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Monstrous Appetites in 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. I suggest these emotions form a second cluster of horror emotions which I call seduction emotions. So, in horror survival emotions and 5 seduction emotions join hands: Blood is consumed in the bedroom, lust accompanies danger, fear flirts with fascination and death embraces sexual emotions. Before we turn to seduction emotions, first a few words about survival emotions or negative emotions as psychology calls them. Negative emotions are experienced as unpleasant and disagreeable, they leave us dissatisfied, and we dislike and avoid them.15 In Emotions (1986) Frijda divides a list of 31 emotions into respectively positive or negative. The latter include anger, anxiety, despair, disgust, and fear. The term “negative,” however, is problematic. In “On ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Emotions” (2002) philosophers Robert C. Solomon and Lori D. Stone critisize the use of “negative.” From a functionalist perspective all emotions have a function: anxiety makes us detect danger, fear makes us fight of flee a threat, disgust alerts us to disease and pollution, and so forth. To every situation a fitting emotion. Solomon and Stone explain that “negative” is taken from ethics and not science: “The positive-negative polarity as well as the conception of emotional opposites have their origins in ethics . . . [it] comes out of the medieval church which in turn traces its psychology back to Aristotle.”16 The term “negative” hides three different meanings, namely satisfaction (something is pleasant or unpleasant), moral behavior (good or bad), and ethics (something feels right or wrong and relates to virtue and vice). The three meanings – feeling, morality, ethics – are conflated and obscures our understanding of emotions. Thus, Solomon and Stone argue, to use the term “negative” obscures the difference between the intrinsic experience of an emotion, its cognitive evaluation, and its consequence. In contrast to survival emotions, seduction emotions are positive in the sense that they are pleasant, we like them and we seek them out. However, “positive” has the same normative problematic as “negative.” Bearing this in mind, we shall here use positive and negative only about emotions as feeling states and not to indicate moral or ethical aspects. Negative emotions, simply, are unpleasant emotions we avoid.

Sexual Emotions The cluster of seduction emotions include the sexual emotions which, according to Frijda, are overlooked in emotion theory. They are not among Robert Plutchik’s eight basic emotions (anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, joy) nor among the five universal emotions (fear, anger, happiness, sadness, disgust). Perhaps because sexual emotions do not have their own facial expression or because they form 6 network and link to drives, to the sexual motivational system,17 to the Desire system,18 and because an emotion like love links to again other emotions such as anxiety, jealousy, fear of loss. In The Laws of Emotion (2007) Frijda dedictates a chapter to sexual emotions of which he counts seven: “being attracted; being ; being in love; sexual excitement; sexual desire; lust; sexual enjoyment.”19 These, he says, “might be considered different stages or appearances of one sex emotion.”20 Sexual attraction is physical and reflex-like. It is that automatic turn of the head when a good-looking guy passes by, the need to adjust your hair, straighten your back, inspect your makeup to make sure that you, too, are attractive. Being charmed is a connection. It’s key feature is eye-contact, looking at and looking away. “Eye-play initiates flirting, and mutual eye-play seals it,”21 says Frijda. Gazing at him or her conjures up more sexual emotions and is central to falling-in- love. With animals it is called courtship, with humans flirting. Dogs do it. Baboons do it. Monsters do it. Frijda says it helps “overcome the wariness when meeting a stranger.”22 Sexual excitement, like attraction, is physical and automatic, it “does not need conscious awareness” and is located in our body where it may cause erection in men, genital lubrication in women, or “this peculiar sense of trembling allover,” as Frijda puts it. It is readiness to engage in sex. It is separate from desire and love; we may feel love but unfortunatly lack excitement and we may have desire but no excitement. Sexual desire is the wish to have sex. Frijda reads desire in two forms, the first to do with “undirected sensitivity for sexually relevant stimuli” not unlike a bitch in heat or birds singing in the spring. The second is “the articulate emotion of wanting to obtain sexual access to, and union with a particular individual.” So where excitement is located in the body, desire is in body and mind. It can be an obsession and a passion. Frijda separates desire from lust, describing the latter as physical and animal- like: “In lust, the body comes into awareness as a body-to-be-touched, an instrument of penetration or of receiving penetration. It hums of it and aches for it. The sexualized body also is felt as the instrument for one’s sexual actions. One’s skin clamors for being stroked, one’s hands clamor for stroking.”23 Lust is a physical craving for sexual activity. Desire is the passion for getting, having, possessing a sexual object. I think lust is the physical aspect of desire and that the two are so close as to be difficult to separate. Empathy, affection, and tenderness are part of lust, as is 7 aggression, overpowering, and inflicting pain. As in flirting, they are means to replace the trust we do not have with sexual strangers. Sexual enjoyment is the fulfillment of lust and desire. It is “a full-fledged emotion by itself,” says Frijda, and happens “during orgasm, may persist thereafter, and may occur without.” It is our pleasure and delight at the other person and it wants to expand and linger and fill the moment entirely. This is why we continue to touch and cuddle even after having sex. It is about “opening up for experience, attending to it, letting it stream in, adopting or maintaining non-analytic attention, and doing whatever one can to deepen and prolong the experience.”24 Often love happens after sexual enjoyment; sexual enjoyment clears the way for love and falling-in-love. This enjoyment is oceanic, opening body and mind. It is among the emotions young women who use exstasy during sex report as even better than orgasm.25 The last emotion, falling-in-love, is “about love, and it is not love,” says Frijda enigmatically. It is that first year of love where love is blind, where one is constantly occupied with the other, longing for mental, physical, and sexual union, and where nothing else matters. It is about intimacy, about two becoming one. It often happens in a frenzy with a passionate and ecstatic quality. It blocks out other interests so strongly that it “reorients life, for the moment.”26 It “represents what dynamic system theorists call a state change, the flipover of one form of organization into another.”27 It can make you let go of everything if only you can be with the one, unique, person you have fallen in love with. If not reciprocated, it is accompanied by a legion of unpleasant emotions: anxiety, being tormented, agitation, dependence on someone else, utter self-destruction, going to pieces. Frijda sums the sexual emotions into four: sexual excitement, sexual desire, being-in-love, and love. That latter – love – is tricky. Being-in-love differs from love. The first can lead to the next, however, you may feel love without having experienced being-in-love. Love is not among the basic eight or five emotions, but is on Frijda’s list of 31 emotions and in Wikipedia’s list of 44 emotions. It is a composite emotion, like happiness. Frijda points to three dimensions: passionate love, intimacy, and commitment. Love is also linked to three behavioral systems: attachment, caregiving, and sex. Love depends on mutual affection, intimacy, and trust. We can love a sexual partner, children, family, and friends. Evolutionary theory speculates that sex and love is linked “because an enduring relationship between parents promotes survival of the offspring and increases likelihood, for the men, that the offspring carries their genes.” 8

Another theory suggests “mutual affection represents the fair deal of protection and food-provision in exchange for sexual access, in groups with scramble competition.”28 Whatever the explanation, sex and love interlock and interact even if rooted in different systems, but as often as they activate one another, they may also clash. However, sex can lead to love, and love to sex: “Their sensitivities overlap, and their motivational activators overlap. Trust is a condition for both, or for all three”29 (the three being sex, love and trust). We return to trust in the discussion of The Vampire Diaries. Trust is central to love but is overruled in other sexual emotions. For now, I think seduction emotions includes the ones mentioned, which are attraction, flirting, sexual excitement, sexual desire, love, falling-in-love, and trust.

Part Two. Monstrous Appetites

“Monstrous” relates to the greek monstrum which means “a sign or portent that disrupts the natural order as evidence of divine displeasure.”30 It comes from the verb monstro, to show or demonstrate. A monster is a sign from above and it violates the natural order. A monster is lethal and disgusting, however, more to the point, it usually has a huge appetite. “Appetite” relates a) to food, where we feel it as a hunger, and b) to desire. Philosophy suggests desire consists of appetite (a longing for something) and volition or willpower (the cognitive act for chosing a course of action). We shall understand appetite as a physical and mental hunger which overlaps with appetite in desire.

The Walking Dead Let us first look at an example of monstrous appetite which is negative, has no sexual emotions, and doesn’t overlap with desire. This is Rick (Andrew Lincoln) in The Walking Dead riding into Dallas on a horse at the end of episode one in the first season. He is searching for his wife and son in a post-apocalyptic America where zombies are everywhere and survivors scatter in the ruins of human civilisation. Here he turns a corner:

CLIP: The Walking Dead, 1:1, 1:01:12–1:02:12

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Zombies are lethal, unnatural monsters who eat humans and, apparently, horses. They cause fear and panick, and are repulsive due to their connection to death and zombie contagion, and disgusting because they are dirty, bloody, infectuous, and literally rotten and stink. There are no positive emotions connected to the zombie who has no human features. It is not even an animal like Rick’s horse is an animal: Strong, functional as transportation, probably cosy as company, beautiful and gracious. A zombie is not a subject, it has no individuality, no character. It is appetite stripped of any feeling but hunger. Zombies have neither morals nor ethics. They do not look after one another although they move in groups. They have no social norms or hierarchies, no brain activity but to scan surroundings for prey. They can hear, feel, smell, see, and taste, but these senses merely serve to satisfy the hunger for flesh, preferrably human. “The monster in horror fiction, that is, is not only lethal but – and this is of utmost significance – also disgusting,” says Carroll. “Both fear and disgust are etched on the characters’ features. Within the context of the horror narrative, the monsters are identified as impure and unclean.”31 Grodal likewise points to “disgust and revulsion” as typical in horror and says the undead indicate “tacit folk knowledge of infection, backed up by autonomic reactions of disgust, vomiting, and so on which ensure that we minimize contact with possible sources of infection.”32 The Walking Dead is an example of survival horror where monsters typically are unnatural predators that cannot be reasoned by human logic and are insatiable and disgusting. They need not be zombies; in I am Legend and Stakeland they are vampires, in Carriers they are humans infected with a virus, and in Mad Max they are savage humans of a different morality. Survival horror is concerned with disease, extinction, predation. The protagonists are typically a small groups of survivors who must learn to fight, hunt, and kill if not end up a prey. Of course, they must also learn social skills like cooperation, communication, empathy and responsability, but that is a different story.

True Blood Appetites are different in True Blood, whose story is set in the deep South in a contemporary America where vampires and humans co-exists openly. Vampires can drink a substitute called True Blood that is sold in bars like beer. You become vampire only if you are bitten and killed by a vampire, and if humans drink vampire 10 blood it has effects similar to Ecstasy. Vampires are thematized as a minority (not unlike black or homosexuals) struggling for social acceptance and equal rights. The series also has shapeshifters, werewolves, a Meneid* (from Greek mythology), werepanthers, and nymphs (season five might introduce zombies too). As a vampire you have eternal life, can heal all injuries but a stake through the heart, you have enhanced senses, are ultra-fast, and can telepathically read humans’ minds. The only lethal threats are garlic, silver, sunlight and wooden stakes or bullets. Sexual pleasures in all variations are at the heart of the series which explores clubbing, group sex, sexual role-playing with strangulation and bondage, interracial human-vampire sex, and homosexual relationships. As in Twilight the main storyline is a lovestory between a young woman, Sookie (), and a vampire, Bill (). In the episode “Bad Blood” in season three, Bill has been kidnapped by a pack of werewolves:

“That’s gay”: 3:1 “Bad Blood,” 8:41-9:51

The werewolves get high on “V,” the vampire blood they drain from Bill. V has euphoric qualities and enhances physical sensations. “I can’t tell if my skin is burning up or if it’s freezing, but it feels so fucking good,” says one. This hightened physical sensitivity echoes the pleasures of Ecstasy, often abbreviated as E or X. The real-life drug Ecstasy “evokes great psychomotor excitation, a rise in self-esteem, and enhanced alertness, and promotes greater receptivity in sensual aspects but often without the desire to engage in sexual activity.” Young women having sex on Ecstasy report, that “Sex on E [Ecstasy] is like – I would recommend it because you’ll never want to have it any other way. No, I mean, it’ good. Sex on X [Ecstasy] is your sensations are heightened so therefore everything else is heightened.”33 The overlap between drugs and abusive rape is underlined by having the werewolves cut the vampire with knives instead of simply biting him. Their excitement and lust from drinking the blood from his body culminates in a sexual enjoyment, which eventually saves Bill’s life since the wolves are so lost in physical euphoria and less alert to their dangerous prey. The attack is thematized as gay rape. When a werewolf is told to spit the vampire blood into another’s mouth he objects, “that’s gay.” But spitting is the only way they can share sexual enjoyment. 11

From an evolutionary perspective, blood lust, excitement and lust may interact. In “Cruelty’s Rewards: The Gratifications of Perpetrators and Spectators” (2006) psychologist Victor Nell suggests the existence of a pain-blood-death complex, where the sight of a prey’s blood and its death struggle causes positive affects and excitement: “predation is dopaminergic, affectively positive, and distinct from rage . . . the hunt and kill are positive emotional experiences for the predator.”34 Blood shedding also links to erotic arousal, both in humans and other predator species where “arousal during hunts is very high, with pant-hooting, screaming, whistling, piloerection to exaggerate body size, charge displays . . .” To delight in a prey’s pain and agony, to eat the prey alive, and to share its blood is natural behavior from a wolf perspective. And from a human hunter’s perspective. Nell differs between three kinds of aggression which all can cause excitement and arousal: intermale territorial and sex-related aggression, predatory aggression, and angry aggression. The car scene is sex-related aggression, which spills into intermale and angry aggression when Bill escapes from the car and kills several of the attackers. Here, confronting the four werewolves, the vampire-werewolf fight is cut short when the vampire king arrives and takes charge. A male hierarchy is established with the king on top, Bill next, and the werewolves lowest-ranking. It turns out that the King ordered the werewolves to abduct Bill: “I said escort him, not hunt him like an animal.” “He is a goddamn animal,” replies the werewolf Cooter. They are standing among the naked and dead men/werewolves that Bill has killed, Cooter naked in front of Bill who is dressed and the King, who is on a horse, underlining his royal status. When the King hears that the wolves took silver to Bill and preyed on him, he shoots and kills one of them like a dog, as a warning not to disobey his orders.35 Le us leave Bill with a King competing for territory and werewolves hooked on V and return to sexual emotions. In True Blood, lust, excitement, and sexual enjoyment interact with aggression, hunting, killing, and predation, reinforcing one another. Another example in season three is Tara who has been abducted by vampire Franklin. She earlier had sex with him but left when she discovered he was a sociopath and an assassin. Franklin, however, is in love and wants to make Tara his bride. Tied to his bed Tara charms him into trusting her and untie her, she has sex with him and – on invitation – drinks his blood with Franklin exclaiming “Bite me. Bite into my flesh. Taste my blood, my sinew, my bones. Open me up. Taste me, 12 drink me, feed on me.” As she bites his flesh, Franklin screams: “Fuck, yeah! Kill me. Kill me hard.” Parallelling V (vampire blood) with E (Ecstasy) and “ kill me hard” with “fuck me hard” True Blood unites sexual and carnal and monstrous appetites with pleasure, hunger, and kinky desire. The sexual ethic of the show is consensual sex and respect for an indivual’s rights to a self-defined sexuality, and non-consensual appetites are punished. Bill kills his attackers and Tara clubs Franklin to death in his sleep during day. No characters are evil or disgusting, and ethics are not about whether sex is right or wrong, but whether sex is consensual and wether death is deserved. True Blood includes all the sexual emotions and the central love-story between Sookie and Bill is outweighed by side characters’ stories of falling in love, becoming drug and sex addicts, and having casual and dangerous sex. Such emotions and actions indicate an audience familiar with sexual experimentation.

The Vampire Diaries The Vampire Diaries is a teen vampire drama series (2009–), and more paranormal drama than actual horror. However, it has vampires, werewolves, witches and ghosts. The main story is a love triangle between Elena (Nina Dobrev) and vampire brothers Stefan (Paul Wesley, her boyfriend) and Damon (Ian Somerhalder). We are in contemporary Virginia in the small town of Mystic Falls where vampires hide in human civilisation through the use of magical rings that make them walk in daylight and protect them from the lethal sun. The town also hosts a small secret group of vampire hunters who know of the existence of vampires. The main story is a lovestory, however, focus is not so much on having sex or going steady (which characters do) as it is on trust. The recurring question is who to trust. Your parents? Your boy or girlfriend? Or your friends? We need trust to have relationships based on love to lovers, friends, and family relations. If you are a monster with a secret identity as vampire, or werewolf, or witch, it is vital you can trust others with your secret and thus your life. In “Trust as an Affective Attitude” (1996) philosopher Karen Jones says trust requires an optimistic attitude about another person’s goodwill. “The attitude of optimism is to be cashed out not primarily in terms of beliefs about the other’s trustworthiness, but rather – in accordance with certain contemporary accounts of the emotions – in terms of a distinctive, and affectively loaded, way of seeing the one trusted.”36 Trust is this affective attitude 13 before it may later be about belifs or promises or contracts. I trust you, as simple as that. Lawrence C. Becker calls initial trust basic trust: “Basic trust (and distrust) is something we develop in a crude form in infancy and continue to refine thorugh our lives.”37 Trust, suggests philosopher Lars Hertzberg, might not even be aquired in childhood but be an innate emotion.38 We are born with trust and expand this basic emotion to other situations, learning in the process what and whom not to trust. A characteristic of trust is that it is unconditional and limitless until lost or shattered (like love, it focuses attention on what supports it, not what suspends it). Hertzberg says that “in so far as I trust someone, there will be no limits, given in advance, of how far or in what respects I shall trust him. If I trust someone, I cannot at the same time reserve for myself the judgment concerning the purposes for which he is to be trusted. It is from him that I learn what he has to teach me. I go along.”39 Let me now show two clips from The Vampire Diaries. In the first, vampire Stefan is being tortured by his best friend Alexi and his girlfriend Elena.

example: Season 3, episode 7 “Ghost World” 23:30 – 25

The context is that the “good” vampire Stefan, who used to feed on animal blood and was a devoted boyfriend, has turned “bad” and been taken over by his old Ripper self who loves killing and is mad with blood lust. “See that! That’s the Ripper talking. Once he is weak enough you have to cause him pain. Make him feel things. Anger, rage, anything. You have to make him see past the blood,” says Alexi. Alexi explains to Elena that she must hurt and torture Stefan until he is so weak that he reverts to his older and better vampire self who controls the appetite and doesn’t kill randomly. This better Stefan is also the one who loves Elena. But is the old Stefan still inside him? And will the torture work? Audiences trust in Alexi’s and Elena’s love and goodwill towards Stefan. We also trust Stefan loves Elena even if he denies it. Elena trusts this is his “old” self talking and that she is helping him get out of his “Ripper” state of mind. In a complex plot, Stefan had to revert to this Ripper-self to save Elena from the evil vampire Claus, and now Stefan cannot exit this self. He can no longer control himself. The pain and torture is about controlling the monstrous appetite and teaching the vampire to behave in a socially acceptable fashion. If they cannot trust Stefan, they cannot set him free in human society. 14

Another example is vampire Caroline. When her father, who is one of Mystic Fall’s vampire hunters, discovers his daughter is a vampire, he feels he must either change her or kill her.

Vampire Diaries, 3:3, “The End of the Affair” 11:33–12:29 Carolines nature

Like the former torture scene, this also involves trust and distrust. Do we think her father’s motive is sound? Yes. He wants to help her. But Caroline is not a Ripper like Stefan, she has adapted perfectly to human society. She can control her blood lust. But her father doesn’t trust her and seeing her vampire face when he holds the blood to her face, he thinks her blood lust controls her. Here, desire and hunger interact. Caroline’s natural vampire appetite is to consume human blood. She desires warm human blood rather than cold blood in a bag or animal blood. However, she has trained her willpower, her volition, and learned to control the monstrous appetite. Carline doesn’t need to change. I shall not pursue the show’s highly interesting theme of human and monster nature, of adaption to social circumstances, and of our abilities to control our nature, to transform our identity, and to control our actions. I will merely point out how control and trust becomes central to the monstrous appetites, and how appetite is regulated through torture (later, Caroline asks her father to torture her boyfriend, who is a werewolf unable to control his werewolf transformation). Monstrous appetites are the social challenge and danger in The Vampire Diaries. If not controlled, they can lead to a creature’s death or – on a bigger scale – expose the existence of the supernatural creatures to humans. To hunt require no skills, since unsuspecting human prey is abundant in contemporary society. To control the monstrous appetite is another story. To put contrast in the context of sexual emotions, it, like love and falling-in- love and being charmed, is an interpersonal emotion. It involves intimacy, is related to basic trust, it cannot be willed but “involves a leap of faith,” as Amy Mullin says in “Trust, Social Norms, and Motherhood” (2005). “Trust is important for intimacy, for mutuality, and for children’s sense of love and security.”40 Mullin points out that trust is also shaped by social norms: “The role played by social norms in shapig the content of trust also makes sense of the fact that other people, besides the truster and the one trusted, may be invoked to help settle questions about whether or not trust has been 15 betrayed.” Does he still love me is a question that needs Alexis help to be answered: Yes, this is the Ripper in Stefan talking. And does Carline’s father love her? Yes, but his love is misguided. Just after the clip I showed, Caroline is rescued by her mother Liz and boyfriend. “That’s our daughter in there,” says Liz, “she looks up to you. She loves you.” “Then she’ll trust me to do the right thing,” replies dad, “let me do this, Liz. Not because she’s a monster. But because we love her.” I think trust is an overlooked emotion in horror and a central emotion in many recent horror narratives. Can we trust ourselves? Can we trust our loved ones? Who can we trust? How does social trust develop? Trust, love, and the feeling of safety are central themes, interlocking not only in ghost stories like The Sixth Sense and The Orphanage but also in vampire stories like Let the Right One In.

Conclusion: Gender, Horror, Emotions

Let us return to the two clusters of horror emotions, one about survival, the other about seduction. The first consists of negative emotions, the other of positive, sexual and social emotions. • first, the two clusters intersect with one another. Thus, pain and pleasure may be joined – one’s pleasure can be another’s pain as in my clip with Bill being drained by werewolves in True Blood. It seems that sexual emotions are related to aggression, to cruelty, and to predation in complex ways, excitement often linked to aggression or love and trust to torture and pain • second, sexual emotions can be divided into those aimed at immediate sexual satisfaction – excitement, desire – and those aimed at long-term relationships - – falling-in-love, love. Here, the emotions of trust is part of love • third, we may speculate that a focus on excitement and desire comined with negative emotions have a strong appeal to a male audience and a focus on the falling-in-love and less focus on negative emotions may have a stronger appeal to a female audience

Such generalization needs elaboration, which I turn to in future studies. If difference in taste in fact exists, the relation to innate nature and social norms will be a 16 challenge. Following Caroline, we may conclude that women have not just learned to adapt but also to create horror stories such as True Blood and The Vampire Diaries.

1 The Walking Dead has three seasons (1010–), in all 20 episodes, a fourth season is planned. It was created by Frank Darabont as an adaptation from the comic The Walking Dead (2003–present, 98 issues) by Robert Kirkman. True Blood has four seasons (2008–), in all 52 episodes, a fifth season is planned. It is an adaptation of the book series The Southern Vampire Mysteries by (2001–, 12 books). The Vampire Diaries has three seasons (2009–), in all episodes, a fourth season is planned. It is an adaption of the book series The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith (1991-2011, 10 books). On IMDB the three shows are respectively categorized as drama, fantasy, mystery (True Blood), drama, fantasy, horror (The Vampire Diaries), and drama, horror, thriller (The Walking Dead). 2 Noël Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views, eds. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21-48, 23, 24. 3 Frijda, The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 253 4 accessed on April 12, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_%28psychology%29 5 accessed on April 12, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion 6 Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (London: Allan Lane, 2011), the experiment with feeling cold water is described 382-3. 7 A.D. Craig, ”How Do You Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body” in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, vol 3, August 2002, 655- 666, 655. 8 Metzinger, Thomas. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. New York: Basic Books, 2009. 9 Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” 22. 10 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, 3. 11 I am here avoiding the question of whether affects are conscious or not. My point is that they must be cognitive for us to register them and put them into words. When they can be put into words, I believe they are no longer non-conscious. Of course, if we have not learnt words (like an infant) we cannot put them into language. Yet. However, does this mean they are non-conscious? Or does it simply mean we have not yet learnt to register the affect? This is a philosophical question about the relation between conscious and cognitive. See Eric Shouse, ”Feeling, emotion, Affect” for an argument for affects as non-conscious and Thomas Metzinger for the view that affects (at least in adults) are neccessarily cognitive, since they must be registered by our physical body through what he calls the ego tunnel, our phenomenological self.. 12 Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” 38, 40. 13 Cynthia Freeland, The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000, 3. 14 Hanich, Julian. Cinematic Emotion in Horror Films and Thrillers: The Aesthetic Paradox of Pleasurable Fear. New York: Routledge, 2010. 15 Frijda, The Emotions, about hedonic qualities p. 242, his listing of emotions are pp 218-9. 16 Solomon, Robert C and Stone, Lori D.. “On ‘Positive’ and ‘Negative’ Emotions,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior vol 32, no 4, 2002, 417-435, 418. 17 Frijda, The Laws of Emotion, 228. 17

18 Frijda, The Laws of Emotion, 247. 19 Frijda, Nico H.. The Laws of Emotion. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007, the seven emotions are 228, the four emotions are 252. 20 Frijda, The Laws of Emotion, 228. 21 Ibid, 234. 22 Ibid, 234-5. 23 Ibid, 244. 24 Ibid, 247. 25 Kristine E.P. Kennedy MA, Christian Grov PhD, MPH, and Jeffrey T. Parsons PhD (2010): ”Ecstasy and Sex Among Young Heterosexual Women: A Qualitative Analysis of Sensuality, Sexual Effects, and Sexual Risk Taking,” International Journal of Sexual Helath 22:3, 155-166. 26 Frijda, The Laws of Emotion, 235. 27 Ibid, 238. 28 Ibid, both quotes 250. 29 Ibid, 251. 30 Monstrum accessed on June 9 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_ancient_Roman_religion#monstrum. 31 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990, 22, 23. 32 Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford University Press, 2009, 115. 33 Kennedy, Grov, Parsons, ”Ecstasy and Sex,”163. The theme of women getting off on sex while on V (vampire blood) is exlored in season one, where a girlfriend of one of the main characters turns out to be a V addict. After she has killed a vampire to drain his blood, she is herself killed by a (human) serial killer. Several scenes depict the heightened sensitivity and happiness and affect of the couple when they use V during sex. 34 Nell, Victor. “Cruelty’s Rewards: The Gratifications of Perpetrators and Spectators,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2006, nb 29, 211-257, 212,214. 35 This is in episode two of season three, “Beautifully Broken.” 36 Karen Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude” Ethics 107 (October 1996): 4-25, 4. 37 Lawrence C. Becker, ”Trust as Noncognitive Security about motives,” Ethichs, vol 107, no 1, october 1996, 43-61, 46. Becker is drawing on the concept of basic trust from psychologist Erik Erikson. 38 Lars Hertzberg, “On the Attitude of Trust,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 31:3, 307-322, 308. Here, Hertzberg quotes Wittgenstein. 39 Hertzberg, “On the Attitude of Trust,” 314, 320. First part of the quote is qouting Wittgenstein. 40 Amy Mullin, “Trust, Social Norms, and Motherhood” Journal of Social Philosophy vol 36, nor 3, Fall 2005, 316-330, 323, 327