1 Monstrous Appetites in True Blood and the Vampire Diaries A

1 Monstrous Appetites in True Blood and The Vampire Diaries A Cognitive Approach to the Sexual Emotions of Horror Monstrous appetites are everywhere in horror. Let us consider three scenes with monstrous appetites taken from three recent American television series, the HBO vampire show True Blood (2008–), CW vampire show The Vampire Diaries (2009–), and AMC zombie show The Walking Dead (2010–).1 “Bite into my flesh. Taste my blood, my sinew, my bones,” says vampire Franklin to his human bride in third season of True Blood, inviting her to gorge on his flesh in their sexual embrace in the bedroom. Erotic and carnal appetites often mix in this hit series. Not so often in The Vampire Diaries. Here, energy mostly goes into controlling rather than indulging such appetites. Thus, in third season, a human father uses torture to condition his vampire daughter to suppress her appetite for blood. “In time the thought of human blood will make you repress your vampire instincts completely,” he tells her before inducing pain. Indulgence or control, the monstrous appetites in True Blood and The Vampire Diaries are presented as natural desires and instincts which are, in fact, no less comprehensible than human desires. In contrast, the zombies in The Walking Dead are a pure predatory threat. Here, in season one, our protagonist Rick looses his horse to monstrous appetites that are presented as unnatural, disgusting, and incomprehensible. Psychoanalytic theory has interpreted such appetites as perverse desires, as constructing sexual identity, or as voicing social taboos and fears (Creed 1992; Clover 1993; Williams 1999; Twitchell 1985). In reaction to such views, cognitive film theory has turned to evolutionary and biocultural explanations and argue the core emotions of horror – terror, horror, fear, revulsion, and disgust – relate not to sexuality but to survival (Carroll 1999; Freeland 2000; Grodal 2009). Here I argue that horror is not just about sexual desire, neither that the genre’s core emotions are limited to negative emotions. Rather, horror holds a rich variety of emotions, negative as well as positive, intertwining in such complex fashion that they are difficult to tell apart and theorize. I do not propose a Grand Theory of horror. Instead, I wish to draw attention to the central position of the sexual emotions and the emotion of trust in monstrous appetites. Theoretically, I use rich theory drawing on cognitive film theory, cognitive psychology and cognitive philosophy as well as psychosemiotics and 2 aesthetic analysis. I intend to establish a contact zone of analysis where different theoretical perspectives benefit from and help one another rather than clash. The paper has four parts: First part is concerned with emotions and the next three parts examines appetites in respectively The Walking Dead, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries. In conclusion I speculate that different emotions have different appeals to male and female audiences. Part One. Horror Emotions First, a few words about emotions, which are a complex phenomenon involving physical, cognitive, and social aspects. In fact, emotions link to every corner of our mind and body, be they thoughts of fear, feelings of excitement, or sensations of cold or heat. Emotion theory does not have one but many definitions of emotions. Psychology suggests a tri-part-structure of emotion which involves cognition (thinking), affects (feeling), and conation (action or behavior). Thus, emotions are sensed in our bodies, evaluated by our brain, and cause or indicate actions. My son takes my hand, I stroke his blonde hair and tell him I love him. The sensation of his hand in mine causes thoughts and actions. Cognitive theory holds thoughts to be central in emotions. Thus, philosopher and film theorist Noël Carroll (1999) differs between “what might be called ‘emotions proper’ or ‘core emotions’” and “responses barely mediated by thought.”2 An emotion proper would be my disgust or fear at the sight of a monster. The response barely mediated by thought could be my shivering from cold or anxiety or horror. An affect. In a cognitive perspective, emotions are conscious, they have goals, concerns, and motives, they are felt in situations, they are embedded in contexts, and they cause actions and thoughts. Affects, on the other hand, relate to physical sensations, to our senses of hearing, smelling, feeling, seeing, tasting, and to visceral sensations like hunger or pain. Psychologist Nico H. Frijda (1986) differs between emotions, feeling, and mood. Emotions have an object, happen in a world, and strive to make us act. I am hungry so I hunt for food. Feelings are more elusive cognitive states, an awareness of my inner state rather than directed at external goals. I feel afraid (feeling) but I fear a monster (emotion). Moods are feeling states whose object or cause is displaced in time and they are of long duration. However, Frijda says “emotions, moods, feelings, 3 sentiments, and passions are not sharply separate classes of experiences,”3 they easily slide into one another when given the opportunity. What about affects then, are they emotions? Wikipedia defines affects as “the experience of feeling or emotion. Affect is a key part of the process of an organism’s interaction with stimuli,”4 thus pointing to the experience of feelings. In contrast, Wikipedia defines emotions as linked to the evaluation of feelings, as “a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual’s state of mind as interacting with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves ‘physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience’.”5 Science disagree as to whether human affects are cognitive or not. Experiments show that to feel cold involves cognition6 and neuroanatomist A.D. Craig (2002) argues that feeling a body state – do I feel sick? should I go to the doctor? – does not distinguish the five senses from our visceral senses, but uses all senses including cognitive evaluation to feel. Rats and cats and monkeys do not go to a doctor, not just because they can’t find one, but because they have no representation of a body entity or a “self-representational map” that can go to the doctor, as humans do.7 Like Craig, cognitive philosopher Thomas Metzinger (2009) says the perception of a “a phenomenal self-model” which is meta-reflexive is unique to humans.8 Our mind controls our feeling of our body state. In fact, our mind constructs what he calls the Ego Tunnel, a cognitive window or view of the world which filters our inputs and creates the world to us as it creates our perception of a “self.” A phenomenological- moving-now. So, in a neurophysiological sense, to separate feeling from cognition is impossible. All feelings, affects, and emotions are cognitive. Carroll admits that, “many of the affects that I am ignoring are integral to the experience of film. Through the manipulation of sound and image, filmmakers often address audiences at a subcognitive, or cognitively impenetrable level of response.”9 Bearing in mind Metzinger’s and Craig’s view of the human mind as unique, we shall now return to emotions. Emotions are a holistic concept involving feelings, thoughts, and what Frijda calls action readiness. Affects, moods, feeling states, sensations, and emotions all fall under what I here call emotions. However, I use emotion and affect in their common usage, that is, emotion as conscious and cognitive and affect as experienced and felt (but they, too, are cognitive). Perhaps the difference between them is in their relation 4 to language. The antropologist Kathleen Stewart in her study Ordinary Affects (2007) says her object, the ordinary affects, are “immanent, obtuse, and erratic, in contrast to the ‘obvious meaning’ of semantic message and symbolic signification. They work not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldlings of all kinds.”10 According to Stewart, affects are networks rather than emotions with goals, they are felt rather than thought, and they structure our minds without us giving this much conscious thought. We do not put them into words – yet they make up most of our feeling states.11 Survival and Seduction A lot of attention has been given to the negative emotions in horror. As mentioned in the beginning, cognitive film theory sees the core emotions of horror as fear and disgust. Thus, “little argument seems required to establish that horror films are designed to provoke fear,” says Carroll, adding that monsters are “disgusting,” “repulsive and abhorrent” and that “the depictions and descriptions in horror films are criterially prefocused in terms of foregrounding the harmfulness and the impurity of the monsters” (italics in original).12 Similarly, cognitive philosopher Cynthia Freeland in The Naked and the Undead (2000) writes that “horror films are designed to prompt emotions of fear, sympathy, revulsion, dread, anxiety, or disgust” (italics in original).13 And cognitive film theorist Torben Grodal in Embodied Visions (2009) discusses hunting scenarios and corpses as central elements in horror which help us practise our hunting skills and survival abilities when facing predators or diseases and other dangers. Finally, Julian Hanich’s recent phenomenological study of horror, Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers (2010), is dedicated to the emotions of horror, shock, dread and terror.14 Fear, disgust, horror, dread, and terror are negative emotions which we turn to shortly. I suggest they form a cluster of horror emotions which deal with survival. Survival emotions, however, are only one side of the horror genre. Since its birth in romantic and gothic literature with John Polidori’s short story The Vampyre (1819), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), seduction, excitement, sensuality, love, and passion have been at the heart of horror.

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