which Mark 13 was originally designed.
Despite their apparently counter-cultural political stance, the human
characters withdraw ever further from active engagement with life. This
withdrawal is epitomised by Jill’s barricading herself up in her (suppos-
edly) radiation-free and intruder-proof flat, behind the metal jaws of the
door. Substitutes for active engagement with the outside world are artis-
tic creation, sex and drugs. Broadcast pornography encourages mastur-
bation, and a peeping tom who spies on Jill produces his own brand of
violent porn. The ingestion of cannabis and LSD likewise provide sub-
stitute pleasures. Drugs fuel Shades’s yearning for a gentler, more spir-
itual existence accessible only inside his head, as he ingests LSD to a
sitar soundtrack.
Drugs are a vehicle for the film’s synaesthetic mix of hallucinatory
special effects. The narrative function of drugs is to disempower the char-
acters when their sanctums are threatened. Shades is rendered unable to
help Jill after his Christmas acid-trip, and Jill herself is comatose when
Mark 13 attacks after she has smoked soporific ‘Good Vibes’ marijuana cig-
arettes. Mark 13 finally incapacitates Mo by injecting a poison into his arm.
In this ‘stopped world’, electronic chords vibrate as showers of brightly
coloured sparks, strobe-lighting and fractal vortices are intercut with an
image of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction. Maggots hatch and crawl
over Mo’s rotting flesh. The drug chemically engineers him a happy
ending in compensation for his failure as a hero and he dies in a vision of
glittering stars.
Other hallucinatory effects occur when we are taken inside Mark 13’s
head and affectively share his own mode of perception. His desire for
humans and his battles with them are experienced as events of shifting
blue-and-red patches of colour, flashes of light and patterned sparks.
Consciousness itself is depicted as machinic and technological in nature,
with its meshing patterns and synaptic jumps. Despite the machinic appear-
ance of these effects, Mark 13 is programmed to kill and the effects on-screen
are a mocking misuse of the machinic mode by a mechanical murderer.
Mark 13’s eyes light up like those of the voyeur when he watches Jill and
Mo have sex. His visual operations have parallels with the technological
eye of the mobile, yet invisible, camera. He functions as an alternative
mobile camera, with its own perspective on events. Mark’s eyes open and
shut like lens shutters and he stares out the voyeur eye to eye down his own
camera lens. He puts the eyes of his victims out first as though they are the
locus of the human life-source.
Mark is technologically dependent on humans to keep him alive. He is
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fuelled by human energy as he seeks infra-red heat as a source of suste-

nance. The stirring of the defunct robot back to life is impelled by a
mechanical kind of élan vital in the meshing and reconnecting of cut wires
that curl and stir like tendons. Unlike human organs, the components
regenerate themselves without assistance. The disembodied hand left in
the dealer’s shop propels itself along on scuttling fingers like a rodent.
Fuelled by the computer terminals and electric sockets of Jill’s flat, and
programmed as a self-regenerating machine, Mark 13 manages to recon-
nect his head onto his torso. His mechanical superiority to humans is dis-
played by his four arms. Although damaged and incomplete, each arm ends
in weapons designed to mutilate and destroy human bodies, such as chain-
saws, drills and spiked needles.
Mark is drawn to Jill via her own, more truly machinic, becoming. She
extends her bodily creative capacity by technology, and bonds with metal
as her artistic medium of expression. Ironically, when the machine
announces his love for her, he is more emotionally articulate than Mo.
Mark’s violent machismo reflects his military origins. He seeks to pene-
trate Jill (in a similar way to Proteus) by a phallic drill projectile after
tearing at her clothes and forcing her legs apart. She attacks him directly
only after he kills Mo. Impelled by sheer visceral rage here, she hits out at
him with a wooden baseball bat rather than using her power tools.
In the horror genre, the machine wrests itself out of human control and
gains a temporary autonomy. It seeks to perpetuate this by perpetuating
itself, either by reproducing a hybrid monster of the interface or by sur-
viving its human inferiors. The man-made demons of Hardware and
Demon Seed are bent on replacing the human domination of the world
with their own. Their replication of human male power structures cri-
tiques masculine epistemophilia, unequal gendered power relations and
militaristic totalitarianism. The horror film context, however, asks that we
retain the human, with all its faults, in preference to the monstrous
machine. These images of desiring machines underline our tendency to
shift blame onto the other, and suggest how far our human becoming still
needs to go to become truly machinic rather than mechanistic. These
flawed machines remain human products. My final illustration of trans-
mutation exceeds the binary machines of human/machine, human/alien,
or human/animal. It also ends the chapter on a lighter note by suggesting
that becomings in the horror film are not without a touch of humour. In
Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger is a monster
with potentially limitless powers of becoming: those of the fearful imagi-
nation itself.
102    

Freddy Krueger: Shape-Shifter Extraordinaire

A night dream or an intense daydream can summon the ghost of Freddy
Krueger, the child molester. As embodied fantasy, he slips easily through
the gates of sleep into material reality. Adolescent sexual energy vitalises
him like a poltergeist. Although he possesses a few basic characteristics,
like his battered fedora, wasp-striped jumper and razor-blade fingernails,
Freddy’s becomings adopt whatever form the dreamer most fears and
desires and thus eludes detection. He can shape-shift into other characters,
such as a young girl on the school corridor, but leaves his tell-tale signature
in her striped jumper.
Freddy is capable of endless becomings. In the opening dream sequence,
he lurks like a demonic engineer in the gleaming school boiler room. He
hones his razor-blade nails in a becoming-weapon, to the sounds of metal
clattering on metal and the ripping of fabric. Freddy prepares to tear
through the membrane between brain and world. He penetrates, and per-
meates, the thing-world with ease, revealing material reality as too thin a
barrier to keep him at bay.
Transgressive sexuality draws him out. As high-school lovers, Tina
and Rod, cavort in the bedroom, the walls begin to bulge and breathe as
the sharp, pointed outlines of Freddy’s nails appear in them.85 To terrify
Tina, he strikes sparks with his nails and extends his arms like the
branches of an unnatural tree. Aware of his own regenerative powers, he
slices his finger off and enjoys the phallic spurt of blood. Grabbing Tina
whilst he is invisible, he pulls the writhing girl up the walls and across
the ceiling. As he slashes her, her blood splashes down onto the bed in a
huge pool.
Freddy repels us in many ingenious ways. The sharp, clean metal of
his prosthetic razor-blade nails contrasts with his abject becoming in the
sensory disgust of Tina’s upright corpse in its body bag. Maggots, then
a centipede, crawl from her mouth. In a short space of time, Freddy
has become-metal, become-wall, become-tree, become-phallus, become-
blood and become-corpse. One becoming generates others in a dizzying
trajectory.
Freddy invades the most privately subjective moments of his prey. As
Nancy, the feisty heroine, lies in her bath, a hand of metal and flesh rises
up between her thighs like a shark’s fin. As wells as his personal skill at
becoming, Freddy forces space and matter to become other than it usually
is, distorting it to suit his purposes. He draws Nancy under the water into
a huge, blue-lit tank. The bath is also filmed from a bird’s-eye-view tele-
photo lens, impossibly elongated and thin.
     -- 103

Freddy’s realm is the uncanny double of everyday reality, so much so

that Nancy’s prophylactic phrase, ‘this is just a dream, this isn’t real’, is
unable to ward him off. As she runs up the stairs, the solid wood of the
steps becomes swamp-like mud and she sinks into them. Freddy has power
over supposedly inanimate objects, which collude with him and function
to supplement his own lack. A sheet that manages to retain its own basic
properties is forced to become reptile (a snake) or vegetable (root or
creeper). This animated sheet rises up and twines itself round the sleep-
ing Rod in his cell and drags him around the floor before it strings him up
to hang.
Freddy’s penetrations of the ‘real’ world are often darkly comic, and he
delights in mocking his victims. After attacking Nancy as she lies in the
Institute for Sleep Disorders, he leaves his felt hat, or a teasing simulacra
of it, behind. Freddy delights in permeating the most ordinary material
substance, becoming anything and potentially everything. When Nancy
answers the phone, the receiver becomes Freddy’s mouth and tongue,
which licks her and tries to penetrate her lips. This close-up shot empha-
sises the glistening tactility of his endlessly mobile organs. Nancy’s boy-
friend, Glen, falls asleep and gets sucked into a pit that appears in the
centre of the bed, then spurts out fountains of his blood. In a bravura
display of Freddy’s special effects, this liquid changes its elemental form,
becoming fiery smoke-trails that spread across the ceiling and vanish,
reverting back to a few drips of blood falling into a bucket.
Nancy seeks to trap the machinic Freddy by mechanical means. She
makes a series of anti-personnel devices, which he eludes, but her interac-
tivity seems to weaken his power. After Freddy has pursued her in the
hellish boiler room, she wakes safely back in her own room. He was unable
to foresee her booby-traps because of his rigidly mechanical revenge pro-
gramming. Defeated by his elemental nemesis, fire, he leaves a trail of
flaming footprints before disappearing in a shimmer of light. When he
pops up again, like an impudent phallus rising through the sheets, Nancy
turns her back on him. This rejection renders him powerless and he shim-
mers into nothingness like Nosferatu.
In the ultimate sequence, Nancy and her mother stand at their front
door in natural sunlight. This level of reality is undercut when a car drives
up carrying Nancy’s supposedly dead friends as passengers. Freddy has
become-car, and the vehicle sports red and black stripes on the roof. After
he/it drives off, Mrs Thomson is dragged through a hole in the door by a
striped arm, so the ubiquitous Freddy triumphs in reality, or in a dream
within a dream. He fundamentally rejects the barriers we draw between
worlds and flamboyantly displays the process of becoming-anything that
104    

will carry him through the subsequent film series. Freddy Krueger is
machinic, but only in the most perverse manner.
The mobile flux of existence gravitates against our inbuilt mental ten-
dency to impose stable structures on our changing experience of a chang-
ing world. Bergson asserts that the ossified intellect cannot, ‘without
reversing its natural direction and twisting about on itself ’, think ‘true
continuity, real mobility, reciprocal penetration – in a word, that creative
evolution which is life’.86 Human mentation is out of synch with the flow
of life itself, clinging tenaciously to the spurious stability of templates that
seek to freeze becoming. The current ideological and social climate is
already changing at an unprecedented rate. It adopts chaotic patterns as
science, technology, economics and politics morph into new forms daily.
Genetic engineering and viral mutations modify the existential and episte-
mological meaning of identity. ‘Man’ and ‘woman’ conjoin with other sin-
gularities as well as with each other, adapting and adopting new formations
of identity in the process.
Bergson and Deleuze embrace change as a part of an evolutionary
unfolding that cannot be predetermined, as ‘the spontaneity of life is man-
ifested by a continual creation of new forms succeeding others’.87 Cultural
change breeds aesthetic innovation. These new forms circulate in turn and
input into affective experience and ideation. Structuralist templates are a
fantasy of order which seeks to overlay our own already-happening change.
The horror genre and its monsters belong to both the old overlay and the
ongoing flux, and are ripe for new becomings.
Cyborgs, which extend the living being’s capacity by prosthesis and the
cloned hybrids of genetic engineering, are both increasingly visible in sci-
entific actuality and in the fantasies of popular culture.88 They offer new
ways of exploring the anomalous by our intimate, biotechnological con-
nections with it. Bergson’s model remains organic, but Deleuze’s
machinic assemblage embraces the techno/organic hybrids of more
recent culture. Whether the singularities are biological or machinic in
nature, we extend our limitations by fusing with them to form new assem-
blages. This process, shared by horror film character and spectator, is
becoming-anomalous.
Chapters 1 and 2 have worked through the themes of madness and
transformation. They have signalled ways to reconsider them via schizo-
analysis and becoming. The second half of this book now shifts further
afield, into philosophical territory less familiar to horror Film Studies. I
turn to Deleuze’s film-oriented works to discover what they have to offer
our reading of the horror genre. Despite the distinction between move-
ment and time in the two cinema books, movement is focal in both, reflect-
     -- 105

ing its crucial status in Deleuze’s work. I will be modifying, adapting, and
also simplifying, their philosophical scope to ascertain their specific use-
value for re-thinking the horror film both as text and as experiential idea-
tion. In tandem with more abstract concerns, Chapter 3 maintains contact
with the ‘live’ filmic event, drawing on Cinema 1 to explore the mechanics
of the movement-image as applied to mise-en-scène and other features of
horror aesthetics.

Notes
1. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1983), p. 30.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p.
169.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. H. Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (London: The Athlone Press, 2002), p. 42.
4. Ibid. p. 66.
5. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 151.
6. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Women in the Horror Film,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 52.
7. Gaylyn Studlar, ‘Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of the Cinema’, in
Bill Nicolls (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), p. 610.
8. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), p. 417.
9. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror
Film (London: BFI, 1992), p. 230.
10. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Coldness and Cruelty’, in Gilles Deleuze and Leopold
Sacher-Masoch, Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 134.
11. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Re-presentation of Masoch’, in Essays Critical and Clinical,
ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, London
and New York: Verso, pp. 33–4.
12. Ibid. p. 54.
13. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 65.
14. Ibid. p. 60.
15. Ibid. p. 61.
16. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.
Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 139.
17. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 314
18. Ibid. p. 314.
19. Ibid. p. 11.
106    

20. Ibid. p. 23.

21. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 169.
22. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 2.
23. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 267.
24. Ibid. p. 272.
25. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 2.
26. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275.
27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane
(London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 107.
28. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 42.
29. Ibid. p. 135.
30. Ibid. p. 86.
31. Ibid. p. 43.
32. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.
112.
33. Ibid. p. 112
34. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 106.
35. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 112,
36. Ibid. p. 112.
37. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, p. 131.
38. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 272.
39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276. See Jerry Aline Flieger,
‘Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification’, in Ian
Buchanan and Claire Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 42.
40. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, p. 96.
41. Ibid. p. 96.
42. Ibid. p. 2.
43. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275.
44. Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction’, in Buchanan and Colebrook, Deleuze and
Feminist Theory, p. 2.
45. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Feminism and Rhizomatics: A Thousand Tiny Sexes’ in C.
V. Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of
Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 207.
46. Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Becoming-Woman Now’, in Ian Buchanan and
John Marks (eds), Deleuze and Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000, p. 26.
47. Camilla Griggers, Becoming-Woman: Theory Out of Bounds Vol 1
(Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. xi.
48. Ibid. p. 106.
49. Ibid. p. 77.
50. Ibid. p. 82.
     -- 107

51. Catherine Constable, ‘Becoming the Alien’s Mother: Morphologies of

Identity in the Alien Series’, in Annette Kuhn (ed), Alien Zone II (London
and New York: Verso, 2000) p. 191.
52. Ibid. p. 191.
53. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 119.
54. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 6.
55. Ibid. p. 189.
56. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 171.
57. Gilles Deleuze, ‘To be Done with Judgment’, in Essays Critical and Clinical,
ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London
and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 134.
58. Ibid. p. 131.
59. Daniel W. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and
Clinical, ed. Daniel W. Smith, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco
(London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. xxix.
60. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 99.
61. Ibid. p. 99.
62. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 189.
63. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, An Introduction (New
York: Random House, Vintage Press, 1990).
64. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 278.
65. Shaviro’s persuasive reading is an influence on my own.
66. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 138.
67. Ibid. p. 149.
68. Ibid. p. 144.
69. Ibid. p. 139.
70. Ibid. p. 142.
71. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (London: Penguin, 1991).
72. Richard Rushton, ‘What Can a Face Do?: On Deleuze and Faces’, in Cultural
Critique, No. 5, Spring 2002, p. 228.
73. H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man [1897] (London: Paladin, 1987).
74. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 80.
75. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema, p. 26.
76. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: 18.
77. Ibid, p. 21.
78. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 84.
79. Ibid. p. 83.
80. Ibid. p. 85.
81. Ibid. p. 85.
82. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 68.
83. Ibid. p. 68.
108    

84. William S. Burroughs, The Soft Machine [1961], (London: Flamingo, 1992).
85. The effectiveness of this sequence belies the cheap simplicity of the prop
department’s spandex wall.
86. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 162.
87. Ibid. p. 86.
88. Such as the Borg, the cyborg species in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
 CHAPTER 3

The Movement-Image: Horror

Cinematography and Mise-en-scène

the brain is the screen1 (Deleuze)

whether through words, colours, sounds or stone, art is the language of sensations.
Art does not have opinions.2 (Deleuze)

The Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula moves in the mysterious ways lent to
him by the cinema’s own technological powers of movement. He glides
with the motion of a rapidly tracking camera; and experiences the move-
ments of others as the jumpy, fast motion of silent-film footage. Like
Murnau’s Orlock, he sends out distorted shadows that do not match his
apparent position, by a trick of the light. Morphing extends his arms to
unnatural lengths. He also moves by the flamboyant shape-shifting skills
of CGI, becoming a loping wolf, a rampant demon or a green mist that
penetrates keyholes.
As well as extensive movements in space, Dracula is capable of more
intensive motion. His facial transmutations mix the actor’s facial mobility
with subtle shifts of hairstyle and the prosthetically translucent skin of an
aged man. By the disembodied movements of superimpositions and lap
dissolves, his eyes appear in the sky or in the ‘eye’ of a peacock feather. He
also moves via the vibrations of colour, from flamboyant crimson in his
own castle to subdued dove-grey on the London streets as he attunes
himself to the tone quality of the crowd.
Dracula’s perpetual motion cuts through the barriers of space-time.
The range of his movements is limitless and his impetus unstoppable.
Impelled by the vampire’s force, every shot in the film moves both within
and between frames. A wave-like motion predominates; symbolically con-
nected to the flowing of blood, but exceeding this equation by means of its
haecceity. Camera movements, editing rhythms, a fluid mise-en-scène and
kinetic acting disorientate and intensify the spectator’s own sense of move-
ment. We move within the film and it moves within us as the same event of
images in motion.
In this chapter, my focus is on the movement-image in cinematography
and mise-en-scène. I test the particular applicability of Cinema 1 to the
110    

movements of colour, tactility, sound, lighting, camera and editing. Many

existing readings of horror are semiological, and identify film images as
representations of cultural meaning or psychoanalytic scenarios. As well as
retaining some insights offered by these perspectives, I approach mise-en-
scène in its experiential function as an affective and aesthetic process. As a
theoretical context for this, I outline Bergson’s views of perception and
aesthetics, and Deleuze’s distinctive filmic interpretations of them.
Deleuze approaches film aesthetics as a special form of embodied
thought particular to the movement-image. For the unified assemblage of
film/viewer, thought is light, movement, sound, framing and editing.
Rather than separating aesthetics and thought into artificially separate
stages of stimulus, response and idea, he thinks in, and through, cinema
as experience. This is possible because of the inherent correspondence of
cinematic processes to perceptual thought. Their connection is a direct
event rather than a metaphorical comparison. Cinema ‘not only puts
movement in the image, it also puts movement in the mind’.3 Because
cinema ‘endows the image with self-motion’, it ‘never stops tracing the
circuits of the brain’.4 Cinematic examples are tools for a broader philo-
sophical interrogation of the nature of movement and time that continues
Bergson’s own.

Sensation and Perception: The Aesthetics of Affect

For Bergson, all perceptions are prolonged into movement, and movement
is the key to understanding perception. He locates affect in those bodily
sensations and physical symptoms by which we evaluate the intensity of
stimuli. These sensations may be more passive (intensive) or active (exten-
sive). States of attention involve ‘reflective’ knowing, and states of
emotion, ‘unreflective’ acting. States of attention, which concern us in
cinema viewing, are an involuntary ‘system of muscular contractions co-
ordinated by an idea’.5
Pleasure mobilises the body, both externally and internally. As we
imagine pleasures, our bodies respond by intensive movements. These
become physically perceptible in the relevant organs, ‘as if the organism
were coming forth to meet the pleasure as soon as it is pictured’.6
Imaginary pleasures do not extend muscular tension into external action.
Instead, we arrest the movement and savour the pleasure by an inner focus
on it. Intensity results from the organism’s inertia during total immersion
in a particular pleasure, when other sensations go out of focus. This
process clarifies how we become emotionally affected, and sometimes
physically aroused, by the virtual and simulated pleasures of film. The
  - 111

movement-image occurs both on screen and in us at the same time, and

actually blurs any such distinction between inside and out.
Bergson’s palette of stimuli and sensations is graded in intensity. It
includes: variant flavours; degrees of light; shades of colour; and timbres
of sound. Loudness, for example, is felt as a physical sensation. By con-
taining the ears, the head experiences the sound vibrations of very loud
noise first, then the whole body feels their shock waves. Such strong sen-
sations are partly dependent on quantity, such as high volume, which
shakes the aural nerves. The loud bangs, piercing screams or slight creaks
of horror amplify the listener’s sensations of shock or nervous agitation
across the decibel range. The qualitative properties of these sounds also
affects us in distinctive ways.
As well as registering physical sensations in the body, we are conscious
of their intensive affect within our ‘personality’ via reflex movements or a
sense of powerlessness. Bergson locates intensity at the junction between
‘the idea of extensive magnitude from without’ and ‘the image of an inner
multiplicity’ that arises from ‘the very depths of consciousness’.7 Such
multiplicity exists in complex intensive layers that constantly interweave.
States of feeling are difficult to pin down because of their fleeting condi-
tion. Their becoming is the fluidity of the ego itself.
When we seek to communicate our experiences, language ‘overwhelms’
the ‘delicate and fugitive impressions of our individual consciousness’.8
The complexity of these shifting qualitative sensations is difficult to quan-
tify, because their milieu is quality itself, not quantity. In our inner sensa-
tional flux, we feel ‘a thousand different elements which dissolve into and
permeate one another without any precise outlines, without the least ten-
dency to externalise themselves in relation to one another; hence their
originality’.9 For Bergson, each sense vibrates with its own specific form of
‘real action’, of the same kind as its virtual action on objects perceived. We
thus associate distinct types of sensation with the corresponding vibra-
tions of connected senses.
Physical sympathy connects our senses to kinetic art forms. In Bergson’s
example, if we watch the movements of a dancer, we participate in them
by an internal projection that may become externalised. If the dance sud-
denly stops, we impatiently continue it with our hand in a physical exten-
sion of the dancer’s movement, ‘the rhythm of which has taken complete
possession of our thought and will’.10 The aesthetic pleasure of regular,
rhythmical movement includes a temporal quality. If we can predict the
future development of rhythms, we gain the pleasure of ‘mastering the
flow of time and of holding the future in the present’.11 Kinetic art acts on
us, and in us, as a form of possession that displaces our egoic selves.
112    

Despite the apparent passivity of spectatorship, the movements of art and

our own flow together.
Aesthetic techniques of repetition are hypnotic and open us up to sug-
gestion. They lull resistance and ‘bring us into a state of perfect respon-
siveness, in which we realise the idea that is suggested to us and sympathise
with the feeling that is expressed’.12 Music is particularly hypnotic, as its
‘rhythm and measure suspend the normal flow of our sensations and ideas
by causing our attention to swing to and fro between fixed points’, so it can
manipulate our emotions without needing lyrics. The suggestive potency
of art, which impresses rather than expresses feelings, is shared – or,
rather, ‘caught’ – by the perceiver like a contagious infection.
Bergson claims that ‘superior’ art affects us on more complex levels than
‘inferior’, sensation-based material. A ‘novel’ work of art ‘unique of its
kind and indefinable’ conveys a psychological state by experiential affects
rather than by explanation.13 The artist selects the most potent affective
tools, which our body subtly imitates, to share in ‘the indefinable psycho-
logical state that called them forth’.14 Bergson prefers works that stimulate
both sensation and thought, making us ‘the richer in ideas and the more
pregnant with sensations and emotions’ as we share the original impulse.15
I question the universal validity of Bergson’s early Modernist tastes, and
the ‘originality’ of an artwork is less applicable to the mass form of cinema;
there is, however, much of relevance to film-viewing in his work on the
experiential and affective nature of art.
Movement is the crux of Bergson’s exploration of perception. In the
formations of living matter, motion is embodied in élan vital and its
sensory-motor extensions. He shifts images away from their supposed
origin in the human mind, stressing instead the sensory-motor nature and
functions of the nervous system. The human living image partakes in the
flux of the material world, in which all is image. The locus of Deleuze’s
own aesthetics is also the corporeal reverberations of consciousness.

Bergson’s Movement-Image in Deleuze

Deleuze’s commentaries on Bergson’s elision of movement and image
structure Cinema 1. Movement-images, in their actions and reactions,
form the ‘universal variation’ of the plane of immanence, which is the infi-
nite set of all images. Deleuze extends Bergson’s thesis to cinema via a
typography of cinematic movements and their accompanying perceptions.
External images transmit movement and the human living image mod-
ifies its own movements in response. We are images, so it is mistaken to
locate images in the consciousness. Movement is central to perception and,
  - 113

more generally, to life itself. The constantly renewed set of molecules and
atoms fits a world ‘of universal variation, of universal undulation, univer-
sal rippling’.16 The living microcosm is part of the universal macrocosm
and they move in unison, though their paces differ.
In describing how matter moves intensively, Bergson uses the biologi-
cal image of ‘numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted
continuity, all bound up with each other and travelling in every direction
like shivers through an immense body’.17 For Deleuze, too, vibrations are
physiological sensations that follow ‘an invisible thread that is more
nervous than cerebral’.18 Deleuze validates Bergson’s location of fluid
sensation in a temporal continuum. Sensation ‘contracts the vibrations of
the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume; what comes
before has not yet disappeared when what follows appears’.19 The
concept of the present moment imposes an illusory stasis on the ongoing
flux of time.
Bergson’s view of perception is inherently, though unconsciously, cine-
matic. His description of ‘phenomena of reflection which result from an
impeded refraction’ as ‘like the effect of mirage’ is comparable to cinema
projection as the white screen bounces back the projected beams of light.20
In Creative Evolution, the term ‘cinematographic’ refers to our illusion of
spatialised time. Bergson asserts that if we conceive of time in terms of
static ‘snapshots’ strung together by mechanical movement, we lose our
sense of inner duration. By turning time’s fluid becoming into space-time,
we ‘set going a kind of cinematograph inside us’.21 Deleuze, however,
reminds us that cinema does not give us ‘an image to which movement is
added, it immediately gives us a movement-image’.22
Despite Bergson’s apparently negative view of cinema here, Deleuze
identifies the more fundamental philosophical embrace of the cinematic in
his work. Even with its explicit critique, its implications are ‘startlingly
ahead of his time: it is the universe as cinema in itself, a metacinema’.23
Bergson is the acknowledged precursor of Deleuze’s own pivotal identifi-
cation of ‘movement-image and flowing-matter’.24 He sets out from
Bergson’s initial insights to explore the philosophical and metaphysical
implications of cinema in the unfolding of its forms since Bergson wrote.
Deleuze’s ‘naturally’ cinematic eye-brain is based on Bergson’s neuro-
logical aesthetics of motion. Our eyes ‘frame’ our perceptions of the world,
by a central focus, left/right edges and top/bottom thresholds. Moving
objects within moving frames, as in cinema, can trigger an optical reflex
action. When the eye-brain detects a movement crossing these areas, it stim-
ulates a cerebellum-efferent motor response. This can trigger an instant
nervous response without an accompanying thought. Some elements of
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cinematic perception result directly from the stimulation of the nerve cells
of the eye and can bypass cognitive processing.
Deleuze develops Bergson’s work in his own cinematic emphasis on
the identity of flowing-matter and light. Deleuze asserts that ‘the plane
of immanence is made up entirely of Light’ and that ‘the identity of
image and movement stems from the identity of matter and light’.25
The germ of this is Bergson’s interpretation of Einstein’s physics. For
Bergson, it is not consciousness that illumines matter, but that ‘things
are luminous by themselves without anything illuminating them’.26 Like
Bergson, Deleuze reverses the Cartesian cogito, by which rational con-
sciousness lights benighted matter. He posits that ‘it is not consciousness
which is light, it is the set of images, or the light, which is conscious-
ness, immanent to matter’, thus refusing the hierarchical distinction of
mind and matter.27
For both Bergson and Deleuze, then, perception is the movement of the
human neuronal networks within the wider vibrations of matter. The
moving body/brain is embedded in moving matter as an image among
others, and the movement-image and flowing matter are one. This shift to
affect, percept and sensation is substantially opposed to ego-based schema
of human consciousness. Subjectivity is displaced by a genetic human life
open to duration. Constructed on the immanent ‘plane of consistency’,
this sensational life ‘knows only relations between affects and percepts’
and its composition, ‘through the creation of blocks of sensations, takes
place in the indefinite and virtual time of the pure event’ and it thus par-
takes of duration.28
Deleuze develops Bergson’s concepts and applies them to cinematic
affects. He maps the singularities of particular types of affect and traces
their mutual interactions across the flow of the film. Affective singularities
‘blend into virtual conjunction and each time constitute a complex entity.
It is like points of melting, of boiling, of condensation, of coagulation’.29
This simile of liquid transmutation belongs to a network of elemental
thinking in Deleuze’s work. Human life is elemental in its nature and sub-
stance. We live on a physical but also a psychic level by contraction and
expansion, traversed by the energetic, transformative flows of élan vital.
We are made up of contracted water, light, earth and air, and partake of
their dynamics, as ‘every organism, in its receptive and perceptual ele-
ments, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and
expectations’.30 This motion flows through, and unites, all life and matter
in the process of perpetual change.
Deleuze stresses the material nature of both stimulus and sensation.
When sensation is realised in the material world, it melds with the stimu-
  - 115

lus, ‘the material passing completely into the sensation, into the percept or
affect’.31 Affect is distinguished from personal states of emotion by its
‘autopoesis’, a pre-personal or transpersonal formation of the ‘self ’. The
artwork partakes of these vibrant processes itself and stimulates the human
image’s perception of, and participation in, them.
Style and content work in unison. The overall sensuous force of a text
subsumes representation considered as a separate field. Deleuze and
Guattari assert that art is the language of sensations: ‘Art does not have
opinions. Art undergoes the triple organisation of perceptions, affections,
and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts,
affects, and blocs of sensation that take the place of language.’32 This
provocative statement, with its apparent refutation of art’s ideological
content, deliberately looks elsewhere than the working out of representa-
tional equations or allegorical readings of texts.
It focuses on the perceiver as biological organism and neuronal network.
The embodied eye is embedded in the metacinema of the material world.
Cinema is, above all, affective movement in process. Its movement has
implications for a philosophy of time. Even if the work itself is short-lived,
the sensation of art enters duration, for ‘so long as the material lasts, the
sensation enjoys an eternity in those very moments’.33 As well as being aes-
thetic products in their own right, films connect directly to a broader meta-
physical sweep. Deleuze’s film-philosophy always interweaves this double
layer of significance.

Moving Images
Deleuze focuses on the materiality of the film medium. Stylistic elements,
such as the rhythms of movement, the dynamics of framing and the mod-
ulations of light, are his fields of operation. Rather than producing a semi-
ological interpretation of signs as representations, he regards signs as the
objects of an experiential encounter. We encounter them not by abstract-
ing their symbolic meaning, but by perceiving their dynamics of motion.
This movement occurs both in them, individually, and in their interstices
when particular shots are edited together. Instead of following an associa-
tive chain, Deleuze’s analytical technique moves beyond image content. It
refutes the fixed meaning of ‘the cinema of the One’ and develops an inter-
stitial approach,
AND, ‘this and then that’, which does away with all the cinema of Being
is.
Between two actions, between two affections, between two perceptions, between two
visual images, between two sound images, between the sound and the visual: make
the indiscernible, that is the frontier, visible.34
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By the indiscernible frontier, he means the borders of duration accessible

at the edges of movement-images, or in the gaps between them.
The moving image is often disregarded by cine-semiology’s quest to
identify fixed meanings. Deleuze insists that the signs of the ‘movies’ are
not frozen symbols, but elements of movement and vibrations of force. As
well as carrying representational meaning, images are material forces:
shades of colour, intensities of light and timbres of sound. Every stylistic
component is rich in affective gradations. These interact at a micro level
between themselves and at a macro level with other aspects of the film.
Colour, sound, movement and composition affect us as a part of the filmic
assemblage. As well as ideational thought, perceptual and neurological pro-
cesses operate in us as we watch. These include kinaesthesia (the sense of
movement and bodily orientation in space); synaesthesia (the mixing of
different sense modalities); and hapticity (interaction between vision and
bodily feeling or tactility). We connect our corporeal machine and the film’s
technological and aesthetic machine. If our engagement is intense, we think
in and through the body in a powerful experiential response.
All cinematic images are primarily movement-images. Images move
within the frame via the camera’s motion, and between a series of frames in
the rhythm of editing. The frames move before us on the screen via the pro-
jector and its flickering movements of light. The viewer’s eyes move in col-
lusion with the phi-phenomenon and also move on their own behalf as
machines in motion. By blinking, narrowing with suspicion, widening in
disbelief, or closing in horror, our eyes modify the film’s movement-images.
They input their own responses to them as part of engaged viewing.
At this point, I would like to briefly clarify some key terms in Deleuze’s
Bergsonian approach to the movement-image that connects cinematic per-
ception to perception in general. Asserting that the consciousness is
embedded in the metacinema of matter, Deleuze deploys Bergson’s ‘centre
of indetermination’ to designate the human living image who turns virtual
movement-images into actual ones. The types of images perceived are
the ‘perception-image’, the ‘action-image’ and the ‘affection-image’. By
grammatical equivalent, perception-images correspond to nouns, action-
images to verbs, and affection-images to adjectives.
A perception-image is a framing, a selective registration of incoming
movements. The perception-image filters out irrelevant incoming data and
focuses on essentials of use-value to us. In cinema, framing effects a com-
parable selection and elimination of extraneous content. Framing is the
determination of a relatively closed system, which includes everything
present in the image, such as sets, characters and props. It encompasses
what Film Studies refers to as mise-en-scène. Framing gives a special quality
  - 117

and intensity to the material selected. By taking its contents out of their sur-
rounding context, ‘the frame ensures the deterrorialisation of the image’,
yet it still implies the virtual existence of the out-of-field which continues
to act upon us.35 There are two simultaneous aspects of the out-of-field: ‘the
actualisable relation with other sets, and the virtual relation with the
whole’.36 The latter, which is the most mysterious, opens onto duration.
The perception-image has two poles, subjective and objective perception.
Subjective perception is the point-of-view of a character within the diege-
sis, but Deleuze pays more attention to objective camera-consciousness by
which the camera appears to gain independence from the human viewpoint
and moves by an agenda of its own. The perceptive centre of indetermina-
tion is located in the ‘gap, or interval between a received and an executed,
movement’.37 The perception-image and the action-image occur on each
side of this gap and their operations are inextricably linked. The perception-
image is subtractive and involves elimination, selection and framing.
The action-image occurs in the living image’s delayed reaction to
stimuli. It is caused by ‘the incurving of the universe, which simultane-
ously causes the virtual action of things on us and our possible action on
things’, as perception and action are inseparable.38 By means of incurva-
tion, ‘perceived things tender their unstable facet towards me, at the same
time as my delayed reaction, which has become action, learns to use
them’.39 Although Deleuze may refer to narrative actions as passing
context for his discussion, his chief focus is the sensory-motor participa-
tion of the spectator’s consciousness itself in the action.
For Bergson, perception has extensity, but affection is unextended.
Perception measures the reflecting power of the body and affection meas-
ures its power to absorb. The affection-image is located between percep-
tion and action. It involves interior co-incidence of subject and object and
is qualitative, not quantitative, in nature. Following Bergson, Deleuze
explains that affection is a facet of the perceptual evolution from external
action to internal contemplation. Whilst ‘delegating our activity to organs
of reaction that we have consequently liberated’, we have also ‘specialised
one of our facets or certain of our points into receptive organs at the price
of condemning them to immobility’.40 These immobile facets engage in
refraction and absorption rather than reflection of images. The affection-
image is experienced, then, by our specialised and immobilised organs of
reception. It is Bergson’s ‘motor tendency on a sensible nerve’41 and
Deleuze’s own photographic version of this definition as a ‘motor effort on
an immobilised receptive plate’.42
The affection-image is located in between perception and action, and
occupies the interval itself without either filling it in or filling it up. Rather
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than being in a fixed ‘geographical’ location, affection is in dynamic motion.

It ‘surges’ in the subjective centre of indetermination, between a troubling
perception and a hesitant action. It is internal and self-reflexive in nature,
but retains feeling, being ‘a co-incidence of subject and object, or the way
in which the subject perceives itself, or rather experiences itself or feels
itself “from the inside”’.43 Affection, in which the subject and object coin-
cide, partakes of ‘pure quality’. The affection-image is not a failure of the
perception-action system, but is ‘a third absolutely necessary given’.44
The autonomous quality of the affection-image in human perception
has its corresponding cinematic affect. This may be a virtual conjunction
that moves away from character psychology and plot to make the affect
more independent of the state of things. Deleuze’s example occurs in the
neo-Gothic space of Terence Fisher’s Hammer Horror film The Brides of
Dracula. Fisher applies the autonomy of the affection-image when he
‘makes Dracula perish nailed to the ground, but in virtual conjunction
with the sails of a burning windmill which project the shadow of a cross at
the exact place of the torture’.45 Here, the affective collusion of mise-en-
scène adds a participatory animation to the external objects surrounding
the vampire’s demise and there is no distinction of style from content.
Deleuze distinguishes between the image’s semiological, social meaning
and the quality of the affection-image. Referring to a scene from Pabst’s
Pandora’s Box, which depicts Lulu with her nemesis, Jack the Ripper, he
acknowledges the obvious presence of ‘real’ individuals in social roles. As
well as these fictional representations, there are qualities that ‘in them-
selves, or as expressed’ constitute ‘the event in its eternal aspect’, such as
brightness, terror and compassion, which are ‘pure singular qualities or
potentialities – as it were, pure “possibles”’.46
Although power-qualities relate to narrative causes that make up the
state of things, power-qualities refer primarily to themselves as expressing
the state of things. Particular affects are ‘Dividual’: they vary their quality
according to the connections they enter into and the divisions they
undergo. Emotions like terror and optical sensations like brightness man-
ifest power-qualities, which are virtual possibilities waiting to be actualised
in particular conditions. The quality of an image depends on both its
context in the film and its particular affect on the spectator.
Deleuzian film critique focuses on the dynamics of style. This special
type of mise-en-scène analysis evokes the affective quality of a scene’s aes-
thetic components. Particular qualities might be traced alongside analysis
of representational iconography, or the critic might move out from this to
explore their aesthetic/philosophical implications. The second technique
is more rigorously Deleuzian. He writes that ‘a colour like red, a value like
  - 119

brightness, a power like decisiveness, a quality like hardness or tenderness,

are primarily positive possibilities which refer only to themselves’.47 In
other words, it is possible to dislocate these elements from their narrative
context and their place in the film’s action. Nevertheless, Deleuze does not
indulge in aestheticism. Rather than being for its own sake, art is ‘a tool for
blazing life lines’.48 Style works with the spectator’s intensive embodied
consciousness to breach deeper levels of awareness and philosophical
thought, with potential for extensive action.
If the sensory-motor connection is disturbed, the spectator becomes
disoriented. To perceive the workings of this state of consciousness, intui-
tion is needed. Moving far from Structuralism, Deleuze advocates that ‘it
is necessary to combine the optical-sound image with the enormous forces
that are not those of a simply intellectual consciousness, nor of the social
one, but of a profound, vital intuition’.49 Such an intuition is generated by
a particular array of virtual sense-impressions. In the work of Robbe-
Grillet, for example, we have ‘the descriptive power of colour and sounds,
even as these replace, obliterate and recreate the object itself ’, as well as the
tactile in its haptic function.50
Certain films include aesthetic effects divorced from the immediate
causal chain. When a pure optical and sound situation occurs, it ‘makes us
grasp something intolerable and unbearable’.51 For Deleuze, the extreme
reaction induced by the affection-image is more potent than the explicit
violence of the action-image. Scenes of terror, corpses and blood may actu-
ally appear on screen, but are not necessary for the aesthetic affect. The
affection-image ‘is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but
sometimes also too beautiful, and which henceforth outstrips our sensory-
motor capacities’.52 As the sensory-motor function is suspended or breaks
down, deeper insight occurs.
I deviate from Deleuze in my contention that such moments happen not
just in independent, experimental films, but also in some of the more main-
stream products of the horror genre. From an art-house perspective, such
films might appear to be merely sensationalist. It is important to acknowl-
edge here both the subjective and the social criteria of taste in film criticism.
It is dangerous to draw up a prescriptive canon of those films that ‘outstrip
our sensory motor capacities’ and stimulate deeper levels of awareness in
audience members. My own choice of films is inevitably influenced by per-
sonal and cultural specificities of habitus, such as class, age, gender, aca-
demic interests and what ‘turns me on’ (that most machinic of qualities).
I begin my readings of the movement-image with my perspectives on
Murnau’s Nosferatu’s mise-en-scène as well as demonstrating Deleuze’s
methodology. The film is rich in period detail (its political implications
120    

have been highlighted by critics), suggestive images and innovative came-

rawork. It moves and frightens me even after many viewings. Deleuze’s
chief investment in German Expressionist films is not to fix their socio-
political ‘meaning’, but to think through them as events of light, shadow
and intensive movement. I illustrate Deleuze’s insights on light via an
affective mise-en-scène and cinematography that combines Gothic horror
with the sensory distortions of experimental cinema.

The Infinite Spirit of Evil: The Forces of Light and

Darkness in Nosferatu
Cinematic light is light in motion. Like photography, the film medium
works in (already moving) light, but with additional properties of motion
as film moves through the camera and through the projector’s own beam
of light. The dynamic relations of light and shadow are a basic expressive
device of cinematography, although their centrality declined with the
advent of colour stock. Extremes of light and darkness both prevent our
clear vision and stimulate our awareness of our other senses. They enable
intensive rather than extensive movement.
Silent horror film uses light and dark for symbolic contrasts of good
and evil, whilst grisaille, or grey tones, convey both physical fog and lack
of psychic clarity. For Deleuze, though, light is much more than an aes-
thetic device in cinema. Its physical properties and metaphysical implica-
tions are pivotal to his philosophical structure. Film/philosophy explores
light because it is movement, and ‘the movement-image and the light-
image are two facets of the same appearing’.53 Deleuze foregrounds the
modulations of light in German Expressionist cinema as ‘intensive move-
ment par excellence’.54
The intensive movement of mise-en-scène is heir to the medieval Gothic
tradition in its diagonal, jagged lines and in its spiritual dichotomies, as
well as thematic strands of occultism and folk belief. In tandem with its
Gothic elements, the film draws on Expressionism’s Modernist tendency
towards abstraction, which ‘results from its detachment from the past and
discovery of ‘the spiritual abstract Form of the future’.55 The quality of
Nosferatu is, however, more Gothic than Expressionist in its overt style.
Expressionism’s disorienting shadow world extends into the ‘interior’
metaphysical dimensions of an opaque ‘any-space-whatever’. This ‘is a
perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity’ to become
‘a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible’.56 It
is not an abstract universal, but is manifest via aesthetic affect. Having ‘left
behind its own co-ordinates and its metric relations’, it becomes a ‘tactile’
  - 121

space of ‘textural intensity rather than spatial extensity’, which we ‘feel’

through our virtual sense of touch.57 Deleuze’s analysis here connects aes-
thetic style, corporeal affect and metaphysical reverberation in an experi-
ential assemblage. The dynamic conflict of light and dark is the shifting
foundation of this intensive world.

Into the Black Hole

Nosferatu’s opening presents light in a pristine state unchallenged by the
vampire’s darkness. The natural light of the sun at its zenith bleaches and
dazzles the eye. It glints off reflective surfaces such as the leaves in the
garden where Jonathan Hutter, the exuberant young estate agent, picks
flowers, his hair haloed with sunshine. Hutter’s new wife, Nina, is likewise
brightly lit as she plays with a kitten at the window. The light quality
extends indoors and is reflected off Hutter’s mirror by the window. Light
glows round his head, etherealising his full, sensual face. The technique
of irising in and out of these images, as well as invoking period nostalgia,
mimics the gentle opening and closing of the eyelids in their adjustment
of light, inducing a relaxing, soporific effect. The light is over-bright, like
the couple’s false sense of security, inevitably to be darkened by the
vampire’s shadow.
Darkness encroaches on Hutter during his journey through a sublime
landscape of misty mountains and pines. Naturalist footage of restive
horses and a lurking hyena both gravitates against and enhances the nar-
rative’s fantastic aspects as the nocturnal forces of the vampire assert
themselves. Extending the image cluster of hunter and prey, peasant
women inside the inn become-animal when they huddle in together in
terror like the horses as night falls. In the light of morning, the horses
return to the sun-drenched field. Reassured, Hutter discards his copy of
The Book of Vampires, but the dark clouds that gather outside undermine
his optimism. The intercut tower of a ruined castle is a bent and warped
black silhouette. This rises above, but is also integral to, the pine forest and
rocks. Its appearance foreshadows that of Count Orlock himself in the
next scene.
The ‘land of the phantoms’ is characterised by high-contrast arrange-
ments of light and dark. This is strikingly manifest as Count Orlock’s
coach comes to meet Hutter. The carriage’s serpentine route follows
neither the line of the track nor the natural lie of the land but its own tra-
jectory. The vampire’s anomalous nature is cued by his unnatural velocity
as his coach scuttles downhill with the jerky speed of stop motion. These
movements follow the jagged Gothic line of Expressionist force. From the
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top left of the frame, dark pines reach down to dominate more than half of
the long-shot composition. Their spiky shadows, like sharp claws or teeth,
form a diagonal split with Hutter’s patch of sunlight at bottom right. On
its return journey, the coach shudders back up along the line between light
and darkness. It keeps to the diagonal, but lists slightly to the left of the
frame into darkness. Its disjointed and beetle-like motion plunges Hutter
into a vertigo with mental and psychic, as well as physical, reverberations.
By crossing the bridge and accepting a ride, Hutter has entered into con-
tract with the vampire. His former world-view is radically inverted by the
acceptance. This is emphasised by Murnau’s celebrated use of negative
footage as the coach returns. The reversal of light and darkness renders the
sunlight black, and induces a white, fog-like shadow between trees. This
luminescence reduces the coach’s material presence to a faint, phantom
imprint of itself. The numinous combination of dematerialisation and
unnatural movement is extended by the fast-motion rolling of the clouds
impelling the vehicle on.
Along with these unnatural velocities, the use of abstraction gravitates
further from realism and increases our anxiety by an absolute intensity of
movement which is almost stasis. Geometry renders the vampire-as-
coach-driver predominantly triangular. The pointed roof of the castle
turret, animated by circling, predatory birds, offers a visual rhyme to the
shape of his hat and his nose. Hooded horses echo their master’s cloaked
concealment, too dreadful to be exposed to the light of day. Orlock’s
forward gesture with his whip conveys hypnotic force as well as imperious-
ness. Expressionist lines often point Elsewhere, beyond the frame’s con-
fines towards another level of reality.
Expressionist acting style deploys a body language that mimics the diag-
onal composition of shots. After he is bitten for the first time, Hutter
awakes in a rigid diagonal posture. His customary vigorous stretch has
become stiff and constrained, as his life-force has been drained. When he
discovers the vampire’s coffin, Hutter again becomes diagonal as he slides
sideways up the steps, but his face, frozen in horror, is compelled to focus
on the vampire to the last. From a Freudian perspective, he adopts the
phallic stiffness produced by terror, but this ignores the posture’s unset-
tling compositional force in the frame and its dynamic potential for move-
ment.58 In his chamber, Hutter flings himself to the floor in despair, but
then rises up from his abject posture, crawling towards the window in an
upward diagonal line that seeks escape.
Discontinuous editing elides the impossible speed of the vampire’s
transformations. As ‘coachman’, he drives the shuddering coach off into
the trees, whilst the castle gate swings open to engulf Hutter. In the next
  - 123

shot, the young man crosses the courtyard as his host emerges from the
cavernous semi-circular arch of the castle interior, having changed his
appearance and demeanour, and identifiable only by his black holes of eyes.
He moves stiffly, with hunched back, hugging himself with incurved arms
that echo the curve of the archway. His rigid legs and body, tightly bound
by tight-fitting clothes, and his angular shoulders, suggest that he is always,
already in his coffin. In this undead state, Orlock is freed from normal
human laws of time, space and motion. He controls living creatures and
inanimate objects by the hypnotic force of his own agenda. The vampire’s
castle is the focal point of the shadow realm. Here, darkness extends the
overpowering vampirism of its master. As Hutter and Orlock enter the cav-
ernous interior, the vampire, garbed in funereal black, is absorbed by inter-
ior darkness and rapidly disappears into his own element of thick shade.
Hutter, in his pale greatcoat, stays visible for longer, before he, too, is oblit-
erated and vanishes from sight.
Inside the entrance tunnel, Orlock, his claw-like hands hanging down in
a becoming-beast, awaits Hutter as his prey. The camera is positioned
behind the vampire, who stands in a commanding position in the fore-
ground, mid-frame. This composition makes him larger and more power-
ful than Hutter. Orlock, a creature of enclosed spaces, is often framed by
arches. Again the camera is positioned behind the vampire, from his over-
the-shoulder viewpoint. His broad, stiffly padded back is reminiscent of an
upright coffin. The vulnerable Hutter is physically trapped by doors that
shut by themselves. Dark doorways and arches provide the further impris-
onment of frames within the frame. Hutter is pushed towards the edge of
frame by Orlock’s domineering presence. Beyond the frame is duration’s
Elsewhere, which, in the terms of horror, involves the terrifying loss of
subjective wholeness.
Black and white chessboard squares pave the floor of the great hall. These
alternating blocks of light and dark embody the dynamics of spiritual strug-
gle. The Expressionist use of contrast is an aesthetic means to evoke the
intense metaphysical struggle of opposing powers, as ‘the opaque black
background and the luminous principle [. . .] couple together gripping like
wrestlers’.59 Murnau’s work is notable for its spectacular use of light rays
intercutting darkness. The combat of light and dark distorts space, altering
perspective and creating a depth filled with shadows ‘sometimes in the form
of all degrees of chiaroscuro, sometimes in the form of alternating and con-
trasted streaks’, with their particular spiritual implications.60
The confrontation between the two ‘infinite forces’ of light and dark
determines ‘a zero point, in relation to which all light is a finite degree’.61
Their dimensions of depth and height imply a metaphysical fall, which
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‘measures the degree to which the intensive quantity rises and, even in its
greatest glory, natural light falls’ in the ‘adventure of the individual soul,
caught up in a black hole’.62 The ‘black hole’ results from Expressionism’s
inversion of perspective by locating depth in the foreground. Space is
potentialised by being made unlimited. The struggle of light and dark is
located in a depth that ‘sometimes draws space into the bottomlessness of
a black hole, and sometimes draws it towards the light’.63 The dynamic
sublime of Expressionist art thus opens up a spiritual universe, which
might, at the same time, be illusory.
One numinous effect of Expressionist lighting is its confusion of boun-
daries by creating ‘a dark, swampy life into which everything plunges’ and
is ‘chopped up by shadows’.64 This blurs distinctions between organic and
inorganic matter as it ‘drowns and breaks the contours, which endows
things with a non-organic life in which they lose their individuality’.65 By
this process, the thing-world gains ascendancy over the human, as we saw
in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. It dissolves the difference between the
mechanical and the animate ‘to the advantage of the potent, non-organic
life of things’.66 In the castle, doors swing open and shut by themselves.
Inanimate matter is filled with life-force and its movement is potentialised,
whilst nature has lost the organic and is drained of life. A spiritual terror
is produced by this ‘non-organic’ life, which, ‘oblivious to the wisdom and
limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the
whole of nature, that is, for unconscious spirit, lost in darkness, light which
has become opaque’.67 Humans lose their substance to shadows in this ter-
rifying world.
In the great hall, Hutter is brightly lit, but by artificial candlelight, not
the sun. Here, the vampire, by the magical power of his will, hypnotises
Hutter, forcing him down into a chair and moving in on him before the
scene cuts to leave the impending bite as an implication rather than a real-
ised act. When Jonathan retires the following night, Orlock intrudes more
boldly to resume his meal. By the use of jump cut, the vampire moves
forward with unnatural speed through framing arches and doorways that
recall open coffins. He appears to lean out of the frame towards us, rising
up whilst already vertical. He does not progress in a human manner by
walking, but by a melting motion, which passes through layered planes of
space as though space and time are no longer a barrier to him. As he moves
forward towards the camera, he grows in size and power. The door bursts
open like a coffin lid lifting of its own accord. The on-screen horror of the
approaching vampire lies in his gliding motion, his spiky, claw-like hands
and his shadow.
The shadow absorbs his victim’s light in a virtual prelude to the actual
  - 125

absorption of the life-force. As his body is drained, Jonathan’s own shadow

grows and follows him like a dark döppelganger. As darkness falls, the vampire
awakes and reasserts his power. The shadows are again animated, and the
inter-titles emphasise their role as extensions of the vampire, ‘as twilight
came on, the empty castle became alive with menacing shadows’. As Hutter
leans over Orlock to explain the title deeds, inflated shadows loom behind
him on the wall, stretching out to overpower him as he moves forward.
The distinct nature of the vampire’s vision is manifest by his dark-
rimmed eyes, positioned in centre frame as they bulge out above the paper
he reads. Apparently fixed in the vacant stare of deep trance, these ‘black
holes’ in his dead face are actually the hyper-aware and hypnotic eyes of a
nocturnal predator. They are also bottomless pits of metaphysical terror.
When Orlock claws at Nina’s miniature portrait, his myopic eyes, accus-
tomed to sleep and darkness, peer at it from very close quarters with intru-
sive familiarity. As well as microscopic vision, his visionary powers enable
him to both see and sense her from afar.

Forces in Combat
Distracted from Hutter by the promise of Nina as more alluring prey, the
shadow subsides and Orlock leaves for the West. External nature responds
with sympathetic rapport to the vampire’s shadow as it prepares to expand
abroad. Dark clouds gather and engulf the light of day as autumnal trees
obscure the sky. Orlock, again defying the limitations of human speed by
fast motion, piles up several large chests on a wagon and leaps into the top
one before departing westwards. His body and soul freed from immediate
hypnotism, Hutter moves naturally again and prepares his parallel return.
He returns home in his proper medium of daylight, but its force is weak-
ened, like his own. His journey home is accompanied by the doom-laden
ship Demeter, impelled on by ‘the fatal breath of the vampire’ as though he
were a force of nature.
We cut to a lecture given by natural scientist Van Helsing on the carni-
vores of the plant and animal kingdoms. Orlock’s adversary is impelled by
an enlightened scientific rationalism ineffective to combat the vampire’s
dark occultism. Naturalist clips seen from the point of view of the micro-
scope are inserted, shifting the tale from the fantastic to the natural realm.
Magnified moving images show a Venus Fly Trap, the ‘vampire of the veg-
etable kingdom’, and ‘a polyp with claws transparent, without substance,
almost a phantom’. These natural vampires both validate Orlock’s status
and predict the inevitability of his advent via avatars. The becoming-
animal of the vampire’s shape-shifting is here extended beyond the wolves
126    

and bats of tradition to incorporate more recent biology. Renfield also

becomes-animal, like his master, as he seeks the blood of the living fly in a
becoming-spider.
Orlock sits on the crates in the ship’s hold, superimposed as a transpar-
ent ghost, like the polyp of Van Helsing’s lecture. As well as invisibility, the
vampire’s powers allow him to rise smoothly from his coffin/chest as
though retaining his naturally supine posture. He becomes vertical by a
hunger-driven effort of will. Onboard the ship, we alternate between the
camera’s and the vampire’s point of view. From an upwardly canted camera
placed low in the hold, the vampire towers above us. He appears to loom
forward out of the frame as he clings to the rigging with his spidery hands,
becoming-insect, like Renfield.
The autonomous power of the camera intensifies the impact of the
vampire’s arrival. As Nina gazes across the sea, the camera glides smoothly
out to meet the Demeter far beyond her visual scope. While the town lies
sleeping, Orlock appears, incongruously carrying his own coffin, as the
large brick arch of the harbour wall recalls the architecture of the castle.
His swift speed and supernatural strength make the chest appear light.
The main square of the town is darkened by the shadows of trees as the
vampire passes through and his figure melts into the mercantile warehouse
congenial to him in its arched windows and doors.
The darkness of night extends its power into the day. The long main
street lies in the shadows of houses on the right as they stretch out across
the frame to the left. Shots of cheerful citizens at their windows empha-
sise the enormity of the coming slaughter. White crosses chalked on black
doors are too late to stop the killing, and suggest that conventional religion
is a spent force. A narrowly composed long-shot showing endless line of
coffins carried down the street impels Nina to stop the carnage by distract-
ing the vampire.
In a contest of faciality, Orlock stares across at Nina from the warehouse
window. His relentless, fixed expression in medium shot is both tortured
and torturing. Nina’s own face is anguished as she feels herself falling
under his hypnotic spell, but she retains enough willpower to open the
window in a free act. Her deliberate invitation mobilises his own
suspended, intensive force and extends it into spatial action. Their
encounter is the deathly nuptial of light and dark. Prior to his defeat,
Orlock’s own shadow has gained autonomy from its source. Only his
shadow, as an integral part of his extended desire, is seen mounting the
stairs and opening Nina’s door.
The quality of high-contrast lighting, and its consequent deep shade,
sharply delineates actants in Expressionist films. A character might
  - 127

become ‘strangely and terribly flat, against the background of a luminous

circle, or his shadow may lose all its thickness, by backlighting, on a white
background’.68 These effects can induce terror when shadow ‘exercises all
its anticipatory function, and presents the affect of menace in its purest
state’ removed from its material source.69 In Nosferatu, the shadow
‘extends to infinity’ and acts autonomously, disorienting us by determin-
ing ‘virtual conjunctions which do not coincide with the state of things or
the position of characters which produce it’.70
The forceful presence of the vampire is manifest not only in his shadowy
extensions, but in his isolation from his background. The tonal compo-
nents of black and white include colour elements present in light itself.
These are not visible to the naked eye, but have affective force in a kind of
subliminal process. Deleuze draws on Goethe’s Theory of Colours, rather
than more recent physics, for his assertion that yellow and blue (the fun-
damental colour components of light, along with green) reach a movement
of intensification and emit a reddish reflection. The reflection passes
through ‘all the stages of intensification: shimmering, glistening, scintilla-
tion, sparkling, a halo effect, fluorescence, phosphorescence’, in a complex
array of aesthetic effects.71 This red emanation is supposedly responsible
for Orlock’s impact in certain scenes. Deleuze writes that the vampire
‘reaches a climax when a powerful light (a pure red) isolates him from his
shadowy background, making him burst forth from an even more direct
bottomlessness, giving him an aura of omnipotence which goes beyond his
two-dimensional form’.72 Such sequences access a supplementary dimen-
sion of sublimity, as ‘the rediscovery of the infinite in the spirit of evil’.73
Nina writhes as the vampire’s shadow hands move across her body and
clutch her breast near her heart as though squeezing it. A long shot of the
interlocked couple at once distances the horror of the feeding and invites
our own imaginative input. At cock crow, Orlock looks directly at us/into
the camera with his baleful stare in a medium close-up that emphasises
inhuman details such as his bat-wing ears. The tension lessens when he
breaks the stare to look off-frame.
The sun rises inexorably, illuminating the pointed roofs from top down,
like snow-capped mountains. For the first time, Orlock hesitates, and his
hand clutches at his own heart in anguish. Nosferatu’s death by light
includes his shadow, which, as his manifest ‘soul’, likewise suffers extinc-
tion. He arches backwards, putting his hand out to shield himself from the
burning light. Rapidly and finally, his substance melts into a wisp of mist
and evaporates. Nina stirs and rises with a final effort, but she has given too
much blood to survive. The final inter-title emphasises the struggle of light
and dark, and announces that ‘the stifling shadow of the vampire vanished
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with the morning sun’, while the last shot returns to the castle on the crag,
a ruined shell like its master.74
Deleuze emphasises the congruence of physical and metaphysical in
Expressionism. Light and dark are not emblems of a transcendent spiri-
tual realm, however, but are material forces in combat. Humans caught
up in their struggle are unable to match their speed and potency. Inter-
pretations of their nature, such as those of Van Helsing’s science, are
superficial and fail to grasp the nature of their power. Only Nina, by her
intuitive insight into the implications of the combat, can act for the light
and vanquish darkness. By a free act of will, she causes the balance to shift
to light, even though her life-force is demanded as sacrifice by the forces
of darkness. In Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr, the potential for human
intervention is much less clear, being swallowed up by a grey mist that
blurs moral certainties as well as physical objects.

In a Glass Darkly: Lyrical Abstraction and Molecularity in

Vampyr
the spirit is not caught in a combat but is prey to an alternative (Deleuze)75

Deleuze extends his study of the dynamics of light to the ‘lyrical abstrac-
tion’ of pre-war French cinema. The films of the Danish director Dreyer
are included in this category because of their style. Dreyer’s predominant
tonal technique is grisaille, with shades of grey as his light palette. He also
uses a very stark white for particular effects. These light techniques evoke
the ambiguous and disorientating world of Vampyr.
Deleuze contrasts the Expressionist struggle of light and dark with the
shifting and uncertain relations of light in lyrical abstraction. Luminism,
which values light for its own sake, produces ‘an alternation of terms
instead of an opposition; an alternative, a spiritual choice instead of a
struggle or fight’.76 Lyrical abstraction extends the binary combat by the
addition of a third term, ‘the half-tone, the grey as indiscernibility’.77 As
we saw, the use of light in Expressionist film is intensive and claustropho-
bic. Deleuze values grey for its mobility, as it manifests light as movement.
Grey, as ‘pure movement of extension’, has some of the dynamic proper-
ties of colour, being ‘already like a movement-colour’ even though it works
with monochrome stock.78 This enables a more complex metaphysics of
‘shades of grey’ to develop, too.
In Dreyer’s work, the three-way dynamic of black, white and grey has
implications for space as well as movement. Their inter-relations and alter-
nations produce detailed patterns that ‘reach a high geometric composi-
  - 129

tion, like a “tonal construction” and a mosaic of space’.79 The graininess

of the films recalls the dabs and dots of colour in French Impressionist
paintings, which capture the refractive properties of particular light qual-
ities. These vibrating points of light and shade also offer an objective cor-
relative for the quality of molecularity.
Molecularity is distinct from the ‘molar’ meta-structures of ideological,
social and psychic schema. Particles and fibres adopt specific formations
and engage in multiplicity as they conjoin with others. Deleuze adapts a
scientific paradigm to conceptualise the universal play of molecular inter-
connections. Rather than drawing on psychoanalysis or linguistics, he
applies the concepts of molecular biology to think the moving image of
cinematic experience, because ‘thought is molecular. Molecular speeds
make up the slow beings that we are’.80 Deleuzian film aesthetics empha-
sise the materiality of film and body, and their common molecularity in the
film event.
Cinematographic techniques, such as grainy film stock, soft focus or
filters, blur the clarity of the image but also embody its molecularity.
Cinema literally ‘makes bodies out of grains’.81 Some horror films use a
similar effect to convey the viewpoint of the monster. In Michael
Almereyda’s Nadja, pixellation conveys the vampire’s viewpoint as a
heavily grained molecularity with a jittery motion. This mosaic-like effect
blurs the focus, and likewise produces a blurring of moral certitude for
both the characters and the spectators. We share the disjunctive otherness
of vampiric consciousness. The blurring affect of graininess is intensified
in Vampyr by further disorientation techniques.
Dreyer seems to be evoking the mood of his literary source, Sheridan le
Fanu’s neo-Gothic collection In a Glass Darkly.82 Grisaille, silhouettes
and shadows plunge us into the sensory anomalies of the village of
Courtempierre. In the first shot, the shimmering letters of the title lose
focus to leave a formless shadow. It solidifies into the silhouette of a
wrought-iron angel inn-sign, which later ripples and flows as light moves
over its surface and animates it. Although shadows are expressively used
throughout, a bright but diffused light is the film’s main source of horror.
In seeking to bleach everything out, light extends the work of the vampire,
Marguerite Chopin, who leeches the life-force of the young to enhance her
own power.
The landscape lies in a blurred haze and the clouds shimmer like elemen-
tal forces of evil, as nature lies under the vampire’s spell. Shadows form and
re-form for their own mysterious purposes. These often sourceless shadows
intensify the numinous atmosphere by making it impossible to spatialise the
locale in order to orientate ourselves by clear co-ordinates. Light scintillates
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off the river’s flow and shadows of running figures chase each other without
being cast by anyone. As well as hypnotic spatial disorientation, light con-
fuses the linear direction of time and partakes of duration.
Our sense of space and time is distorted so we begin to doubt its evi-
dence. The events are meant to be happening in the course of twenty-four
hours, but the changeovers between day and night are confused. Time
stretches out of recognisable shape, elongated by its intensive experiential
quality. Day and night are elided by confusing light effects. As night was
unnaturally lit, so day is drowned in shadow. A shadow gravedigger throws
the soil he is digging in reverse footage. This reversal makes time flow
backwards, so the narrative trajectory also loops back on itself. The
vampire’s force drains all energy from the present and refuses the progres-
sive direction of linear time. She exists in both the present time and two
centuries before, causing a temporal overlay that prevents the future from
being realised.
In qualitative distinction from the shifting grey world outside, the exte-
rior walls and interior spaces of Chopin’s headquarters have harsh, high-
contrast lighting, and a glaring white predominates. In Dreyer, the
customary moral and metaphysical values associated with black and white
are undermined. The ‘cell-like and clinical white has a terrifying, mon-
strous character’ that removes its positive associations so that ‘the white
that imprisons the light is worth no more than the black, which remains
foreign to it’.83 White is harsh, cruel and morbid, draining other tones like
the vampire drains blood.
Despite the spatial anomalies of the building, tricks of light have a more
solid quality than the grey luminosity outside, due to contrast produced by
the harsh white. The shadow silhouette of a soldier with a wooden leg
climbs a ladder to an upper floor. Becoming embodied, he sits on a bench,
and his shadow splits from him and faces the opposite way. Dancing figures
in silhouette are accompanied by phantom musicians, like shadows cast by
automata. Throughout the film, the world of shadows moves by its own
dynamic. It is not dependent on originary sources in human or object.
Impersonal forces are at work that hold human subjectivity at nothing.
Dreyer’s use of light in Vampyr is overwhelmingly draining and oppres-
sive. Yet, when light insists on its own materiality independent of narra-
tive representations, it accesses a quality of the affection-image that
Deleuze considers of profound spiritual significance. He contends that, in
Bresson and Dreyer, this ‘pure, immanent or spiritual light, beyond white,
black or grey’ has significance for ‘a physics (or a metaphysics)’.84 This
light quality modifies both black and white, suffusing them with a spiritual
force in which they lose their limitations, ‘it restores the white to us, but a
  - 131

white which no longer confines the light. It finally restores the black to us,
the black which is no longer the cessation of light. It even restores to us the
grey, which is no longer uncertainty or indifference’.85
Deleuze argues that particular aesthetic singularities such as lighting
may be isolated from their narrative context and demand attention in their
own right as they vibrate beyond the confines of their frame. They influ-
ence and shape the entire mood and tone of the film’s affect. Jorge Iven’s
Rain, for example, presents the affective quality of rain as an essential force
abstracted from all possible rains. Although he opposes the fixity of essen-
tialist thinking in general, Deleuze does seem to be suggesting here that a
particular force has its own essence. By his use of essence, though, the
metaphysical becoming of movement, not stasis, is revealed.
Deleuze’s any-space-whatever appears in films where plot and action are
less central. It is produced by the affective qualities of aesthetic compo-
nents. Although it may form the ground to events, it operates essentially
independent affects: ‘shadows, whites and colours which are capable of
producing and constituting any-space-whatevers, deconnected or emptied
spaces’.86 In Dreyer’s work, supplementary spiritual dimensions and pos-
sibilities are opened up when ‘space is no longer determined, it has become the
any-space-whatever which is identical to the power of the spirit’.87 Deleuze
does not reference a particular Dreyer film here.
For me, the liminal village of Courtempierre, both in its localised detail
and as an ‘any-space-whatever’, accesses metaphysical potency via its phys-
ical powers of light. The white, black and grey tonal palette manifests an
unstable, heterogenous space by its ‘richness in potentials or singularities
which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualisation, all determina-
tion’.88 The light of Courtempierre is an autonomous force and also illumi-
nates the sensory anomalies of mise-en-scène. Light works affectively through
other cinematographic elements that make up the film’s intensive space.

Sensory Anomalies and Intensive Space

Sensorial distortions begin with the opening shot of the angel inn-sign. As
well as its refraction of light mentioned already, the sign is tilted and
skewed in the first of the film’s startling camera angles. This image is pre-
sented without an establishing shot or other contextual clues, transmuting
a potentially Christian symbol into a more sinister force. The subsequent
shift to long shot reveals a grim reaper figure approaching a gallows-like
structure (or an old peasant man with a scythe). A bell rings in silence to
summon a ferry across the misty lake. Throughout the film, unnerving
sounds and long silences are preferred to words. Language, when spoken,
132    

is stilted and minimalist. In this short opening, Dreyer uses canted camera
and minimal sound to lead us in to a series of inexplicable images and
events. The build-up of these techniques produces the disturbing spatial
and temporal event of the film.
David Gray, the narrative’s protagonist, is a dapper young man on
holiday. Apart from this, we discover nothing else about him. As a stranger
forced to investigate and experience the mystery of the place, he is our per-
petually aghast surrogate rather than a character in his own right. Gray’s
fixed facial intensity reflects the horrors he encounters. His sleeked-back
hair serves to offset his liquid, protuberant eyes, which bulge ever wider in
horror as events progress. Gray is not a traditional hero whose actions
move the plot along by solving mysteries and fighting adversaries. His
name reflects his status as one of Dreyer’s ‘grey men of uncertainty’.89 He
embodies the forces of grey, which, according to Deleuze, express our
uncertainty and seeking. Contemplation and reverie have replaced decisive
deeds in an intensive, rather than extensive, world.
The unnerving ambience is intensified in Gray’s hotel room by lighting
and sound. Incoherent voices are heard through the wall as, in close-up, the
roses on the wallpaper vibrate like shimmering spots of darkness. A jump
cut into the corridor reveals a shuffling blind man with a deformed face.
After banging on the door, a (different) old man enters purposefully,
watched by the entranced Gray. Pronouncing the inexplicable words ‘She
mustn’t die – do you hear?’, he opens the curtains and leaves a parcel
behind, with the written instruction ‘to be opened after my death’. Here,
the narrative, via Gray’s intensive visionary perception, has moved out of
linear time and accessed future events.
Spatial fragmentation increases spectatorial confusion. It is difficult to
ascertain the layout of either landscape or buildings, as they are rarely
shown in their entirety. Disorientation peaks at its source, the headquar-
ters of the vampire. One room contains machinery with spikes and wheels,
like torture implements. Another reveals a coffin in flickering light. The
camera pans across Chopin’s old study bedecked with skulls and voodoo
dolls, to the sound of plucked strings and drum rolls that intensify strange-
ness and suspense. Although the coffin and the machinery feature later, all
the highlighted objects remain opaque to Gray and to us. They offer no
clue to the overwhelming mystery and the magical implements play no part
in subsequent events. The thing-world is animated on its own account in
a mise-en-scène that suppresses narrative events.
The door opens of its own accord as a sinister doctor enters. The
vampire’s assistant is a grotesque figure, with thick spectacles, a moustache
and wig-like white hair. Although Chopin probably climbs the stairs, she
  - 133

appears to come straight through the corner of the wall on the right of
screen. She is an androgynous elderly woman with hawkish features and
white wispy hair, wearing the black gown and white ruff of her era. The
objects of her occult collection are magically animated at her return. A close-
up of a hideous figurine is intercut, and a skull spins round in welcome.
Gray is powerless to intercede in the sinister plot he is forced to witness
and is deliberately delayed by temporal and spatial illusions. He wanders
back outside into to the world of blurry grisaille, where sourceless shadows
chase each other across the grass. Whilst he prevaricates, a vulnerable sit-
uation is intercut. In a chateau, whilst two young women lie dwarfed in
their oversized beds, a murder occurs. Chopin’s soldier-servant, in sil-
houette, rises out of a coffin armed with a rifle and shoots the girls’ father,
who had appeared in Gray’s room earlier. The action of shadows has ter-
rifying impact in the solid world.
Intuiting the murder too late, Gray runs towards the chateau through
the blur of its shadow garden. Discovering the dying man, Gray offers
ineffectual comfort to his grieving daughter, the child-like Giselle.
Together, they search for her sister, Leone, already under the vampire’s
sway. The diffused light of the meadow, with its bright, yet hazy sky, over-
whelms the couple. They are absorbed into semi-visibility by a light that
confuses day and night. The vampire finds sunlight congenial as she feeds
on Leone’s prone body, cruelly twisted beneath her. Gray and Giselle are
unable to move quickly. The force of the light drains their vital energy
and slows them down, allowing the vampire to hobble away and avoid
capture. Dreyer’s manipulations of time and space cancel human agency.
Predestined horrors occur in an inevitability free from intervention.
Leone’s upturned eyes and fangs indicate her transformation into a
vampire. With dramatic irony, the sinister doctor is summoned, and the
next sequence becomes overtly hallucinatory in its effects. Persuaded to
give his blood to save Leone, Gray lies weak and drowsing, back-lit by flick-
ering light to suggest the disturbed, premonitory nature of his dreams. As
drum-beats pound, he visualises a skeleton whose bony hand grasps a
poison bottle. Waking, he grabs the bottle just before the entranced Leone
drinks its contents. The doctor escapes from the house through doors that
open and shut by themselves.
Pursuing him across the meadow, Gray falls down on the ground for no
physical reason, stymied by Chopin’s magic. As he sits on a bench in the
same posture as the soldier earlier, a ghostly, shadow-like double of
himself is manifest by double exposure. He is forced to split, and his döp-
pelganger, leaving his sleeping form behind, continues on to Chopin’s
house. The door reflects Gray like a mirror, splitting him further. His
134    

faintly superimposed form watches undertakers at work. He sees himself

– this time in sharp focus – inside a coffin. This double doubling gives the
profoundly uncanny impression that part of him is dead and that his
watching self is already a ghost. He peers through a wire barrier, his face
distorted by the mesh, to see Giselle, her arms pinioned at a distorted
angle and her eyes frozen open. In his ethereal condition of disembodied
watcher, Gray is unable to free her. As a surrogate for the horror film spec-
tator, he is compelled to witness without being able to act.
Gray watches ‘himself ’ being closed up in the coffin, and as the lid is
hammered shut. The camera shifts to the point of view of the apparently
dead man and we watch events from inside, sharing Gray’s alert but
immobilised point of view. Through the glass pane, we see the lid being
lowered and screwed down. Candles are placed on the glass and lit as
Chopin’s malevolent face peers down in triumph. In disorienting slow
motion, we have a distorted, low-angle vista of an avenue of trees seen
from beneath. The ghostly shadow of the cortège in long shot passes the
figure of Gray still hunched on the bench. At this point, he returns to
sharp focus and rises up as though coming back to himself after a dream
or a visionary experience.
Gray moves at a slow, dream-like pace, under the pallid light of a sun
faintly seen through cloud. Reaching the churchyard, he helps an old man-
servant to exhume and stake the vampire’s body, which turns into a skele-
ton in an atypically low-key scene that is quickly over. Leone rises, cured,
and the sun beams out briefly before Chopin’s demise disturbs the ele-
ments and a storm rages. At the window of the vampire’s house, the face
of the girls’ father appears as a vengeful apparition. The light flickers on
and off, as though a lantern were swinging back and forth, until the soldier
falls over, dead.
The mill resembles a torture chamber, with its wheels and screws that
start themselves up. White flour sifts down onto the trapped doctor, as it
inflicts a slow, relentless death. He is killed via a swirling fog of grains that
leaves only his hand sticking up and hanging onto the wires. The forces of
light released by the vampire’s death have dispatched both the soldier and
the doctor. Despite the villains’ punishment, aesthetic forces undercut the
apparently stock ‘happy ending’.
After searching for Leone on the misty lake, Giselle and Gray walk
through the striated shadows of the trees into the sunlit brightness of a new
day. The couple are engulfed by the brightness that has been consistently
draining them and are thus wiped out of material existence. Light, not the
hero and heroine, triumphs at the end, leaving the any-space-whatever free
from human intrusion.
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Horror film continued to work predominantly with the aesthetics

of light and shadow in its monochrome phase, but by the 1960s, the use of
colour stock came to prominence and brought with it a distinct array of
affects in motion.

Sensational Colour: Spectral Horror

[colour] immediately renders a force visible.90 (Deleuze)

Despite the specificity of each medium, some of Deleuze’s insights on

colour in painting are valuable for my own analysis of affective colour in
horror cinema. The affect of colours on the sensorium is due to the varied
speeds of their light vibrations. Deleuze is influenced by Bergson’s physics-
based perspective, according to which ‘the irreducibility of two perceived
colours is due mainly to the narrow duration into which are contracted the
billions of vibrations which they execute in one of our moments’.91 If we
were able to stretch out this duration, and live it at a slower rhythm, we
might perceive the vibrations of light’s energy itself and ‘see these colours
pale and lengthen into successive impressions, still coloured, no doubt, but
nearer and nearer to coincide with pure vibrations’.92 He implies that the
vibrational quality of colours affect the senses directly, prior to their learned
social and cultural associations. The crux of Deleuzian colourism is like-
wise the affective perception of these vibrations of force.
Although Deleuze briefly refers to colour in cinema, his main theoreti-
cal application is to painting. This is because he regards cinema’s chief
expressive tools as light and movement, and painting’s as colour, texture
and form. He distinguishes intensive and extensive forces as Francis Bacon
depicts bodies ‘sometimes with an inner force that arouses them, some-
times with external forces that traverse them’.93 Deleuze considers colour,
like light, chiefly as a force, at times eliding the terms as ‘colour-force’. He
presents colour as a stimulus and modulator of the ‘colouring sensation’.94
Painters apply colour to static canvases, on which they create virtual
movement and energy in the space contained by the frame. Deleuze’s work
on Francis Bacon considers the complex relations of colour regimes and
their tonal harmonies.95 His imagery of colour’s spatialising energy
expresses natural dynamics in ‘the shores of vivid colors and the flows of
broken colors’.96 Once selected and framed, colours engage in complex
interrelations, which mobilise movement in films as well as paintings.
Tonal scales mix and interact in both media. Tones, defined by the con-
trast of black and white, may be either saturated or rarefied. Tonal rela-
tions have a tactile, as well as a visual, dimension. Their characterisation as
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‘warm’ or ‘cool’ is based on the complementarity of colours in the spec-

trum. Modulation in intensity or saturation is determined by the relations
of particular colours to their ground, or their zone within the frame. In the
case of film, the frame delimits the content of the shot, but the colours
themselves are already in vibrational motion. Their intensive, inherent
movements combine with the movement of camera, characters and editing
to unlock the virtual force of affect.
Though everything is visual in painting, vision mobilises at least two
senses. Deleuze describes vision’s capacity to mix with other sensory prop-
erties and its subsequent expansion of scope. I am suggesting that film, as
well as painting, ‘gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the
lungs’ and that cinema spectator’s eye itself is a ‘polyvalent and transitory
organ’.97 Our whole body is caught up in the affects of colour as we vibrate
in unison with them.
Deleuze’s work with colour affect highlights the relationship of eye and
hand. Touch and sight are interconnected in three different degrees: the
digital, the manual and the haptic. The digital marks subordination of
hand to eye, but the optical retains the manual in virtual form by means of
depth, contour and relief. The manual reverses the hand/eye relation.
Formless space and restless motion exceed the eye’s capacity and disman-
tle the purely optical. The most significant relation between hand and eye
is the haptic. Distinctive elements of touch are included in sight. The
haptic sense elides the visual and the tactile in the ‘tactile-optical func-
tion’.98 This sensory elision is reflected, for example, in the warm and cool
colours I mentioned above.
Although he is discussing Bacon’s distorted human figures, Deleuze’s
focus on the centrality of colour is applicable to our perception of the mon-
sters of horror. Moving away from their symbolic function, Deleuze
locates the painter’s figures in relation to the regimes of the colour scheme.
He asserts that, considered ‘figurally’, Bacon’s monsters and hideous
objects reveal the ‘most natural’ of poses, depending on their function in
relation to ‘different regimes of color, which constitute a properly visual
sense of touch, or a haptic sense of sight’.99
Applied to horror film, this perspective demands defamiliarisation. It
requires detachment from customary dramatic engagements of identifi-
cation and suspense, and releases us from imbrication in plot dynamics. It
also subsumes the symbolic functions of language used in dialogue. At the
same time, it enables awareness of a more primal level of experiential
engagement via its shift from representation to the machinic sensorium.
I consider the affective possibilities of horror films that express their
forces via colour, sound and tactisigns, beginning with Roger Corman’s
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psychedelia-influenced The Masque of the Red Death, photographed by

Nicholas Roeg.

Death by Colour: The Masque of the Red Death

To threatening drum beats, the colour-machine of the film slashes pure
blood-crimson across the frame. This title sequence cues in The Masque of
the Red Death as an unashamedly Expressionistic display of colour dynam-
ics, a cinematic colour poem with red as its leitmotif. In horror film, red is
actual or symbolic blood. As well as its cultural significance, red shocks and
stimulates the sensorium, and may also be erotically arousing. Rather than
striving to fix a pre-existing template of ‘meaning’ over a world of ani-
mated symbols, we could let our response to this affective quality shape our
experience of the film. This approach does not block out or censor the
other cognitive levels with which it fluctuates, but it enhances our percep-
tion of them.
Bergson’s discussion of the wavelength and vibrational properties of
red is useful here to shift focus from the symbolic meanings we have
learned.100 In terms of physics, red has fewer vibrations than other
colours. Red light has the longest wavelength, so its vibrations are the least
frequent. In the space of one second, it vibrates 400 billion times in suc-
cession, far too rapidly for human perception to register. This ‘low’ vibra-
tion might account for the warm opulence of red in its physiological affect.
Red, then, is a matter of colour frequency. Colour vibrations and waves
scattered from the screen are experienced directly across the neuronal net-
works of the viewer.
The opening shots contrast to the title sequence in their colour, but
repeat its compositional form to develop a rhythmical pattern. Grey is
slashed by the black silhouettes of branches in a barren, colour-deprived
realm. A drab peasant woman appears, gathering wood. The cowled scarlet
figure of the Red Death sits waiting beneath a tree, an explosion of colour
into this world from a metaphysical Elsewhere. As he transforms a white
rose into a blood-red one, so will the woman be the bearer of his fatal
bequest: the bloody plague spread throughout the land. This sequence sets
the film’s ritualised, neo-Gothic tone, and prepares to engineer the take-
over by red.
Prince Prospero, a sadistic feudal aesthete, visits a village. He displays
the shimmering opulence of cloth of gold, which both mocks, and depends
upon, the drabness of the peasantry as colour signals class relations. Vivid
red appears on the scabby, red-flecked face of the plague-bearer. This is
extended by the red and black of flames as the village is torched at
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Prospero’s orders. In contrast to the overwhelming greyness of this waste

land, the castle is awash with gaudy colours. Francesca, the young woman
seized by Prospero, bathes in a room decorated with gold swans and bright
blue and white arabesque tiles. The courtiers wear garments of clashing
colours from opposite sides of the spectrum to signal their unnaturalness.
One woman wears a bright green dress with a purple veil; another mixes
red and yellow. Purple and mauve predominate this mise-en-scène of aris-
tocratic decadence.
In an attempt to corrupt her, Prospero leads Francesca through his suite
of interlocking rooms, in which everything matches its presiding colour
scheme. First, they enter a gaudy, daffodil-yellow room. Prospero’s father
had imprisoned his friend in it for three years; when released, he could not
bear the sight of sunlight. A purple room is followed by a deathly white
room with a vase of funereal arum lilies and a locked door, beyond which
they do not pass. The floor of the great hall is paved in clashing colours:
cyan, gold, black and white. Blue and green candles in Gothic-style cande-
labra light the hall. No natural light enters the castle, but the décor is
brightly, even glaringly, illuminated. An exception to this is the gloom of
the dungeons, and the black room where Prospero and his consort Juliana
perform ‘the most terrible rites and incantations’ to Satan.
Francesca is decked in a mauve nightgown, in vibrant contrast to her
auburn hair and the crimson bloodstain on a book cover. The white of her
bedroom offsets these colours. Prospero’s artifice engineers sound as he
throws his amplified voice through a speaking tube to frighten her. The
young woman passes through the yellow and the purple rooms. The
colours she moves through resonate in different tonal effects as they
ground and interact with her hair and negligee. Finally, she enters the black
room. Its negation of colour is modified by the dark red glow of light
diffused through its windows and other concealed sources of illumination.
Francesca is lit by this hellish glow as Prospero awaits her.
The film’s stilted, melodramatic dialogue and ritualised plot denatural-
ise events and throw further emphasis on the affective colour of the visuals.
In contrast to the upper chambers, the dungeons are a minimalist tonal
scheme of black iron, shadowy arches, pale cobwebs and red flames.
Prospero’s purple and burgundy costume here emphasises fertility gone to
waste in over-ripe rottenness. Juliana wears a blood-red velvet gown as she
commits herself to Satan and prefigures her own death. Her ensuing vision
is marked by colour contrast. Clad in a diaphanous negligee, under blue-
green submarine light, demons slash at her with phallic knives in the blood
wedding she desired. When she returns to the great hall, a black-clad
Prospero unleashes a hawk, which gashes her face and breast as her blood
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flows. Her vision is a premonition of her own ‘red death’ shown in gory
close-up, with red slashes which continue the visual rhyme.
The masque arranged by Prospero is a shifting collage of clashing colours
as the dancers pretend to become-animal. Dancing shapes are a shifting
human kaleidoscope of mid-blue, cyan, purple, magenta and maroon. The
masks emphasise fabrics, colours and movements rather than individuals.
These dehumanised puppets of Prospero are nothing more than their
surface display of colours. The Red Death enters masked in red fringing.
Passing through the revellers, he infects them with his own colour as he
leads in ‘the dance of death’. He raises his red-robed arm, which blanks out
the screen as it blots out all other colours. When he lowers it again, he leaves
behind exposed, disease-marked flesh as he inflicts death by colour.
The dance moves ever more slowly to electronic drum reverberations as
the courtiers freeze like automata or puppets. A forest of red arms reaches
out for Prospero, vengefully seeking to infect him with their colour disease.
We share Prospero’s point-of-view of his courtiers in a blurred close-up as
they fall down like a deck of cards. To reassert his own gaudy spectrum,
Prospero passes back through his suite of coloured rooms to the black, red-
lit one where the Red Death awaits him. The Red Death is all red, the force
of redness incarnate. His face, which is now Prospero’s twin, approaches
him, gleaming with slicked blood as the red vibrates in contrast with the
black of the room. Death raises his cloak and transfers the marks of the
disease to Prospero. In the final sequence, the Red Death, rendered harm-
less by having fulfilled his task as nemesis, plays cards with a peasant child
beneath a tree. His spectral brothers join him: black, yellow and blue deaths
clad in hooded, concealing robes. Their colours recall Prospero’s suite of
rooms and underline its morbid implications. After they line up and walk
away together, the end-titles appear with the red-lit tarot cards of destiny.
Costume plays a significant role in the film’s colour scheme, but décor
has equal importance. Corman deploys a mise-en-scène of pure studio arti-
fice with no attempt at realism. The moving figures are little more than ani-
mated colours themselves as they intermesh their kaleidoscopic patterns.
A comparable Technicolor Expressionism appears in the Hammer Horror
films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, costume becomes more cen-
trally affective in its style and colour as it dominates narrative locales.

Dressed to Express: Colour and Costume in The

Vampire Lovers
In British cinema, ‘historical’ costume was the chief expressive mode in
such ‘women’s pictures’ as the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s. It
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was given Technicolor expression in the flamboyant fantasies of Michael

Powell and Emeric Pressburger. 101 Costume became prominent in the
low-budget Expressionism of the Hammer Horror series. In their fre-
quently autumnal settings, low-angled sunlight produces densely satu-
rated colours. Away from location shooting, rough mattes and studio sets
throw the costumes into relief against undemandingly sketchy scenery.
In The Vampire Lovers, the protagonist, Carmilla, changes her dress
colour in harmony with the changing mood and shifting power relations.
Clothes display the repetitions and variations of an extended pattern of
colour rhythms throughout the film. Carmilla’s home, Karnstein castle, is
introduced in a gloomy monochrome, which, like the forest in The Masque
of the Red Death, functions as ground to emphasise vivid colours. A
Karnstein vampire rises from her grave as a jet of white mist. Melting into
her embodied form, she wheels slowly in a transparent white shroud. As
well as revealing her voluptuous body, the diaphanous fabric expresses the
vampire’s liminality. Vampires may be mist, warm body or undead corpse.
They partake of spirit and flesh at the same time, becoming visible or invis-
ible at will.
In the neo-Gothic spaces of both Hammer and Corman films, decadent
aristocrats are the source of opulent colour. Here, the village inn and its
peasant customers are drab. Crimson is introduced by the vampire in a
blood trickle on a youth’s neck, then as a blood-smeared close-up of
her own fangs. The blonde vampire glows with stolen life in her semi-
transparent gown. Her allure is ended by a sudden swift slash of vampire
hunter Baron Hartog’s sword blade as he severs head from body. A filter
floods the screen with crimson, leaving white traces of the beheading. In
both The Masque of the Red Death and The Vampire Lovers, red is isolated
by the titles to key in its affective network of force throughout.
The next scene mobilises an affective struggle of colours as tonal exten-
sions of vampires, their victims and their adversaries. The heat of the
blood-red screen is cooled by the blue of moonlight on the pale portico of
General Spielsdorf ’s neo-classical villa. Low-key colour and soft lighting
enhance the tasteful subtlety of the dancers’ gowns in pastel mauves and
soft greens. Laura, the General’s niece, wears pearl grey/mauve satin.
General Spielsdorf stands erect, a solid block of scarlet. His colour is a
force of protection and contained aggression on the right of the frame, as
the vampire’s equal and adversary. Harmonious tones of soft mauve and
charcoal grey expresses the rapport of the friends Laura and Emma with
their heads together, the complementary tones of their blonde and auburn
hair enhanced by glowing light.
This pastel world is vivified by the arrival of ‘Marcilla’, the pseudonym
  - 141

of vampire Carmilla, and her family. Their matt-black coach is darkness

solidified, and shadows darken the hall as they enter. Two shades of red,
the general’s military scarlet and Carmilla’s blood crimson, engage in a
face-off of opposing forces as the two figures draw together and their hues
vie with each other for precedence. Carmilla’s red, in her crimson gown
and ruby pendant, is the focus of all eyes. The colours of blood and death
enter to support her via her father, with his black, red-lined cloak and
pallid face, and mother, likewise in monochrome with pale skin, black dress
and hair. When Carmilla later communes with her father from the porch,
her red blends into the black of the night as she submits her passion to the
over-arching forces of death.102
Dialogues of colour and tonal qualities mark the progress of Laura’s
seduction. Carmilla’s crimson is changed for turquoise, closer in hue than
scarlet to Laura’s grey stripes (also echoed on the General’s waistcoat).
The vampire feeds on her victim via a green filter and the flickering super-
imposition of a cat’s face. This combines with a fur rug creeping up the
bed to smother her victim in a combination of unnatural colour and the
haptic sensation of choking. After the seduction is complete, Carmilla
reverts to a more assertive green gown as turquoise is enhanced by its move
to an adjacent shade on the spectrum.
Green is ambiguous in its affect. The sun emits a higher proportion of
green light than red or blue. In harmony with this, the human eye’s sen-
sitivity to green is higher than its receptivity to blue and red, the other
key colours it is equipped to perceive at a cellular level via the rods and
cones at the back of the eye. In relation to green, ‘other colours enter
different fields within the eye-brain activity and will cause different
affects’.103 Green usually indicates natural growth and bounty, and has
pleasing and soothing properties; but it may also trigger sinister occult
associations. As a particularly lurid shade here, it has a more disturbing
affect in its sinister associations of decay, and of the supernatural. It sug-
gests the phosphorescence of fungi at night. Edged by its black border, it
becomes both assertive and morbid. Green also recalls the filter used in
Laura’s cat dreams.
Colour harmony can suggest relations of rivalry, as we saw in the red
shades of ‘Carmilla’ and Spielsdorf. A potential love triangle is also keyed
in via gown colour. Mlle Perrodon and Carmilla both wear dark shades as
they vie for the attention of Emma, in virginal white. Like Emma, Carmilla
increasingly adopts white (due to frequent scenes in her nightgown) but
with the deliberate self-awareness of experience. Carmilla’s gleaming wet
flesh is teasingly semi-covered by a white towel after her bath, while Emma
wears her white gown for the last time before succumbing to the vampire’s
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embrace. The couple reappear dressed for dinner in vibrant shades which
assert their passion. Emma wears the victim’s mauve-grey as Laura had
done earlier. Carmilla is back in her familiar blood-red gown and wears her
ruby droplet as she starts a new vampiric relationship. Her crimson glows
in triumph over Mlle Perrodon’s grey.
The vampire is finally vanquished in the gloom of Karnstein castle by
an alliance of the forces of grey, when the only emphatic colours are the
dark red dress of Carmilla’s old portrait and her ruby pendant dropped on
the ground. After Spielsdorf beheads her, tones lighten and the stained
glass becomes clearer as ‘natural’ colours return. Her portrait becomes
skeletal, drained of blood-red to the white of bone and the black of disso-
lution. The world returns to grey in the stone tombstone of the final close-
up. Rather than being ‘told’ by narrativity, the tale has been expressed in
the affection-image of changing colours. My third example, Dario
Argento’s Suspiria, adds touch to his sensory toolkit.

Tactisigns of Terror: Suspiria

In Suspiria, Argento incorporates as many senses as possible to frighten
and arouse the spectator in their experience of the film event. Tactility is
evoked with particularly repellent force. We can explore its impact via the
Deleuzian cinematic sensorium. Deleuze adds the term ‘tactisigns’ to his
sensory categories of ‘sonsigns’ and ‘opsigns’. Tactisigns reveal ‘a touch-
ing which is specific to the gaze’.104 In this context, the tactile is not an
extensive act of the hand, but an intensive sensation of touch possible ‘on
condition that the hand relinquishes its prehensile and motor functions to
content itself with a pure touching’.105 Horror films appeal to the sensor-
ium as comprehensively as possible by including haptics in their range of
affects. The tactisign is pivotal in scenes of sensory horror and enhances
the potency of their virtual presence. As well as terrifying sights and
sounds, we perceive affective textures of a repellent nature, such as the wet
stickiness of human blood, or the slimy trail of a monster.
Argento’s lurid, saturated colours lack nuance and assault the sensorium
in their perverse mimicry of the Disney cartoon spectrum. Red predomi-
nates in a variety of vibrant shades. It is first glimpsed fleetingly, on an
anonymous woman at Frieburg airport where the heroine, American dance
student Suzy Bannon, arrives. Suzy next sees red on a terrified student
fleeing the dance academy. Red stains the outside of this building, spread-
ing via the wallpaper and drapes as well as wine, blood, fingernails and lips.
Violet-blue velvet covers the walls and adds tactile to visual potency. This
Technicolor palette drains the strength of the good characters by absorb-
  - 143

ing their life-energy and glowing brighter afterwards. It vibrates in us

intensively, oppressing yet arousing us.
The film foregrounds art and artifice to the detriment of human life.
The art nouveau ‘modernisation’ of the ancient building evokes fin-de-
siècle decadence in the endless ‘feminine’ curls of etiolated natural forms,
and the style affords a fit setting for the occult theme. The building is
impregnated with evil female forces embodied in the academy direc-
tor/witch queen Madame Blanc and her assistant Miss Tanner, a brutal
dominatrix. Men, as servants or dance students, are disempowered in this
sinister gynocracy.
Practical devices are deployed by the witches to ensure secrecy, like the
use of drugged wine to send the dancers to sleep when a ritual, or murder,
is afoot. There are, however, occult manifestations in the sensory realm
impossible to explain. Nature itself is rendered unnatural by psychic dis-
turbances in the locale, manifest by frequent rainstorms and strong winds.
The heroine’s arrival at the airport is greeted by torrential rain and gales.
The witches emanate an aura of supernatural evil, which only the
pianist’s dog and Suzy are able to see. Suzy has very wide staring eyes that
allow, or compel, her to witness and observe much more than she is meant
to. Exceptions to her omniscience occur when she is given drugged wine,
and when she is temporarily dazzled by a shard of mirror in a maid’s
hand. Magnified light is harnessed by evil forces to blind Suzy’s clear-
sighted investigations.
Several of the film’s occult phenomena are emphatically tactile. They
frighten us by the radical incongruity of nature out of place and the mixture
of elements usually kept separate. Kristeva’s identification of the abject as
matter out of place is relevant here, but my focus is the experiential impact
of these repellent manifestations on the senses. The first victim is grabbed
by a hand that materialises from the darkness outside her window on the
third floor. Outside, a mysterious, watching eye is suspended in darkness in
a concretisation of the witches’ symbolic omniscience.
Anomalous forms of life invade the dormitories. Their repulsive tactile
qualities are emphasised by the sensitive skin exposed to them as the
dancers undress. A bat flutters down onto Suzy and clings tight, biting her.
Hundreds of maggots appear, wriggling and crawling over the floor, and
the girls are compelled to tread on them, squashing them either with their
shoes or with naked feet. The maggots land in the girls’ hair and crawl on
their skin as they struggle to brush them off. The use of close-up in this
sequence intensifies the viewer’s virtual sensation of slime, squirming
larvae and viscous texture, particularly repellent on bare flesh.
The murders intensify tactisigns to unbearably excruciating levels in
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their speeded-up, yet elaborate, tortures. Inflicted by invisible torturers,

their affective potency is increased by the lack of subject/object split to
provide some degree of narrative distancing. This is further intensified by
the use of extreme close-ups. Knife blades dominate the screen as they slice
into flesh, and internal organs such as the heart are torn loose and exposed.
When one victim, Sara, believes she has eluded pursuit, she falls into a bed
of wire coils and struggles against them. They clutch at her and slice her
flesh, trapping her further the more she struggles. She dies an agonising
death by tactility, cut to shreds by metal wires.
The animal world is possessed and controlled by the witches, who use
familiars, in an occult animal-becoming, to do their work by proxy. As well
as the maggots and bat, a dimly seen flock of birds in a darkened public
square is impelled to dive-bomb Daniel, the academy’s blind pianist, who
wanders home alone. Despite his inability to witness their deeds, he has
been cruelly humiliated and dismissed by Miss Tanner. His Alsatian guide
dog, able to sense the evil nature of his master’s employers, had growled at
the maid’s son. The swooping birds initially terrify the dog, then he turns
against his master. In a horrific scene, the pianist, who is only able to feel
and hear his assailants, is savaged and partly devoured by his own guide
dog and has his throat torn out and eaten. The dog may either have become
possessed or been terrified into forgetting his training and responding to
his carnivorous nature, roused by the smell of fresh blood.
Sound techniques with an exaggerated, hyper-real echo are deployed as
affective devices. The tapping, clattering and thudding of the dancers’
shoes resonates with hollowness on the floorboards of the studio. In the
bier-keller, the thumping and slapping of Bavarian dancers swells to an
unnatural volume before Daniel’s murder. Natural sounds like wind and
rain have the force of potential threat. Voices and music are ultra-clear,
with a hollow tonal quality, and stand out in isolation from the broader
sound mix. The electronic chords and discords of the rock band Goblin
create a rich sound texture. Whirrings, whisperings and tweeterings
without any diegetic source grate on the spectator’s aural nerves and stim-
ulate anxiety.
The film’s denouement is a flamboyant showpiece of sensory stimula-
tion. Suzy enters the hidden chambers of the coven via its magic key of art
nouveau, a blue metal iris on the wall. She accidentally knocks over a
peacock ornament, which encapsulates the film’s colour scheme in mini-
ature. When Suzy pierces the amorphous, shadowy witch-queen with a
knife, she forces her to materialise in the partial form of organs without a
body. Her mouth, eyes and hands, each one a sensory tool, appear in isola-
tion and she uses them to both to perceive and to terrify her assailant.
  - 145

Electronically mixed sound is used to create her distorted voice. In a finale

of tactility and colour, the red academy is finally burned down in a hellish
conflagration of scarlet flames. Suspiria extends the sensorial palette of
horror by its excesses of colour, sound and touch.
Although Deleuze acknowledges the sensory operations of colour, mise-
en-scène and editing, his chief locus of the cinematic affection image is the
human face, particularly in close-up. Throughout this book, I have noted
the pivotal role of faces, both human and monstrous, as the affective focus
of the horror experience. To illustrate the face’s horrifying potential, I will
use a film in which the face has, literally, lost its features, Georges Franju’s
Les Yeux sans Visage.

The Face of Horror: The Intensive Affection-Image

in Les Yeux sans Visage
the affection-image is the close-up, and the close-up is the face.106 (Deleuze)

while perception measures the reflecting power of the body, affection measures its
power to absorb.107 (Bergson)

By literally removing faces, the film’s plot remains unnervingly close to the
liberation from facialisation described in Anti-Oedipus, ‘to escape the face,
to dismantle the face and facialisations, to become imperceptible, to
become clandestine [. . .] by quite spiritual and special becomings-
animal’.108 As a horror film, though, these processes are shot through with
terror and revulsion. The unnatural cruelty of dismantling the face is
stressed here. Young women are laboratory animals robbed of their largest
organ, skin, in a perverted attempt to repair the damaged face of the
heroine/victim, Christiane. Her face was burned away in a car accident
caused by her father, the renowned plastic surgeon Doctor Génessier, now
the chief perpetrator of these dreadful acts. The skin, and its underlying
tissue, is an enforcedly mobile and transferable organ grafted by violence
onto a set of others belonging to a different body. The controlling Sadeian
eye of the camera moves about its purpose of exposure in a slowly insistent
glide. It savours horrific close-ups of the cutting away and grafting of one
face onto the raw flesh of another.
Close-ups of faces in extremis are frequent in horror film. Deleuzian
faciality, based on the ‘unextended’ nature of the affection-image in
Bergson, can elucidate their impact. The power quality of intensive images
is expressed for itself in a virtual conjunction unlimited by spatio-temporal
co-ordinates. Power-qualities ‘in themselves’ are expressed by faces (or their
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equivalent) and embody the affection-image. The face is the epitome of the
affection image’s ‘motor effort on an immobilised receptive plate’. By the
magnifying properties of close-up-and extreme close-up, its shapes, tex-
tures and muscular movements reveal a variety of interrelated modalities,
in ‘parts which are hard and tender, shadowy and illuminated, dull and
shiny, smooth and grainy, jagged and curved’.109 These elements interact
intensively among themselves or more extensively with other intercut close-
ups, in an internal composition of close-ups in affective framing, cutting
and montage.
The face is used by Deleuze to interrogate the nature and location of
subjective identity. The ‘the pure affect, the pure expressed of the state
of things’ relates to the face that ‘gathers and expresses it as a complex
entity’.110 Deleuze identifies two types of face. The intensive face
expresses ‘pure Power’ in its extensive connections with environmental
others, and may be defined as ‘a series that makes us pass from one
quality to another’.111 The reflective face expresses ‘pure Quality’ in
‘“something” common to several objects of different natures’ and is of a
more contemplative, intensive nature.112 The face in close-up suspends
individuation and attains a transpersonal quality. The intensity of the
close-up face opens onto both time and space. It modifies space-time, ‘in
depth or on the surface, as if it had torn it away from the co-ordinates
from which it was abstracted’ and thus acts ‘like a short circuit of the near
and far’.113
The face full-on is rare in mainstream cinema. Faces are more usually
shown in mobile degrees of profile to maintain the illusion of a self-
contained fictional world by their indirect expression. The modulations of
facial affect are expressed by turning-towards or turning-away. Facial
obliteration, as in extreme close-up, however, ‘goes beyond the threshold
of decrease, plunges the affect into the void and makes the face lose its fea-
tures’.114 Christiane is introduced to us turned away from the camera,
reduced to a non-person filled with self-loathing and despair, deliberately
hiding her face in the pillows in a gesture of self-obliteration. This con-
cealement piques our curiosity to see her face. Whatever degree she turns
to, though, we will learn little more about her face, which is bereft of most
of its features.
Our first sight of Christiane’s ‘face’ conceals it, or, rather, reveals it as a
blank white mask she is compelled to wear most of the time. She resembles
a fashion mannequin with archetypally perfect, frozen features rather than
an expressive and individuated human face. The mask enables her face to
become the intensive face of pure quality in an overt manner. The viewer
seeks in vain to read the marks of emotion and personality in the face itself.
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By being both visually isolated and blanked out, Christiane’s face is poten-
tised and draws on the viewer’s ability to superimpose absent muscular
movements when there is no facial mobility. The mask is topped by
vibrantly waving hair. It is pierced by large, liquid and expressive eyes,
which it throws into sharp relief. This, along with her voice and a stiffly
gliding bodily mobility, indicate her suppressed life.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the face’s potential as a tabula rasa, ‘a
suggestive whiteness, a hole that captures’.115 Both signifiance and subjec-
tification are projected onto this ‘white wall’. Not only is the face a frame
or screen for social meaning, it is also the ‘black hole’ of subjective con-
sciousness expressed by the ‘third eye’ of the camera. Close-ups of the face
serve to defamiliarise it as an ‘alien landscape’. In the case of Christiane,
our responses are contradictory. Our empathic sharing of her emotion is
intensified by our own imaginative input, which we project onto the mini-
ature blank screen of the mask. At the same time, we are alienated from the
subjective sphere by the faceless face of the mask, so that its ‘hole’ could
open up to the ‘Whole’ of duration.
At the start of the film, we see Louise, Génessier’s assistant and ‘secre-
tary’, with a frozen, tense expression as she drives her car alone at night.
On the back seat, a human figure is slumped, its face and head obscured
and de-personalised by a hat pulled low down. The young woman’s muti-
lated body has been disguised to cover up the horror of her ravaged fea-
tures. The police and forensic scientists who discover the dumped body
describe its ‘vast open wound in place of a face’.
Skin is the most sensitive bodily organ and the facial features it covers
are most intimately connected to our socialised sense of selfhood, renewed
daily via our mirror reflection. Skin is the film’s dominant diagrammatic
component, fetishised as the locus of beauty and vulnerability. Skin-like
fabrics, textures and effects dominate the mise-en-scène of this glossy
monochrome film. Louise’s shiny black oilskin raincoat glistens with the
dampness of mist reflecting the gleam of car headlamps. The glossy pol-
ished bonnet of the doctor’s Citroën forms a reflective surface for the trees
and buildings it passes. In the mansion, the shimmering of plate-glass
windows, the gleam of tiles and the shine of the metal lamp in the operat-
ing theatre likewise offer reflecting surfaces. They mock Christiane by the
whole environment’s becoming-mirror.
Christiane also forms a moving crystalline surface of tiny mirrors as she
glides around. She wears full-length housecoats of glittery fabrics that
shimmer with the reflected light she seems to emit herself, enhancing her
ethereal, fey appearance. Her floor-length garments hide her feet and add
to our sense of her as a moving statue or automaton. As well as the visual
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effect of shimmer and shine on light-reflective surfaces, the insistent tex-

turing of skin, fabrics and other materials evokes tactile sensations.
Prosthetic and cosmetic surgery is, of course, deliberately used to
modify facial features and skin texture in ‘face-lifts’, collagen implants and
other beauty treatments. The doctor’s métier has made him ‘a man of dis-
tinction’ who duplicitously profits from anxieties implanted by the cult of
youth in the fashion industry. His lecture audience, who cluster admiringly
round him, comprises wealthy older women and their younger male com-
panions. Potential patients are prepared to repeatedly suffer the excruciat-
ing agony of exsanguination, and risk cancer from the radiation with which
he bombards them in the operating theatre.
The doctor uses human women as laboratory animals. He has objectified
both beasts and humans for his obsessive experimentation. The dogs and
the young women are both lost, without protection, and equally vulnerable
to capture. Both are unceremoniously dumped when the doctor has fin-
ished with them. The inhuman coldness of his attitude is fuelled by the
neo-Gothic horror tradition of the mad scientist who abuses his skills and
interferes with the natural order out of scientific hubris.
Christiane expresses her most positive emotions in the company of her
caged birds or the dogs imprisoned, like her, to await her father’s next
experiment. In a tender scene, she visits the dogs, rendered docile by her
gentle presence. They bark and snarl at the doctor when he passes and
some of them are bandaged from his skin-graft tests. As well as kissing and
stroking their soft furry skin, she bends down to their level to rub noses
with them in a becoming-animal. Christiane’s tactility is highly developed,
perhaps in compensation for her other sensory impairments. She deli-
cately strokes the face of one of the human girl victims as she, too, is an
experimental animal. In a startling image, we see Christiane’s exposed face
from the victim’s point-of-view as a blackened shape with prominent pale
eyes, shot in out-of-focus negative footage. Blood and raw flesh are ren-
dered black and grey by monochrome.
Doctor Génessier also assumes a mask in the operating theatre. This
half-mask emphasises his hawk-like eyes and brow dripping with sweat
from the tension of difficult incisions. Like a beautician preparing make-
up, he draws around the victim’s face with a marker pencil. He takes the
scalpel and we see him in painfully tactile close-up carving along the line
he has drawn, transforming the living face into a removable mask of
skin. Blood oozes out along the line left by the blade. The act of cutting
and lifting the stolen face is rendered in even sharper relief by being
performed in silence. We watch with fascinated revulsion as he cuts into
the delicate skin around the eyes, aware of the vulnerability of the
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softest part of the soft machine. The scalpel makes the blood seep out
and drip down.
Lifting the facial flesh off with tweezers embedded around its circum-
ference, Génessier and Louise peel back the face with a trembling move-
ment, which causes a slight wobble in the flesh. The doctor pulls and prises
at it, separating the facial skin from the underlying tissue. As the lifted face
drops forward, it unnervingly appears to age, adopting a hag-like aspect as
the features cave inwards towards each other. The excision leaves the raw
exposed flesh beneath as the victim’s face is taken from her to be grafted
onto Christiane, before her dehumanised body is discarded.
Christiane’s lack of face has led to her social invisibility and virtual
imprisonment by her father. She is, however, highly self-reflexive. She is
aware of her own nullified status and has seen her own hidden face, both
with and without the mask. She frequently reflects upon her loss. Despite
the removal of all mirrors, she explains that ‘if the windows are open, there
are other shiny surfaces. The blade of a knife, polished wood’. She con-
fesses to Louise that ‘my face frightens me: my mask terrifies me even
more’. She can accept her mutilated state better than the mask her father
and Louise insist upon. Ignoring her stated wishes, they force her to wear
an impossibly frozen face to render her appearance easier for them to bear.
The face of Louise is also unnaturally marked by a sinister, mask-like
stillness that hides her own emotions. She owes her own present face to the
doctor’s surgical skills and wears a pearl choker to conceal the remaining
scar round her neck. Louise’s eyes are strongly outlined by eyeliner and she
sometimes wears a tightly wrapped headscarf round her hair. These add to
her facial isolation and mask-like appearance, which, despite her own
grateful collusion with Génessier, gives her some affinity with the mother-
less Christiane.
The terror and distress of one victim, Enid, when she awakes on the
operating bench, is likewise powerfully conveyed solely by her eyes, left
uncovered by the mummy-like wrappings of bandages. This shot of the
eyes in isolation is mirrored by Louise peering through a slit in the door of
the operating theatre, the rest of her face remaining concealed. Enid has
been forcibly stripped of her identity and flings herself out of the window
in despair, leaving her eyes staring open in silent accusation.
When Christiane first appears after her operation, her stolen face still
resembles a mask, but one made of human skin this time. Her lack of mus-
cular facial animation leads Louise to note the quality of ‘something
angelic’ about her, again underlining the culture’s idealisation of young
womanhood. Enid’s grafted face has been changed in its form and expres-
sion by the underlying bone and tissue structure of Christiane. The affront
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to nature is punished by failure in a disturbing series of freeze-frame

photographs taken as ‘necrosis of the graft tissue’ sets in and Christiane’s
appearance rapidly degenerates from perfection to deformity, and beauty
becomes beast.
Christiane’s despair at her role of human guinea pig and horror at her
father’s cruelty leads to her demand for a lethal injection to put her out of
her misery. Her compassion for the victims finally leads to her empower-
ment. In a free act, she releases the last young woman captured, as well as
the dogs and her own pet caged birds. When freed, the dogs savage
Génessier’s head, leaving him, too, finally without a face. Christiane
wanders out into the dark garden under the trees with a dove perching on
her arm. A figure of surreal grace, she glides away, freed from her father
and his terrible tearing of organs from bodies. For Deleuze and Guattari,
‘dismantling the face is also a politics, involving real becoming, an entire
becoming-clandestine’.116 Even though she still wears her mask,
Christiane’s act is a refusal of the kind of faciality enforced by her father,
and begins her becoming of a more truly Deleuzian body-without organs.
Deleuze’s work on the types of movement-image offers a new film/phil-
osophical approach to the aesthetics of horror. This response demands a
degree of detachment from the terrifying drama of horror narratives. It
rarely fixes symbolic meanings onto images. It also looks elsewhere than
the researches of film historians who map the cultural context of the film’s
production and distribution. At the same time, though, it enables aware-
ness of a more primal level of experiential engagement via its focal shift
from representation to movement and its affect on the machinic sensor-
ium. In Chapter 4, I move away from the material aesthetics of horror, and
their stimulus on the senses, to consider the impact of time on experien-
tial thought in the horror film.

Notes
1. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The
Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 366.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchill (London and New York: Verso, 1994), p.
176.
3. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 366.
4. Ibid. p. 366.
5. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1910]
1971), p. 28.
  - 151

6. Ibid. p. 38.
7. Ibid. p. 73.
8. Ibid. p. 132.
9. Ibid. p. 132.
10. Ibid. pp. 12–13.
11. Ibid. p. 12.
12. Ibid. p. 14.
13. Ibid. p. 18.
14. Ibid. p. 18.
15. Ibid. p. 18.
16. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), p. 58.
17. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.
Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 208.
18. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 168.
19. Ibid. p. 211.
20. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 37.
21. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 306.
22. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 2.
23. Ibid. p. 59.
24. Ibid. p. 59.
25. Ibid. p. 60.
26. Ibid. p. 60.
27. Ibid. p. 61.
28. Ibid. p. 59.
29. Ibid. p. 103.
30. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 74.
31. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 167.
32. Ibid. p. 176.
33. Ibid. pp. 166–7.
34. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 180.
35. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 15.
36. Ibid. p. 18.
37. Ibid. p. 62.
38. Ibid. p. 65.
39. Ibid. p. 64.
40. Ibid. p. 65.
41. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 55–6.
42. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 66.
43. Ibid. p. 65.
44. Ibid. p. 65.
152    

45. Ibid. p. 112.

46. Ibid. p. 102.
47. Ibid. p. 106.
48. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 187.
49. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 22.
50. Ibid. p. 12.
51. Ibid. p. 18.
52. Ibid. p. 18.
53. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 49.
54. Ibid. p. 49.
55. Ibid. p. 55.
56. Ibid. p. 109.
57. Ibid. p. 109.
58. Freud, Sigmund [1922], ‘Medusa’s Head’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis,
1940), pp. 273–4.
59. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 101.
60. Ibid. p. 101.
61. Ibid. p. 49.
62. Ibid. pp. 49–50.
63. Ibid. p. 111.
64. Ibid. p. 111.
65. Ibid. p. 111.
66. Ibid. p. 52.
67. Ibid. p. 51.
68. Ibid. pp. 111–12.
69. Ibid. p. 112.
70. Ibid. p. 112.
71. Ibid. p. 53.
72. Ibid. p. 53.
73. Ibid. p. 53.
74. The making of this film is the subject matter of E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow
of the Vampire. This is a more visually conventional version than its original
as character acting in close-up predominates. In colour, the lighting is much
more uniform and detracts from the contrast of light and shade. Its use of
clips from Murnau’s film serves to throw the older film’s distinctiveness into
relief.
75. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 113.
76. Ibid. p. 113.
77. Ibid. p. 113.
78. Ibid. p. 44.
79. Ibid. p. 113.
80. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 366.
  - 153

81. Ibid. p. 366.

82. Sheridan le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’, in In a Glass Darkly [1872], (Gloucester: Alan
Sutton Publishing, 1990).
83. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, pp. 113–14.
84. Ibid. p. 117.
85. Ibid. p. 117.
86. Ibid. p. 120.
87. Ibid. p. 117.
88. Ibid. p. 109.
89. Ibid. p. 114.
90. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.
Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 151.
91. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 203.
92. Ibid. p. 203.
93. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, p. 160.
94. Ibid. p. 112.
95. Ibid. p. 152.
96. Ibid. p. 142.
97. Ibid. p. 52.
98. Ibid. p. 151.
99. Ibid. p. 153.
100. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 205.
101. Such as The Red Shoes and Tales from Hoffmann.
102. The Vampire Lovers has been read psychoanalytically by Bonnie
Zimmerman, ‘Daughters of Darkness: The Lesbian Vampire on Film’, in
Barry K. Grant (ed.), Planks of Reason (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press,
1984); and in my own Anna Powell, Psychoanalysis and Sovereignty in Popular
Vampire Fictions (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario and Lampeter, Wales:
The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).
103. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 112.
104. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement-Image, p. 12.
105. Ibid. p. 12.
106. Ibid. p. 87.
107. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p, 56.
108. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 171.
109. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 103.
110. Ibid. p. 103.
111. Ibid. p. 90.
112. Ibid. p. 90.
113. Ibid. p. 104.
114. Ibid. pp. 104–5.
115. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 168.
116. Ibid. p. 188.
 CHAPTER 4

Horror Time

we shall never reach the past unless we frankly place ourselves within it.1 (Bergson)
relations of time are never seen in ordinary perception, but they are seen in the
image2 (Deleuze)

At the birth of cinema, the vampire Louis watches Lumière’s train.

Among the clips we see in the same sitting are Murnau’s Nosferatu and
Sunrise, which fades into Tequila Sunrise, a self-reflexive reference to the
star, Tom Cruise, who plays the Vampire Lestat in the 1991 film. Time,
history and memory are compressed in cinema as well as in the vampire,
for whom a century elides into a few minutes. In this brief sequence of from
Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire, a shorthand version of cinema
history is presented via a screen within the screen. Cinematic memory
operates time in many ways, some more obvious than others.
Time permeates the horror film in all its aspects, as insistent pasts
undermine a linear map of time. Several different types of horror time are
operant. The personal past, with its traumas, and the historical past that
imposes itself over the present, have particular generic status. Ghosts con-
flate past and present as they linger to repeat their own present, refusing
to let it be past. They compel present-day characters to abandon contem-
poraneity and to experience the history of others by enforced overlay. Even
though the present is never fully materialised by film, editing, camera
movements and superimposition work overtly with, and in, time as well as
space. Tension is experienced as an unbearable dilation of time, whereas
shock intensively collapses a temporal force felt like a physical blow.
The metaphysical plane of horror also opens on to duration. The work
of Deleuze and Bergson on the nature of time throws new light on this
aspect of horror-time. Psychoanalysis suggests that the unconscious is a
bounded zone, a burial ground for the (personal) past that haunts the (sub-
jective) present. Psychoanalytic time is personal history. Following
Bergson and Nietszche, not Freud, Deleuze prefers a universal model of
time as flux and process. Bergson describes a universe of fluid, ever shift-
ing flows and vibrations rather than solid bodies in motion. In some
respects, his views were shaped by contemporary views of quantum
   155

physics. By eliding movement with time, Bergson seeks to ‘avoid the visual
image of bodies and the concomitant and inevitable abstraction of move-
ment (i.e., time) from that which moves’.3 Deleuze, too, interrogates what
happens when time is not measurable by the translation of movements into
action. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image and elsewhere, Deleuze distinguishes
between two kinds of time.
Chronos is the spatialised, measured time of the clock; but Aeon, as
duration itself, is virtual. It is a transpersonal, transtemporal, force and
partakes of the élan vital of all evolving life. Chronos is present-oriented.
With God at its centre, it measures out the action of bodies and causes.
Aeon, however, is the limitless flow of past and future, in which the present
is ‘the instant without thickness and without extension’.4 As ‘always
already passed and eternally yet to come’, Aeon is the ‘eternal truth of
time: pure empty form of time’.5 The subjective model of human self-
consciousness operates in Chronos, whereas the living image participates
in the perpetual process of affect that is Aeon. As centres of indetermina-
tion, humans have the latent capacity to perceive the workings of duration,
made manifest both in consciousness and in art.
Temporal relations not visible in ordinary perception may be seen in the
image. The temporal process becomes evident to our senses when cinema
self-reflexively foregrounds its own mechanisms. Cinema can represent
time in the fictionalised ‘present’, but the film image itself, unlike the tele-
visual image, is not in the present moment. Referring to the work of
Tarkovski, Ozu and others, Deleuze states that the cinematic image ‘is an
ensemble of time relations from the present which merely flows’; and that
the image renders ‘time relations – relations that can’t be reduced to the
present – sensible and visible’.6 Such films make us conscious of duration,
both in them, and in ourselves as living image. Cinema helps us to experi-
ence and to think time.
The movement-image appears in cinema more often than the time-
image, which is still an emergent form. In Cinema 2, Deleuze sets out to
exemplify a new form of ‘direct time-image’ in art-cinema after the Second
World War, beginning with Italian neo-realism. One way in which the
power of cinema captures time is in the relations and disjunctions between
sound and vision, when what is said does not arise naturally from what is
seen. In such films as Last Year at Marienbad, the movement-image is
superseded by the time-image. Time is no longer derived from movement,
but ‘appears in itself and gives rise to false movements’.7 Despite Deleuze’s
distinction of the two types of cinematic image, their interface is perme-
able and fluid. Movement is always in time, and one force does not func-
tion without the other.
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Deleuze is less concerned with the realistic parameters of Italian neo-

realism as a style than with moving beyond the ‘real’, into the process of
thought stimulated by the style. His intent is to ‘turn from exteriority or
extensiveness in space toward a genesis in mental relations or time’.8 His
examples exhibit the workings of time by their defamiliarisation of the
familiar. They produce a more contemplative form of cinematic experi-
ence. All film images, however, inherently destabilise time by their tempo-
ral modulations across past, present and future, and many different types
of film, including more mainstream generic examples, have use-value as
tools to explore this process. Deleuze’s work on the time-image in cinema
is shaped by Bergson’s complex exploration of the nature of time and his
distinction between clock time and duration.

Bergson’s Time: Movement and Duration

In Matter and Memory, Bergson initially locates duration in the impetus
given to consciousness by sensation. We respond to intense sensory stim-
ulus by ‘irresistible’ reflex movements and a sense of powerlessness, which
make us briefly lose consciousness of our personality. When consciousness
returns, our reflections on the reverberation of sensation produce an image
of inner multiplicity. This multiplicity is of quality, not quantity. Multiple
states of consciousness permeate each other, and even in the simplest of
them ‘the whole soul can be reflected’.9 To our conscious perception, inner
duration appears as a fluid ‘melting of states of consciousness into one
another, and the gradual growth of the ego’.10
States of consciousness are not external to each other, being intensive
rather than extensive in nature. They only appear to be external if we
falsely locate them spatially rather than temporally. Here, Bergson draws
on his frequently made distinction between duration and another model
of time based on space. In order to perceive our conscious states with
greater ease, to reflect on them, and speak of them in the language of
‘common sense’, we externalise them via thought forms. To help us do
this, we think time as a form of space and separate our states of conscious-
ness, so they are no longer intermeshed. We lay them out alongside each
other to perceive them simultaneously. We thus ‘project time into space,
we express duration in terms of extensity, and succession thus takes the
form of a continuous line or a chain, the parts of which touch without
penetrating one another’.11 By this method, we symbolise our states of
consciousness by locating them in the simultaneity produced by spatial-
ising time.
The fluid nature of duration eludes the fixity of the language that helps
   157

us to apprehend it in everyday terms. Duration appears to be ‘confused,

ever changing, and inexpressible, because language cannot get hold of it
without arresting its mobility or fit it into its commonplace forms’.12 By
this process, which we adopt to suit social and linguistic requirements, ‘the
self is thus refracted and thereby broken to pieces’.13 We become content
with ‘the shadow of the self projected into homogenous space’.14 Our
deeper layers of being are thus barred from us. I feel there is some com-
monality between Bergson’s description and Lacan’s concept of barred
plentitude here, despite psychoanalysis’s very different paradigm of per-
sonal psychic history.
We apply a comparable ruse when we try to think motion by confusing
it with space. This kind of thinking is ‘a case of endosmosis, an intermin-
gling of the purely intensive sensation of mobility with the extensive rep-
resentation of the space traversed’.15 By attributing to a motion the
divisibility of the space that it traverses, we are ‘forgetting that it is quite
possible to divide an object, but not an act’.16 Duration partakes of univer-
sal motion and cannot be chopped into separate portions.
To perceive its nature more effectively, Bergson draws on the insights of
‘immediate intuition’ that shows us ‘motion within duration, and duration
outside space’.17 The ‘deeper’ self can become aware of the fluid and multi-
ple natures of states of consciousness. This self, by perceiving distinct
states, then concentrating its attention on them, will see them ‘melt into
one another like the crystals of a snowflake when touched for some time
with the finger’.18 Unity underlies apparent distinctions. Duration thus
links the past, present and future in a seamless continuum, which is
divided artificially only when time is turned into space.
As well as images from the physical world, like the melting snowflake,
Bergson draws on art to elucidate our experience and perception of dura-
tion. Like music, duration is ‘an indivisible multiplicity changing qualita-
tively in an ongoing movement’.19 It unites past and present into an
organic whole, ‘as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so
to speak, into one another’.20 Absorption in an aesthetic event offers a par-
allel process in our consciousness via the intensive affective vibrations it
triggers. Bergson believes that the main function of art is to reveal the
nature of duration to us. The limitations of language inevitably offer us
only the ‘shadow’ of duration. A skilled novelist, such as Marcel Proust,
however, by describing an ‘infinite permeation of a thousand different
impressions which have already ceased to exist the instant they are
named’ has ‘brought us back into our own presence’.21 This return to our-
selves is imbricated in the processes of memory that we use to recover the
enduring past.
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In order to endure, the consciousness is not entirely absorbed in the

present, passing moment, but maintains awareness of its former states at
some level. Time passes, but time continues. Memory enables the ego to
experience its ‘full, living, potential’ in the quality of ‘pure heterogene-
ity’.22 Memory brings the past back into the present of consciousness.
Bergson states that pure duration is ‘the form which the succession of our
conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from
separating its present state from its former states’.23 By reanimating the
past in the present, we become fully alive to time’s potential richness and
complexity.
Memory is image-dependent. A powerful sense impression is made vir-
tually manifest in memory via ‘the coloured and living image which reveals
it’.24 Particularly potent memories emanate light, as ‘shining points round
which the others form a vague nebulosity’.25 If these affective focal points
are actualised, they reproduce their corresponding sensations within the
body. All our experiences in the present are shot through with memory, and
there is no perception without it. Although memory tends to ‘imitate per-
ception’ as it returns from duration ‘like a condensing cloud’, it still retains
elements of its ‘original virtuality’ to keep it distinct from the present.26
Despite this inherent distinction, Bergson maintains that the past has its
own virtual reality, and ‘we shall never reach the past unless we frankly
place ourselves within it’.27
The concept of duration underlies Bergson’s work, but he develops it
via a distinct focus in each of his studies. Time and Free Will introduces and
identifies his concept of duration in relation to the free act. He opposes
outer space and inner duration, and asserts the impossibility of quantify-
ing psychological states by spatialising them. In the free act, however, we
fully experience what Bogue calls ‘the identity of consciousness and durée
as well as the freedom and openness of durée’.28 In Matter and Memory,
Bergson focuses on memory and the virtual past.
Creative Evolution connects duration with élan vital, the vital impulse or
impetus that characterises all living entities. Here, Bergson explores the
futural aspect of duration more closely in the evolutionary process. The
universe endures, and duration reveals itself as ‘invention, the creation of
forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new’.29 In evolution, the
past can be traced in both the living present and its future form, because
life is an unceasing process of creation. It is in this ‘continuous creation of
unforeseeable form’ that the dynamic force of duration and its openness to
future possibility is manifest.30
   159

Deleuze’s Time-Image
that Deleuze is a philosopher of time means that he is a philosopher of life: an inven-
tor of concepts that affirm life and its untimely forces of creation.31 (Smith)

Deleuze endows cinema’s moving image with a unique capacity for making
visible the workings of time and its relationships. The shot, for example, is
a ‘mobile section’ of time that as a ‘temporal perspective or a modulation’,
is edited with other shots of time to produce ‘a variable, continuous, tem-
poral mould’.32 A series of moving shots edited together expresses ‘time
itself as perspective or relief. This is why time essentially takes on the
power to contract or dilate, as movement takes on the power to slow down
or accelerate’.33 The variable qualities of time are conveyed by the combi-
nation of extensive and intensive movements both between and within par-
ticular shots.
Time is considered as the measure of the movement-image. Two types
of chronosigns are identified by Deleuze: ‘time as a whole, as a great circle
or spiral, which draws together the set of movement in the universe’, and
‘time as an interval, which indicates the smallest movement or action’.34
The interval is the accelerated, variable present. He draws on Nietszche’s
concept of the eternal return as well as duration in his characterisation of
time as a whole, a ‘spiral open at both ends, the immensity of past and
future. Infinitely dilated, the present would become the whole itself.
Infinitely contracted, the whole would happen in the interval’.35
In The Passion of Joan of Arc, Deleuze distinguishes Joan’s ‘internal’
time of the spirit from historical time. This recalls Bergson’s conception
of the elusive present. The present moment is never fully present, as it
forms, and is formed from, an ever shifting amalgam of past, present and
future. The special, dual nature of Joan’s physical and metaphysical expe-
rience of the present is expressed by Dreyer’s cinematography and
Falconetti’s performance. It contains two intersecting presents, one of
which is already established and the other of which is endlessly arriving. It
is ‘the same event but one part of it is profoundly realised in a state of
things, whilst the other is all the more irreducible to all realisation. This is
the mystery of the present’.36 Despite certain films’ ability to convey time
as quality as well as quantity, they still rely on action-images built on
sensory-motor links. They retain a dual temporal scheme, with the two
times in a relation of tension or conflict.
The new types of images in post-war cinema move away from the
sensory-motor action image to develop the ‘beyond of movement’ in pure
optical, sound and tactile images.37 Such images reject cliché in order to
160    

produce the more challenging cinema of ‘powerful and direct revelations’

via the time-image (chronosigns), the readable image (lectosigns) and the
thinking image (noosigns).38 These elements correspond to the processes
of narration, description and thought.
The new types of interlinked sign may be ‘read’. Deleuze’s concept of
reading refers to the work of American semiologist Charles Sanders Pierce.
It must not be confused with the approach of film semiology, which iden-
tifies the cultural and symbolic meaning of images in, for example, James
Monaco’s textbook, How to Read a Film.39 Deleuze’s usage of reading
refers to the process of philosophical thinking via visual and other senses.
He derives the term ‘lectosign’ from the use of lekton by the Stoics to mean
what the image expresses rather than its objective content. He explains
how, in reading film, chronosigns are inseparable from lectosigns,

which force us to read so many symptoms in the image, that is, to treat the optical
and sound image like something that is also readable. Not only the optical and the
sound, but also the present and the past, and the here and the elsewhere, constitute
internal elements and relations which must be deciphered, and can be understood
only in a progression analogous to a reading.40

A lectosign adds supplementary dimensions to the descriptive content of

the image, making it multi-faceted, or ‘crystalline’.
The chronosign is a ‘purer’ form of image, which has moved away from a
referent and towards a ‘pure optical and sound situation’. Such images,
which are distanced from the sensory-motor actions of characters, afford a
more transcendent perception of time. Chronosigns seek to present time
itself directly rather than implying its presence in the gaps and fissures of the
movement-image. They correspond more closely to Bergsonian duration.
Chronosigns are subdivided into three types. These are ‘points of present’,
‘sheets of past’, and the series. Rodowick defines the series as the ‘transfor-
mation of states, qualities, concepts, or identities’ across a series of images.41
Noosigns arise when movement shifts emphasis from spatial extension
to the intensive processes of thought. For Deleuze, they are exemplified by
camera-consciousness, manifest when the camera eye moves through space
of its own accord, independent of characters. The ‘mental connections’
that the independent camera enters into include ‘questioning, responding,
objecting, provoking, theorematising, hypothesising, experimenting, in
accordance with the open list of logical conjunctions (“or”, “therefore”,
“if ”, “because”, “actually”, “although . . .”) or in accordance with the
functions of thought’.42 The autonomous camera, in Hitchcock for
example, is a philosophical tool that can express, stimulate and extend
human thought.
   161

The brain is itself an image in the Bergsonian sense, a ‘spiritual automa-

ton’ rather than a Cartesian ‘I’ who thinks. The processes of thought
operant in the time-image are distinct from those of the movement-image.
The movement-image shocks us into thought, as in the Eistensteinian
montage of juxtaposed images in a dynamic collision productive of thought
as their third term (thesis–antithesis
synthesis). Rodowick notes that the
time-image ‘wants to augment our powers of thought through assisting our
knowledge of these powers’.43 It is thus a more self-consciously philosoph-
ical type of cinema.
The regime of movement images is ‘organic’, or ‘kinetic’, linked to a
linear, sensory-motor and ‘naturalised’ narrative form and world-view. It
operates the binary opposition of truth and falsehood, which need to be
distinguished in the process of creating a more profound truth. The
regime of the time-image is either ‘chronic’ or ‘crystalline’. The multi-
faceted process of the crystal image is open-ended. It replaces a fixed truth
waiting to be discovered by the continuous creation of truth in becoming.
Rather than seeking the permanent form of truth, the time-image works
with the reflected ‘metamorphoses of the false’.44 A crystalline image, then,
is contingent and provisional. Instead of the pro-filmic objects presented
by the old ‘organic’ regime, it is now ‘the description itself which consti-
tutes the sole decomposed and multiplied object’.45
The crystalline ‘power of the false’ derives from the incommensurabil-
ity of space and time it reveals. Rather than treating time as a dimension of
space, as in the movement-image, the direct time-image offers time and
movement in their conceptual and metaphysical complexity. The time-
image works with ‘pure crystalline optical and sound descriptions, and fal-
sifying, purely chronic narrations. Description stops presupposing a
reality and narration stops referring to a form at one and the same time’.46
The line between reality and illusion becomes indiscernible. Rather than
one truth being revealed, we have ‘incompossible’ worlds. This term is
borrowed from Leibnitz’s approach to the contradictions of free will and
predestination. In his model of the crystal pyramid, Leibnitz layered a
series of contingent futures in order to suggest ‘the simultaneity of all pos-
sible worlds’.47
Bergson and Deleuze posit two types of recollection. When we perceive
a visual or acoustic image, we construct a mental description of it by
searching through the layers of our memory, moving between the ‘sheets
of past’ until we can produce a workable image. Automatic, or habitual,
recollection is an end-directed and spatially motivated response to stimu-
lus. It involves a linear chain of reaction/action. In attentive recollection,
on the other hand, perception withdraws from external stimuli. Thought
162    

moves intensively through layers of time rather than extensively through

space. These two processes distinguish actuality and subjectivity. The
actual is objective, spatial reality, and the subjective is mental and imagi-
nary, sought out in time through memory. It may be difficult to differen-
tiate between these two processes in the horror film, as we shall see in
Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder and elsewhere.
Indiscernibility is another aspect of the crystalline image. This multi-
faceted image, like a mirror, has two poles, actual and virtual, which cor-
respond to the objective world and to memory. According to Bergson, the
process of describing reality to ourselves moves between the actual and the
virtual in an ongoing circuit. Indiscernibility is the impossibility of distin-
guishing real from imaginary. In the time-image, indiscernibility makes it
difficult for both characters and spectators to distinguish past and present,
as with the manifestation of ghosts.
In Alejandro Amenábar’s film The Others, for example, narrative
engagement is constructed on indiscernibility. The audience accepts the
inhabitants of an archetypally neo-Gothic ‘old dark house’ as living char-
acters. In 1945, Grace and her two children, Anne and Victor, await the
return of their husband/father from the war. The curtains are constantly
closed to keep out the light, and the children’s white faces are supposedly
due to a rare, light-sensitive disease. A staunch Roman Catholic, Grace ter-
rifies the children with accounts of ‘the children’s limbo’ of the afterlife.
Anne claims to be aware of the house’s Edwardian ghosts, but she could
be ‘telling stories’, and Grace employs three sinister servants who are later
revealed as spirits of the dead. Only at the end of the film is the true status
of all these characters revealed. Grace became deranged with grief on the
news of her husband’s death in action, and killed her two children and
herself. The affects of trauma have lasted beyond the grave in Grace’s
neurosis and the children’s distrust of her. Except for the father who
passes through before returning to his own purgatory, they are all ghosts
trapped in the house who have been contacted by a medium conducting
an exorcism for a couple who are considering buying the ‘empty’ prop-
erty. They have been undergoing a purgatorial experience, from which
they are released into the ‘light of day’ after accepting the reality of their
own deaths.
The atmosphere is oppressively static and claustrophobic. Shadow and
‘ghostly voices whispering’ within the house are matched by the constant
fog without, which drains the colours of late autumn of their richness.
Grace finally meets her shell-shocked husband, another unquiet spirit, in
the woods where the fog lies thickest. Events take place in a predominantly
grey ‘twilight zone’, where the spectral house casts a pale reflection in the
   163

waters of the still lake. As Mrs Mills, the dead housekeeper and uncon-
scious Deleuzian, tells us, ‘the only thing that moves here is the light’.
As in Vampyr, light, or lack of it, is itself a major actant in the plot. It
keeps the characters trapped and shapes the affective quality of the film’s
world. Grace’s attempt to keep light out is also an attempt to freeze the
onward flow of time, and underlines the affinity of duration with light. In
The Others, ghosts are haunted by ghosts who impregnate a static space
with their intensive movements. The film expresses layered time as it oper-
ates in memory. It highlights our inability to distinguish the past from the
present or the real from the imaginary. The physical object and its mental
description have become indistinguishable in ‘a mutual interpenetration of
matter and memory’.48
In Bergson’s double movement of creation and erasure between actual
and virtual, each circuit ‘obliterates and creates an object’.49 The succes-
sive planes and circuits may cancel or contradict each other, join or fork,
but they still ‘simultaneously constitute the layers of one and the same
physical reality, and the levels of one and the same mental reality, memory,
or spirit’.50 When the image is sharply focused in reality, it is limpid. When
it moves into the memory circuit, it becomes opaque. Yet it may be
returned to sharp focus by recollection. In a peak or point, the smallest
internal circuit of ‘continual exchange’, distinct elements remain present,
but they are indiscernible.

Time and Motion

the shot is the movement-image. In so far as it relates movement to a whole which
changes, it is the mobile section of a duration.51 (Deleuze)

In Cinema 1, Deleuze uses the movement-image in its own right, but also
as a pointer to duration. He finds evidence of duration in, between, or just
outside, aspects of cinematic movement, such as the frame, the shot and
montage. It may also be perceived in the affective qualities of light. In indi-
vidual shots, the characters move, or the camera moves, or both move in
unison. The shot in motion functions as ‘the intermediary between the
framing of the set and the montage of the whole’.52 Clearly, neither these
movements nor our perception of them occur in isolation. As we perceive
the movements of a shot, our perception of the whole film modulates.
Movement within a shot or a linked set of shots ‘is the relationship between
parts and it is the state of the whole’ and, as well as modifying the relative
positions of a set, it is ‘itself the mobile section of a whole whose change it
expresses’.53 Both perceived and perceiver are part of the bigger ‘whole’ of
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universal flux and our awareness of cinematic movement can reveal this
interconnection.
As well as being a virtual presence in inter- and intra-shot movement,
duration exists beyond the edges of the frame in the out-of-field. Deleuze
identifies two types of out-of-field. The first is ‘relative’ or spatial, whereas
the second is the ‘absolute’ out-of-field of duration. These particular loci
form a comprehensive durational presence that permeates every framed
image but that can never be given as such. The out-of-field is implied by
every closed frame. One function of the closed frame is to introduce ‘the
transpatial and the spiritual into the system which is never perfectly
closed’.54 In The Passion of Joan of Arc, for example, the more closed
Dreyer’s framings seem to be, the more open they are to duration as a
fourth dimension, and further, to the fifth dimension of spirit. The out-of-
field, which does not exist, but, rather, ‘subsists’ or ‘insists’, implies the
disturbing presence of ‘a more radical elsewhere, outside homogeneous
space and time’.55
When we engage in the conscious close reading of a film extract, we
analyse mise-en-scène components and identify the micro dynamics of each
shot. We ‘decompose’ the set by distinguishing between fixed and moving
parts and mapping their interrelations. More significantly for a Deleuzian
project, though, we might also become aware of a deeper temporal process,
which cannot be subdivided without losing its nature. Our spectatorial acts
of decomposition, whether in close-reading or attentive spectatorship, can
thus become ‘recomposed into a great complex indivisible movement
according to the whole whose change it expresses’.56
When we note this micro-movement of the shot’s ‘set’ of images, some-
thing else occurs, then, of a more profound nature. We can experience the
quality of duration intermeshed with its integral movement. Deleuze
asserts that ‘movement also concerns a whole which is qualitatively differ-
ent from the set. The whole is that which changes – it is the open, or dura-
tion. Movement thus expresses a change of the whole, or a stage, an aspect
of this change, a duration or an articulation of duration’.57 A movement-
image shot, in so far as it relates to a changing whole, functions as a ‘mobile
section’ of duration. Movement in film makes manifest, both to the
viewer’s senses and their mental correlative, the very flowing of duration
itself. Deleuze suggests that ‘the translation of the parts of a set which
spreads out in space, the change of a whole which is transformed in dura-
tion’ brings about their ‘perpetual conversion’.58 The shot thus ‘acts like a
consciousness’.59 Cinematic movement offers an aesthetic form of embod-
ied mentation.
Deleuze, however, qualifies a total identification of thought and cinema.
   165

The distinctions between human and cinematic perception prevent their

complete elision. His comparison is only ‘as if ’; because
natural perception introduces halts, moorings, fixed points or separated points of
view, moving bodies or even distinct vehicles, while cinematographic perception
works continuously, in a single movement whose very halts are an integral part of it
and are only a vibration on to itself.60

The strength of the camera’s flowing eye, free from the limitations of the
human eye, such as disjunction, lies in its ability to extract and record the
essence of movement itself. Cinematic consciousness ‘is not us, the spec-
tator, nor the hero; it is the camera – sometimes human, sometimes
inhuman or superhuman’, as we saw in The Shining.61 The movement-
image of the camera is able to extract from already moving objects ‘the
movement which is their common substance’, or from movements ‘the
mobility which is their essence’.62 In some ways, the technological camera
eye operates a more perfected form of perception than the human eye and
accesses duration more closely. Deleuze’s conviction of this underlines his
disagreement with Bergson’s view of ‘cinematographic contrivance’.
Editing also has a special capacity to open up to duration. Moving shots
are linked by montage to form a further kind of movement, between shots
at a micro level and also at a macro level, within the wider context of the
film. By being edited together, movement images participate in a process
that can release more of their inherent, but indirect, duration. If the shot
is the movement-image, then montage is ‘the composition, the assemblage
of movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time’.63 Montage
is ‘the determination of the Whole’, accessing duration by means of con-
tinuities, cutting and false continuities.64 Duration is evident in ellipsis, as
when false continuity is used with deliberation. False continuity such as
Dreyer’s is no longer engaged in connection, but has become ‘a dimension
of the Open, which escapes sets and their parts. It realises the other power
of the out-of-field, this elsewhere or this empty zone’.65 The Open of dura-
tion has metaphysical, even mystical qualities.
Deleuze operates a kind of mystical immanentism comparable to that of
Spinoza. Spinoza used the concept of expression, or explication, to
suggest how God made himself manifest in material creation. Explication
means unfolding. Bogue points out that in Spinoza, the One is ‘both expli-
cated, or unfolded and implicated, enfolded. It is also complicated, or
simultaneous’.66 This recalls Bergson’s image of duration as
a qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to number; an organic evolution that is yet
not an increasing quantity; a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct
qualities. In a word, the moments of inner duration are not external to one another.67
166    

As the elements of duration vibrate intensively, they pass over into each
other. They are impossible to fully isolate and separate without becoming
space-time. I want to explore some forms taken by duration in the horror
film, beginning with Robert Wise’s The Haunting. Unlike the more usual
psychoanalytic scenarios of maternal engulfment that have been mapped
onto this film, my reading will explore the overlay of time and the haunt-
ing of the present by the past.

Duration and Entrapment in the Gothic Haunted

House: The Haunting
interiority and exteriority are only relations among images. 68 (Bergson)

The interval dividing past from present assumes another value, for without this
assumption the possibility of exercising free will is lost.69 (Rodowick)

Bergson asserts that the entire past, both personal and general, is preserved
in virtual form as a non-chronological existence in time. In the horror film,
such preservation is a source of atrophy rather than perpetual motion. Hill
House, the locale of The Haunting, is a psychic museum where time is
frozen and refuses to progress. The Gothic revival of the late nineteenth
century dominates the film’s mise-en-scène just as the human events of its
history dominate the ‘present’ of the early 1960s. A team of psychic
researchers set out to investigate this very process and become prey to the
domination of memory in a house that is alive.
Although Hill House is a specific geographic locale, it is located tempo-
rally rather than spatially. The house is in duration, not linear space-time,
and forces characters to live there, too. The looping-back of time in the cir-
cuits between matter and memory produce replay and overlay. Temporal
ellipses of the present are filled by sheets of the past that peak in frighten-
ing form. According to Bergson, psychic phenomena are ‘in themselves
pure quality or qualitative multiplicity’70 because ‘intensity, within you, is
never magnitude’.71 Yet the ghost-haunted film, by its literal manifesta-
tions of the past, forces duration to adopt spatial presence and imposes
temporal stasis. At the same time, duration becomes partly evident to the
senses in an intensive form.
A traditional view of ghosts and hauntings is that intensive experiences
of shock or more prolonged psychological suffering have impregnated a
particular geographical locale and refuse to go away. Space is thus subor-
dinated to time. In Hill House’s memory, sheets of past co-exist in a virtual
state until actualised via sensitive human channels. This manifestation is
   167

especially potent when the house’s past becomes congruent with the per-
sonal past of living characters. The patriarchal Victorian world of Hugh
Crain’s family tragedies imposes a template on the present-day events we
witness unfolding as well as more recent events prior to the opening of the
current time of the main narrative.
The opening sequence is accompanied by the voice over of Dr Markway,
the academic leader of the research team whose project is to investigate
psychic phenomena reported at the Hill House. It is a collage of moments
of intense horror from the history of the house. The material selected illus-
trates Markway’s account, but the viewer experiences the scenes as reani-
mations of actual events rather than his subjective slant on the house’s
history. These intensive events are imprinted on the fabric of the building
and its grounds. They remain as memories, layers and folds of the past with
the potential to be reactivated. Each item in the introductory collage is
both divided and linked by a mist that materialises the scenes like ecto-
plasm. This amorphous substance connects events by a fluid ellipsis that
crystallises only at moments of physical or psychic agony.
The past of Hill House is presented as inherently tragic, as the audio-
visual images of film bring to light only memories of suffering, fear and
death. The opening collage can be read as a Bergsonian/Deleuzian con-
traction of the past into significant peaks or points of memory brought up
into present consciousness by recollection. The first ‘memory’ of Hill
House we access is the image of a fatal carriage crash on the drive in the
Victorian era. The violence and horror of the accident shakes up the
orderly progress of the carriage, splitting open both space and time. The
camera itself is jolted by the accident, and the viewer’s complacent distance
is undermined. The carriage is overturned, its wheel splintered against a
tree by an irrational, malign force. The balance of the composition is shat-
tered by the sudden appearance of Mrs Crain’s dead hand that drops into
the frame from above. Linear time is stopped at Hill House partly because
of its series of untimely deaths. The frozen postures of death indicate that
the dead step out of space-time and into duration. Death splits time, and
the dead are plummeted from the present into a permanent state of past
time. This is accessible only by memory, or by the hauntings that are its
horror film manifestation.
Eleanor, the most gifted psychic on Markway’s team, validates the
living force of the past as ascendant over the present. She states of the
house, ‘it’s alive [. . .] I can feel it’, as duration dominates space-time for
her. Hill House is easily able to ‘possess’ Eleanor because of the parallel
elements of their histories, which interlock and mutually manifest them-
selves in the physical form of direct time-images. There are at least two
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simultaneous hauntings, which knot more tightly together as the multi-

layered narrative progresses.
As well as the haunting of Hill House, we experience the haunted dura-
tion of Eleanor’s psyche as memory is made manifest. We thus become
engaged, like she does, in the confusing process described by Bergson
when he suggests that ‘of the aggregate of images, we cannot say that it is
within us or without us’.72 Rodowick notes the time-image’s paradox of
‘equally possible yet mutually contradicting narrative explanations. In
other words, direct images of time present contingent narrations’.73 We
have a more overt picturing of this process by mainstream film in both The
Haunting and The Others. Rodowick emphasises the need for memory to
retain the interval as a ‘dislocation in time’ between past and present, for
‘without this assumption the possibility of exercising free will is lost’.74 In
The Haunting, Eleanor’s free will is crushed between the grinding wheels
of two memories and two durations: her own and those of Hill House.

Haunted Cinematography and Mise-en-scène

The film’s titles, with their lettering formed out of evaporating and con-
densing wisps of mist, both validate the uncanny and present the ghostly
ambience with a tongue-in-cheek generic self-reflexivity. Behind them
stands the house itself, a looming silhouette of turrets and battlements. It
is at once a shadowy memory-image and a solid bricks-and-mortar build-
ing with a power of its own. The late-nineteenth-century Gothic revival is
an ideal style to express haunting and enigma. It is itself an inherently
haunted style, with European medieval baronial and ecclesiastical echoes.
Due to the influence of Ruskin and Pugin, it incorporates the more access-
ible and secular Venetian mode as well, in an eclectic blend of retro motifs.
It also re-works, or ‘updates’, the earlier Gothick style of its own grand-
parents. From the outset, the opulent and perverse neo-Gothic world is
established as a richer context and ground to the one-dimensionality of
mundane modern life.
The collage continues with the second Mrs Crain’s fall down stairs after
a shock, possibly induced by the vengeful ghost of her predecessor. The
cause is only implied by the image of her horror at something that remains
unseen. The real horror for us, though, lies in the sensory disorientation
caused by the spinning camera. Cinematographic horror extends through-
out the film and the mobile camera leads the haunting. In the next segment,
the camera singles out an embroidered text in a frame, ‘Suffer Little
Children’. Possibly embroidered by Crain’s daughter, Abigail, this motto
has a double meaning in relation to her experience. After the trauma of her
   169

mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, her youth is frozen. Her life-
cycle as a woman is put on hold, never allowed to grow or reach fruition.
Superimpositions, by their slow transmutations of one image into
another, are a method of editing that conveys Bergson’s ‘melting’ states of
duration. By superimpositions, Abigail’s face rapidly ages from girlhood
to near death as she lives secluded from the world. She is unable to leave
the house, which has a firm hold on her through its manifestation of her
father’s will. Her biological change is frozen in intensive rigidity rather
than being extensively enacted. She lies in the prison of her bedroom as
life passes her by. Her bed is significantly located in the nursery. As she is
prevented from growing up, it is the place of death, not new life. The
sudden, shocking burst of energy on her deathbed comes too late. Abigail’s
call for help is unheard by her paid companion, whose erotic liaison brings
about both Abigail’s death and her own. Again, a vengeful force is signalled
by the unnaturally loud pounding echo of the old woman’s cane on the
wall. A similar booming sound, much amplified, will herald the later man-
ifestations of an angry ghost.
The carer, deranged by guilt, or driven to despair by Abigail’s ghost,
climbs the spiral staircase in the library. As with the death of the first Mrs
Crain, a sudden shock effect is caused by the drop of the suicide’s body into
the frame from above. After she hangs herself, her corpse is shot from
beneath by an upwardly canted camera. Bodies without the force of élan
vital are presented as limp, inert matter. The corpse dangles out over the
abyss beneath the staircase as the spinning camera returns back down the
steps as though complicit with Abigail’s angry spirit.
This staircase, or rather, its spiral formation, acts as a diagrammatic
component. It embodies the endlessly incurved looping of time and the
circuits between space-time and duration. It forms a tunnel in time as well
as space, and draws vulnerable characters up into itself. The coil of rope
carried in the companion’s arms as she passes a threatening shadow cast by
the eagle sculpture on the wall likewise echoes this spiral formation. The
camera moves in a dizzying circle at climactic points, and the present-day
protagonist, Eleanor, will echo this movement as she attunes herself to the
central diagrammatic component.
The lives of Abigail and Eleanor reflect each other in a series of inter-
secting variations on common ground. Eleanor’s caring for her invalid
mother, who died when she was out of the room, repeats Abigail’s death
and the carer’s ‘neglect’. Eleanor shares Abigail’s own pent-up frustration
and rage as a lonely single woman trapped in the domestic space. Rather
than remaining imprisoned as Abigail had done, Eleanor attempts to
escape from an unfulfilled life and find independence. Her apparent new
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beginning drives her straight back into Abigail’s trap, which is also her
own. Eleanor’s drive from Boston signals the start of a belated adolescence
as she sets out alone for the first time. She fantasises possible futures for
herself, such as living in a cosy house with stone lions, but, in the imagery
of Jean Luis Borges’s tale ‘The Garden With Forking Paths’, takes the
wrong fork on the path of time and finds herself in the past rather than in
the future.75
The gateway of Hill House offers a temporary setback, or warning sign,
to Eleanor. Its triangular, upward-pointing forms, shut by a heavy chain
and lock, imply a barred realm of spiritual or transcendent reality, a time-
less zone of eternal stasis. When she forces an entrance, angry at her exclu-
sion when ‘expected’, the gatekeeper gibes at ‘city folk’ who ‘think they
know everything’. The city is here elided with superficial intellect, whereas
the country exists on a different time zone and intuitive knowledge. The
supernatural is a familiar experience to him and his housekeeper wife, and
the past-haunted present is an integral layer of their reality.
The anomalous space of Hill House is perceived via Eleanor’s
becoming-camera. Several brief shots of the façade of the house appear, as
Eleanor blinks up at it. She opens and closes her eyes several times, like a
still camera lens when the shutter drops to take individual snaps. She is
unable to take in the temporal and spatial enormity before her in a
smoothly cinematic establishing shot. The freeze-frames suggest the film’s
sticking at particular layers of duration rather than flowing forward in
linear space-time. Not all the images are from her supposed point-of-view,
and the multiplication of perspectives creates a sense of both subjective
and objective reality, strangeness and recognition. From two eye-like
windows, the darkness of the house itself stares down at her as they
exchange looks. Eleanor’s car is shot from the point-of-view of a hidden
watcher, or that of the house itself.
The subtle use of negative footage reverses the light quality of black and
white. Fast-motion clouds suggest that familiar laws of movement and
speed do not apply here. The building exists in its own reality outside the
usual space and time co-ordinates, and has the round turrets of a fairytale
castle At the same time, however, it is a historically specific reminder of the
past scenarios it replays. Eleanor adds the fuel of her personal emotional
history to the memories already held by the house and causes a temporal
conflagration.
Inside the hall, highly polished floorboards give back an unfamiliar
reflection of Eleanor’s face. She touches this tentatively, unsure which
Eleanor is real. Her touch adds haptic texturing to the sensory investiga-
tion of the house. Auditory information is added by the notes of a harp,
   171

which we later discover plays by itself, or by a disembodied hand. Potted

palms; aspidistras; heavy drapes; low ceilings, windowless inner rooms;
ornate mirrors; carved woodwork; padded upholstery and symbolic stat-
uary are preserved unchanged, as though part of a mausoleum. The house
makes itself felt via the insistent presence of its décor, which remains static
within a space permeated by its own past.
Art nouveau images of women are displayed, frozen in the coldness of
marble statues. One of them has her face veiled, her individuality
repressed. As well as their hieroglyphic potential, these objects have their
own insistent materiality and virtual presence. The heaviness of the décor
dominates the characters in many shots. It acts on them in a vampiric
manner as it sucks out their life-energy, draining them physically, emotion-
ally and mentally.
A second, more complete reflection of Eleanor’s face startles her as she
is unexpectedly confronted with her own double in the mirror on the
landing. The glass is scratched and stained, and further distorts her face.
The house may be looking out at her through mirrors, but she is also seeing
a new reflection of herself as a denizen of the house and part of its past.
The juxtaposition of Eleanor’s body and the house’s décor will be a con-
tinuous motif as she increasingly becomes part of Hill House.
Hill House begins its overt communication with the psychic investiga-
tors via the ‘haunted’ camera, which spins and soars, adopting oblique
angles and producing shots which are not their point-of-view but its own.
The interior of the building itself plays tricks on the team, suddenly shut-
ting doors and making it impossible to find their way around. The dining
room is especially padded and airless, with insistently patterned wallpaper
that irritates the nerves. There is no homely fire in the grate. The framing
is claustrophobic, with the ceiling pressing down on them, shot from a very
low angle.
Personal memory combines with Eleanor’s ability to sense the memories
of Hill House. She becomes increasingly schizophrenic as the two memory
strands tangle together and constrict her ability to live effectively in the
present moment. This simultaneous replaying of the two sets of memory
occurs as she lies in bed on her first night. The low camera angle presents
her recumbent body by canting up from the floor of her room. It then
moves to a position right by her, at her level, as she lies on the bed. These
are the points-of-view of a carer or nurse sitting by an invalid. Eleanor has
sat in this position whilst tending to her mother. Abigail’s suicidal com-
panion also shared this perspective.
Abigail’s vengeful presence is implied in the hollow booming sounds
that come up the stairs, down the corridor outside and approach Eleanor’s
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room. As well as recalling approaching footsteps, the sound replays the

thumping of the dying woman on the wall and, possibly, that of Eleanor’s
own mother. In an attempt to stop the noise, Eleanor likewise bangs on the
wall. Shortly afterwards, the presence outside the door responds by sudden
silence. Instead of going away, however, it becomes even more insistent by
turning the doorknob, which is a carved image of the gorgon Medusa,
another vengeful female.
Both Eleanor and Theo, an urbane lesbian on the team, huddle together
on the bed. The fabric of the room appears to have been given its own
autonomous viewpoint as we have a shot of both women reflected in the
mirror, where they appear to be trapped inside its heavy frame. They stare
fixedly at the door as they expect the presence to enter. The moving camera
takes several differently angled shots of the doorframe and door as though
the source of numinous energy is located there. Again, the camera signals
and creates the sense of horror, by linking present and past times in a con-
tinuum. Eleanor acts like a psychic magnet who draws the past back into
the present.
Eleanor is excited by her psychic powers and their ability to move in the
past and to make it manifest. Ironically, she tries to use this ability to
further her current life and to reach out towards the future in an intimacy
with Dr Markway. As she basks in his attention, she expects ‘something
really extraordinary’ to happen. Eleanor’s arrival at Hill House sparks off
an unstoppable magnification of the past, which insists on its own validity.
The power of time remembered is able to dominate the space-time of
present sensory-motor situations. A statue of Hugh Crain with three sub-
missive women dominates the frame and towers above the living characters
from a low-angle shot. Crain’s facial features recall those of Dr Markway.
In the vicinity of the statue, Eleanor’s schizophrenia intensifies. She leans
right back over the balcony in a posture that mixes fear and desire, and later
acknowledges the presence of Crain’s spirit by dancing with him. Her
further affinity with the Victorian era is signalled by her long, high-necked
nightgown and loosely flowing hair. Eleanor’s old-fashioned style of dress
contrasts sharply with Theo’s Mary Quant outfits, which assert the valid-
ity of her life outside and its future potential.
The past steps up its sensory communication with the present when the
team discover a ‘genuine cold spot’, significantly beneath the text ‘Honor
Thy Father And Thy Mother’. Luke, the cynical heir to the property,
becomes increasingly convinced by the haunting when his sensorium reg-
isters ‘something I can feel – and see’. On the second night, Eleanor and
Theo hear the distorted sounds of laughter in their room. Within the
carved leaves of the woodwork, the gaping eyes and mouth of a human face
   173

is subtly manifest by the use of shadow. Via a tactisign, Eleanor experiences

intimate physical contact with the haunting presence. A whip pan from the
door to Eleanor in bed shows her clenched hand extended in space, sup-
posedly clutching Theo’s hand. Her terrified question – ‘whose hand was
I holding?’ – again suggests the ghostly presence either of Abigail or her
own mother who refuses to let go.
Eleanor’s possession by the past climaxes in a lengthy scene. In her
bedroom, a floor-level camera cants up to make the door loom out
towards us as it breathes in and out like living lungs. The solid substance
of heavy wood changes its molecular make-up and becomes flexible. The
wildly canted, swinging camera bends the spatial perspective of the cor-
ridor. Fleeing, Eleanor is trapped by a veil-like curtain, which lends her
a temporary bridal appearance. Antique objects are animated by a
destructive force as the chandelier and the harp rock violently and the
mirror bends off the wall. Floor-angle shots of Eleanor running cue her
mental disintegration and disrupt spectatorial control. A spreading dark-
ness breaks up the cohesion of the group, isolating each character’s dimly
spotlit face.
Eleanor flirtatiously invites Crain’s ghostly presence to dance. The spin-
ning motion of her dizzying whirl resembles the spiral staircase and
implies that it is drawing her to it. A whip pan pushes her into the library,
a room she has previously avoided, to the sounds of a drum roll and, later,
a melody on the harp. In one shot, the camera spins up the steps by itself
and this spiralling induces Eleanor herself to ‘turn and turn and turn’ as
she becomes caught up in a continuation of the movement. A close-up of
her delicate naked feet on hard metal rungs induces our haptic collusion.
Bolts begin to move, ripping screws out of the wall.
The steps are alive, animated by Eleanor’s rapport with the house and
possessed by its memories. The holed metal dapples her with shadow as
she climbs, replicating its angle as seen by the suicide. Eleanor’s relief on
reaching the landing at the top, where the carer hanged herself, seems to
validate her submission to the replication of past. She is repeating a vari-
ation of the carer’s experience in her transgressive desire for Markway as
she leans backwards in a mixture of sexual invitation and fear at his
approach. As the couple show signs of tenderness, a horrible, distorted face
suddenly appears through a trapdoor. Although we discover that this is
Mrs Markway, it suggests the tormented ghost of the dead nurse, who she
resembles facially, or even Abigail herself.
When Eleanor is left accidentally alone in her car, the engine starts up
and it drives off by itself. It reaches the point in the driveway where the first
Mrs Crain had her accident. Here, Mrs Markway, possessed by the spirit
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of the house, runs across the track and the car crashes into a tree, killing
Eleanor instantly. As with the opening collage, we have a shot of a spinning
wheel and a dead woman’s hand. Luke’s opinion acknowledges the reality
of the house’s evil past: ‘it ought to be burned down and the ground sown
with salt’. The final voice-over is female, not male as at the beginning,
implying that Eleanor is now the ghost of Hill House, having subsumed all
other haunts, and ‘whatever walks here, walks alone’.
The Haunting presents layers of the past that refuse to stay past. By
refuting space-time, duration is directly experienced by Eleanor. The
horror lies in its partial, one-sided development. Without any future pos-
sibility, it remains static and drags its victims back, preventing them from
continuing their own lives and experiencing the onward flow of time. Hill
House itself acts as an attractor for duration, amplified by Eleanor’s own
openness to the power of the past. It is geographically separate from the
present, and leeches out the living reality of the present moment. The
Haunting is a modern neo-Gothic haunted house movie in which the past
lurks to entrap the present. The next film, Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder,
presents more tangled temporal and spatial convolutions. Flashbacks and
flashforwards are deployed to suggest the co-existence of different layers
of space and time within one extreme moment.

Death by Flashback: Jacob’s Ladder

the direct time-image always gives us access to that Proustian dimension where
people and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one they
have in space.76 (Deleuze)

a fast trip down the ladder (Michael Newman, renegade chemist)

Jacob’s Ladder presents a version of duration accessed at the point of

death. For a mainstream movie, which mixes Vietnam, horror and altered-
states genres, its generation of the time-image compares to that of the art
film’s. The narrative is a long, ladder-like collage of distinct, densely
layered realities. Contradictory storylines offer different possible out-
comes. As I write, I will try to re-run my responses to the film on first
viewing – where a number of cognitive schemas jostled for precedence –
rather than after repeated viewings, when plausible structures emerge.
The authenticity of linear space-time is undermined via altered states of
consciousness and the experience they offer of a kind of duration. Light
and movement are used in anomalous ways to engage the spectator in the
protagonist’s mental confusion. Strobes and rapid flicker are its affective
diagrammatic components of light. Such effects, which overlay and freeze
   175

‘present’ time by flash-frames so brief as to be almost imperceptible,

induce what Deleuze calls the ‘emancipation of time, which ensures the
rule of impossible continuity and aberrant movement’.77
Flashbacks literalise film’s undermining of temporal stability. Accord-
ing to Deleuze, they operate as ‘a closed circuit which goes from the
present to the past, then leads us back to the present’.78 Flashbacks under-
mine the present by replacing it with phenomenally insistent portions of
the past. They may be bracketed by fades, incidental music or some other
marker to indicate their difference. Nevertheless, they induce spectatorial
amnesia, deceiving us by using exactly the same cinematic devices as the
‘present’. If they are long flashbacks, we become absorbed in them and
respond as though they were ‘present’, like the rest of the film, temporar-
ily forgetting their past status.
The conventional flashback is an extrinsic device recognisable by its use
of dissolve-link or superimposition. Even if the flashback signals memory,
if it is bracketed off it still belongs primarily to the movement-image. The
same may be said for clearly signalled dream sequences and other tech-
niques representing distortion, discontinuity, or extreme subjectivity.
These may weaken the sensory-motor scheme or widen its scope. As long
as they remain modelled on a deviation from narrative norms and a return
to them, and are clearly signalled as dream or memory, they will be unable
to move freely in duration proper.
For Deleuze, the flashback indicates by convention a causality that is
psychological, but still ‘analogous to a sensory-motor determinism, and,
despite its circuits, only confirms the progression of a linear narration’.79
The flashbacks in this film, though, are not distinguished by their differ-
ence from a solid level of fixed reality. They complicate the distinction of
physical and metaphysical, actuality and memory. Both the past, and the
present, are hallucinatory in nature, and are finally exposed as illusions.

Incompossible Worlds
The film’s narrative structure resembles Chinese boxes, with several die-
getic ‘worlds’ fitted inside each other. These are not explored systemati-
cally, but, as we hop between them, we share Jacob’s fragments of ‘real’
memory and his fantasies of the past. The opening sequences, which we
mistakenly take for the diegetic present, take place on the Mekong Delta
during the Vietnam War. To lush music, tranquil dawn skies are disrupted
by the purposeful whirling and whirring of helicopter blades, an audio-
visual effect that reappears at intervals throughout the film. A genial
marijuana-smoking platoon, including the protagonist, Jacob, is suddenly
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attacked by a troop of soldiers. Shock and terror are physically expressed

by the uncontrollable jerking of two men’s heads in a vibrating motion that
is a key component of the film’s style.
Chaos descends for the spectator as the camera’s rapid 360-degree spins
and jolts replicate the men’s disorientation as they realise that ‘something’s
wrong’. Like the characters, it is impossible for viewers to centre them-
selves or grasp the nature and order of events. The helicopter troops have
begun to fire into the men on the ground. A soldier’s body continues to jerk
even when the flesh of his leg has been burned off. One man sits motion-
less, staring in shocked disbelief, and weeping. Jacob, creeping on his belly
through the trees, gets a sudden, unidentified bayonet jab in his guts and
recoils in horror and pain.
The next shot skips space and time by cutting to Jacob in postman’s
uniform, on a New York tube train, ruefully feeling his chest as he signifi-
cantly reads The Stranger by Camus. At this point in the narrative, we relo-
cate the scene we just saw as Jacob’s dream. He appears to back in the
present of social and personal reality, having awakened from a nightmare;
yet his present environs remain threatening in their desolate gloom and
abrasive roar as the train tears through a tunnel. The light flickers on and
off like a slow strobe. As he moves around the carriage, Jacob sees, in flash-
frame, a hairy, penile tail protruding from the rags of a sleeping tramp. A
heroin helpline poster on the train warning ‘Hell . . . but it doesn’t have to
be that way’, and, later, a product advert offering ‘Ecstasy’ are thematic
pointers only readable with hindsight.
The sinister quality of the location is visualised by the numinous blue
light emanating from the tunnel. It is also made tactile as viscous liquid
drips onto the line, and a rat swims in it. Jacob sticks his foot in the wet
ooze as he crosses the line and we haptically share his disgust. Naked,
swinging light bulbs shimmer and cast weird, submarine effects. A sudden
wind from the tunnel heralds a blinding light, and a rainbow lens flare
hypnotises Jacob as he stands in the track of the train, flinging himself
down in a near miss. This is in one of several near-death moments he
experiences, which we later discover are unable to kill him. From the
train, a pale, sinister figure in black stares out at him, cueing an ever-
present surveillance.
Jacob returns to his flat in a housing project, where the sensuous warmth
of a shower with his partner, Jezzie, offers only temporary comfort. As the
water drips down his body, we move back into the space and time of a
memory recollection by direct cut. Jacob crawls along the jungle floor in
agony, with his viscera hanging out. A shimmering out-of-focus form
sharpens into a spider’s web with water droplets. At the red beam of an
   177

approaching torch, we cut back to the present as a nightmare replay of past

events is signalled. Although the scenes are linked by visual rhyme, their
switch is sudden and unexpected.
The prevalence of memory and its tendency to overwhelm the present
by the past is pivotal to the style, structure and theme. Jezzie throws Jacob’s
photos of his earlier family life into the incinerator after they cause him
nostalgic distress. On first viewing, her act seems motivated by jealousy. We
later receive more complete narrative justification for her attempt to
destroy his past. Significantly, Jacob hangs onto a photograph of his dead
son, Gabe. Super-8 black-and-white footage shows father and son playing
together. The difference in film stock and gauge indicates memorial spec-
ificity and its lack of spatial, sensory-motor presence. Its appearance on the
screen, however, underlines the virtual nature of memory and its ability to
relive itself in the present by temporal overlay.
Jacob considers his chiropractor, Louis, to be an ‘overgrown cherub’
and a ‘lifesaver’, and confides his ‘weird flashes’ to him. Louis suddenly
twists his patient’s head and the pain rockets him back to the Vietnamese
jungle in a flash of purple light. It later appears that Louis, like Jezzie, has
a purgatorial function in orchestrating the flow of Jacob’s recollections.
The supernatural quality of Jacob’s life is increased as he leaves the
surgery. A car tries to run him down, and a man of demonic appearance
leans out of the window and shudders wildly, his face distorted by ana-
morphosis. The supernatural atmosphere continues when, seeking his
post-combat therapist for help, Jacob enters a hospital. Demonic horns
sprout beneath the cap of the nurse who denies any records of Jacob’s pre-
vious visits.
The present, or what we perceive to be the present, takes on increasingly
nightmarish characteristics. During a wild party, Jacob shies away from the
dancing to find a monster’s head in a plastic bag inside the fridge. A
fortune-teller jokingly informs him that he has no lifeline on his palm. A
caged bird escapes to fly haphazardly round the room, the objective correl-
ative to Jacob’s mental state. His point-of-view becomes more hallucina-
tory as flash-frames of the monster’s head are intercut. The face of a
bearded man in black transforms to a bald and vibrating phallic head.
Jacob, who is very shortsighted, loses his glasses. Overwhelmed by strobes
and loud funky music, he watches in horror as a monster penetrates Jezzie.
Jacob is surrounded by concerned faces, which he views as threatening. He
returns to Vietnam, where, by an associative cut, he is likewise surrounded
by a ring of GIs. A stretcher-bearer comments that ‘his guts are hanging
out [. . .] let’s push them back in’.
A third layer of Jacob’s memory life is opened up by the trauma of this
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temporal and spatial see-saw. His family past, barred from him in the
‘present’, is reconstructed by the rosy glow of selective memory. He is now
a middle-class academic and family man living back with his wife, Sarah,
and children. He awakes and recounts a nightmare to Sarah. The contents
of this are formed from his ‘present’ with Jezzie that we have hitherto
believed him to be experiencing. He tells Sarah, ‘I was burning with ice
and there were all these demons . . . what a nightmare.’ This return to
Sarah forms a third to the previous alternative worlds as Jacob moves
through co-existent layers of memory in duration.
The flashbacks and flashforwards accelerate and increase our confusion.
Jacob’s return to Sarah cuts to a slowly spinning, low-angle shot of the
jungle penetrated by rays of sunlight. Like the protagonist of Vampyr,
Jacob views the world from below as he is carried on his stretcher. Rapidly
returning to Jezzie’s flat, a slow tracking shot pans from Jacob’s traumat-
ised expression as he lies in an ice-filled bath to the doctor’s face then back
again. Jacob blinks back tears of disbelief as he awakes in his own ‘night-
mare’ to find that his life with Sarah is the dream from which he is forced
to wake, not the other way round.
The doctor tells him that he is lucky to be alive. This third near-death
experience has also been a spiritual crisis for him. In Vietnam, the flicker
of the ’copter blades takes on a stroboscopic quality as Jacob’s body is
carried closer to them. We leave this level by a long fade-out to black, which
indicates his loss of consciousness and is not primarily a flashback punctu-
ation mark. Back in the level of reality associated with Jezzie’s flat, Jacob
pitifully asks her, ‘Am I dead?’ He wants to die to escape the suffering and
confusion caused by jumping, or being pushed, between various ‘rungs’ or
layers of the past. As Jacob will discover, his memories are actually a func-
tion of a religious purgatory.

‘They’re Coming Out of the Walls’

Jacob gradually realises that he is beset by the purposeful tortures of
demons. He pores over books on demonology and witchcraft to investigate
their occult agenda. A close-up of an engraved illustration to Dante’s
Purgatorio, Canto 5, attracts his attention as emblematic of his current
suffering. As he looks in the bedroom mirror, Jezzie’s familiar face becomes
split and distorted, showing her duplicitous and demonic aspect. He no
longer knows who she ‘really’ is, but we put this down to his paranoid pro-
jections at this stage.
Jacob’s haunted buddy from the forces, Paul Granger, exacerbates the
supernatural status of the present and announces, ‘I’m going to Hell [. . .]
   179

they’re coming out of the walls.’ Paul is blown up in his car, whilst the army
grabs Jake and threatens him for investigating what happened to his
platoon in Vietnam. His hallucinations become more horrific. After a
beating from a Salvation Army Santa Claus, who steals his wallet contain-
ing Gabe’s photo, a sinister team of medics pick him up. As Jacob is
wheeled through an abandoned building, he sees his son’s discarded bike.
Floor-shots of the trolley wheels induce total disorientation as temporal
and spatial overlay intensifies.
He is pushed through a hellish asylum of insane, despairing and
deformed people. Corpses strew their path and blood streams down walls.
The trolley wheels run over body fragments. They pass a pile of arms and
hands, and an amputee strapped into a frame with a shuddering, covered
head. Demonic medics surround Jacob, and a surgeon with a bloody apron
and a pallid face prepares to operate on, or torture, him. They strap him
onto a wheel and screw down his head as though in preparation for electro-
shock treatment. Jezzie stands nonchalantly among the medics and in-
forms him: ‘You’re dead . . . there’s no way out of here . . . you’ve been
killed, don’t you remember?’ An eyeless surgeon wielding a hypodermic
needle drills into Jacob’s forehead through his third eye.
Juxtaposed sequences of fantasy and actuality step up the film’s critique
of the Vietnam War encapsulated in personal trauma. At the excruciating
pain of the needle, we cut back to the earlier flashback of the jungle as trees
pass overhead from Jacob’s viewpoint. His stretcher is carried faster and
the medics despair of saving him. Jacob awakes in hospital, overwhelmed
by ambient whiteness. He lies on a huge white pillow, in a white gown,
whilst ethereal music plays. He seeks consolation in his third layer of fan-
tasied ‘memory’ and is visited by Sarah and his children, but a disembod-
ied voice undermines this by telling him to ‘dream on’.
Louis, Jacob’s ‘guardian angel’, bursts into the ward to rescue him from
traction. Jacob recounts, ‘I was in hell . . . it’s all pain . . . I don’t want to
die.’ To reassure him, Louis paraphrases Meister Ekhardt: ‘The only thing
that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life. Your mem-
ories, your attachments. They burn ’em away. But not to punish you.
They’re freeing your soul.’ He explains that the dying person who refuses
to let go experiences demonic attack. If, however, they have made their
peace with God, the devils become angels freeing them from the earth.
Louis gets Jacob to stand up and walk by himself. By this action, he is able
to progress to the next stage of his life-in-death.
Jacob looks through his old army box, uncovering and accepting his
traumatic ‘real’ past. He finds his own honourable discharge certificate and
a letter Gabe sent to him in Vietnam. Intercut is a flashback of Gabe’s death
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when run down by a car. These items from the past indicate that Jacob is
beginning to accept the reality of his own death and letting go of life.
Through his tears, he catches sight of the teasingly elusive figure of Gabe
through a blurred and broken mirror. Flashes of the entity with the jerking
head ominously intrude. Jacob gets a phone call from ‘part of a chemical
warfare unit in Saigon’, which speeds up the pace of his investigation of
the past.
A renegade chemist who was co-opted by the army confesses his work
with the use of consciousness-altering drugs in combat. By isolating
‘special properties’ of the ‘dark side’ of the psyche, they tapped into the
anger and aggression of their subjects in ‘a fast trip down the ladder’.
During a cab ride to his old home in Brooklyn on a rainy night, Jacob re-
lives the bayonet wound and recollects that it was his own buddy who had
stabbed him. He returns home along gleaming blue pavements to a plush
apartment block with a doorman. The building’s polished floor glistens as
it reflects the light. He wears his army shirt as he enters the numinously lit
blue drawing room.
A half eaten pie, open schoolbooks and the patterns on a blank TV
screen suggest that his family have only just left the room. The flickering
of a neon light outside continues the ongoing strobe technique. Still photo-
graphs in frames within the frame, such as the graduating couple and
Sarah with a baby, stand in for memories. Jacob’s smile suggests his present
reconciliation with his past. Meister Ekhardt’s words return. Darkness
falls as we see a picture of the three children with a red kite. Black leader
continues to run, creating a contemplative pause before the room is again
illumined by the dawn light on Jacob’s smiling face as he is ready to pass
into pure duration.
In the warm pink glow, Gabe plays at the bottom of the stairs. The boy
leads Jacob up the stairs in hazy soft-focus, to ethereal music. They pass
the light streaming through from the window before they disappear and
are absorbed by the overwhelming brightness of eternity. The final shots
of the film show Jacob’s dead body with a beatific smile in the field hospi-
tal at dawn. The medics comment that he ‘put up a hell of a fight’. The
end-titles locate the film as a fantasy inspired by the experimental military
use of the hallucinogen BZ in Vietnam denied by the Pentagon.
Viewed through the prism of Bergson and Deleuze, Jacob’s Ladder is a
journey through sheets of past that undermine the authenticity of the
present. The religious overtones suggest that Jacob has been descending
purgatorial steps through time and space, then climbing up again to reach
his personal Heaven. In horror films, the persistence of memory, coupled
with dream/hallucination, presents duration as a hellish experience. The
   181

redemptive ending of this journey through memory gravitates against the

film’s horror elements.
The hellish terror that lurks outside the boundaries of space-time can
be found in a much simpler form in the neo-Gothic horror/sci-fi hybrid
Event Horizon, directed by Paul Anderson.

Back From the Black Hole: Event Horizon

Event Horizon is a hybrid of horror and science fiction. The film imagines
what might happen if the boundary of space-time is breached, using sci-
entific and pseudo-scientific terminology based on theories of relativity
and Stephen Hawking’s extensions to the theory of black holes.80 Several
of these terms and concepts, such as the ‘singularity’ – the point at the
centre of a black hole at which matter becomes infinitely dense – have like-
wise been removed by Deleuze from their context in physics and used for
variant purposes.
The Deleuzian re-application of physics is ‘twice-removed’ by being
itself shaped by Bergson’s. Despite his disagreement with Einstein on the
nature of time, Bergson’s work is a broad philosophical exploration of
relativity’s insight that ‘there is no absolute point of reference, no privi-
leged system’.81 In the relativistic world of Event Horizon, space-time is
folded back upon itself, with disastrous results, when a spacecraft enters
a black hole.
Black holes are bodies so compact for their mass that light cannot leave
their vicinity against the intense gravitational field. An event horizon is
the boundary round a black hole at which the escape velocity exceeds the
speed of light. It has anomalous temporal properties. At an event horizon,
clocks stop from the standpoint of a distant observer and there is an
infinite time-dilation effect.82 From the viewpoint of an earthbound
observer, an astronaut in a craft would appear never to reach the event
horizon, but to hover at its horizon, frozen in time. From the astronaut’s
point of view, it takes only a finite time to cross over into the interior of
the event horizon, but the craft would never be able to return because it
would not be able to exceed the local light velocity. The spacecraft, itself
named the Event Horizon, is the product of a secret government project
to create a spacecraft capable of faster-than-light flight, which the law of
relativity prohibits.
The opening shots of the title sequence show a glistening blue vortex of
energy surrounding a black hole. A meteoric object hurtles towards the
camera from deep space. The ship, feared lost when it disappeared in a black
hole beyond Neptune, has returned to the ‘now’ of 2047. The velocity slows
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to reveal the ship’s heavy metal nuts and bolts, apparently a familiar, solid
product of human engineering. When acceleration stops, the interior of the
ship enters free-fall. Amongst the slowly floating objects, a wristwatch is
highlighted. Like Dali’s melting clocks, the transmuted timepiece indicates
infinite temporal dilation.
The inventor of the ship, Dr Weir, has evaded the laws of relativity by
creating a ‘new gateway’ to jump instantaneously from one point to
another light years away. This is effected by ‘using a retaining magnetic
field to focus a narrow beam of gravitation’. These techniques, in turn, fold
space-time until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large and
produces a singularity. Realising that the crew (and some of the film’s audi-
ence) have problems understanding the terminology of physics, he ends his
account by using ‘layman’s terms’. Weir continues, ‘The shortest distance
between two points is zero. It folds space so that point A and point B co-
exist in the same space and time. When the spacecraft passes through the
gateway, space returns to normal. Its called a gravity drive.’ The crew of
the missing ship were given the go-ahead to use the gravity drive to open
the gateway to Proxima Centauri, then disappeared elsewhere before their
anomalous return. At the end, the ship explodes, ripping the fabric of the
universe into another black hole, and the ship is sucked down into it, back
whence it came.

Inner Space in Outer Space: Travels in Duration

The motif of the unsatisfying past returning to the present to haunt astro-
nauts echoes Tarkovski’s Solaris in the more graphic form of body horror.
Dr Weir is initially presented as a sympathetic figure, haunted by his per-
sonal past in the dream form of his dead wife Claire, who vengefully awaits
him. Her nightmarish pallor and dead eyes, in close-up, impel him in terror
from his liquid-filled travel tube. In an attempt to reassure the anxious
crew, despite his own traumatised state, Weir offers them some background
to the Event Horizon project.
Weir, whose manner becomes increasingly sinister, attempts to pass this
distortion of space-time off as an ‘optical effect’ created by a burst of
gravity waves that escaped from the core. He explains that when the
engine’s three magnetic rings align, they create an artificial black hole,
which has the power to bend space and time. This allows the ship to travel
to any point in space. As Weir speaks, the gravity drive creates hypnotic
reflections of itself in his eyes, shown in close-up as he gazes at his crea-
tion, as though it has possessed him, or absorbed him into its own
machinic assemblage.
   183

This manifestation of the engine’s ability to transmute matter is followed

by its further ability to shift temporal co-ordinates. Memories based on past
events are manifest as present realities, due to the engine’s interference with
the space-time continuum. We learned earlier that Dr Peters, the medical
technician, has a dysfunctional family and feels guilty about leaving her son
behind whilst she works. Peters begins to experience distressing projections
from her guilty conscience. She hallucinates her little boy on the ship, his
legs covered with sores, calling plaintively for his ‘Mommy’.
Weir crawls through a complex tunnel of reflective facets to seek a sup-
posed fault in the ship’s circuitry. As he moves through this crystalline
tunnel, it spreads and stretches out, expanding in time as well as in space.
Weir’s wife appears, and invites him to be with her ‘forever’ before he
blacks out and the screen goes dark. Captain Miller experiences his own
first hallucination produced from a layer of memory tapped by the gravity
drive. He sees the figure of a former bosun rise from a pool of liquid fire to
stare at him accusingly. Miller feels responsible for the death of this young
crew member he was compelled to leave behind when the ship exploded.
When Justin, the ‘baby’ of the present crew, dies, Miller’s memory matches
this with the bosun’s death. Flash-frames of the bosun’s bloody face indi-
cate the operations of guilt as present events trigger the associations of
memory. The ship unlocks the crew’s innermost secrets from intensive
memory, and projects them into present, extensive space.
Weir’s attempted rationalisations of events as carbon dioxide hallucina-
tions sound increasingly hollow. The sensory reality of the manifestations,
including that of his own wife, undermines his claims. The spectator sees
what the characters see, ‘objectively’ present in the same frame with those
who see them. The heat is felt, not imagined, and instruments register
‘bio-readings of an indeterminate origin’. By breaking through the space
and time of this universe, the ship has brought back an elsewhere in which
known laws are no longer valid. Memory literally becomes matter.
As well as the materialisation of personal memory, a culturally shared
layer of historical past is plumbed via ecclesiastical echoes in the mise-en-
scène. The windows of the medical room combine Romanesque and Gothic
features. One curved arch in centre frame surrounds three lancet windows
of light. The inside of the ship resembles the interior of a terrestrial build-
ing with brick-like walls.83 The doors of the medical room are coffin-
shaped. The identification of the peripheral space to which the Event
Horizon has travelled as ‘Hell’, the use of Latin and the demonic manifes-
tations, increase the film’s neo-Gothic ambience.
The gravity drive steps up its predations. Peters sees flash-frames of her
son holding out his arms to her. He leads her to her death as she drops
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down a virtual chasm that opens in the ship. Weir’s wife, whom we see
reflected in his eyes, slashes her wrists in the bath, in the virtual space of a
personal Hell made from his memory traces. He pokes his own eyes out in
anguish. When Weir blows the rescue ship up, the screen briefly becomes
an ‘any-space-whatever’ of swirling fire and coloured sparks, and provides
a brief, disorienting respite from narrative horrors.

‘It’s’ Alive: The Event Horizon as Demonic Machine

The spacecraft manifests its own life-force after it has returned from
beyond the space-time boundary. The metal matter of the ship has become
a living space of anomaly, ill disposed towards humanity and insisting on
its own will as demonic machine. The first human figure that appears from
the former crew is dead, silhouetted against a bright, cruciform window in
the posture of a crucified Christ. A medium close-up reveals his bloody
torso and a face frozen in suffering. This image introduces the visual and
aural echoes of ecclesiastical architecture that permeate the diegesis. By
passing out of known space and time, the ship has, in some sense, regressed
to a medieval religious paradigm and manifests demonic forces and the tor-
ments of the damned, despite its sci-fi terminology and setting.
Religious motifs are introduced with the crew of the rescue ship, initially
orbiting earth. The briefly blank white screen, then the dazzling light
which introduces them, implies a positive spiritual ambience in contrast to
the infernal gloom of the Event Horizon. The rescue crew are plagued by
a sense of foreboding when their mission is announced. The pilot, Mr
Smith, crosses himself. One crew member has an Egyptian ankh tattooed
on back. This mix of conventional and alternative religious iconography
suggests the survival of human spirituality into the future.
Locking onto the stranded ship, via the main airlock (XIII in Latin
numerals), the rescue crew begin to pick up unexplained sounds, which
they record and play back. These are a ‘high-pitched squeaking, deep
howling noise’ with an indistinct voice in Latin saying what initially resem-
bles ‘liberate me’ or ‘save me’. Thunder and lightning begins in deep space,
cueing in the Gothic atmosphere. Continuing the religious motifs, the
ship’s outline resembles an ankh, or a crucifix on its side. Later flash-
frames show an amorphous, bloody sac with a red pentagram on it.
Captain Miller and Dr Weir cross the umbilicus bridge, in the deep
freeze of ice crystals. The Captain feels that the place is ‘a tomb’. Sudden
motion breaks the stillness as a blue/black spiralling vortex appears, with
a fang-like gateway at the centre of a tunnel. The reflective, mirrored sur-
faces have a hypnotic effect on the eye, their crystalline nature inducing
   185

multi-faceted vision. The two men walk past benches ominously smeared
with cobweb formations of viscous organic matter. They enter the second
containment without compromising the magnetic fields. When the captain
pulls out the ship’s log, a deformed face and torso with ‘massive abrasions’
looms out at him, and he mistakenly speculates that an animal was respon-
sible for the carnage.
The engine, described by Weir as ‘the core, the gravity drive’, is ‘the
heart of the ship’ and is impelled by a machinic life of its own. This huge,
spiked globe resembles a deep-sea mine, or a torture machine. It has a triple
outer structure of intersecting rings, adorned by glowing circlets of light,
and rotates with a motion propelled by its own force. Close-ups lead our
eyes to its detail, elaborate patterns etched on its metal plates. The form of
the engine mutates to an eight-pointed star as it unfolds to emit an unbear-
ably bright light, which makes the men stagger back.
After this burst of light, the predominant blue gloom returns. In curi-
osity, Justin pokes his finger into the engine’s side. In an elemental becom-
ing, the metal transmutes into a mercury-like liquid, and he withdraws his
finger with a blob on the end. His life-scan sensor lights up, suggesting an
active living presence in the engine. Justin puts his hand into the
solid/liquid substance and his arm is drawn in after it, followed by his
entire body. He is sucked into the centre of the globe by machinic osmosis,
and vanishes. The machine shows warning signs of its destructive intent,
then erupts in light sparks and red flames.
The taped ship’s log is played back. Before opening the gateway to
Proxima Centauri, the Latinate captain bids everyone ‘Ave atque vale.’
Static and a high-pitched howling cut him off. An updated translation of
the Latin words on the audiotape offers a warning from the captain, ‘Save
yourself from Hell.’ The visual recording shows bloody men devouring
each other and destroying themselves. A human arm projects from one
man’s throat and we have a close-up of the grinning captain who has torn
out his own eyeballs. Announcing that he is ‘home’, Weir disappears into
darkness. The infernal regions have relocated from Earth’s underground
to ‘beyond the boundaries of the known universe’.
The core shows Justin a glimpse of Hell, then sends him back to
terrify his mates. He recounts his experience of ‘the dark inside me . . .
from the other place’. Justin prophesies his own death: ‘He’s coming . . .
the dark!’ The Devil comes for him in the form of a gory death as his
body is turned inside out within the compression chamber. Physics can
provide an account of what happens to him. When an astronaut crosses
the event horizon and is drawn into the singularity at the centre, he or
she is ‘torn apart by tidal forces’84 and ‘crushed out of existence’ by being
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sucked in by the gravitational field of collapsed matter.85 Alternatively,

Justin suffers an inversion of his spatial extent by being rotated in the
fourth dimension.
Weir, now completely a demon-possessed mad scientist, is able to see
without physical eyes. He captures the surgeon, D. J. Trauma, and tortures
him on his own operating table, eviscerating him with a scalpel along a pre-
existing scar. He hooks Trauma’s viscera to the ceiling in elaborate spider-
web patterns highlighted by the Romanesque arch. Weir exults that his
ship ‘tore a hole in our universe – a gateway to another dimension – a
dimension of pure chaos, pure evil’ and, in the process, the Event Horizon
came back ‘alive’.
The physical impact of rescue technician Coop’s return from outside
the ship blasts a hole through the wall, which causes the contents to be
sucked out. As well as these strictly sci-fi horrors, more traditional occult
manifestations include a sea of blood that wells up and washes Stark, the
pilot, away. The ghostly bosun seeks revenge by attacking the captain with
a focused flame. Weir is the diabolic force behind these illusions, and
adopts their form. His face is scratched and scarred, as though etched with
strange symbols. He gloats that ‘Hell is only a word – the reality is much,
much worse’, and attempts to carry them all off there.
His supernaturally enhanced trajectory is stopped when Miller, in a sac-
rificial gesture, blows the ship up. The explosion opens up an any-space-
whatever as smoke and flame temporarily blot representation out. The hole
closes up again in swirling mist, and thunder rumbles as the survivors
Coop and Stark watch from the window of the rescue craft. Those crew
members whose guilt-laden pasts caught up with them are destroyed. The
film ends with Stark’s final hallucination of Weir’s continuing presence,
and she is sedated to calm her terror.
The film introduces, but does not fully develop, relativistic concepts of
time and duration. The action-driven plot is rendered sensational by the
neo-Gothic elements of body horror. Nevertheless, its rationale of split-
ting space-time, and the prevalence of the past in the form of memory, are
relevant to our discussion. As in Jacob’s Ladder, the theme has a religious
dimension and explores the operations of a guilty conscience. From this
perspective, travel in duration, and the inability of the characters to keep
the past as virtual memory, can lead to Hell.
My final reading is a more detailed study of time and motion in
Mulholland Drive, directed by David Lynch. The film straddles the art-
house/mainstream divide and incorporates components of supernatural
horror. Bergsonian and Deleuzian tropes mesh together in this dense and
philosophically suggestive text.
   187

Dreaming Duration in Mulholland Drive

this is my dream place (Betty/Diane)

Lynch’s work is often described as Surrealistic, though the director ingen-

uously denies this.86 The films offer an overt array of Oedipal themes, per-
verse sexual fantasies, sadistic violence and a convincingly uncanny
ambience. Dual identity appears in Fire Walk with Me and Lost Highway,
as well as Mulholland Drive. Above all, they operate a substantial oneiric
component in which the boundary between dream and waking life is
blurred, even non-existent. This dream world evokes inexplicable qualities
of supernatural horror.
Bergson’s comments shed new light on Lynch’s oneiric complexities,
approach to dreams is philosophically rather than psycho-sexually oriented.
He does not unearth Oedipal configurations, or Jungian archetypes of the
collective unconscious, although it might be argued that Lynch’s films do.
Dreams, for Bergson, are a simplified example of the interweaving of con-
cepts in the ‘deeper regions of the intellectual life’ when we are awake.87
Cinematic superimposition is prefigured by his analysis of the ‘strangest
dreams’ in which ‘two images overlie one another and show us at the same
time two different persons, who yet make only one’.88 This illumines the
daydreams, night dreams and overlaid levels of reality in Mulholland Drive
as fixed identity is replaced by the composite figures of fantasy.

Betty’s ‘Dream Place’

The first part of the narrative features the stylised ‘true romance’ and
meteoric rise of ‘Betty’, a would-be Hollywood star, who, as we later dis-
cover, does not actually exist. Plot concerns such as the separation of truth
from falsehood and the solution to the mystery remain opaque. The irrel-
evant, or possibly non-existent, ‘meaning’ has little value compared to the
affective experience of the film. Time, space and motion are loosely strung
together less by plot events than by the affective resonance of diagram-
matic components, such as the quality of the colour blue. The blue tone is
set in the pre-title sequence, with jitterbugging dancers silhouetted against
an indigo ground. The threatening swell of electronic chords mixes in with
the hard-edged rattling rhythm of the music. With no visible floor, the
dancers appear to fly. Their shadow doubles loom large behind them, simu-
lacral dancers who duplicitously copy the real dancers’ every move. This
effect evokes dreams as moving shadows with autonomous life. It begins
the film’s distortion of spatial and temporal co-ordinates.
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A brightly lit close-up of Betty’s blissful face confronts us. Her wide
blue-eyed wonder will be the predominant mode of her adopted persona.
A bleached-out three-shot shows her with a (deceptively) benign elderly
couple. The validity of this sequence is undermined by a jump cut to
rumpled pink bedcovers, shot in close-up. Jump cuts feature substantially
in dream ellipsis as the dreaming consciousness hops between memory
layers and selects material impelled by its own trajectory. The camera eye
descends into the pillow, suggesting the burrowing motion of dreaming.
The film’s mobile camera moves by a sinister force of its own, not bound
to the point-of view of any character. By inducing sensory disorientation,
it confuses our perceptions and opens up anomalous time and space.
Bright letters on the black ground of a street sign jump cut us to a new
location, Mulholland Drive. The sign, with its fluorescent flicker, appears
to float. Rapid alternations of dark and light induce a hypnotic, strobe-like
effect. The film’s titles likewise ripple in fluorescence before fading out.
This technique extends the hypnotic flicker of the sign on the viewer’s
eyes. Flickering light, with its consciousness-altering properties, marks
climactic points in the film.
Long-held electronic chords cue in car headlamps cutting through
darkness. Slowly alternating long and medium shots fade into each other.
Los Angeles is a simulacral city that partakes of the qualities of dream. The
nocturnal panorama appears viewed from the slow gliding car guided on
by white lines at the road edge. The smooth motion of fluid tracking is
broken by an abrupt cut inside to the pallid, sculptured face of a woman.
Her image recalls the film noir femme fatale, with black hair, dark crimson
lips with matching nails and slinky black dress. The skewing of her appar-
ent point-of-view shot from the back seat undermines our potential iden-
tification. Rather than focusing on the driver’s back, the camera reveals an
indistinct space in the darkness ahead, as though she is absorbed in a
reverie that blanks out the present and us. The car abruptly stops, senso-
rially assaulted by the glare of headlamps and the sound of rattling and
yelling as joyriders crash headlong into it.
An extended image cluster of beds and sleeping effects the suspension
of mundane reality and its replacement by dream journeys elsewhere. The
crash survivor rises like a somnambulist and limps down to the city,
impelled by a trance-like energy. Concealing herself in bushes, she slowly,
sinuously, lies down to sleep. Whilst the crash is being investigated in a plot
cul-de-sac, she sneaks into a house as its owner leaves, and sleeps a second
time. What ensues via a jump cut is assumed to be her dream because of its
immediate juxtaposition, but we come to realise that the dreamer/dream
connection is tenuously drawn. Unlike the fades or lap dissolves that con-
   189

ventionally demarcate the edges of dream sequences, the film undermines

the distinction of dream and reality.
The entire narrative of Mulholland Drive comprises knotted layers of
undifferentiated fantasy/dream/memory. According to Bergson, dreams
are collages of memory fragments. Their overlaid nature is due to several
‘sheets’ of memory co-existing. Overlay produces a sense of quality, not
quantity, as relations shift between outer, extensive consciousness and
inner, intensive state of memory. Sleep deprives the ego of the ‘outer circle
of psychic states which it uses as a balance-wheel’ between itself and every-
day objects.89 It thus relaxes ‘the play of the organic functions, alters the
communicating surface between the ego and external objects’, so that we
‘no longer measure duration, but we feel it’ as quality.90 Overlay is tripled,
in this scene, by its weaving of a dream within a dream within a dream.
This dream world, like that of the Surrealists, is both contempo-
rary/urban and fantastic in nature. The pastel façade of a diner leads into
a ‘space’ of supernatural horror as a man confides a traumatic dream to his
analyst and insists on re-enacting it. Close-ups of his fearful, perspiring
face authenticate the affective force of memory. The two men find uncanny
horror embedded in the mundane world and lit by full sunlight. Their
anxious approach to a ruined wall is presented by the shaky empathy of a
low-angled, hand-held camera. The nightmare is realised as the close-up
face of a filthy vagrant with hyper-aware turquoise eyes erupts from behind
the wall. The dreamer’s actualised nightmare gives him a heart attack. We
cut on a sound bridge of the analyst’s muffled distress to an unidentified
sleeper apparently dreaming this scene, not the woman we expect.
Near the end of the film, we revisit this dream-within-a-dream in the
uncanny repetition of an ‘original’ itself a repetition. This time, the
dreamer stands in the same corner of the diner as his analyst had done
earlier. A slow fade moves us round the back of the building, to the long-
held vibration of electronic notes on the soundtrack. Darkness swamps out
daylight as the sinister vagrant appears, hellishly lit by red smoke from the
fire behind. S/he holds a vibrantly blue box and places it into a grubby
paper bag. In a long-held shot, the box flickers red in the glow of the fire.
Exaggerated camera motion evokes disturbed emotional or mental
states. In ‘Aunt Ruth’s’ apartment, the camera’s gliding viewpoint moves
eagerly forward, then cautiously back. This rapid fluidity exceeds the fea-
sible viewpoint of Betty’s hesitation at the open bathroom door. Betty’s
first sight of her dark-haired interloper is the blurred image of a voluptu-
ous body through the frosted glass of a shower. From inside the shower, the
woman spots a movie poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda and instantly
adopts the name of this deceptive movie femme fatale. Her persona is
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formed by identification with a fantasy image via the duplicitous interme-

diary of a two-way arrangement of mirrors. A shot of the back of her head
melts into a glide over her shoulder, to pause at her face in the mirror, as it
looks at the reflection in a second mirror. The visual duality matches her
devious persona.
Camera movement is frequently motivated by its own, often anticipa-
tory agenda. Whilst Betty phones Aunt Ruth, the camera tracks along the
corridor, taking a route that she will shortly take herself. The camera’s
motion expresses the insistence of desire and the force of manifest
thought, in a domination of linear time and space. Betty follows the
camera’s lead to see for herself what it has already viewed with its super-
ior eye, Rita weeping on the bed. Rita’s amnesia disempowers her and
makes her dependent on Betty. Rita’s enigmatic dark eyes and Betty’s lucid
blue ones lock as Rita’s bag reveals emblematic objects: wads of dollars and
a strangely triangular blue key.91
Betty’s personal geography is among the film’s self-consciously oneiric
hints. Having left Deep River, Ontario, she is now in her ‘dream place’,
Hollywood. As well as private forms of memory, the film draws on cultu-
ral memory as the glamour of old Hollywood is evoked by ambivalent nos-
talgia. The film is a dense pastiche of an already artificial ‘original’, the
Hollywood movie version of its own history and geography, seen in
Lynch’s self-reflexive use of both location and studio shots. Betty enters
the Hollywood dream factory through the old pink and ivory gates of the
studio, where she is magically transformed from a nobody into an up-and-
coming star. The retro kitsch film Adam Kesher directs echoes Betty’s own
taste for 1950s retro in jitterbugging. Adam himself adopts a 1950s revival
haircut, sideburns and square-framed shades.
The independent eye of the camera undermines the movie-cliché first
eye-contact of these potential lovers. It lays bare the scene’s artifice by track-
ing away from them through the rectangular frame of the sound stage. Here,
it could be argued, the camera eye is the semi-detached presence of the
invisible dreamer who critically observes her own fantasy scenarios. The
camera eye later glides into the courtyard towards Aunt Ruth’s apartment.
Aware of where Rita is hiding, it seeks her out. Its swooping movement
heralds Louise, a witch-like neighbour wrapped in a long cloak, with glazed
eyes and frizzled hair. As she pronounces that ‘something bad’s happening’,
the camera swoops right in to the hidden Rita’s anxious face inside the room,
either impelled by Louise’s psychic ‘second sight’ or on its own accord.
These dreams have full sensorial presence as well as visual expression.
When Betty and Rita break into a black and white faux Tudor apartment,
they are assaulted by a rotten stench. Sensorial immersion in horror is con-
   191

veyed as they mask their noses from the smell of decay. The camera glides
on before them and moves into deep shadow, intensifying the lurking
mystery. The woman’s body curled on the bed, in a posture reminiscent of
the sleeping Rita, likewise appears to be asleep. Rita’s scream is muffled by
Betty’s hand as they recognise the deformed figure as a corpse. The pink
coverlet recalls the invisible dreamer in the title sequence, waiting
throughout the film for the dream to unfold. The corpse’s texture induces
haptic revulsion as the mottled blue arms and damaged face shine with the
dampness of decay. In a horribly literal sense, it recalls Deleuze’s descrip-
tion of the body as ‘the developer of time, it shows time through its tired-
nesses and waitings’.92 Decay belongs not to duration, but to unstoppably
linear space-time.
Lynch films validate the urgency of dream life and visionary quality.
Dreams within dreams are a recurring feature. When Betty and Rita
become lovers, sexual ecstasy affords them brief respite from time’s arrow
until their peaceful sleep is disturbed by Rita’s nightmare. With her eyes
wide open, she murmurs, ‘Silencio – no hay banda – no hay orquestra’, then
apparently wakes. Rita urges Betty to join her in response to a dream,
summons, although this could still be part of her dream, like the fantastic
subsequent sequences at the Club Silencio.
The oneiric quality of Rita and Betty’s cab ride through the blur of
unreal streets is expressed by the soft-focus iridescence of pre-dawn light.
They enter a blue-lit lot, vacant apart from a few blowing scraps of litter.
Without any narrative purpose, this any-space-whatever evokes pure
quality of an eerie, threatening kind. The camera glides rapidly across it
and pushes them into the nightclub from behind. Inside the club, to a
small, mainly female audience, a doubly artificial performance is enacted.
In a self-referential display of technological artifice, an on-stage MC
announces that the music of a white-clad trumpeter is recorded. The
trumpeter continues to mime after the tape has stopped, so that he is
playing silence. An inexplicable figure watches from the balcony: an
androgynous woman with deep blue hair and eighteenth-century costume.
As well as the goatee beard of a stage magician, the MC has genuinely
diabolical powers to affect his audience. Thunder crashes through the
theatre and Betty trembles uncontrollably in her seat, as though electrified.
The MC, who wears a single pearl on his cravat, like Rita’s earring lost in
the crash, stares directly into the camera with his bulging, manic eyes,
engaging the movie audience full-on. He vanishes in a cloud of blue smoke,
leaving behind a luminous microphone in the flickering submarine light.
From a set-up on stage, a long shot de-personalises the captivated auditor-
ium audience.
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The show climaxes with the performance of the real-life singer,

Rebekah Del Rio. Clad in a tight sheath dress, she mimes Roy Orbison’s
song ‘Crying’, in Spanish. Her androgynous face is plastered with make-
up, which highlights her voluptuous crimson mouth. Despite the blatant
falsity of a tear stuck on her cheek, her eyes brim with tears of pathos.
Overcome by emotion, Rebekah collapses, and is carried off-stage as her
voice unnervingly continues to sing, in pure sonsigns. Betty and Rita cling
weeping to each other at this simulation, which at the same time induces
the actual quality of love and pain. The aesthetic force of music invokes
virtual memories that genuinely affect the present.
The tramp’s blue box inexplicably appears on Betty’s lap. She takes the
triangular key (which seems made for it) out of her bag, in obedience to
dream logic. A temporal and spatial ellipsis shifts them back home and
Betty vanishes after placing this box on the bed. The empty quality of the
apartment is emphatic. Rita also opens the box and the camera dives
through it into visual blackout and the sound of rushing wind. The box
falls onto the carpet. Inexplicably, Aunt Ruth enters the empty room and
seems disturbed by the residue of psychic turbulence. Her sudden man-
ifestation adds a further layer to the dream’s distorted temporal and
spatial schemata.

Diane in Duration
The spatial and temporal convolution of the film stymies critics seeking a
plausible overall schema. Betty’s story is the wish-fulfilment day- and
night-dream projection of Diane, a film extra disappointed in love. The
dreams are an assemblage of false and true memories recalled into being at
the point of her death. They re-mould her actual past into one she desires;
‘remembering’ events that never happened. Diane projects her dreams, or
substitute memories, as she slips away from the demands of present action
into the permanent eternity of dream life. This feasible slant I am taking on
the film’s disturbing dream events only becomes possible late in the story.
Diane’s dream world does not merely re-tell a plausible, if romanticised,
account of her own past. Sinister deus ex machina figures appear, like Mr
Roque, the disabled Mafia boss in his glass-walled room. Their uncanny
quality exceeds the realms of nightmare or paranoid projection. Numinous
beings with autonomous existence, they are denizens of another, meta-
physical, layer of reality played out through the dream world. This pos-
sibility, which fits in with the director’s other work, underlines the film’s
quality of supernatural horror. The Cowboy is another disturbingly
skewed stereotype, in 1970s check shirt, Texan accent, ten-gallon hat and
   193

red neckerchief. Rather than being tanned and wholesome, he has slit eyes
and a ginger-haired pallor. After his slow, softly spoken threat to Kesher,
the bare light bulb above the gate of his ranch flickers and he vanishes in
the dark.
Bergson compares the virtual experience of past events reactivated by
memory to dreams. The necessities of present action block our past from
us, but if we relinquish the demands of the present by daydream or con-
templation, it may be recovered and returned to consciousness. The
blocked past will ‘find strength to cross the threshold of consciousness in
all cases where we renounce the interests of effective action to replace our-
selves, so to speak, in the life of dreams’.93 Dreams thus offer an image of
the processes of memory in a simpler form. In Lynch’s film, Diane’s
dreams form on-screen reality for us. They are, however, complex and con-
voluted, not simplified, versions of projected memories.
Temporal and spatial disjunction is strongly marked after both Rita and
Betty have disappeared ‘into’ the blue box, which functions as a time
tunnel linking co-existing layers of duration. An interlude returns us to a
different layer of time in the mock-Tudor apartment, as knocking at the
door forms a belated sound bridge to the knock that disturbed Rita and
Betty earlier. An apparently sleeping woman lies on the bed with her back
to the camera as the Cowboy enters with the order, ‘Hey, pretty girl – time
to wake up.’ This is followed by a long, black fade-out. Time has discon-
certingly looped back to when the corpse seen by Betty and Rita was alive.
At this point, we do not merely switch in space and time, but shift from
one protagonist to another in the same skin. Betty becomes ‘Diane’, and
Rita becomes ‘Camilla’, the name of the would-be starlet in the earlier
section.94 Unlike her alter-ego, Diane is burnt-out and bitter, not fresh-
faced and naïve. Another blue key, of normal appearance this time, lies on
the coffee table as Diane’s friend, who Rita and Betty met earlier, collects
her belongings and warns her that two detectives were looking for her (the
same men seen by Betty and Rita).
According to linear plot logic, time’s forward flow has forked. Diane is
both dead and alive at the same time, and, as Betty, she has also seen her
own dead body. Alone, Diane stares through the grimy window and sighs
for Camilla, who enters in a glamorous red gown. They quarrel during sex
and the camera focuses on an ashtray, the same one we saw the friend take
away earlier in yet another temporal convolution. On the level of narrative,
these events disorientate the spectator. From the perspective of Deleuze,
cinema has made us aware of the way sheets of past are organised around
peaks of present.
Temporal suspension is broken by the strident ringing of the telephone
194    

in a ‘present’ determined to impel the narrative forward into the future.

Here, however, the possibility of a ‘present’ is heavily undermined by mise-
en-scène. The phone is near the ominous red light cast by a crimson lamp-
shade surrounded by opaque darkness. This recalls the earlier attempt of
Rita and Betty to contact Diane. A further jump cut has occurred, because
Diane, with a despairing expression, is now dressed for an evening out,
imitating Camilla’s style by her vampish red and black outfit.
In a repetition of the opening credits, the Mulholland Drive street sign
flickers, and shots from the start are replayed. The repetition suggests a
circular looping of time and space. It makes us reassess the earlier scene as
a modified version of Diane’s own (future) fate. She sits in the same
posture as Rita, as though Rita’s experience had been a rehearsal for
Diane’s. She likewise repeats the lines. ‘What are you doing? We don’t stop
here.’ Instead of a gun, the driver tells her to expect a surprise, which turns
out to be the engagement party for Camilla and Adam that precipitates
Diane’s final psychotic breakdown.
Diane’s nightmare world is literally the death of her when it appears in
‘actuality’ near the end. In a state of post-traumatic shock, Diane sits
staring at the blue key left as a sign that Camilla has been murdered at her
request. Gloomy ambient lighting contrasts with the pallor of her robe and
skin, and emphasises her isolation. Her intensive recollections are dis-
rupted by a loud banging at the door. The sinister elderly couple seen with
Betty at the airport return from the unidentifiable space of Elsewhere as
Diane sinks into despair. With maniacal laughter, they move forward in
jerky, stop-frame motion, like automata.
The demonic couple are Furies summoned by Diane’s guilt and
remorse, to drive her to despair. Miniaturised, they crawl under the door
whilst a stroboscopic flicker bathes Diane’s close-up eye to intensify the
numinous horror of events. Returning to full size, they attack her, and from
their over-the shoulder point-of-view, force her down onto a blue-tinged,
blurred bed. She scrabbles for a gun in the bedside cabinet and a shot is
heard. The smoke-filled room becomes opaque whilst the light continues
to flicker.
Although he does not discuss either the manifest or latent content of
nightmares, Bergson’s account of dreams describes their potential to frag-
ment and lose durational wholeness. He describes this in negative terms as
a descent into space-time. A comparable disintegration is produced by the
anxiety-inducing jump cuts between alternative levels and spaces in
Lynch’s work. The anxious affect is enhanced by unnerving motions of
cinematography and anomalous objects of the mise-en-scène that express an
extended dream world.
   195

The force of nightmare continues to reverberate in the immediate after-

math of Diane’s death. The tramp’s face appears, rendered demonic by the
lurid mix of a blue filter and the red glow of a fiery background. This
hellish ambience transmutes by lap dissolve into a brighter vision. The
next close-up is Diane as Betty, bleached with light, laughing and happy as
we saw her in the titles sequence. A blonde-wigged Camilla appears in the
cab next to her, in a composition that recalls the two- and three-shot close-
ups of the jitterbug contest of the pre-title sequence. This pale, luminous
image is repeated twice. Both two-shots appear to be on the same spatial
line, as the camera pans across from the first one to repeat a slightly varied
version of the same set-up, producing the impression of a three-shot.
These images of Diane and Camilla together melt and fade into each
other in slow motion. This movement suggests their transcendent nuptial,
as memory breaks free from material limitations into the eternal time of
Diane’s version of Heaven. Lynch’s Heaven is characterised not by the
frozen stasis of perfection, but by the shimmering vibration of light in
intensive flux. At this point, the nightmares of life are replaced by the
eternal dream of blissful duration outside space-time.
The any-space-whatever of the Club Silencio is the film’s final location.
The interior is shrouded in (superimposed) smoke. This fades into a sharp-
focus shot of dark red drapes and a blue microphone on the empty stage.
The woman with blue hair looks down from her box. With her heavily lip-
sticked mouth recalling the shape of Camilla’s, she whispers the final
words, ‘Silencio.’ She sets a seal of silence on a mystery left deliberately
opaque to provoke the viewer’s further speculations on the film’s enigmas,
space and time.

Space-Time and Dream Duration

Although Bergson finds a shadow of duration in dreams, their invasion by
space gravitates against their ability to present it in its pure state. As we
dream, the components of our durational self become scattered. They
adopt separate, spatial characteristics and lose some of their intensive
force. When this occurs, our past, which till then

was gathered together into the indivisible impulsion it communicated to us, is broken
up into a thousand tiny recollections made external to one another. They give up
interpenetrating to the degree that they become fixed. Our personality thus descends
in the direction of space.95

Bergson regrets the dilution of duration in dreams. Aesthetic events like

fiction films, which offer a comparable experience, inevitably express
196    

themselves in spatialised images. Despite this, the image’s temporal flow

enables certain films, in certain scenes, to recapture and convey the quality
of duration. I argue that Mulholland Drive expresses duration’s affective
force in the ‘shining points’ of particular images and sequences, and the
broader ‘sheets’ or layers of its overall construction.
As Betty and Rita hide out, the onward flow of linear time appears to
stand still. Beneath this surface stillness, temporal change continues. A
technique that makes time visible is used when they hurtle out of the
apartment they had broken into, startled by knocking at the door. In these
shots, duration rather than space-time is conveyed. As they run, the frag-
mentation of both their personas by trauma is displayed. In a multiplic-
ity of visual vibrations, their images are overlaid in a Futurist-style image.
They are plummeted out of linear space-time as inner ‘sheets of past’ in
duration are exposed. Multiple superimpositions freeze the linear tem-
poral flow into an intensive moment. We thus become aware of the nor-
mally buried layers of duration as they co-exist within memory. The
extensive manifestation of intensive states is impelled by the potent event
of horror.
In a scene pivotal to the dream projections, Diane, with a pale, sweating
face and desperate expression, masturbates on the couch. Her sobbing
orgasm mixes physical pleasure and emotional pain. The psychic potency
of her jouissance blurs the sharpness of reality as the stones of the wall go
in and out of focus. Either during orgasm, or at her death, Diane’s extreme
emotional state might project the mixture of true and false memories in the
film’s convoluted narrative. The latter of the two stimuli would account for
the inclusion of subsequent anomalies.
According to Deleuze’s schema, Diane’s destiny has projected some-
thing of the ‘pure power of time’, which alters her memories of a real,
personal past, to affirm a time ‘which overflows all memory, an already-
past which exceeds all recollections’.96 This sense of being lost in time
results when attentive recognition fails. Deleuze suggests that failure of
memory suspends sensory-motor extension so that the image perceived
fails to link up with either a motor-image or a recollection-image that
would re-establish contact. The actual image then enters into relation
with ‘genuinely virtual elements’, such as feelings of déjà vu, dream
images and fantasies. He concludes that ‘it is not the recollection-image
or attentive recognition which gives us the proper equivalent of the
optical-sound image, it is rather the disturbances of memory and the fail-
ures of recognition’.97 Diane’s reveries in extremis have accessed an any-
space-whatever of duration, and via this they work to suspend the
viewer’s customary temporal schema.
   197

Deleuze’s description of the sensory-motor schema of modern cinema

sheds light on our opaque experience of Mulholland Drive. In post-war art-
cinema, conventional schemas are ‘shattered from the inside’ as percep-
tions and actions become disjointed and spaces are left empty or
uncoordinated.98 Characters trapped in this disjointed world are ‘pure
seers’, who are ‘caught in certain pure optical and sound situations’.99
These characters ‘no longer exist except in the interval of the moment, and
do not even have the consolation of the sublime, which would connect
them to matter or would gain control of the spirit for them. They are rather
given over to something intolerable which is simply their everydayness
itself ’.100
Diane’s schizophrenia results from trauma. She projects her successful
Betty persona of the first half of the film as a compensation for her every-
day despair. The pure optical and sound situations experienced by the
viewer, such as the ghostly taped music and the numinous blue light in the
Club Silencio, are projections beyond her conscious control. As the film’s
aesthetic anomalies take over, she becomes increasingly unable to act, even
in her go-getting assumed persona. Through Betty’s refusal of the every-
day when she hides out with Rita, Diane takes on the more passive per-
spective of a seer.
Diane’s experience is not, however, without touches of the sublime in its
own schizoid ‘misery and glory’. When she experiences sexual ecstasy, and
when she arranges Camilla’s death, she seeks the sublimities of passion and
revenge. Returned to everydayness by the very way she sought to escape it,
she falls into despair. By killing Camilla, she has destroyed her route to
sublime passion that took her, literally, out of herself. Her solution is to
seek the ultimate escape from intolerable everydayness in the sublime state
of her own death, which may be construed as a free act, despite its mechan-
ical gremlins.
In cinema, duration and space-time are related in several distinct ways.
I argue that even the most formulaic of Hollywood horror films opens up
suggestive relations with space-time and, less frequently, with duration.
More experimental feature films, in their stylistic complexity, offer stylis-
tic loopholes for duration to enter. The horror-oriented films I consider
overtly seek to manipulate the spectator’s sensorium. As part of the
mind/body/film assemblage, they also invite speculative thought as we try
to apprehend their deceptive operations and explore their mysteries. The
concepts of Bergson and Deleuze provide profound tools for engaging in
this process of affective thought. They help us discover what cinematic
time might have to offer in its intensive motion.
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Notes
1. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W.
Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 135.
2. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The
Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 371.
3. Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, (London and New York: Routledge,
2003), p. 19.
4. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (London: The
Athlone Press, 1990), p. 164.
5. Ibid. p. 165.
6. Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, p. 371.
7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. xi.
8. David N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 79.
9. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 98.
10. Ibid. p. 107.
11. Ibid. p. 101.
12. Ibid. p. 128.
13. Ibid. p. 128.
14. Ibid. p. 128.
15. Ibid. p. 112.
16. Ibid. p. 112.
17. Ibid. p. 114.
18. Ibid. pp. 138–9.
19. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 14.
20. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 100.
21. Ibid. p. 134.
22. Ibid. p. 104.
23. Ibid. p. 100.
24. Ibid. p. 133.
25. Ibid. p. 171.
26. Ibid. p. 134.
27. Ibid. p. 135.
28. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 17.
29. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1983), p. 11.
30. Ibid. p. 30.
31. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. xviii.
32. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), p. 23.
   199

33. Ibid. pp. 23–4.

34. Ibid. p. 32.
35. Ibid. p. 32.
36. Ibid. p. 106.
37. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 23.
38. Ibid. p. 23.
39. James Monaco, How to Read a Film (Oxford and New York, Oxford
University Press, 1981).
40. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 24.
41. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 89.
42. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 23.
43. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 84.
44. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 134.
45. Ibid. p. 126.
46. Ibid. p. 135.
47. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 98.
48. Ibid. p. 92.
49. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 46.
50. Ibid. p. 93.
51. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, p. 22.
52. Ibid. p. 19.
53. Ibid. p. 19.
54. Ibid. p. 17.
55. Ibid. p. 17.
56. Ibid. p. 21.
57. Ibid. p. 18.
58. Ibid. p. 20.
59. Ibid. p. 20.
60. Ibid. p. 22.
61. Ibid. p. 20.
62. Ibid. p. 22.
63. Ibid. p. 30.
64. Ibid. p. 29.
65. Ibid. p. 28.
66. Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, p. 26.
67. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen and Unwin, [1910]
1971), p. 226.
68. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 25.
69. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 97.
70. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 224.
71. Ibid. p. 225.
72. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 25.
73. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, p. 95.
200    

74. Ibid. p. 97.

75. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden With Forking Paths’, in Labyrinths, trans.
Donald A. Yates (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).
76. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 39.
77. Ibid. p. 39.
78. Ibid. p. 48.
79. Ibid. p. 48
80. Stephen M. Hawking, ‘Black Hole Explosions?’, Nature, Vol. 30, No. 248,
1976.
81. Henri Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, ed. Robin Durie, trans. Leon
Jacobson (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999), p. 24. For details of the dis-
agreement between Einstein and Bergson, see pp. 198–206.
82. Dennis Sciama, ‘Time “Paradoxes” in Relativity’, in Raymond Flood and
Michael Lockwood (eds), The Nature of Time, Oxford and New York:
Blackwell, 1986, p. 16.
83. An interview with Paul Anderson cites the French cathedral of Notre Dame
as an inspiration for the sets. See http://filmforce.ign.com/articles1466/
446412p1.html (December 2003).
84. Sciama, ‘Time “Paradoxes” in Relativity’, p. 17.
85. Roger Penrose, ‘Big Bangs, Black Holes and “Time’s Arrow”’, in Raymond
Flood and Michael Lockwood (eds), The Nature of Time, Oxford and New
York: Blackwell, 1986, p. 46.
86. For a psychoanalytic slant on Lynch, see Michel Chion, David Lynch
(London: BFI, 1992).
87. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 137.
88. Ibid. p. 136.
89. Ibid. p.126.
90. Ibid. p. 126.
91. The discovery of this talismanic key to a world of dreams recalls sequences
in Maya Deren’s Surrealist film, Meshes of the Afternoon, also shot on loca-
tion in the Hollywood hills.
92. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. xi.
93. Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 154.
94. It also recalls the lesbian vampire Carmilla, in The Vampire Lovers, dir. Roy
Ward Baker (1970).
95. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 201.
96. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, p. 48.
97. Ibid. p. 54.
98. Ibid. p. 40.
99. Ibid. p. 41.
100. Ibid. p. 41.
 Conclusion: Living Horror:
Thoughts On Our Nerve-Endings

an inhabitation rather than an interpretation.1 (Colebrook)

Deleuzian horror films threaten the stability of body and mind. They
transform the embodied mind of the spectator as well as the bodies on
screen. We feel and think the films directly on our nerve-endings, ‘inside’
with emotions and ideas, and on the surface of our skin in goose-bumps.
Film alters our perceptions, extending and transforming mundane modes
of consciousness. We are not the same viewer before, during or after the
horror film event. Rather than seeking to capture the meaning of my
chosen films, I have followed their affective lines of force. Locating horror
both on screen and in the spectator, I have traced its schizoid becomings in
movement and time.
The horror movie, as its name suggests, is essentially movement. The
apparatus of cinema presents virtual objects, so film’s representational
capacity is inevitably limited. Its technology produces flattened, abstracted
and partial copies. Rather than seeking a mirrored reality in cinema, we
respond to the sensory stimuli of the apparatus and its affective impact.
Instead of drawing representational equations, the image of the film moves
in the human living image as part of the universal flux of matter. We are
moved by, and move with, lighting, montage and the camera’s motion in
space and time. The cinematic process is a dynamic terrain where the char-
acteristics of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ change and exchange.
We are physically aroused by cinematography, editing and mise-en-scène.
The camera moves through space to reveal to us ‘unbearable’ elements
often hidden from the characters’ eyes. The way the camera moves is
directly affective, as when hand-held camera-shake conveys a stalker’s
excitement as the prey is about to be captured. Editing can startle us by
jump cuts or induce a haptic sense of pain by rapid-fire intercutting, like
that of the shower murder in Psycho. The use of light and shade, and sat-
urated colour stock, initially affects the nerves of the eye, then spreads
through the body’s neuronal network via tonal vibrations.
The images of viewer and film interlock in a machinic assemblage of
202    

movement-image. During the film, the interface between the two singular-
ities shifts and thins. In moments of particular force, it disappears. Horror
films work the vibrations of sensory affect on our jarred and confused optic
and aural nerves. They also operate through our haptic projections of sen-
sations such as tactility, simulated and engendered by visual and aural
techniques. Even some peripheral sensations of taste and smell can be
synaesthetically induced through cinematography and sound.
As well as expressing the physicality of horror as it bombards our nerve-
endings, I suggest that it is productive of thought. This occurs both during
and after the film event. We think as well as feel on our nerve-endings in
interaction with the film. We are stimulated by movement- and time-
images congruent to our human image as a living centre of indetermina-
tion. Our neuronal circuitry connects audio-visual cells to the brain and
back again, channelling the flux of force that passes through them. The
machinic assemblage of film and viewer is part of larger flows such as the
movement of light waves through matter, space and time. The flicker on
the screen, reflected backwards by the rods and cones of our stimulated
optical apparatus, can literally act to enlighten us. In the dynamic motion
of these circuits, film becomes thought as well as feeling.
The cinema books are part of Deleuze’s wider philosophical project to
assert that ‘the brain is the screen’, and to validate his interpretation of
Bergson’s view of the universe as metacinema.2 Cinema is capable of
inducing perceptual thoughts of a philosophical kind on the nature of time,
space and motion. It also offers a self-reflexive exploration of perception
itself. Clearly, not all such thoughts occur immediately on watching the
film, as perception and reflection vibrate in us at different speeds. Ideally,
Deleuze wants us to approach each film as a direct event, letting it work on
us without preconceptions.
When the film appears to be over, it continues to run. We reflect on our
experience and become aware of its ongoing reverberations within our
consciousness. We replay sequences in our imaginations, producing a
virtual experience of the virtual film. The initial experience becomes
overlaid with other layers of memory through time. Inevitably, the
sensory affect becomes less intense each time we remember, while the
thoughts triggered extend and form assemblages with other thoughts on
other films to produce new insights. If we view the same film more than
once, we have changed in the interim and should be open to a distinct
experience each time.
We also share our responses to films with others. This requires exten-
sive and communal operations of language, which both Bergson and
Deleuze regard as a dilution of original affective impact. Whilst acknowl-
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edging this perspective and its ironical challenge to analytical discourse,

interchange about film can be interpreted more positively. When we share
responses, some of our original affective feeling is reanimated by the
senses, but differently. Our intensive affect is translated into extensive live
communication by facial expression, timbre of voice and other bodily
expressions. The articulated interchange of the complex process of
viewing, and re-viewing, impels further exploratory thought via memory.
The filmic experience is reinforced and reconsidered by communicating
with others and sharing their feelings/thoughts by contagion. We make
lines of flight between congruent perspectives. This interaction itself stays
with us and continues to reverberate at an intensive level of consciousness.
It goes on to connect with other existing ideas to form circuits of ever-
increasing complexity.
For Deleuze, certain kinds of film are better suited than others to stim-
ulate such intensive mental activity. These films, broadly categorised as
Modernist art-cinema, are his preferred focus. He does not regard the for-
mulaic texts of Hollywood as vehicles for existential change. Such generic
horror films may also be absent because of their use of effects overload,
standardised narrative structure and continuity editing. Deleuze prefers
parametric, art-house narration, avant-garde visual style and non-continu-
ity editing as more suited to stimulate philosophical thought. As we have
seen, films of this type, such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari,
are used by him to exemplify the metaphysical implications of German
Expressionist style rather than as horror texts in their own right.
Even though Deleuze includes some standard art-house horrors, I want
to extend the limitations of the Parisian cinéaste evident in his choice.
Seeking a broader and more inclusive application of his conceptual frame,
I set out to test whether a Deleuzian approach is applicable to popular
generic horror, and to mainstream, classical cinema, as well as more experi-
mental works. Formulaic films initially appear less rich in Deleuzian con-
cepts than stylistically adventurous work, but this does not mean that
mainstream horror is not suggestive of time, space and movement. Many
such films offer an intensive experience of horror. This can serve to isolate
a particular thought and potentise it as a memorable event.
More significantly, the spectator may have to work harder to extract
new meaning from the more formulaic films. We input more of our own
affective response if ‘trapped’ in a set of conventions that we struggle to
experience differently. Deleuze’s choice of films belongs to the art-house
canon. Like genre films, it is difficult to approach them without a precon-
ceived set of interpretative templates. If we respond afresh to mainstream
films, we might well produce a more potent creative assemblage than if the
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work of defamiliarisation has already been done for us by an experimen-

tal text.
Some of the richest films for my project offer the best of both worlds.
They interface popular generic formulae and the art-film’s more adventur-
ous form and style. Natural Born Killers, for example, blends the conven-
tions of the criminal couple-on-the-run road movie with documentary
footage, altered-states cinematography and the numinous dimension of
magic. Films like this stretch and blur the institutionally imposed dividing
line between experimentation and generic formulae. They stimulate ana-
lytical and affective thought. Although I am aware that I cannot claim to
represent the tastes of that abstract entity ‘the mainstream audience’, my
concern is to open up the new ways of experiencing and thinking about
film offered by Deleuze, which should not merely be the preserve of a
cinéphile elite.
Philosophical thought does not have to be abstract or transcendental in
nature. The horror film experience offers a particular quality of thought.
My working method celebrates the dynamic, material congress of specta-
tor and screen image rather than an abstracted cerebral detachment.
Nevertheless, we rarely feel a sensation in complete isolation from its
reverberations in consciousness. If we do experience such overwhelming
affect, we later return to an awareness of our perception of it.
The experience of sitting at a public screening in a cinema auditorium,
and the very different one of watching the DVD or video screen in a
domestic living room, are produced by a conscious choice to participate in
aesthetic fantasy. We have internalised a template of generic expectations
as a viewing prism. In the case of horror, we expect to be frightened. A
powerful film will stir and shake us. It might arouse us erotically, make us
laugh, or move us to tears. Nevertheless, we retain a certain degree of dis-
tance from our virtual fantasy. It is in the interstice between sensuous
engagement and aesthetic detachment that we think the horror film.
At this point, I will anticipate a few objections to my thesis. On one level,
the structuring frameworks of traditional critical perspectives appear to go
out of focus if we give ourselves over to the film’s molecular make-up, and
our own. The question arises as to whether molecular delight in the film’s
aesthetic force prevents awareness of the molar power imbalance of the
socio-political contexts highlighted by some theorists. The Deleuzian
method might also be accused of belying its claim to ‘materialism’ by delib-
erately stripping this concept of its ‘molar’ Marxist dimensions. Fear,
terror and desire have subjective specificity, and operate within a socially
learned framework. Work that maps social and political meaning onto the
representations of fantasy has done signal service in horror Film Studies.
  :    - 205

Many horror films overtly present severely dysfunctional families and

perverse sexuality. Psychoanalysis has provided substantial psycho-sexual
templates to fit the fears and desires of horror, and suggested their primal
components. Although psychoanalysis views all fantasy as psycho-sexual
in nature, whether overtly displayed or not, it is important to remember
that not all horror films are sexually fixated. In The Blair Witch Project, for
example, there is little sign of erotic interest. Despite this, psychoanalytic
film theory, seeking the ‘repressed’ of the text, might interpret the disap-
pearance of Heather, Josh and Mike as a regressive pre-Oedipal journey
back to the primal mother, who reincorporates them in death.
In this kind of interpretation, deep structures are superimposed over
and engulf the actual event of the film. As I argued in Chapter 1, the deter-
ritorialisation offered by the ‘intensive voyage’ of schizoanalysis opens up
a sorely needed critique of psychoanalytic dogmatism.3 I have moved away
from the psychoanalytic focus of the genre’s unconscious mechanisms to
embody the experience of horror. We cannot maintain the distanced gaze
of subjective spectator at objective spectacle, but respond corporeally to
sensory stimuli and dynamics of motion. Fantasy is an embodied event.
This new perspective should not cancel out the others, but enhance
them. The film event does not exist in a hermetically sealed vacuum. I do
not suggest that we lose touch with our formative socio-political contexts,
familial experiences or psycho-sexual fantasies, but that we perceive them
differently. In suggesting that it is time to re-think the horror film experi-
ence from a Deleuzian perspective, I do not suggest that we excise our
sense of film’s social and historical context, its economic and industrial
determinants, or its power to effect our lived behaviour. I argue that its
experiential potency on feeling and thought is considerable.
We participate in a wide continuum of assemblages, connected in their
turn to the apparatus of cinema. These include technology, economics,
politics, aesthetics and their attendant relations of power. Hopefully the
effort to experience films anew will have practical reverberations.
Deleuzian theory affords space for a hybrid response that mixes philosoph-
ical thought with cultural awareness and psycho-sexual frames. The
concept of the ‘interstitial’ reading allows molecular and molar frames to
co-exist, and further exploration of their interconnections, such as those
of Buchanan and Griggers, are timely. Deleuze does not advocate a with-
drawal from cultural and social experience, but a total, insightful, engage-
ment in it.
I also want to signal an area of horror aesthetics in urgent need of the
attention I have not been able to theorise in detail here. In the cinema
books, Deleuze’s film critique remains predominantly visual. He only
206    

touches on sound, despite his characterisation of spoken language as a ‘con-

tinuous, immanent process of variation’, which crosses the sociolinguistic
field, undercutting the hierarchised distinctions of structural law and
empirical instance.4 Intriguingly, he hints that the study of cinematic
sound, ‘when we are able to analyse the sound image for itself ’, will ‘raise
the problem of enunciation’.5 By ‘enunciation’ he implies, but does not
elaborate on, a new praxis enabled by theory.
Sound waves, as well as light waves, travel though us and work strongly
on the sensorium, bypassing the cerebral cortex and mainlining into our
central nervous system. The unnerving sound effects of horror range from
human screams to the synthesised and distorted electronic notes of
Lynch’s Fire Walk with Me. Extra-diegetic music is instrumental in agitat-
ing the spectator’s aural nerves, preparing us for the horror to come, as
with Bernard Hermann’s shrieking violin in the Psycho theme.
In The Blair Witch Project, the sound is directly diegetic, with no inci-
dental music. Wild sound predominates, as characters talk and argue, and
their speech is often mumbled or indistinct, which adds to the realism.
When ‘supernatural’ noises do occur, like the cries of children outside the
tent, the fact of their being picked up by the sound equipment enhances
our sense of their objective reality. Some of the most distressing sounds
come directly from characters we see, such as the sobbing, choking gasps
we hear when Heather hyperventilates on opening a bundle of bloody
viscera. In order to produce a closer approximation to this kind of affective
experience, more scholarly work with auditory responses is needed. This
is a rich, and largely untapped, resource.
A pivotal question I need to consider at this concluding stage is whether
horror films are still frightening when analysed from a Deleuzian perspec-
tive. I argue that they are. A Deleuzian approach might appear to remove
the horror from the horror film, but I refute this assertion. In horror films,
or films with horrific components, it is difficult not to feel fear or revul-
sion at certain moments. I admit that I retain some sense of subjective vio-
lation when ‘I’ want to look away from the horror of the image and, in
psychoanalytic parlance, refuse the invasive violation of self by unbear-
able other and re-build my ego-defences. However ‘desensitised’ our per-
sonal and professional tastes might appear to adversaries of the genre, we
horror buffs have our ‘weak spots’. I offer no auto-analysis to accompany
the following brief confession apart from its obvious relevance to my
choice of contents.
Serial-killer horrors frighten and repel me in their use of conceivable,
and actual, human behaviour and I find the documentary-style Henry:
Portrait of a Serial Killer a particularly gruelling experience. Depictions of
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torture, both physical and psychological, are difficult for me to watch,

unless Grand Guignol special effects dazzle me by their virtuosity, as in
Hellraiser or the films of Dario Argento. The worst scenes of physical
torture for me are the interrogations of supposed witchcraft by the forces
of repression: Dreyer’s Day of Wrath, Bava’s The Mask of Satan, Michael
Reeves’ Witchfinder General and Ken Russell’s The Devils (those familiar
with the films will know the parts I mean).
I do not advocate that we lose touch with what makes us afraid. After all,
this is what the films are ‘about’. For me, there is still some tension between
the optimism of haecceity, the affective ‘this-ness’ or immanence of
process, and the downward spirals of horror. The films and scenes I want
to close my eyes to, or fast-forward, are undoubtedly potent with frighten-
ing affect. I experience this as a claustrophobic sense of closing down,
rather than physical and metaphysical expansiveness. This book has rean-
imated some of my favourite horrors. Now, I need to begin work with
horror film at the very point where I am most afraid, in the films I have left
out. My next move is to revisit my personal ‘unbearable’ and to work on it.
This might or might not induce ‘a revelation or an illumination’, but I can
learn to open myself up more fully to the film event in me, as well as on the
screen, when it is actually at its most powerful.
A shift to Deleuze in Film Studies is happening as part of a broad re-
thinking of aesthetics in contemporary culture. Reflecting scientific and
philosophical debate on space and time, relativity, quantum mechanics and
molecular biology, it shifts focus from the molar politics of representation
to the molecular materiality of film. Following Bergson, Deleuze argues
that identity is in constant flux and process. Perception takes place on a
direct, visceral level rather than at a subjective level. Cinema is an inten-
sive sensory event of colour, light and movement. If our subjectivity is not
fixed, then our identity in the viewing experience is not a rigid template,
but a fluid becoming.
In order to do justice to the complex experience that is horror film, my
approach is eclectic. An interdisciplinary set of tools does a better job
than one implement in isolation. Approaches need to be supplemented,
although not necessarily displaced, by two methods not made available by
current Film Studies orthodoxy. The first is a detailed exploration of aes-
thetics in order to suggest the extreme levels of affective engagement expe-
rienced by the spectator. The second is horror’s capacity to stimulate
adventurous philosophical thought. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari suggest that ‘a fibre strung across borderlines constitutes a line of
flight or of deterritorialization’.6 My book asserts that the horror film expe-
rience offers such lines of flight.
208    

A new aesthetics of horror film is long overdue. The approach of

Deleuze offers a concrete, and medium-specific, way in to extending our
awareness of the genre’s force. Innovative kinds of horror film, such as The
Blair Witch Project, invite innovative ways of theorising. The application
of Deleuzian approaches opens up new directions in film aesthetics. For
horror film, they involve a critical look at both psychoanalytical and cultu-
ralist approaches, and introduce a more film-specific, material way of
reading the genre and its affects. This mobilises a fresh perspective on the
horror staples of fear and desire.
Deleuzian analyses are not intended to supplant social or psychoanalyt-
ical Film Studies with an alternative orthodoxy. They seek to challenge,
but also to supplement, existing methods, by transversal readings located
in the interstices between the two. Rather than seeking to replace more tra-
ditional methods of analysis by a new orthodoxy, Deleuzian/Bergsonian
aesthetics may fruitfully be used to both extend and critique extant ways
of reading. From where I am now, I advocate an interstitial, transverse con-
nection across existing approaches, whilst continuing to push the frontiers
of the field further. I feel it is definitely time to re-draw the map of exist-
ing horror Film Studies, but not to kick it away just yet.
Above all, the value of Deleuzian film theory lies in its experiential aes-
thetics and its emphasis on embodied thinking – both too long absent from
readings of the horror film. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘what we need to
consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the fragmented
body, it is the body without organs, animated by various intensive move-
ments’.7 The potential of the horror film lies in its dynamic connection
with the incorporated mind of the spectator. The horror film event, in its
schizoid becomings, its motions and times, is a moving-image of our own
transformation.

Notes
1. Claire Colebrook, ‘Introduction’, in Ian Buchanan and Claire Colebrook
(eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press),
p. 3.
2. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen’, in Gregory Flaxman (ed.), The
Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis and
London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 366.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark
Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), p. 319.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), p.
103.
  :    - 209

5. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and

Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.
85.
6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 249.
7. Ibid. p. 171.
 Glossary of Key Terms

Affect, Affection-Image
Affect is a neuronal response to external stimulus. Qualitative, not quanti-
tative, it involves the body’s power to absorb an external action and react
internally. Affect is an intensive vibration, Deleuze’s ‘motor effort on an
immobilized receptive plate’, rather than an extensive sensory-motor act.
The affection-image is experienced by our specialised and immobilised
organs of reception. Bergson and Deleuze compare affection-images to
adjectives. The autonomous quality of the cinematic affection-image makes
the stylistic affect more independent of character and plot. Mise-en-scène,
cinematography, sound and movement act in the mind/brain/body system
to stimulate both sensory-motor responses and thought via affect. The face
in close-up is the epitome of the intensive affection-image. The extreme
close-up of Heather’s face in The Blair Witch Project is an expression of this.

Anomaly/anomalous
Anomalies are unnatural, irregular elements in a system, forces of poten-
tial transformation, such as the stray housefly caught in the teleporter in
Cronenberg’s The Fly, which produces a genetic mix of human and fly.
The anomaly or outsider, which ‘carries the transformations of becoming’,
is central to the dynamics of the horror genre. The anomalous ‘thing’ pro-
duced by the conjunction of singularities is a monstrous entity in perpet-
ual motion, unfixed in its identity. It maintains its transformative potential
as it becomes. Anomalies subvert subjective wholeness and undermine
species norms. Objects of filmic fascination, they incorporate us into their
virtual assemblage.

Assemblage
An assemblage is the dynamic interconnection of congruent singularities
that remove the subject/object interface, yet retain elements of specificity.
The human assemblage is a multiplicity that forms new assemblages with
     211

existing social and cultural assemblages. Our mind/brain/body melds

with the technology of cinema in a molecular or machinic assemblage of
material movement, force and intensity. Cinema is an assemblage of appa-
ratus, text and spectator.

Becoming
Becoming is defined as ‘extreme contiguity within a coupling of two sen-
sations without resemblance’. Becoming refutes binary divisions and
enables further transformations, melding subjects and objects in close
proximity. The becomings of horror are expressed through hybridity, as in
werewolves, or the shape-shifting of vampires. In more recent films, such
as Alien Resurrection, genetic engineering is the preferred method of
becoming. As well as on-screen transformations, the embodied conscious-
ness of the spectator participates in the process of becoming.

Body-Without-Organs
The term ‘body-without-organs’ is used by Artaud to suggest the ‘true’
condition of the human body if freed from the punishments of a repres-
sive God. Deleuze and Guattari re-map the fixed biological body as a
dynamic force field of speeds and intensities ‘traversed by a powerful, non-
organic vitality’ that includes the mind. The body-without-organs is
‘affective, intensive, anarchist’ in nature. This amoeba-like body is open to
surrounding matter, which it incorporates. Its perpetual motion is mapped
via its ‘poles, zones, thresholds and gradients’. In our assemblage with the
screen, the cinematic body-without-organs experiences sounds, textures
and rhythms as incorporated vibrations. Horror film produces some
graphically literal bodies-without-organs, such as Frank, in Hellraiser,
whose organs stick themselves back together.

Diagrammatic Component
Deleuze melds style and content to suggest a predominant diagrammatic
component for each film. This may be an image, or an element of framing
or editing. His example is the ubiquitous spiral in Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
which unites camera movements, architecture, costume and special effects
as well as narrative structure. In my view, there may be more than one
diagrammatic component in each film, in which case they operate a
diagrammatic assemblage. For Mulholland Drive, diagrammatic compo-
nents include the blue box, flickering light and dreams.
212    

Duration/Space-Time
Bergson’s concept of duration is shaped in distinction to quantum physics.
He suggests that memory stores past experiences in a virtual existence that
is not that of space-time. Deleuze distinguishes the extensive, spatialised
time of the self-conscious subject from the intensive time of duration,
which partakes of the élan vital of all evolving life. Humans can perceive
the workings of duration in intensive states of consciousness, and in art.
Cinema helps us to experience, and to think, time. Duration emerges when
film foregrounds its own mechanisms, and Deleuze associates it with more
experimental work. I argue that mainstream ghost films such as The Others
can also present duration in intriguing ways.

Extensive/Intensive
The action-image expresses extensive, goal-oriented movement in space,
as in its extreme form of the ‘action movie’. The affection-image vibrates
intensively rather than extensively, in the use of the colour red in The
Masque of the Red Death, for example. Deleuze describes schizoanalysis as
an ‘intensive voyage’ that mobilises intensive states of consciousness
evident in aesthetic production and reception. An ‘intensive map’ is a
cluster of affects in the process of becoming.

Haecciety
Haecceity is the quality of ‘this-ness’ in a ‘thing-in-itself ’. Haecceities are
intensive states experienced by the automatic or auto-erotic movements of
machinic desire rather than by the psychoanalytical subject. The use of
colour, the timbre of a voice or the rhythm of a movement are cinematic
haecceities. Horror film offers distinctive aural experiences, such as the
different tonal qualities in The Shining, when a tricyle rumbles over the
wooden floorboards or glides over the carpet. Such sensory haecceities are
not reducible to symbolic meaning.

Haptic/ity
Hapticity is the interaction between vision and tactility. Elements of touch
are included in sight as distinct from purely optical properties. The haptic
sense elides the visual and the tactile in the ‘tactile-optical function’, as in
‘hot’ and ‘cool’ applied to colours. Cinematography, editing rhythms and
mise-en-scène induce kinetic and haptic sensations and synaesthesia. The
     213

haptics of tactility are central to horror affect, and are used extensively in
the sharp or slimy textures and feverish reds of Suspiria.

Line of Flight
A line of flight connects singularities, or planes. As ‘a fibre strung across
borderlines’, it is a means of deterritorialisation, of thinking afresh. An
example is the link between Moby-Dick as a ‘white wall’, the human face
and the blank screen; or my connection between the apparently incom-
mensurable paradigms of popular horror film and philosophical thought.

Machinic
A machinic assemblage is an amalgam of processes mistakenly kept dis-
tinct. The machinic assemblage is a multiplicity of forces in motion, not
fixed components. Horror film illustrates the contrast of the potentially
machinic (Demon Seed) and the mechanically limited (Hardware). The
human is a machinic meld of body/mind/brain. Our mind/brain/body
melds materially with the movement, force and intensity of film technol-
ogy. The subject/object power relations of cinematic voyeurism are dis-
placed by the machinic experience of an aesthetic event.

Molecular/Molar
Deleuze and Guattari convey the ‘imperceptible’ micro dynamics of the
molecules that compose both matter and perception itself. The same force
flows through congruent elements that adopt specific patterns and forma-
tions in a molecular meld. Movement and change take place at this cellu-
lar level. Both Bergson and Deleuze use the image of unicellular creatures
to describe becoming as molecular desire in motion. Molecularity is dis-
tinct from the ‘molar’ macro order of ideological, social and psychic
schema. Melding occurs as we connect with other molecular collectivities,
or haecceities, by contiguous movements and speeds. Altered states of con-
sciousness access molecular modes of perception, and intensive viewing
forms a molecular assemblage of medium and mind. Film may also make
molecularity visible, as with the grainy film stock of Vampyr, or the special
effects of computer consciousness in Demon Seed.

Movement-Image
Deleuze, like Bergson, identifies ‘the movement-image and flowing-
matter’. All cinematic images are primarily movement-images. The fluid
214    

camerawork in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, displaces language-like

representation at the crux of the filmic event. Images move within and
between the frame, via the camera’s motion and the rhythm of editing.
Frames move on the screen via the projector and its flickering movements
of light. The viewer’s eyes move in the phi-phenomenon as mobile
machines that modify and reflect the film’s movement-images. The human
‘living image’ turns virtual movement-images into actual, intensive move-
ments. A ‘perception-image’ is a framed selection of incoming movements.
The sensory-motor action-image deals with the ‘virtual action of things on
us and our possible action on things’.

Schizoanalysis
Deleuze and Guattari refute Freudian paternalism via schizoanalysis. The
rigid template of psychoanalysis is opposed by the emotional immanence
of schizoanalysis, which maps an auto-productive desiring machine, not a
subjective ego in a permanently paranoid condition. The unconscious
changes form from archaeology to a cartography of motion as it passes
from psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis is applied to re-
thinking both politics and art. The material aesthetic of immanence priv-
ileges the transitions of consciousness in aesthetic production and
reception. For Deleuze, schizoanalysis is a way in to the intensive affects of
cinema. Schizophrenia offers thematic and visual dualities, such as those
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but the horror film also produces affective
images of mental derangement that exceed the limited conventions of
‘madness’ and schizophrenise the viewer.

Singularity
In physics, a singularity is the point at the centre of a black hole at which
matter becomes infinitely dense. Deleuze uses the term to mean the spec-
ificity of a particular component or assemblage, its special, distinctive
quality, as well as its infinite potential.

Time-Image
In the time-image, time is not derived from movement, but appears in
itself. Whether it be intensive vibration or extensive velocity, movement
nevertheless is always ‘in’ time. The ‘direct time-image’ emerged in art-
cinema after the Second World War. It turns from spatial exteriority to
‘mental relations or time’. Deleuze’s examples exhibit the workings of time
     215

by defamiliarisation devices, which produce a more contemplative, philo-

sophical form of cinematic experience. Techniques like the multiple expo-
sures of Mulholland Drive offer an image of duration.

Vitalism, Élan Vital

Deleuze endorses Bergson’s ‘vitalism’, or the universal presence of
dynamic forces in all living, and evolving, entities, including the human.
For Bergson, the universe endures, and duration, from his vitalist perspec-
tive on evolution, is ‘invention, the creation of forms, the continual elab-
oration of the absolutely new’. Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm
Street continually invents new manifestations for his own perverse élan
vital, which can potentially become anything.
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 Filmography

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Stanley Kubrick.

Alien (1979) Ridley Scott.
Aliens (1986) James Cameron.
Alien3 (1992) David Fincher.
Alien Resurrection (1997) Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Wes Craven.
The Blair Witch Project (1999) Meyrick and Sanchez.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Francis Ford Coppola.
The Brides of Dracula (1960) Terence Fisher.
Broken Blossoms (1919) D. W. Griffiths.
The Brood (1979) David Cronenberg.
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1926) Robert Wiene.
Carrie (1976) Brian de Palma.
Cat People (1943) Jacques Tourneur.
Un Chien Andalou (1928) Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali.
The Day of the Triffids (1962) Steven Sekely.
Day of Wrath (1943) Carl-Theodor Dreyer.
Demon Seed (1977) Donald Cammell.
The Devils (1971) Ken Russell.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1932) Rouben Mamoulian.
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) Freddie Francis.
Event Horizon (1997) Paul Anderson.
Fire Walk with Me (1992) David Lynch.
The Fly (1986) David Cronenberg.
Forbidden Planet (1956) Fred M. Wilcox.
Hardware (1990) Richard Stanley.
The Haunting (1963) Robert Wise.
Hellraiser (1987) Clive Barker.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) John McNaughton.
The Hollow Man (2000) Paul Verhoeven.
The House on Haunted Hill (1959) William Castle.
The House on Haunted Hill (1999) William Malone.
In The Mouth of Madness (1995) John Carpenter.
Interview with the Vampire (1994) Neil Jordan.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Don Seigel.
224    

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Philip Kaufman.

The Invisible Man (1933) James Whale.
Jacob’s Ladder (1993) Adrian Lyne.
Last Year at Marienbad (1960) Alain Resnais.
Lost Highway (1997) David Lynch.
The Mask of Satan (1960) Mario Bava.
The Masque of the Red Death (1964) Roger Corman.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) Maya Deren.
Mulholland Drive (2001) David Lynch.
Nadja (1994) Michael Almereyda.
Natural Born Killers (1994) Oliver Stone.
Nosferatu (1922) F. W. Murnau.
The Others (2001) Alejandro Amenábar.
Pandora’s Box (1926) G. W. Pabst.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) Carl-Theodor Dreyer.
Psycho (1960) Alfred Hitchcock.
Psycho (1998) Gus van Sant.
Rain (1961) Jorge Iven.
Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000) E. Elias Merhige.
The Shining (1968) Stanley Kubrick.
Sunrise (1927) F. W. Murnau.
Suspiria (1977) Dario Argento.
Tequila Sunrise (1988) Robert Towne.
Terror at the Opera (1987) Dario Argento.
The Tingler (1959) William Castle
The Vampire Lovers (1970) Roy Ward Baker.
Vampyr (1931) Carl-Theodor Dreyer.
Vertigo (1954) Alfred Hitchcock.
Videodrome (1982) David Cronenberg.
Witchfinder General (1968) Michael Reeves.
Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face) (1959) Georges Franju.

Television Series
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–94).
 Index

abjection, 82, 85 anomalous, the, 31, 63

in Kristeva, 3, 16, 17, 36, 64, 65, 143 and abjection, 82, 143
and Ripley, 75–8, 88, 102, 122 Anomaly, the, 210
abstract machine, 93 becoming-anomalous, 62, 66–7, 71, 105
action-images, 116–19, 159, 212, 214 and Bergson, 76–8
actual, the, 41, 47, 68, 116, 124, 162–3, in characters, 38, 63
196 in cinematic techniques, 26, 56, 174, 194
actuality, 162, 175, 179, 194 in mental states, 10, 15, 23–4, 38, 41, 50,
Aeon, 155 57
aesthetics, 212–14 and the senses, 131
aesthetic assemblages, 53, 62 social anomalies, 73
‘aesthetics of sensation’, 15–18 in spaces, 47, 130, 170, 184
Bergsonian aesthetics, 110–13, 157; see and the temporal, 181, 188
also Bergson Argento, Dario, 17, 65, 142, 207
Expressionist aesthetics, 115–29; see also Artaud, Antonin, 21, 78, 211
Expressionism artificial intelligence, 93, 94, 96, 99
horror aesthetics, 1–10, 20–1, 23–4, assemblages, 205, 211, 213, 214
63–7, 105, 150, 204–8 in becoming, 53, 55, 67–8, 74, 210
Kubrick’s aesthetics, 43, 48 of bodies-without-organs, 79, 88
in Lynch, 192–7 bodies as, 14, 35, 44
machinic aesthetics, 58, 94–5 cinema as, 4–8, 11, 17, 80, 110, 116, 197
and thought processes, 164 in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 35, 38
affect, 27, 31, 57–8, 210, 211, 214 of images, 52
aesthetics of affect, 110–21, 155–62, machinic, 92, 93, 95, 99, 104, 182, 201
201–8; see also aesthetics mental, 45, 72, 192
in cinema, 15–17, 37, 39, 45, 52–4, 129, of movement-images, 165, 201
131 in Psycho, 24–5
in horror, 8–11, 62–6, 84, 92, 127 and schizoanalysis, 21
in Mulholland Drive, 187–97 spectatorial, 55, 63, 202
in schizoanalysis, 19–20, 22–5 stylistic, 28, 121
and the senses, 135–50
affection-images, 116–19, 130, 142, 145–6, Bacon, Francis, 7, 135, 136
210, 212 Bataille, Georges, 2, 17, 23, 66
Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet), becoming, 1–8, 10, 12, 30, 66, 113, 131,
74–8 150, 161, 210, 211
aliens, 74–8, 96, 98, 101, 147 becoming-animal, 10, 52–3, 62–4, 67,
animals, 27, 34, 52–4, 57, 62–70, 89, 99, 69–72, 123–6, 144–5, 148
101, 121, 125, 126, 139, 144, 145, becoming-human, 92–98
148, 185 becoming-monster, 10, 74
226    

becoming (cont.) Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford

becoming-woman, 10, 72, 73, 77, 82 Coppola), 10, 109, 214
of characters, 28, 32, 35, 51, 68, 109, Brontë, Emily, 7
140, 170, 185
of consciousness, 19, 20, 111 Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The (Robert
in Hardware, 98–101 Wiene), 25–30, 39, 49, 124, 203
in Hellraiser, 86–8 camera, 201, 214
in The Hollow Man, 90–2 camera angles, 24, 25, 39, 131, 189
of objects, 41 camera-eye, 39, 117, 147, 160, 165, 188,
and schizoanalysis, 8, 22–3, 25, 58, 201, 190
208 camera movements, 31–3, 43, 71, 75, 92,
of spectator, 31, 33, 207 99–100, 109, 110, 116, 154, 163, 211
Belson, Jordan, 95, 96 in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 35–9
Bergson, Henri, 92, 200, 207 in The Haunting, 167–76
on aesthetics, 110–17 as machine, 22, 120
on colour, 135, 137 in Mulholland Drive, 191, 192, 193,
Creative Evolution 62–8, 63, 76–7, 81, 195
89, 104,105, 113, 158, 198, 199, in Nosferatu, 123–7
200 and perception, 4–6, 40
Deleuze/Bergsonism, 2–3, 8–9, 93, 96, in The Shining, 44–51,
186, 208, 210 and spectator, 29, 90, 91, 98,
on duration, 11, 12, 34, 50, 165–9, 181; in Vampyr, 132–6
see also duration Carpenter, John, 7
on dreams, 187, 189, 193–7 cartography and maps, 1–3, 6, 9, 14,
on élan vital, 2, 10, 33, 35, 63, 83, 85, 17–25, 28, 65, 72, 83, 85, 88, 114,
88, 101, 112, 114, 155, 158, 169, 212, 150, 154, 164, 208, 212, 214
215 Castenada, Carlos, 95
Matter and Memory, 105, 145, 154–63, Cat People, The (Jacques Tourneur), 10,
158, 197 34, 53, 65, 68–72, 141
on movement, 112–14 Chronos, 155, 160
on time, 12, 50, 110, 155, 181; see also chronosigns, 159, 160
time cinema
Time and Free Will, 19, 20 cinematograph, 113
biotechnology, 82 cinematography, 2, 8, 15, 26, 31, 38, 39,
black holes, 86, 98, 123–5, 147, 181, 182, 43, 48, 54, 83, 92, 109, 120, 159, 194,
214 201, 202, 204, 210
body-without-organs, 211 metacinema, 113–16, 202
and affect, 78 Clover, Carol, 2, 16, 65, 105
and becoming, 10, 62, 65, 79 Colebrook, Claire, 73, 201, 208
and death, 52 Colombat, André, 21
literal, 84–5, 88, 90, 92 colour, 11, 44–5, 51, 57, 109, 111, 118,
as machine, 93 119, 120, 127, 128, 135–45, 162, 187,
and the schizophrenic, 20, 29 201, 207, 212
and spectator, 80 black and white, 26, 28, 31, 38, 84, 123,
Bogue, Ronald, 158, 165, 197 127, 130, 135, 138, 170, 177, 190
brain, 4, 6, 10, 38, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51, blue, 46, 84, 100, 127, 138, 141, 142,
72, 83, 92, 94, 98, 102, 109, 110, 113, 176, 180–1, 185, 187, 189, 191,
114, 141, 161, 202, 210 195–7
  227

green, 109, 127, 138, 141, 144 metaphysical, 11–12

grey, 6, 71, 81, 89, 109, 120, 128, 130–2, in Mulholland Drive, 187–97
140, 141, 142, 162 universal, 66
red, 48, 50, 52–3, 57, 85, 89, 99, 101, as ‘the whole’, 55, 147
118, 127, 137–9, 140–2, 145, 189,
194, 212 editing, 2, 8, 24, 33, 76, 109, 110, 116, 122,
white, 37, 45, 48, 68, 79, 123, 113, 122, 136, 145, 154, 169, 201, 203, 211,
128, 130–1, 134, 138,140, 141, 142, 212, 214
147, 162, 179, 212 ellipsis, 44, 165, 167, 188, 192
composition, 24, 36, 46, 67, 114, 116, eternal return, 52, 93, 159
121–3, 128, 146, 165, 167, 195 Event Horizon (Paul Anderson), 181–6,
Conley, Verena, 73, 106 200
Constable, Catherine, 74, 75, 76, 106 evolution, 44, 66–8, 77, 104, 117, 158, 165,
continuity, 66, 104, 113, 165, 175, 203 215
false continuity, 165 Expressionism, 25–9, 120–8, 203
corporeality, 2, 4, 5, 16, 34, 40, 42, 57, 58, eyes, 87
80–2, 86, 112, 116, 121 as ‘black holes’, 86, 98, 123, 132, 144,
Creed, Barbara, 16, 17, 64, 75, 77, 105 186
Cronenberg, David, 10, 14, 62, 74, 80, 82, in Les Yeux sans Visage, 145–9; see also
83, 210 the face
crystal image, 96, 97, 147, 160–2, 183, as machinic, 100, 136, 160, 214
184 and perception, 45, 113, 116, 188
and spectatorship 4, 7, 29, 36, 37, 191,
Dadoun, Roger, 15 207
darkness, 98, 141, 143, 132, 170, 173, 185,
188, 189, 194 face, the, 210, 212
in Nosferatu, 120–8 faciality, 85, 87, 126, 145, 150
Demon Seed (Donald Cammell), 92–101, and identity 85, 87, 139, 170, 171,
213 190
diagrammatic components, 6, 23–4, 27, in Les Yeux sans Visage, 145–50; see also
37, 45, 69, 98, 147, 169, 174, 187, eyes
211 as mask, 39, 70, 87
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Rouben facial transformations, 57, 62, 84, 86,
Mamoulian), 10, 31–8, 214 125, 137, 169, 170, 177, 179, 185,
dreams, 29, 41, 52, 102, 133, 141, 187–95, 191
200, 211 feminism, 16, 64, 72–3, 75, 77
Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 128–33, 159, 164, film philosophy, 3, 6, 9, 11, 18, 115, 120,
165, 207 150
drugs, 57, 95, 100, 180 Film Studies, 1–10, 64, 116, 207, 208
duration, 9, 11, 212 horror Film Studies, 1, 8, 9, 104, 204,
in art and cinema, 79, 113–17, 154–60 208
and becoming, 34, 77 Fisher, Terence, 7, 118
and cinematic movement, 163–7 flashbacks, 30, 86, 175–9
and Elsewhere, 123 flicker, 41, 57, 174, 178, 188, 194, 202
and flux, 19 flux, 4, 16, 19, 21, 22, 62, 64, 66, 88, 104,
in horror, 47 111–13, 154, 163, 195, 201–2, 207
interior, 64 Fly, The (David Cronenberg), 11, 80, 126,
in Jacob’s Ladder, 174–80 177, 187, 210
228    

focus, 5, 7, 33, 36, 38, 47, 48, 51, 92, 110, hallucinations, 11, 26, 27, 38, 39, 41–5, 56,
122, 129, 133, 134, 148, 163, 176, 57, 100, 133, 175, 177, 180, 183, 186
180, 182, 195, 196, 204, 207 haptic, the, 17, 22, 32, 35, 37, 84, 85, 89,
soft-focus, 37, 191 97, 116, 119, 136, 141, 142, 170, 173,
Foucault, Michel, 16, 73, 80, 84, 107 191, 201, 202, 212
frames, 214 Hardware (Richard Stanley), 80, 93,
and composition, 34, 86, 140, 172 98–101
flash-frame, 54, 175–6, 179, 183, 184 Haunting, The (Robert Wise), 11, 166–74
frame-within-the frame, 95, 180, 190 Hellraiser (Clive Barker), 83, 85, 87, 88, 92,
freeze-frame, 57, 150, 170 207, 211
movement within, 109, 113, 116, Hermann, Bernard, 24, 206
135–7 heterogeneity, 5, 52, 93, 158, 165
in Nosferatu, 121–7 Hitchcock, Alfred, 6, 16, 18, 23, 160, 211
and out-of-field, 26, 32, 36–7, 43, 55, Hollow Man, The (Paul Verhoeven), 83,
131, 164, 169 88–92
stop-frame, 194 How to Read a Film (Monaco, James),
superimposition in, 56 160
Freud, Sigmund, 2, 3, 15–20, 25, 32, 39, hybridity, 10, 62, 63, 67, 74, 80, 86, 92, 97,
40, 43, 50, 64, 65, 70–1, 81, 122, 154, 101, 104, 181, 205, 211
214
imaginary, the, 17, 31, 41, 48, 49, 162, 163
genetics, 9, 10, 62, 64, 74–7, 80, 88, 89, 94, immanence, 3, 10, 20–3, 34, 42, 66, 79, 93,
95, 104, 114, 210, 211 112, 114, 130, 205, 207, 214
ghosts, 11, 46–51, 58, 102, 126, 134, indetermination, 65, 71, 155
162–163, 166, 168–9, 173–4, 212 centres of, 116, 117, 118, 155, 202
Gothic, 25, 29, 30, 35, 74, 120, 121, 138, indiscernibility, 128, 162
166, 168, 183, 184 interface, the, 44, 76, 82, 94, 99, 101, 155,
neo-Gothic, 2, 11, 15, 24, 31, 38, 46, 71, 202, 204, 210
83, 88, 95, 118, 137, 148, 162, 168, interstitial, the, 31, 115, 205, 208
174, 181, 183, 186 interval, the, 117, 159, 166, 168, 197
Griggers, Camilla, 73, 74, 205 Invisible Man, The (H. G. Wells), 88, 107
grisaille, 120, 128, 133 Irigaray, Luce, 75
Grosz, Elizabeth, 73, 106 Italian neo-realism, 155–6
Guattari, Félix, 211, 213, 214
on becoming, 52–3, 62–3, 72; see also Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne), 174–81
becoming jump-cuts, 188
on body-without organs, 10, 20, 52, 62,
78, 84, 93, 115, 208; see also body- Kennedy, Barbara M., 2, 3, 79, 92
without-organs kinetics, 109, 111, 116, 161, 212
on faciality, 84, 147, 150 Klein, Melanie, 3, 64
and La Borde, 20 Kristeva, Julia, 3, 16, 64, 75, 88, 143
on lines-of-flight, 207
on Nietszche, 52, 66, 93; see also Lacan, Jacques, 2, 3, 15, 17, 65, 157
Nietszche lack, the, 2, 3, 17, 18, 21, 23, 27, 32, 64, 89,
and schizoanalysis, 3–5, 10, 14, 15, 18, 92, 93, 103, 142, 143, 149, 163, 177,
19, 21–3, 51 181
Laplanche, Jean and J. B. Pontalis, 19
haecceity, 42, 109, 207 lectosigns, 160
  229

Les Yeux sans Visage (Georges Franju), machinic connection, 4, 21, 29, 119
145–50 and movement, 38, 43
life-force, 45, 86, 89, 122, 124, 125, 128, and schizoanalysis, 22, 213
184 and sensorium, 137, 150
light, 211, 214 mad scientists, 35, 74, 79, 148, 186
in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 26–30, Mamoulian, Rouben, 10, 37
in Cat People, 68–71 masks, 39, 70, 87, 91, 139, 146–50, 190
and colour, 53, 137, 138, 141, 176, 177, masochism, 2, 17, 64–6, 82
191, 194, 197 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 2, 64, 105
effects of, 37, 87, 89, 109, 143, 147, 180, Masque of the Death, The (Roger Corman),
185 136–9
as force, 84, 91, 92, 99 matter
in The Haunting, 170 abject matter, 143
and memory, 158 and black holes, 181, 214
and mentation, 45, 95, 97, 100, 110, in Hellraiser, 86–8
174, 201–7 and image, 95
and movement, 6, 111, 113–16, 163, immanent matter, 23, 187
181–2, 195 and memory, 163–6
in Nosferatu, 120–35 as metacinema, 116
and shade, 135 and movement, 21, 64, 72, 92, 113–14,
in The Shining, 45–51 169, 201–2, 213
shining light, 34, 158, 196 organic matter, 91–2, 112, 124, 183–4,
lighting, 2, 31, 33, 57, 69, 70, 76, 100, 110, 185
124–6, 130–2, 140, 174, 188, 194, 201 transformation of, 27, 66–7, 102
lines of flight, 21–2, 24, 29, 33, 34, 72, 73, Melville, Herman, 7, 79
77, 79, 203, 207, 212 memory, 12, 20, 34, 73, 154–8, 161–3,
Lovecraft, H. P., 7, 53, 63 166–75, 176–81, 183–4, 186, 188–96,
Lynch, David, 7, 186–7, 190–1, 193–5, 202, 203, 212
200, 206 Meyrick, Daniel and Sanchez, Eduardo, 1
lyrical abstraction, 68, 69–71, 128 mirrors, 3, 24, 32–4, 39, 46, 49–50, 62, 89,
121, 133, 143, 147, 149, 162, 171,
machines 172, 173, 178, 180, 190
binary machine, 58, 72 mise-en-scène, 1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 15, 23, 26–8,
body as machine, 4, 55, 80–2, 116, 124, 38, 43–5, 81, 89, 105, 109, 110, 116,
148, 214 118, 119–20, 131, 132, 138–9, 145,
cinematic machine, 62, 137 147, 164, 166, 183, 194, 201, 212
desiring machine, 16, 18, 20–1 Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), 7, 79, 212
and horror, 87, 184–5 Modleski, Tania, 16, 19
processual machine, 46 molar, 25, 35, 67, 72, 73, 83, 85, 88, 92,
schizoid machine, 48 129, 204, 205, 207, 213
social machine, 34, 73 molecularity, 213
machinic, the, 185, 213 in becomings, 10, 20, 30, 63
in Demon Seed, 91–104 and cinema, 91–6
and Freddy Krueger, 119 and gender, 73
machinic assemblage, 18, 43, 136, 182, and genetics, 9, 62, 77
201–2, 211 and horror, 88
machinic body, 74, 81–2 and lines of flight, 72
machinic camera, 47 and molar, 25, 205
230    

molecularity (cont.) Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone), 51–8

molecular biology, 207 Nietszche, Friedrich, 2, 3, 66, 93, 154
and rhizomes, 67 Nightmare on Elm Street, A (Wes Craven),
in schizoanalysis, 22 102–4
and the social, 79 Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau), 103, 119–27,
in spectator, 5, 204, 211 154, 203
and transformation, 35, 66, 80–1
in Vampyr, 129 occult, the, 1, 57, 58, 68, 70, 71, 83, 84, 88,
monsters, 8, 9, 15, 16, 21, 35, 42, 58, 63, 94, 97, 133, 141, 143–4, 178, 186
74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 90, 91, 96, 98, 99, Oedipus, 2, 3, 14–20, 23, 51, 58, 65, 73,
101, 129, 130, 142, 145, 177, 210 105, 145, 187, 205, 208
montage, 2, 54, 146, 161, 163, 165, 201 optical, the, 17, 24, 73, 77, 95, 113, 118,
morphing, 75, 92 119, 136, 159, 160, 161, 182, 196,
movement, 197, 202, 212
and affect, 37, 54, 57, 66, 131, 201 organic, the, 20, 27, 29, 68, 79–82, 85–9,
and becoming, 66 91, 93–4, 97, 104, 124, 157, 161, 165,
in Bergson, 112–14 184, 189
of body, 35, 53, 75, 77, 86, 169, 173 Others, The (Alejandro Amenábar), 11, 50,
of body-without-organs, 78–9, 208 162, 163, 168, 212
of camera, 33, 47, 90–2, 165, 190 out-of-field, 26, 117, 164, 165
in cinema, 5, 7, 9, 33, 51, 95, 109, 115, overlay, 1, 8, 11, 46, 56, 71, 104, 130, 154,
120, 207 166, 174, 177, 179, 187, 189, 196,
and force, 4, 116, 211 202
intensive, 11
machinic, 29, 63, 93, 202 past, the, 7, 11, 15, 18, 20, 26, 44, 46–7,
in Nosferatu, 121–8 50, 66, 72, 120, 154–63, 166–8,
and speed, 38, 67, 73, 170, 195 170–80, 182–3, 186, 192–6, 212
and thought, 22, 79, 110, 111, 160, 164, perception, 4, 5, 11, 23, 34, 35, 44, 45, 55,
175 56, 66, 72, 89, 92, 95–7, 100, 110,
and time, 2, 9, 104, 154–7, 159, 163, 112–18, 132, 135–6, 137, 145, 154–8,
203 160–5, 202, 204, 213
in Vampyr, 129–34 perception-image, 95, 116, 117, 214
movement-images, 213, 214 perspective, 4, 5, 9, 17, 27, 35, 43, 44, 48,
in Cat People, 68 50, 54, 58, 123–4, 136, 159, 170, 173,
and consciousness, 42, 175 202, 204
and duration, 55, 164 philosophy, 2, 3, 8–10, 18, 66, 115, 120
and horror, 26, 51, 92 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 160
and kinetics, 11 point-of-view, 24, 26, 33, 36, 39, 48, 55,
in perception and cinematography, 117, 139, 148, 170, 177, 188
109–20, 150, 155, 202 postmodernism, 3
in the shot, 163–5 power, 213
and time-image, 159–61 and affect, 11
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch), 7, of becoming, 58
187–200, 206, 211, 215 of black holes, 182
multiplicity, 20, 37, 44, 63, 71, 73, 92, 111, of the body, 117, 145, 210
129, 156, 157, 165, 166, 196, 210, of the camera, 126
213 of decisiveness, 118
Murnau, F. W., 26, 109, 119, 122–3, 154 of the false, 161
  231

and gender, 16, 24, 101 in vampire films, 109, 118,

and intensity, 29 in Vampyr, 129–34
of light, 45 Shaviro, Steven, 2, 16, 17, 22, 23, 65, 82,
of the out-of-field, 166 83, 105, 107
spiritual 131 Shining, The (Stanley Kubrick), 2, 6, 7,
and time, 155, 159, 172–4, 196 43–51, 97, 165, 212
will to power, 78 Silverman, Kaja, 16, 65, 105
prosthetics, 9, 23, 33, 48, 62, 73, 81, 82, singularity, 5, 10, 38, 62, 63, 67, 68, 74, 75,
87, 99, 102, 104 79, 94, 98, 104, 114, 131, 181, 182,
Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), 18, 19, 185, 202, 210, 212, 214
23, 24, 25, 58, 201, 206 smell, 85, 144, 191, 202
psychoanalysis, 1, 3, 4, 9, 10, 15–21, 25, Smith, Daniel, 18, 29, 159, 184
52, 58, 64, 75, 81, 82, 93, 129, 157, Soft Machine, The (William S. Burroughs),
205, 208, 212, 214 98, 107
sound, 213
Quality, 146 analysis of, 205–60
quantum mechanics, 207 distorted sound effects, 32, 96, 110, 138,
142, 144
reflections, 24, 33, 45, 50, 91, 96, 101, 104, in The Haunting, 169–72
113, 117, 127, 132, 133, 145, 147, in horror, 2
149, 156, 162, 169–71, 180, 190, 202, and the movement-image, 50
214 in Mulholland Drive, 188–97
repetition, 11, 47, 112, 137, 154, 173, 189, ‘pure sound situations’, 159–61
194, 195 in Repulsion, 40–1
Repulsion (Roman Polanski), 38–42 as sensory stimulus, 5, 11, 111, 145
Rodowick, David, 16, 160–1, 166, 168 and silent film, 28
Rushton, Richard, 87 sound and vision, 155
sound images (sonsigns), 115, 119
schizoanalysis, 3, 8, 9, 10, 15, 18–25, 51, and synaesthesia, 202
52, 54, 58, 64, 78, 104, 205, 212, 214 in Vampyr, 131–2
science fiction, 67, 73, 77, 92, 98, 181, 184, volume, 111
186 space, 212, 214
screen, 202, 204 any-space-whatever, 120, 131, 134, 186,
brain as screen, 94–8 191, 195, 196
sensorium, 11, 23, 51, 65, 83, 91, 135–7, in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 26–8
142, 150, 172, 197, 206 and the camera, 160, 201–2
sexuality, 6, 16, 18, 21, 36, 38–43, 56, 64, and duration, 157–8
72–3, 76, 80, 81, 85, 93, 94, 100, 102, distortions of, 39, 56, 102
173, 187, 191, 193, 197, 205 in Event Horizon, 182–86
shadows, 6, 26, 146 in The Haunting, 166–74
in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, 28–30, and motion, 79, 109, 135–6
in Cat People, 68–71 in Mulholland Drive, 187–97
in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 32–7, in Nosferatu, 120–7
in The Haunting, 169–73 in The Shining, 44–51
in Mulholland Drive, 187–191 and time, 7, 22, 93, 146, 154, 156,
in Nosferatu, 120–7 161–2, 164, 166–7, 181, 201, 203,
in Repulsion, 39–40 207
of the self and duration, 157, 195 in Vampyr, 128–34
232    

space-time, 44, 47, 95, 109, 113, 146, transformation, 8

166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 181, in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 32–6
182, 183, 184, 186, 191, 194, 195, and becoming, 41, 58, 62–4, 77–80, 211
196, 197, 212 of the body, 82, 92, 133
special effects, 1, 5, 10, 15, 70, 81, 83, 92, of consciousness, 64–7, 104, 210
100, 103, 207, 211, 213 machinic, 94
Spinoza, Baruch, 165 in Nosferatu, 122,
Stone, Oliver, 10, 51 and the series, 160, 210
strobe, 57, 76, 100, 176, 177, 180, 188
Studlar, Gaylyn, 64, 105 uncanny, the, 3, 7, 28, 32, 39, 41, 58, 64,
superimposition, 18, 30, 35, 47, 50, 56, 98, 70, 103, 134, 168, 187, 189, 192
126, 133, 141, 147, 154, 175, 187,
195, 205 Vampire Lovers, The (Roy Ward Baker),
Suspiria (Dario Argento), 142–5, 212 139, 140
symbolic, 1, 10, 11, 12, 23, 58, 65, 70, 115, vampires, 2, 10, 67, 109, 118, 121, 122,
120, 136, 137, 143, 150, 160, 171, 212 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 130,
synaesthesia, 116, 212 132, 133, 134, 140, 141, 142, 154, 200
Vampyr (Carl-Theodor Dreyer), 6,
tactility, 22, 37, 45, 54, 84, 89, 97, 103, 128–35, 163, 178, 213
116, 142, 144, 145, 148, 202, 212 Videodrome (David Cronenberg), 80–3
tactisign, 142, 143, 173 virtual, the, 96, 98, 210, 212, 214
Technicolor, 139, 140, 142 and the actual, 41, 96, 117, 124, 162–4
time, 212, 214, 215 affect, 136, 145
and cinema, 11, 154, 159, 201 becoming, 68–70, 78, 80
and duration 47, 114, 115, 156–8, 161, and duration, 155, 166, 192–3, 196
165, 166 in image, 118, 201
and flashbacks, 175 sensation 17, 23, 27, 28, 42, 45, 84–5,
in The Haunting, 167–74 111, 119, 121, 135–6, 142–3, 158
horror-time, 154, 203, 208 space, 66, 117, 120, 127, 186
interior time, 20, 46, 113, 132, 150, 156, and time, 50, 114, 171, 186
180, and viewing, 15, 26, 43, 63, 84, 110, 116,
and movement, 2, 8, 9, 45, 47, 104, 111 202, 204
in Mulholland Drive, 182–97 virtual reality, 158
perception of, 29, 42, 82, 160, 202 visceral, the, 2, 5, 8, 17, 23, 24, 51, 83, 84,
and space, 7, 22, 26, 44, 93, 123, 124, 85, 101, 114, 176, 186, 206, 207
146, 164, 176, 182–4, 203, 207
temporal distortions, 44, 76, 130, 133, whole, the, 76, 159, 163, 164
163 will, the, 68, 78, 85, 94, 111, 158, 161, 166,
time-images, 155, 156, 160, 161, 162, 167, 168, 184
168, 174, 214 Williams, Linda, 16
tracking shots, 34, 48, 178 witches, 69, 143–4, 178, 190, 207