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HORROR AND REENCHANTMENT: A SUPERNATURAL GENRE IN A SECULAR AGE
SCOTT PRESTON
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
JOINT PROGRAM IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, CANADA
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1+1 Canada ABSTRACT
This dissertation investigates a body of films belonging to the contemporary
horror genre of the American cinema in terms of the way these respond to and seek to resolve the complex conditions of belief in our secular age. In my reading of horror, it is not just one genre among many in contemporary popular culture. Rather, it is a privileged
literary and aesthetic discourse with roots traceable to the cultural moments associated with the beginning of the Modern Era in the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
From this perspective, horror's unique position in modern culture comes from its insistence on the centrality of mystery, wonder and the supernatural in the face of the overwhelming disenchantment characteristic of modern life. Film theory tells us that close reading of popular texts can provide valuable insights into a society's collective attitudes, assumptions, hopes, and fears. My discussion of recent horror films, drawing upon extensive knowledge of the genre's history and imagery, reveals how the popularity of the supernatural in the mass media today relates to the cross-pressures of life in the secular age identified in the work of Charles Taylor.
After building a unique interdisciplinary framework that fuses ideas from sociology, religious studies, philosophy, film genre theory, myth criticism, and cultural studies, I turn to the ambivalence that characterizes modern life. A great number of secular people desperately want to just believe in something, but all of the momentum around them is in the direction of doubt. Their imaginations may be in a state of rebellion
iv against the dominance of materialist skepticism into which they are born but they cannot escape the feeling that to simply believe would start them on a slippery slope to fundamentalism, or madness. Under such conditions, the reenchanting function of supernatural horror films plays an important role. For example, narratives of conversion from skeptic to believer offer compelling resolutions. Serial killer films, on the other hand, present dark meditations on the reality of evil. Both entertain the existence of something greater than or beyond the everyday world. Horror takes great pleasure in rubbing reason up against the irrational, and setting the supernatural loose in the mundane reality of the natural. Detectives investigate paranormal activities, prove and disprove local myths and legends, and FBI special agents hunt monstrous multiple murderers who may or may not be evil personified. These characters and others bring to life a small part of the struggle to find the meaning of life in a secular age, and to reenchant this disenchanted world.
v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The ideas presented here are the product of many years of learning from many teachers and colleagues, as well as many years of unwavering support from cherished friends and family. First and foremost, I was blessed with a supervisory committee most graduate students can only dream of. My supervisor, Janine Marchessault, encouraged me to apply to York to pursue a PhD and she embraced and nurtured my earliest notions of what my research might investigate. A supervisor must wear many hats and Janine wore them all with aplomb. When I was losing focus, she knew exactly how to put me back on track; when I was down, she knew just what to say. Janine, I can not thank you enough for your patience and for the confidence and encouragement you provided year in and year out. Each of the other members of my committee, Monique Tschofen, Steve Bailey and John Caruana, played an important role in seeing me through this process. Monique's door was always open and her close reading, editing and feedback improved my writing and my ideas in so many ways. Steve provided guidance as I maneuvered through the program and was always a source of calm energy, right up until the day of my defense.
John joined the committee at a crucial turning point in my work and gave me the last push I needed to finish. The remaing members of my defense committee, Paul Coates,
Suzie Young, and John McCullough, all read my work with a critical eye and contributed valuable insights that will help me going forward. Thank you all for all of your support.
vi Outside of my committee, many others at York and Ryerson had a hand in this project over the years. Murray Pomerance went above and beyond what any student could expect from a mentor. His steadfast belief in me from the moment we met has been a constant source of strength, and his energy is always an inspiration. John O'Neill encouraged me to write about horror for his course in my first semester and was an early champion of my potential. He gave his time generously when I was just beginning to lay the groundwork for this project. Dennis Denisoff provided an invaluable perspective on my comps committee. Professors Tom Cohen and Richard Lippe at York and Andrew
O'Malley at Ryerson were not only inspiring teachers to work for but they also showed great generosity by taking an interest in my progress as a graduate student and lending their time and counsel in different ways. Diane Jenner and Julie Birkle at York patiently guided me through the program from my very first day to my very last. My fellow
ComCulters Lauren Cruikshank, Sarah Sharma, Nathan Holmes, Alison Powell, Sean
Springer, Kate Zieman and Amanda Graham all made my experience in the program, and my life in Toronto over the years, richer in so many ways. I could not have made it through without the time we shared together. Lastly, a special mention must be made about the debt this entire dissertation owes to Robin Wood. Not only did his early writing on the horror film make mine possible, but his whole approach to film studies is the enduring model for my work. Imagine then my thrill at taking a course with Robin while at York. When he actually liked my writing and encouraged me, I think I was so
vii overwhelmed at first that I couldn't process it. As I struggled over the years to find my voice, however, his seal of approval had an incalculable effect. Sadly, Robin passed away the same week I completed my final draft. He may never have the chance to read these pages but his spirit is found in each and every one of them.
The research presented here is really the culmination of work that began in the
Department of Film Studies at Concordia University. The faculty there made me the film scholar I am today and laid all of the groundwork that allowed me to pursue a PhD in
Toronto. I want to thank everyone who taught me film at Concordia, but in particular
Martin Lefebvre, who early on contributed important ideas to this dissertation, and Peter
Rist whose love of cinema and passion for teaching continues to inspire me today.
Writing a dissertation can be such an all-consuming task that friends, simply by being friends, provide an invaluable form of life-support. Thanks to Jonathan Yam and
Debbie Chenier who saw me through this entire process, as well as to the whole gang at
SNIC. For two decades now, Rene Kayser and Fernand Comeau have shared so many conversations with me about movies that each in their own way has had an important influence on my ideas.
Finally, three people contributed in ways that truly can not be measured. My mother is a true horror aficionado. Her infectious love of scary movies planted the seed that bears fruit in these pages. Thank you, Mom, for not only letting me rent all those horror movies at far too young an age, but for actually renting and watching them with
viii me! My father quite simply made this whole chapter of my life possible when he single- handedly moved me to Toronto after six years in Montreal. He rode a bus up from New
Brunswick, rented us a van, loaded my apartment into it, drove me to Toronto, unpacked me, drove the van back to Montreal, and then took the bus back to New Brunswick, all in the span of two days. Dad, I will never forget that gesture, but then, it is also just one example of the endless love and support you have shown me my entire life. Thanks,
Mom and Dad, for always believing in me. Last, but not least, Agnieszka Sliwka inspired me, pushed me, comforted me, challenged me and then guided me hand-in-hand right to the finish line. You were the missing piece. Thank you for everything.
IX TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract iv-v
Acknowledgments vi-ix
Table of Contents x-xii
1. Introduction 1-7
1.1 The Exorcist and the Possibility of Reenchantment 7-12
1.2 Religion and Film Studies 13-17
1.3 Chapter Breakdown 20-26
2. Taking the Supernatural Seriously: Genre Theory and the Horror Film 27-30
2.1 "The monster no longer metaphysical": Politics and the Study of Horror 30-41
2.2 Theoretical Frameworks for Studying the Horror Genre 41-46
2.2.1 Mythic Function of Genre Films 46-56
2.3 Conclusion 56-58
3. "I Want to Believe": The Dilemmas of the Secular Age and the Meaning 59-62 of Reenchantment
3.1 Defining Secularization: Weber, Berger and Taylor 62-77
x 3.2 Reenchantment and the Ambivalent Subject 77-87
3.3 Who is Reenchanted? Audiences for American Supernatural Horror films 87-90
3.4 Conclusion 90-93
4. Discrediting the Immanent Frame: Converting Skeptics in the Supernatural 94-100 Investigation Cycle
4.1 The X-Files and the Emergence of the Cycle 100-110
4.2 Fallen and The Blair Witch Project: Analysis of Two Supernatural 110-113
Investigation Films
4.2.1 The Skeptical Protagonist 113-118
4.2.2 Investigations, Evidence, and Conversions 119-124
4.3 Conclusion 124-130
5. Denying the Denial of Evil: Looking into the Abyss in the Serial Killer 131-136 Profiler Cycle
5.1 FBI Profilers and Serial Killer Culture 136-144
5.2 The Profiler Cycle: Themes and Motifs 144-159
5.3 From Hell and Suspect Zero: Analysis of Two Serial Killer Profiler Films 159-163
5.4.1 The Hunter 163-168
5.4.2 The Abyss 168-173
5.5 Conclusion 173-176
XI 6. Reenchantraent and Utopia: Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow 177-185
6.1 The Headless Horseman and the Reality of the Supernatural 185-189
6.2 From Believer to Skeptic: Ichabod and the Supernatural Investigation 189-194
Cycle
6.3 The Heroic Monster Hunter: Ichabod and the Serial Killer Profiler Cycle 195-201
6.4 The Utopian Union of Science and Magic: Ichabod and Katrina 201-208
6.5 Conclusion 208-212
7. Concluding Remarks 213-218
Bibliography 219-247
xn 1. Introduction
The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with
their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had
partially unveiled the face of nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a
wonder and a mystery.
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1831x
Scientific progress is ... the most important fraction, of that process of
intellectualization which we have been undergoing ... Let us first of all clarify
what this means in practice. Does it mean perhaps that today we have a greater
understanding of the conditions under which we live than a Red Indian? Hardly.
... The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. ... It means something
else—the knowledge or the belief that, if one only wanted to, one could find out
any time; that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work.
-Max Weber, 1918
'This passage is not in the original 1818 edition of Frankenstein but is rather one of many additions made by Shelley for the final 1831 edition. 1 Given the striking similarity of language in these two quotes, one might suspect
Max Weber of deliberately reworking Mary Shelley in his now-famous lecture on science
and its role in shaping modernity. The last line here, "that there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work", describes precisely what a moment later
Weber will call, in a lasting and influential characterization of modernity, "the disenchantment of the world" (13). But even if this similarity of language is only a coincidence, it is telling nonetheless. Today Shelley's novel about a young scientist who discovers the eternal mystery of life only to give birth to a monster stands as our most imitated horror narrative. It is the most famous and most studied gothic novel, that genre of popular literature preoccupied with the irrational that flourished amidst the age of reason and progress. And Weber, in seeking just what it meant to be modern, isolated the loss of wonder and mystery that accompanied the rise of the scientific and the rational worldview. Frankenstein, in these words spoken by Victor Frankenstein that preface his story of discovery, evokes a world where natural philosophers (scientists) in their pursuit of knowledge threaten to pull back nature's veil and uncover all of the mysteries of life.
At the outset of the nineteenth century, Mary Shelley's generation, the Romantics, witnessed both the excitement and the anxieties stirred by this project. A century later,
Weber declared that the project had reached its conclusion: "There are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work." Science had finished its task. The world by
1918 was now "disenchanted."
2 The juxtaposition of my two opening epigraphs, one taken from popular literature, the other from the intellectual study of modernity, allows me to illustrate a central insight upon which is built the whole of my argument to follow. Simply put, the horror genre, from its gothic antecedents all the way to the present, is at one level a long aesthetic response to the disenchantment of the world and the dilemmas engendered by this process. The philosopher Charles Taylor contends that these dilemmas or "cross- pressures" typify modern Western life, and reach back to Mary Shelley's lifetime. "A very common experience [today]," says Taylor, "is that of being cross-pressured between open and closed perspectives." (555). "Open" for Taylor means being open to the possibility that something beyond this world exists. Horror from this perspective becomes an index of Western cultural history since the beginning of modernity. If this is so then the study of horror ought to be a central concern for anyone who wishes to understand where we are today, how we got here, and where we are headed. For film studies specifically, this suggests a fresh approach to the genre. The most frequent studies of horror film have been ideological readings that categorize individual horror films as politically progressive or reactionary, or otherwise they have been attempts (usually psychoanalytic or cognitivist) to explain in the broadest terms the genre's appeal to audiences (ie. why we enjoy being frightened). Both of these approaches provide valuable insights but neither captures the role of horror I am highlighting here. Too often ideological readings reduce films to nothing more than politics, while attempts to locate
3 the genre's appeal in a specific psychological or cognitive framework operate so broadly that they miss the way horror interacts with history.
Considering horror as a response to disenchantment opens a middle path between these two extremes. The genre remains grounded in history, but its relevance lay in its turning away from history towards eternity. Rather than reduce horror's iconography to material relations of power, we uncover something much more interesting. The genre is one immense riposte to the very frame of mind that presumes to make such a reduction.
The best way to appreciate the historical context of supernatural narratives is to recognize how they touch the part of us that exceeds that context. Furthermore, revealed here is that horror shares a subject with the whole philosophical discourse of modernity. As Taylor illustrates, nearly all Western social, political and philosophical thought since the
Enlightenment emerges out of the challenge to tradition posed by disenchantment. When we look closely at the themes of horror, we see the same concerns, misgivings and apprehensions addressed by those thinkers who have taken the measure of our secular age. Thus, we should not be surprised when we find Mary Shelley and Max Weber reaching for the same words and images. Both want to describe the relationship between the past and the present, the known and the unknown—between science, reason, mystery, and wonder. The concern of both is disenchantment.
But, what of reenchantment? Importantly, just as Weber announced the culmination of modern science's project to disenchant the world, others were busy
4 launching a counter-attack. Out of the ruins of dada and the Great War, for example,
Andre Breton was formulating the launch of surrealism. Paul Hammond characterizes the goal of surrealism as the "reenchantment" of this disenchanted world (1), and I borrow this phrase to describe the function of the supernatural horror films I will discuss here.
For Breton and many others, Freud's recent "discovery" of the unconscious represented a blow to the confidence in science and reason that animated the previous century. A crack appeared that seems to have energized a resistance movement that had been losing steam.
Surrealism was after all hardly the first faction to attack the Age of Reason, Industry and
Progress and to make reenchantment its goal. Isaiah Berlin tracks the history of what he calls the "Counter-Enlightenment" all the way to back to the eighteenth century. Yet, the avant-garde movements of post-war Europe in the 1920s, especially surrealism and expressionism, channelled the disillusionment of the war and the startling new insights of psychoanalysis into unique and powerful visions. Both of these movements would have a hand in shaping the horror film.
Broadly speaking, horror as a genre responds to disenchantment in two distinct but related ways. Some horror narratives present critical reflections on the processes and consequences of secularization, while others function mythically to resolve the cross- pressures of secularization. Perhaps the most familiar example of the former is the genre's treatment of science as a discipline that produces monsters. This is Shelley's contribution with Frankenstein, of course, and the early years of the Hollywood horror
5 film overflowed with mad doctors whose bizarre experiments transgressed traditional boundaries (between living and dead, human and animal, etc.) and ran roughshod over common values. A popular cycle in the 1970s, eco-horror films, updated the old critique of science (implicating modern industry as well), as pollution, nuclear waste and disregard for the environment caused nature to fight back with, for example, swarms of bees {The Swarm, 1978), giant alligators {Alligator, 1980) and mutant grizzly bears
{Prophecy, 1979). These kinds of horror films consist mostly of a lament, a critique or a warning, usually directed towards notions of science and progress. The other kind of horror narrative that responds to disenchantment and secularization, the one that will be our focus here, is less a reflection on what is lost in modernity than an expression of a wish that we might get it back. Like surrealism, horror also has reenchantment on its mind. Increasingly today, as secularization widens, as the tensions of a disenchanted world mount, horror films become avenues for imagining the possibility of reversing or balancing this process. In addition to condemning disenchantment, horror aims for reenchantment.
When a significant percentage of the population feels cross-pressured by life in a disenchanted world, a yearning for some kind of reenchantment (the term can mean many different things) will make itself felt. As Charles Taylor says, "Western modernity tends to awaken protest, resistances of various kinds" (555), and one form of resistance is to go in search of reenchantment. Horror films, whether they contain ghosts, psychic powers,
6 monsters, or even a pure metaphysical evil, function in this context. In other words, horror narratives are a crucial way in which we imagine possibilities for reenchantment in a disenchanted world. There is perhaps no better concrete example of this than the most successful horror film of all time, The Exorcist.
1.1 The Exorcist and the Possibility of Reenchantment
"Is God Dead?" In bold white text on a stark black background, the April 1966 cover of
Time magazine printed these three words, challenging its American readers to consider this controversial possibility. In doing so, it addressed a growing sense by the 1960s that western modernity, and even traditionally religious America, was all but completely secular. At about the very same time, these questions led the successful Hollywood screenwriter William Peter Blatty to ponder an idea for a novel about the struggle for faith in the modern world. That novel turned out to be The Exorcist; it became the best- selling book of 1970. The origins of the story of Father Damien and the possession of young Regan go back to Blatty's time as an undergraduate student at Georgetown
University in 1949. There, at the Jesuit university, the Catholic-raised Blatty read an article in the Washington Post describing a real demonic possession and successful priestly exorcism." It seemed to the young divinity student that here was "tangible evidence of transcendence... If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God
2The story appears in detail in William Peter Blatty on The Exorcist: From Novel to Film. 7 and a life everlasting" (Kermode, 12). He wrote a paper on the incident at the time, but the subject stuck with him over the intervening years, until he returned to it in the 1960s in hopes of producing a definitive non-fiction account of the events with the help of those originally involved. When his investigations ran into nothing but dead ends, as those close to the case refused to discuss it, Blatty had little choice but to switch instead to a fictional story inspired by the exorcism. The novel appeared in 1970 and the film, based on his screenplay and with Blatty as producer, began shooting in the late summer of
1972. The Exorcist, directed by William Friedkin, and starring Jason Miller, Lynda Blair, and Max von Sydow, hit America's screens on Thanksgiving weekend in 1973. It went on to become the highest grossing horror film of all time, and topped the 1974 North
American box office. It was the first time a horror film had achieved this since
Frankenstein in 1932.
Much has been said and written about The Exorcist but I know of no serious treatment of this important background story about the intentions of its creator.
Overlooked by all it seems is that the seeds of the most successful of contemporary horror films were sown not with the intent primarily to frighten its audience but, rather, to reenchant it, not to horrify or terrify as an end in itself, but as a means to a theological or spiritual end. Was the popularity of the film related at all to these intentions, however? Or was The Exorcist's unprecedented box office success attributable simply to the film's effective fright scenes, or its marketing campaign, or some other unquantifiable factor?
8 Put another way, is it just a coincidence that this uniquely successful horror film was born of a seemingly unique approach to the genre: horror as reenchantment? Or could Blatty's diagnosis and prescription for modernity's spiritual malaise have touched a wider nerve than even he could have expected? Upon its release, many commentators noted that the film's occult content, its representation of supernatural evil, seemed part of a growing interest in such matters throughout society. The film's religious dimension, and not just its style and its hype, did appear significant to contemporary observers. One such observer was the sociologist Peter Berger.
In 1974, Berger wrote a short piece in the journal Worldview in response to the film's success. In it, Berger linked Blatty and Friedkin's film to other indications of an
"occult revival" in early 1970s America. The central insight he offered remains both provocative and entirely unrecognized today. Drawing a parallel with pornography, which he suggests exists as a category precisely because we suppress and censor sexuality, Berger calls the revival of interest in the occult, the "pornography of the modern mind" ("The Devil", 35). This parallel is not meant to be pejorative. He simply suggests that an interest the devil as a character, and by extension the whole occult revival, is the result of a backlash against secular society. It is most definitely not, he insists, a reaction against the church and organized religion, as many thought it to be at the time (35). The seat of people's discontent by 1970 could hardly be with any constraints imposed by the church, not in the wake of sexual revolution and the counter-
9 culture. Instead, if people are generally dissatisfied with life today, Berger argues, the principle cause of this is society's disenchantment (36). In other words, what is
increasingly denied us in modernity is an experience of the sacred or transcendent, of
mystery and wonder, or at least of the possibility of a spiritual outlook or worldview.
This "censorship", he suggests, appears to be provoking surprising "irrational" interests and beliefs, and the broad appeal of The Exorcist, which reached out far beyond genre
fans, could be tied to this (36).
Berger's observation about The Exorcist was made entirely in passing and not developed either by himself or anyone else. I believe however that he was absolutely right. The received history of the horror film, especially its striking shift from a drive-in,
skid row, post-war genre to one respectable enough to feature major stars and substantial budgets beginning in the 1970s, remains incomplete unless more attention is given to this religious/spiritual context, to this reenchanting function. Charles Taylor's recent work echoes the same point Berger made in 1974. Discussing the possibility for belief in transcendence to persist in contemporary society, he draws upon the same basic mechanics of censorship and backlash: "Here is where one of the disadvantages of belief has a flip side which is positive [for it]. The very fact that its forms are not absolutely in true with the spirit of the age; a spirit in which people can feel imprisoned, and feel the
J Interestingly, Berger had written previous to this a novel of speculative fiction, seemingly as another way of working out his ideas about the place of the supernatural in modern life. Protocol of a Damnation, which bears a resemblance to The Exorcist, was published in 1975, though it was written in the late 60s (at the same time Blatty was writing his best-seller). 10 need to break out; ... this can draw people towards it" (533). In other words, believing in
something supernatural, whether it be a specific theological conception of God or a general new age spiritual notion like reincarnation, becomes an act of rebellion against secular society by an individual left dissatisfied amidst the dilemmas of modern life.
At the time of The Exorcist's release, Berger's work on modernity and secularization was at the forefront of the sociology of religion. The consensus of most post-war social science followed Max Weber in assuming that religion was incompatible with the modern world. This came to be called "the secularization thesis". In the 1960s,
Berger investigated this situation, explaining how it could be accounted for via the sociology of knowledge. In doing so, he became one of the strongest proponents of this thesis. Simultaneously, however, American society experienced the resurgence of religious feeling discussed above—not just the counter-culture and the occult revival, but the continued rise of evangelical Christianity as well. To his credit, Berger was one of the first to observe and attempt to account for this as well. In doing so, he was forced to rethink and account for not only disenchantment but the sudden and surprising possibilities of reenchantment suggested by the new spirituality. Many at the time dismissed the new age movement of the 1970s as a cultish fad, but social scientists have since come to recognize that, on the contrary, the push for reenchantment persists some three decades later. In 1981, Morris Berman explored the contemporary critique of disenchanted modernity, placing the mood of the 1970s in the context of a long tradition
11 of western thought reaching back to the Enlightenment but his argument remained an isolated opening salvo; it would be over decade before some momentum appeared in philosophy and critical theory. Today, we see authors in various disciplines invoke the term "reenchantment" often enough to identify something we might call "the turn to reenchantment."4 What is behind this turn? I agree with Berger that we realize now that
Max Weber, in 1918, "did not sufficiently perceive the possibilities of a re-enchantment of the world" ("Glory", 29).
The continued importance of religion, the dilemmas of secularization, and the hunger for something beyond what Taylor calls the "immanent frame" hardly register today in the study of film and popular culture. Films appear each year, many out of
Hollywood, that engage with these concerns but film studies scholars barely recognize religion and spirituality when they discuss contemporary cinema. Berger and Taylor represent scholars whose work addresses these issues in disciplines like sociology and philosophy. For film, media and cultural studies, there is much to be done. Reframing horror films in the context of contemporary religion and spirituality, the task of this dissertation, is one small contribution to this larger project. Next, I will look at the general state of scholarship that brings together the concerns of religious studies and film studies to assess the health of this project at this point in time.
"Examples would include Griffin (2001), Bennett (2001), Gane (2002), McGrath (2002), Graham (2007), and Smith (2008), Elkins and Morgan (2009). 12 1.2 Religion and Film Studies
By highlighting how horror films respond to disenchantment and imagine paths toward reenchantment, this research participates in a larger critique of contemporary film theory and cultural studies that does appear to be gaining momentum in recent years. This critique aims to correct an imbalance summed up well by Dennis Taylor:
We live in an age of critical discourses that are expert in discussing the
dimensions of class, gender, textuality, and historical context. Yet, an important
part of the literature we read [and cinema we see] goes untouched by our
discourses, or is deconstructed, historicized, sexualized, or made symptomatic of
covert power relationships (3).
The "important part" to which he refers is religious experience in all its various forms.
The need identified by Dennis Taylor and others is the "need for a religious criticism"
(3). This is emphatically not a theological criticism that frames films with one or another religious creed, but rather a foundational critical language for talking about the spiritual dimensions of modern life and, in particular, their expression in our art and popular culture. I intend for the research presented here to contribute to this growing project, one that already includes significant work from scholars in a variety of fields. Before discussing some of that work, I want to elaborate on Taylor's concerns by examining in more detail how they relate to film theory and the study of popular film genres. 13 Today, there is little doubt that theory and criticism of popular cinema remains grounded in approaches that Jeffery Pence calls "thing-centered", that tend "to develop and promulgate methods that either ignore other possible modes of thought, expression and feeling or convert them violently into the method's own terms" (45). As a result, film theorists continually fail to acknowledge the very real spiritual or religious concerns of both filmmakers and audiences, concerns that make the desire for reenchantment a significant social phenomenon, whether one believes it is in vain or not. What is needed here is not a drastic overhaul, only an adjustment that recognizes that the spiritual dimension of life is just as real for human subjects as the social, psychological and political. Films must still be situated within the complex historical circumstances from which they emerge. These circumstances must still be interrogated for the influence of power relations on the beliefs, values and assumptions they represent and reproduce. And we must of course continue to account for the ways in which individuals and groups use film texts to contest meaning, and to assert some degree of control and autonomy over their lives. What is missing from these approaches is a better appreciation for the complex role that all the forms of contemporary religion and spirituality, and the cross- pressures of life in a secular age, play in each of these areas.5
Where should we begin to fix this situation? Is there any groundwork laid for a treatment of the "spiritual or religious concerns" of artists and audiences in film studies?
5No doubt, the major reason for this goes far beyond film studies itself. It has to do with widespread assumptions in critical theory about the role of religion in the contemporary life. I return to this in Ch 2. 14 Is there any precedent for considering how the critical turn to reenchantment operates within cinema? At first glance, it appears that there might be. Over the last fifteen years, a new interdisciplinary area has been emerging. Employing theoretical frameworks from religious studies, theology and film theory and criticism, it continues to reinvigorate a dusty old corner of academia that usually goes by the name of "religion and film". Before about 1995, a list of publications belonging under this heading was small indeed, especially in English. In fact, since the beginning of academic film studies in the 1960s, the total number of publications could probably be counted on one hand. Paul Schrader's
Transcendental Style in Film appeared in 1972 and Ronald Hollo way's Beyond the
Image: Approaches to The Religious Dimension in Cinema in 1977. In 1982, John May and Michael Bird published a very strong collection of material, Religion and Film, now long out-of-print. And the list pretty much ends there. Since about 1995, however, the number of new books has grown each year.6 Alongside this increased activity we find peer-reviewed academic journals like the Journal of Religion and Film (launched in
1996) and the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (launched in 2002). The role played by the former is especially significant, creating as it did an initial forum for discussion and helping to define the frameworks and goals of this area of study. Yet
6A selective list of publications might include Martin and Ostwalt (1995), Marsh and Ortiz (1997), May (1997), Miles (1998), Plate and Jasper (1999), Bergesen and Greeley (2000), Aichele and Walsh (2002), Bandy and Monda (2003), Coates (2003), Lyden (2003), Christianson, Frances and Telford (2005). 15 another indicator of an emerging field having finally arrived is the appearance of a number of general introductory textbooks.
Why this trend now? Lyden offers a few explanations for the rapid growth in the field. First, he points out that a new generation of religious studies scholars is embracing the central importance of mass media and visual popular culture in contemporary life (1).
This leads to an increase in the study of film from both a variety of academic perspectives
(history of religions, sociology of religion, etc) and specific religious points-of-view
(theologians of various backgrounds, for example). Lyden also notes that new technologies grant educators unprecedented access to films that can be used in classroom instruction as well as in research, increasing the likelihood that religious studies scholars will engage with cinema in a serious fashion (1). Finally, he highlights a general shift in the attitude towards what constitutes religion and religious experience today, as scholars move away from orthodox definitions and begin to take seriously the manner in which contemporary popular culture replaces traditional religion, for better or worse, for increasing numbers of people (2).
Lyden's ideas draw attention to a very important distinction that must be made.
Religion and Film studies (I will capitalize these words now to emphasize a distinct interdisciplinary area), by combining two established academic disciplines, faces the inevitable consequence that its contributors consist of two rather distinct groups. There
7 These include Wright (2007), Mitchell and Plate (2007), Flesher and Torry (2007), and Watkins (2008).
16 are those trained in religious studies or theology who turn their attention to the movies, and there are film studies scholars who develop a particular interest in the religious aspects of cinema. Lyden, himself a religious studies scholar, clearly has the first group in mind. When he attempts to account for the rise in Religion and Film studies since the
1990s, he assumes that an interest in religion already exists and asks, "Why a growing interest in film?" But when we stand on the other side, the opposite question appears. A film studies perspective takes an interest in movies for granted; consequently, it is the interest in religion that seems curious and calls for explanation. We might ask: why the growth in interest among film studies scholars in religion and religious categories of experience since the early 1990s?
Immediately, the question highlights a surprising fact: it is not at all clear that there has been any significant increase in attention to religion within film scholarship. A close look at the explosion of attention to religion and film over the last decade reveals that the vast majority of work comes from academics whose principle affiliation is with religious studies or theology. This is a surprising and I think quite serious situation for film studies. At the risk of sounding defensive, I think there has to be a concern on the part of film studies with this significant case of disciplinary poaching. If film studies defines itself by and claims as its rightful domain the critical investigation and analysis of cinema in all its aspects, from production to reception, from history to aesthetics, then it should be concerned that virtually none of the books published in the explosion of works
17 on religion and film since 1995 come from academics in film studies departments. Of course, I am not criticizing the material on cinema produced by religious studies and theology. Quite the opposite, in fact. Much of this material is strong enough that it makes the situation all the more serious. Nearly all of the recognized authorities in Religion and
Film studies, those building this vibrant and vital interdisciplinary area, can be found outside of film departments.
Again, this is not to suggest we have no significant contributors within film studies, but it does provide a sense of what is at stake. Nor should this be a competition in any way. Naturally, the best possible situation for any interdisciplinary field of inquiry is a dynamic and productive balance of contributions from each of the traditional disciplines involved. As things stand, however, we are not anywhere close to this. If interdisciplinary work promises an exciting and fruitful exchange of ideas between academics with different backgrounds, then right now both religious studies scholars and film studies scholars are missing out. The former, I have no doubt, for I have spoken with many, would welcome more input from their colleagues who specialize in cinema. At the same time, the latter continue to overlook much of the excellent work on film being done by those who have been building a new area of study called Religion and Film studies over the last several decades.
What is at stake in my research is the contribution film studies as a discipline can and should make to an emerging interdisciplinary field that will only grow in importance
18 in the years to come. The dilemmas of secularization and the contested role of religions and religious categories of experience will not be resolved any time soon. This will form a central aspect of social, cultural and political discourse over the next several decades at least. The manner in which film scholars meet the challenge to bring more to the table in this vital area will affect the discipline's health and relevance for the next generation or more.
My contribution to Religion and Film studies with this research is to focus on genre, an area that remains overlooked so far. This absence of genre studies is almost certainly a result of the lack of contributions from film studies scholars. The current literature by religious studies scholars focuses more on individual films, especially those works that eschew genre in favor of a narrative and stylistic approach we might loosely call, after David Bordwell, "art cinema." Or else, it takes an auteurist approach focused on the work of specific filmmakers, or a survey of representations of particular religious figures or characters: Jesus, priests, the devil, etc. The latter approach comes closest to genre studies but remains limited in what it can say as long as a more comprehensive understanding of film genre is missing. A look at how religious and spiritual concerns find expression not only in singular works of art cinema or in the careers of specific film artists, but also in the rich, complex area of popular genre cinema can significantly broaden the scope of Religion and Film studies.
19 At the same time, the absence of the study of the religious or spiritual dimensions of film genres in film studies leads to a limited understanding of what popular films do and what genres mean to both filmmakers and audiences. My intention, from this perspective, is to reorient our approach to a familiar and continuously popular cinematic genre, the horror film. The necessity of such a task exists because nearly all critical studies of the genre fail to acknowledge one of horror's most vital functions. As much as scary films may aim to send a shiver down our spine, make us jump from our seats, or squirm and shield our eyes in disgust, they also directly address the tensions and anxieties of life in a secular age. In other words, while horror certainly has more than one social function, we must take better account of how it has allowed artists and audiences alike to negotiate their deeply ambivalent feelings about modernity, and their desire for reenchantment.
1.3 Chapter Breakdown
The following five chapters aim to take a closer look at horror's reenchanting function today. In "Taking the Supernatural Seriously: Genre Theory and the Horror Film", I situate my approach to the horror film within the existing literature on genre in film studies. First, I address the manner in which contemporary film scholarship frames horror films politically. This approach, I argue, leads film studies to overlook the religious or spiritual dimensions of the films and results in a lack of attention to the reenchanting
20 function so important today. In order to reorient our approach, I historicize the political approach to horror by situating it within the development of film studies in the 1970s. In that decade, political ideological criticism eclipsed another framework for studying genre texts, myth criticism, that still has much to offer. One of the weaknesses of myth criticism however was its tendency to universalize where ideological critics (correctly) insisted on historical context. In reconsidering the usefulness of myth criticism, therefore, I follow
Andrew Tudor, in seeking to avoid a generalizing approach that would claim to account for all horror film (as if such a category could even be defined). Instead, my goal is to describe the "particular" function of specific contemporary cycles of the genre. By avoiding speaking of horror films as one all-encompassing group, and focusing instead on specific cycles, I sidestep the pitfalls of genre studies that assume stable, abiding and universal boundaries and functions for their objects of study. The definition of a horror film has unquestionably changed over time and the uses to which society has put horror narratives have also changed and continue to do so. Tudor suggests then that we not ask general questions like "why horror?" but instead ask "why this horror at this time for these people?" My focus on reenchantment as a mythic function follows this advice, as it examines particular cycles of the horror film since the 1990s that speak to a particular ambivalence about secular society, belief and transcendence. Drawing on the work of
Richard Slotkin, Robert Ray and especially Richard Dyer, I propose using a notion of the
21 popular text as myth in a manner that balances historical context with sensitivity to
human concerns of a religious or spiritual nature.
The next chapter, '"I Want to Believe': The Dilemmas of the Secular Age and the
Meaning of Reenchantment," consists of a closer look at these concerns. The existence of
dilemmas around belief and secularity alluded to previously are now addressed in detail.
Building on the work of Peter Berger and Charles Taylor, I trace the history of the idea of
secularization from Max Weber into the present and highlight how the term
"disenchantment" has come to describe what it means to live in a secular world. With disenchantment defined, it becomes possible to consider what reenchantment might mean. After discussing various ways in which that notion appears in contemporary discourse, I tie my definition of reenchantment as a function of the horror genre to the tensions, anxieties and cross-pressures felt by today's audiences. The goal is to highlight the way that the majority of the audience of popular texts such as these feel deeply ambivalent about life in the secular age and the way that supernatural narratives respond to and offer resolutions to this ambivalence, primarily by providing an opportunity to imagine, contrary to the apparent "flatness" of modern life, that there is indeed
"something more."
Chapters Four and Five turn from the general to the specific and examine two of the most important horror film cycles of the last two decades: the Supernatural
Investigation Cycle and the Serial Killer Profiler cycle. In both of these chapters, I look at
22 how a genre as broad as the horror film produces within a given period of time one or more series of films that can be grouped together by a shared set of characteristics and themes. These cycles, once recognized, can then be studied for the context that they emerge from, the specific films whose success helped launch them, and the historically- situated anxieties and tensions to which they respond.
"Discrediting the Immanent Frame: Converting Skeptics in the Supernatural
Investigation Cycle" looks at the Supernatural Investigation cycle, a large group of films that appeared in the wake of Fox Television's successful series, The X-Files. Here we see the reenchanting function of horror very clearly. In these films, an investigation undertaken by a skeptical and rational detective leads to an encounter with the supernatural, converting the skeptic into a believer. I discuss the relationship between knowledge, belief and faith in contemporary society and note the unique blend of the detective and the horror genres that give this particular cycle its identity. I argue that this cycle offers pleasure and resolves ambivalence by discrediting the closed interpretation of the immanent frame associated with secular society.
The investigation structure of these films remains the most common framework today for cinematic treatments of the supernatural but the contemporary horror film also includes a whole category of narratives that critics and scholars recognize as distinct from supernatural horror because the fears they generate come from threats that are entirely
"real". And the vast majority of realist horror films feature what was once called the
23 "psycho killer" and today is called the "serial killer". These realist horror films have always been a part of the genre; yet, they have taken on a much more central role in recent decades. Indeed, it was in the 1990s, at the same time that the Supernatural
Investigation cycle emerged, that the serial killer film reached a point where it became recognizable as a cycle. The key development that led to the cycle was the appearance of the character called the "profiler", after his/her unique method of detection, "profiling" or
"mindhunting."
In "Denying the Denial of Evil: Looking into the Abyss in the Serial Killer
Profiler Cycle," I examine these profiler films and in particular those examples of the cycle that blend a realistic treatment of real killers with a nod to the supernatural. The profiler's ability to get inside the mind of the killer becomes difficult to separate from a psychic power or "sixth sense," and the line between serial killer hunter and superhero blurs. At the same time, the killer himself seems to embody a force of genuine evil that threatens society. This chapter situates the representation of killers and their hunters in the context of the modern study of random stranger murder within the social sciences and law enforcement, highlighting how our language in these discourses continually slips from the scientific objectivity to metaphysical reflections on the reality of evil. Just like in the Supernatural Investigation cycle, a disenchanting notion (in the previous chapter it was "the immanent frame", in this it is the "denial of metaphysical evil") is discredited or
24 at least thrown into question and the possibility that some mysterious incalculable force
does exist entertained.
And so the horror genre over the last two decades presents us with two very
distinct cycles, one focused on reality of the supernatural, and the other raising the real threat of real-life killers to the status of genre icons. At first glace, these two cycles might
appear to have little in common besides their coincidence in time. But in Chapters Four and Five I will demonstrate how they both aim to reconcile ambivalence brought on by the cross-pressures of life in a secular age, where many feel something is missing from a world that exists only within the strict border of the immanent frame but also feel unable to access or conceive of "something more." In the cycles, however, this cross-pressured
subject can watch skeptics, in whom they recognize a little (or a lot) of themselves, converted from non-believers to believers by encounters with the supernatural. Or they can watch heroic detectives with a paranormal gift struggle against a force that is both very real and also seemingly metaphysical. The Serial Killer Profiler film asks "Perhaps serial killers are truly Evil, for how else can we explain such behaviour?" Both cycles in their own way afford audiences the opportunity to resolve their ambivalence via reenchantment. Whereas the access to reenchantment in the Supernatural Investigation cycle comes from the ambiguous nature of reality, the fine line between belief and doubt, and the undermining of the immanent frame, in the Profiler film the possibility of reenchantment emerges from the encounter with this darkness that seems to contradict the
25 modern denial that evil exists.
By way of a conclusion, my chapter "Reenchantment and Utopia: Tim Burton's
Sleepy Hollow" pulls together all of the ideas I introduced in the previous chapters and employs them in a close textual analysis of the exemplary horror film of the era. Sleepy
Hollow (1999) epitomizes the American horror film of this period by combining a supernatural investigation narrative with a profiler film. It follows the basic structure of the former cycle: A rational detective who represents the core notions of the scientific search for truth (logical inference, rational explanation, trust in the scientific method) catches a case that appears to involve a supernatural influence. The case however is one of serial murder and the killer represents an evil of metaphysical proportions. The detective struggles to apply his methods but is finally forced to recognize that, despite his skepticism, there is something happening here for which science can not account. Upon acknowledging this, he undergoes a conversion but also maintains his rational detective skills, the new balance of skeptic and believer that he represents becomes the key to solving the mystery and leads to the film's happy ending. Tim Burton, the film's director, has said that the story is about "being open," and the contemporary horror film in general allows us, in fact encourages us, to be open to the possibility that "something more" exists. The need to believe that this can be true remains an important one in our world today, a need to which the reenchanting function of the horror film responds.
26 2. Taking the Supernatural Seriously: Genre Theory and the Horror Film
You can raise issues in the horror genre that you can't raise so easily in other
types of films. Characters can talk about the existence of God in a horror movie,
whereas in other films that would be incredibly pretentious.
- screenwriter Nicholas Kazan
Modern horror and the cinema grew up together, their destinies intertwined. Both are children of the nineteenth century, born slowly over many decades. Horror's roots are
in the gothic romance and the revival of interest in folk and fairy tales in the late 1700s.
Cinema's roots are in the earliest optical entertainment devices that appeared in the same era. A memorable scene in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999) brings this connection to life. Circa 1800, a young boy plays with a candle-powered magic lantern that splashes
spectacular shadows of witches around the room and the lead character, played by Johnny
Depp, carries a thaumatrope around in his pocket. The prehistory of the movies took a giant leap forward in the 1840s with the invention of photography at the same time that
Edgar Allan Poe began to transform gothic into horror. The century ended with the birth of cinema in 1895 and the publication of the Dracula two years later, a connection alluded to by Francis Ford Coppola in Br am Stoker's Dracula (1994). And there is more.
Horror's classic movie monsters—Lugosi and Karloff; Dracula, Frankenstein and the
27 Mummy—coincided with the invention of sound and the beginning of the classical
Hollywood period. And, most significantly for us here, film studies as a discipline, the
scholarly study of horror, and the modern horror film all came of age together in the period that spanned the late-1960s through the 1970s.
The first books on the history and theory of horror movies (Clarens, Butler)
appeared around 1968 at the same time that academic departments dedicated to the study of cinema began to appear. These earliest works surveyed the themes and symbolism of
silent and classical era movie monsters just as George Romero's stunning low-budget
Night of the Living Dead (1968) set the entire genre on a path of revival and transformation. Film theory too was about to undergo a transformation. Out of France and the work of the Cahiers du Cinema critics, where so much of film studies had begun, came new concepts such as "apparatus" and "ideology" that would change the way movies would be studied. Over the next two decades, the new horror film was a frequent subject of this new film theory, sometimes championed, often criticized, but always treated seriously and commanding attention. Of late, however, things seem to have changed.
Despite an abundance of publications on the horror film recently, there is no sustained treatment of the overall direction of the genre since the demise of the slasher cycle of the 1980s. There are close readings of individual films, detailed industrial histories on earlier eras, a variety of reception studies, as well as numerous surveys—
28 some broad, others detailed—of all the extant literature. None, however, attempt a serious
assessment of American horror over the last two decades. Some will attribute this to an absence of anything worth discussing, arguing that there have been few interesting films and no significant trends. They couldn't be more wrong. While the "golden era" of the
1970s may be far behind us, horror continues to offer provocative texts and striking reflections of contemporary issues. One of these issues, of course, is the dilemma of secularization, to which we may attribute horror's present concern with reenchantment.
In this chapter, I begin my study of horror and reenchantment by considering why those who study the genre overlook this area. The reason, I argue, lay in received attitudes about horror within film studies that are tied to specific analytical frameworks and a received history of the genre. In the 1970s, the serious study of horror coincided with the rise of a highly politicized film theory, and both helped establish the discipline's academic identity at a crucial period in its development. Few other approaches to horror have gained even a toehold since. When it comes to an idea like reenchantment, which deals with notions so antithetical to engrained political attitudes within the discipline and the academy in general, the task of reorienting horror film theory is even more daunting.
But the new direction I propose, the study of reenchantment, need not abandon the work that precedes it. In the second part of this chapter, I outline an approach to studying supernatural narratives that balances a consideration of ideology (or, the
"situated-ness" of the film text within social and historical context) with a focus on how
29 these movies reflect and respond to disenchantment and the desire for reenchantment. I argue that the best way to achieve this balance is to return to the founding moments of film studies and the study of the horror film, at or just before the entrenchment of the political-ideological approach, and to locate there some old but fresh ideas. In the early- to-mid 1970s, the treatment of genre as "myth," though it was rarely applied to horror at the time, offered an insightful and still valuable framework for studying popular texts. I synthesize the ideas of several myth critics and outline how, with careful adjustments to account for history, a mythic approach to horror can illuminate the genre's reenchanting function and open up finally for serious study a whole generation of films.
2.1 "The monster no longer metaphysical": Politics and the Study of Horror
The American horror film provokes less enthusiasm today among many scholars because of the waning of the connection between horror and politics that characterized the genre in the 1970s. The original wave of vibrant academic theory and criticism of horror film coincided with a significant rise in the genre's social and political engagement alongside a blossoming of creativity and popularity. For a time, the films and their critics fed off one another. The new independent horror films of the 1970s, created by the likes of
George Romero, Wes Craven, Larry Cohen, David Cronenberg and others, pulsed with energy and intelligence. The genre suddenly had something important to say about contemporary life. This in turn inspired scholars to treat the horror film seriously and
30 attempt to articulate its achievements and its potential. Before 1970, only three book length studies of the horror film existed in English. By the end of the decade, they were appearing at the rate of two or three a year. Concurrently, the financial success, visibility, and popularity of the genre drew the attention of less enthusiastic critics as well. The slasher/stalker cycle in particular found itself at the centre of a new film studies discourse on gender, sexuality and representation introduced by feminist scholars. While these two positions towards the new American horror films of the 1970s and 1980s differed in one sense, as one celebrated one group of films while the other questioned the value and the intentions behind another group of films, they did share some common ground. Both were in principle interested in the relationship between the horror film and contemporary politics. Today, the landscape of horror has changed. Not only has the vigorous feminist analysis left the genre behind, but the politically charged independent horror film embraced and celebrated in the 1970s has all but disappeared as well. Today's horror films, those made over the last two decades, rarely attempt to make the kind of political statements for which the previous generation received praise. Instead, they have turned towards reenchantment. This has left the conventional approach to horror with little or nothing positive to say.
Scholars discussing contemporary horror films seem by default then to adopt a dismissive attitude. In the new introduction to the 2004 revised version of his important early collection, Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (originally published in
31 1984), Barry Keith Grant writes that "horror's situation in the new century reflects merely the increased intellectual impoverishment and neoconservatism of the New
Hollywood" (Grant and Sharrett x). Christopher Sharrett, echoing Grant's perspective, laments the compromised politics he sees everywhere in the "neo-conservative" horror film. But isn't this position unnecessarily selective and pessimistic? By framing the horror film exclusively via contemporary politics, exclusively along a spectrum of progressive to reactionary, critical reflection on the films limits itself to only one sort of reading and one criterion for determining value. The disappointment with contemporary horror derives from an assumption that the genre's essence is its potential for radical politics, which it achieved, according to Sharrett, as the "films of the 1960s and 1970s became steadily more progressive, constantly challenging the legitimacy of capitalist, patriarchal rule, with the monster no longer metaphysical ... [but rather] an emblem of the upheaval in bourgeois civilization itself (100).
This political approach to the horror film is the direct legacy of Robin Wood's influential reading of the genre dating to the late 1970s. That theory, which posited a distinction between politically reactionary and politically progressive works, put the study of the genre on solid academic ground. At the time, of course, film studies discourse was itself highly politically charged. The notion of ideology introduced in the
1960s led to a debate about how to incorporate it into film studies. The sort of analysis
32 Wood applied to American horror belonged to that debate. Against the growing attitude that ideology contaminated all of popular cinema, Wood polemically differentiated the genre so that those works challenging the status quo at the time could be appreciated.
Thus, the theory was a political theory and had a political goal from the outset. As well, it surely could not have been written had there not been a group of politically-charged horror films appearing on screens at that very time. In this sense, Wood's reading of the
American horror film was less a thorough overall theory of the genre (which to his credit he always admitted) than it is a contextualization of a transformation in the genre brought about by a striking cycle of political horror films produced in the 1970s.
Today it is evident that the radical political wing of the 70s horror film, while important, consisted of a rather small number of movies made at a particular moment in time. It is usually associated with the work of George Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe
Hooper and Larry Cohen. In fact, there is no strong consensus that even these best examples presented an uncompromising progressive picture. Dana Polan argues convincingly that nearly all the films of the 70s, despite a certain amount of insurrection narratively and thematically, ultimately reinscribed some version of the status quo (150-
1). Similarly, R.H.W. Dillard's penetrating analysis of Romero's iconic Night of the
Living Dead (1968) found little more than nihilism and despair where others had tried to
Robin Wood discusses this context in his Introduction to Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton. 33 identify a radical political statement. At the time it perhaps seemed that the horror film
had discovered, in Wood's words, its "essential subject" (204), but such an argument
dismisses not only five decades of horror movies, which become only a prelude to the
modern political horror film, but also a very long tradition of gothic narrative, horror
film's literary antecedent, most of which had little interest in politics.
One wonders in fact whether horror and politics mix well at all. While the
intention to convey a decisive progressive or conservative message may be there, the
nature of the genre inevitably interferes. Horror's gothic heritage is critical here. It is a
common observation of the Gothic that its most prominent characteristic is the overriding
ambivalence with which it treats its subjects, consistently undercutting any clear political
statement a text might appear to make. Fred Botting argues that "the ambivalence of
Gothic fiction seems to be an effect of the countervailing movements of propriety and
imaginative excess in which morality, in its enthusiasm to identify and exclude forms of evil, of culturally threatening elements, becomes entangled in the symbolic and social antagonisms it sets out to distinguish" (8-9). Numerous other readings of horror also emphasize the centrality of ambivalence and ambiguity to the genre. The notion appears in Freud's unheimlich, in Julia Kristeva's chora, and in Noel Carroll's cognitive theory of art-horror. Even when unintended, ambiguity remains a side effect of any attempt to represent the genre's central concerns: the supernatural, monsters, evil, violence,
2 An example of the latter can be found in Ryan and Kellner, Camera Politica. 34 darkness and death. Wood himself acknowledged the genre's ambivalence even as he
outlined his guidelines for distinguishing the progressive from the reactionary horror
film. More than anything else, it is the incompatibility between Wood's schematic
approach, searching as it does for clear and simple formulas, and horror's inevitable
ambivalence that leaves one most unsatisfied upon reading his work. Those who engaged
with, elaborated upon, and followed from Wood's initial propositions usually recognized
this and made adjustments, but the final word might be that the genre's ambivalence
works against the whole project of trying to judge the films according to strict political
criteria and subsequently categorizing them as simply progressive or reactionary. More
often than not, horror refuses such attempts at clarity.
The received approach to the contemporary horror film highlighted here is a perfect example of what Jeffery Pence calls "thing-centred" approaches in the theory and criticism of popular cinema. For Pence, the difficulty with these approaches is that they
"develop and promulgate methods that either ignore other possible modes of thought, expression and feeling or convert them violently into the method's own terms" (45). One effect of this is that film theorists fail to acknowledge genuine spiritual or religious concerns of both artists and audiences. The horror film more so than any other genre suffers today from the reductions of "thing-centred" theory and criticism, precisely because the films' concerns are so often today oriented towards the spiritual, religious or
35 transcendent, as the screenwriter Nicholas Kazan suggests in the epigraph that opened this chapter.
Ideological approaches tend to remain resolutely immanent, profoundly suspicious of the notions of truth and transcendence found in metaphysics and religious thought. Ideological criticism's goal, after all, is to ground values and their representation in history and in this world. Horror, as do most forms of religion and spirituality, continually points to another world, or at least another dimension of this world that undermines a commitment to what Charles Taylor calls a "closed" conception of ":the immanent frame" (542). The dissonance between the two is evident, for example, in the assertion made by Sharrett that "the monster no longer metaphysical" was a positive transformation for the genre. Such a judgment takes for granted that "the death of God" and "the end of metaphysics" pronounced by modern philosophers ought to be reflected in the horror film. A good horror film, according to this perspective, is one that employs the monster allegorically as part of a critique of political and social injustice. But, this runs contrary to the entire history of the genre, which, since its beginnings in the gothic fiction of the eighteenth century, has provided an aesthetic counter-point to this very sort of thinking. Sharrett's assumption emerges from a specific conception of critical theory and ideological criticism, one that thrived in the 70s and 80s but today seems unnecessarily narrow. While twentieth century philosophy took for granted "the end of metaphysics," the twenty-first century began in the midst of a "turn to religion" in
36 continental philosophy and critical theory. Presently, there are indications that film studies may be coming around (Pence, Coates) but as I pointed out in Chapter One, most of the work on religion and film remains the dominion of religious studies scholars.
At the same time, the shining moment of the political horror film has long since passed. Most horror is and almost always will be metaphysical in its concerns, and was even in the 1970s, as my anecdote on The Exorcist in Chapter One highlighted, and this is so even when it deals with the "real" horrors of modern violence and murder, as we will see in Chapter Five. Nevertheless, in the most common approaches to horror in film studies, we see an unfortunate attempt to reduce horror's concerns to politics. It is this approach to the genre that I challenge here. While I recognize that much of the critical work on the politics of horror is of great value, rarely does film studies scholarship accept that the genre's treatment of metaphysical categories and concerns, while not necessarily outside ideology, need not be reduced so violently into a contest between progressive and reactionary politics.
This is not to say, however, that I propose abandoning a critical ideological theory of the horror film. Instead, I will do what ideological criticism supposes to be its task, but which it has so often failed to perform with regard to horror: place the films within the horizon of beliefs, values and assumptions in which they were made. Critics of horror have excelled at situating their chosen texts within assumed notions of gender, class and race since the 1970s, but at the cost of overlooking how these films express the dilemmas
37 of secularization and are shaped by the contested place of belief, faith and the spiritual in contemporary society. Unlike those approaches to horror that consistently focus on the immanent, to the point of allegorizing every representation of the supernatural, I intend to foreground these representations as denotations, the supernatural as supernatural. It is the question of the reality of the supernatural, the possibility that something real exists beyond this world, or beyond science's conception of it, that attracts us to these films. We will miss the point of narratives that rub the supernatural up against the natural, the normal up against the paranormal, and skeptics up against believers, if we do not take representations of the supernatural at face value but instead reduce these images to political or ideological symbols. If there is a politics in the contemporary horror film, it should be located instead in the genre's resistance to a certain experience of flatness and emptiness generated by modern life (Taylor, 390-1). Considering horror as reenchantment will result in a better understanding of how the contemporary supernatural horror film fits into the broader discussion about religion, faith and culture in today's world.
One solution to this problem is to reevaluate the received wisdom and received history of the genre. Whereas it is common today to distinguish between the "classic" horror films of the 1930s through the 1960s and the "modern" horror films of the 1970s onwards, we ought now consider whether a third period has begun. In contemporary examples of the genre made since 1990, the tensions between the secular and the
38 spiritual, the immanent and the transcendent, always at least a part of the gothic, begin to take on a central importance. Over the last two decades, there is a noticeable increase in the production and popularity of explicitly supernatural horror films, one significant enough to compel an update to the standard periodization of the American horror film.
Many American horror films made in this period share a set of concerns and a collection of recurring figures that distinguish them from the films of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the classical films of the 1930s and 40s, the two periods that have drawn the attention of most scholarly work on the genre. This begins around 1990, indicated by the demise of the slasher film, the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers, and a shift in tone that treats the subject matter of horror with deadly seriousness.
Two cycles in particular became the avenue for these shifts, the supernatural investigation narrative and the serial killer profiler film. The former highlights another key shift, perhaps the key shift, of the post-1990 horror film: the return of supernatural.
Accompanying this is a return to metaphysical, rather than political, concerns. Again, the crux of this transformation is that the American horror film of the 90s onward has shifted from the social and political concerns of the 1970s and the escapism and excesses of the
1980s to an investigation of the possibility of reenchantment closer to what animated the films of the classical period. However, in the years between the classical monster movies and the contemporary metaphysical horror films both the genre audience and the social and historical context have changed. Here is where the framework on secular society and
39 the search for reenchantment plays a vital role in the analysis. The existing approaches to the horror film do not effectively address this new period of the genre, which is best understood in light of the dilemmas of secularization to be outlined in next chapter.
The new horror film typically has an earnest tone that leaves behind the irony so typical of its predecessors in the 1980s but unlike the films of the 1970s this earnestness is metaphysical not political. In this, its most important model is The Exorcist (1973), a film that treated the supernatural as a very real and very serious subject, not as a metaphor for social or political concerns or as a source of entertainment. In fact, contemporary horror exhibits an overriding interest in experiences of the supernatural.
The narratives explore these encounters via characters whose status in the film is determined by their attitude towards the possibility of its existence. In other words, these contemporary horror films consistently distinguish protagonists according to their belief in something beyond the immanent frame. The films' function seems to be to allow viewers the opportunity to entertain the possibility that the supernatural does indeed exist.
In doing so, they speak to a widespread ambivalence about secular society among modern audiences, using skeptics and believers in their narratives to embody this ambivalence and create stories about overcoming it. In this sense, the films follow a classic model of the American genre film: they dramatize a deficiency characteristic of modern life and attempt to resolve it. Often this is achieved by either showing us a skeptic undergo a
40 conversion to belief, or by reconciling the two points of view (skepticism and belief, the natural and the supernatural) in the film's denouement.
Next, I will map this framework onto existing notions of the popular text, popular audience, film genre, and the horror film. To do so, it will be necessary here to take a step back and survey how scholars have traditionally approached the horror film, and how film studies and cultural studies understands the role and function of popular genres.
Once contextualized properly, it will become clear that over the last few decades a significant and persistent concern with disenchantment and reenchantment informs the
American horror film and that this concern is best understood in relation to a very significant broader social discourse around belief and faith today.
2.2 Why not "why horror?"?: Theoretical Approaches to the Genre
In situating my approach to the contemporary horror film in relation to the extant work on the genre as well as work on genre in film studies generally, I will rely on Andrew
Tudor's (1997) contrast of "universal" and "particular" approaches. While there are certainly as many ways to approach the study of horror movies as there are methodologies in film studies, the most common approach has been a very broad functional analysis. The questions asked by this approach include such perennial queries as: "Why do horror movies exist?", "Why do people enjoy being frightened by them?", and "What purpose do they serve?" For Tudor, these can be summed up by the question
41 "Why horror?" The difficulty with that question, as Tudor goes on to show, are the assumptions that accompany it. First, there is the assumption that "horror" can be identified in the first place, that it is a stable category with abiding parameters and characteristics. Second, there is the assumption that the function of horror is singular, that the answer to why it exists, and thus what it affords those who watch it, can be pinned down and applied to all cases. "It is a mistake", he says,
to seek an explanation of horror's appeal which aspires to universality and which
has no recourse to information about the diversity of horror audiences both within
and across cultures... If we really are to understand horror's appeal, and hence its
social and cultural significance, we need to set aside the traditionally loaded ways
in which 'why horror?' has been asked. For the question should not be 'why
horror?' at all. It should be, rather, why do these people like this horror in this
place at this particular time? (461)
In his overview of the various approaches that scholars have used to study the horror film, Tudor compares the two most impressive and influential models. The psychoanalytic approach to horror, most often associated with Robin Wood but also employed by many others3, posits a general function such as the release and management of repressed energy. The second approach, outlined by Noel Carroll in his book The
3 See the work of Bruce Kawin, James Twitchell, Valdine Clemens, for example. As well, there are the approaches based upon or influenced by Lacan's psychoanalytic identification model such as Creed and Clover. 42 Philosophy of Horror; or Paradoxes of the Heart (1990), eschews psychology for
cognitive psychology and analytic philosophy but it still posits a general function for horror and attempts to construct a theory that applies to all horror films. In contrast to these two provocative but finally unsatisfying general theories, Tudor favours those studies of horror that focus on the particular. Within this group, he identifies three levels of particularity in the existing literature on the horror film that illustrate the approach he endorses.
The first level of particular analysis focuses on "a direct thematic link between specific features of the genre and aspects of agents' everyday social experience" (457).
This would include, for example, the familiar connection drawn between the paranoid alien invasion films of the 1950s and the Cold War fear of communism of the same era.
Another example would be the relationship between the rise in explicit violence of the late 1960s-early 1970s American horror film and the real-life violence of the time period
(Vietnam, anti-war protests, riots, etc.) A second, higher level of abstraction, yet one still focused on particular films and particular circumstances, steps back to look at how the genre develops over time. It attempts to match these changes to "macroscopic currents of social change". (457) Here Tudor gives the example of theoretical work on "body horror" and its relationship to "postmodern social experience" (458). Finally, there is the possibility of an even higher third level of abstraction where "whole systems of horror discourse form the focus of the analysis" (459). Here Tudor offers as an example his own
43 work on the shift from "the secure" to "the paranoid", two discourses whose relationship in the horror film can be productively compared with shifts in the social world over the course of the genre's history. Finally, and correctly, Tudor points out that all three levels of particular, as opposed to universal, analysis aim to relate "particular features of the genre" to "specific aspects of their socio-historical context" (459).
The advantage of Tudor's model is that it steers scholarship away from the impossible task of finding a universal or all-encompassing theory that answers the question "why horror?", a question itself deeply problematic because it assumes that both horror and the pleasures or functions it provides are singular. Yet while Tudor's discussion points us towards a better approach and a better way to formulate our questions ("why this horror for these people at this time?"), his attempt to articulate what the operative mechanism is between the films and their audiences remains vague. Terms and phrases used to describe this include "thematic link", "relationship", and
"connection". At one point he writes that "social agents recognize in texts features of the everyday world of social experience, transmuted perhaps, but none the less pleasurable in their sense of familiarity and relevance" (459). But why should recognition be pleasurable? And, if it is, does this really account for what viewers of horror experience when they watch the films? At another point, Tudor states that fears presented on screen are "perceived by spectators to gell with particular features of modern life" (460). Again, this is too vague. I agree with Tudor's emphasis on active audiences but we still need a
44 more dynamic description of what sorts of things are happening between viewers and texts than words like "recognition" and "gelling" provide.
Tudor remains unclear on this point because his attention is focused elsewhere.
He argues for an investigation of the particular material conditions of particular texts (50s paranoia and 50s alien invasion films; postmodern social experience and postmodern
"body horror") and, although he acknowledges "the active viewer", the approach to horror that he champions is basically a reflection model: changes in the genre reflect, or are examples of, changes in society. Once this is established, the viewer is brought into the equation, responding because the films "gel" with their experience of the world. The specificity that makes the analysis of the films' relation to their social context so strong is abandoned when the question of the viewer's particular experience is raised. In other words, we are back to "why horror?" To his credit, Tudor acknowledges this. His rebuttal is that "like all popular genres, horror appeals to people for as many reasons as its consumers can find ways of making use of genre products" (461). But this is of course as problematic as any appeal to a single universal function of horror. To say that there are an infinite number of functions tells us no more than to insist that there is only one.
Undoubtedly horror films serve multiple purposes and provide multiple pleasures, but
Tudor has not effectively answered a key part of his own question: "Why do these people like this horror?".
45 I intend to focus on this question of "why", remaining committed to Tudor's
"particular" approach while also extending it in order to answer this nagging question. I
believe it is possible to both account for the particularity of today's supernatural horror
films by situating them in the material and social conditions of their production while at the same time addressing concretely at least one of things that viewers get from watching them. Put another way, and here I put on my sociologist's cap, what function are these texts serving for their audience? "Why horror?" becomes for Tudor "Why do these people like this horror?" and this becomes for me "What are the particular characteristics
of this horror, and what is its particular function?" A compelling answer can be found in the work produced decades ago by some of the earliest studies of the horror film, in the moments just before the political-ideological study of cinema took hold of the discipline.
I believe that we can fill out Tudor's analysis by dusting off and updating of the notion of
"myth" in relation to film genre texts.
2.2.1 Mythic Function of Film Genre Texts
The aspects of myth and ritual so central to genre films require us to understand
not only the logic behind their construction but our individual and collective
responses to them as well
- Barry Keith Grant ("Experience and Meaning", 128) 46 Most uses of myth in film studies originate from the recognition that popular cinema is authored collectively. In one sense, this means that commercial films are the product of a group effort, from screenwriter and producer, through directors, actors and cameramen, and down to various other crew members. In another sense, it refers to the fact that popular movies follow narrative and stylistic patterns that belong to no single film but instead to the cinema collectively. This second sense is particularly pertinent to the study of genres. The question arises, "who is the author of these general narrative patterns such as the ones we see in the horror film?" One answer might be that, like myth, they bubble up from the culture itself and are written and rewritten until they become densely packed transmitters of cultural meaning. A very different answer attributes authorship to the movie studios who as capitalist enterprises act as mouthpieces of the ruling class. From this perspective, as products of the culture industry, movies merely reflect the dominant ideology of that class, contributing to the oppression of the masses rather than expressing their culture. Rick Altaian, in summarizing the literature on film genre, calls these two approaches "ritual" and "ideological" respectively.
For Altaian, ritual approaches assume "the narrative patterns of generic texts grow out of existing social practices, imaginatively overcoming contradictions within those very practices" (27). Here Altman refers to work done by film genre studies pioneers such as Schatz, Wright and Cawelti in the 1970s. Earlier in the same discussion,
47 he associates these same theorists with what he calls "transhistorical" conceptions of
genres (19). For Altaian, Will Wright's characterization of the Western is typical: "the
Western, though located in modern industrial society, is as much a myth as the tribal myths of the anthropologists" (20). Robin Wood's characterization of horror films as
"our collective nightmares" ("Horror Film", 203) would be another example.
Altman criticizes the association of genre texts with myth because he believes this perspective tends to ignore history and posit an "essence" for each genre that obscures its discursive nature and its constantly shifting parameters. This of course echoes the stance of Tudor discussed above. I agree with Altman that conceptualizing genres as "modern myths"—seemingly authorless narratives that spring naturally from the social group—is both misleading and dangerous. Yet, he simplifies some of the complexity of how the notion of "myth" has been used in the study of film genre. One need not adopt a transhistorical definition of a genre in order to discuss the western, the musical or the horror film in terms of myth. Nor must one adopt a simplistic ideological notion of myth as a lie. Other scholars have effectively employed a "ritual approach" to genre study while maintaining a notion of ideology. Put another way, some uses of myth as a critical concept are both attuned to the operation of ideology in popular narratives, thus avoiding the transhistorical error, as well as sympathetic to the way these stories are more than just conduits of dominant ideology, expressing instead some of the genuine hopes, dreams
48 and anxieties of communities. I have in mind two examples, the work of Richard Slotkin on the frontier myth, and the work of Richard Dyer on the film musical.
Richard Slotkin's use of the terms "ideology" and "myth" in his study of the frontier myth in American history and popular culture strikes the right balance between ideological and ritual approaches. His notion of ideology resembles that of Roland
Barthes in that it emphasizes the "given-ness" of ideology's propositions, but his focus is less on false consciousness than on how beliefs and values circulate in a cultural system.
Slotkin outlines the assumptions of his project, the study of the frontier myth in American history and popular narrative, thusly,
Ideology is the basic system of concepts, beliefs and values that defines a
society's way of interpreting its place in the cosmos and the meaning of its
history. [It] refers to the dominant conceptual categories that inform the society's
words and practices, abstracted by analysis as a set of propositions, formulas or
rules. In any given society certain expressive forms or genres—like credo,
sermon, or manifesto—provide ways of articulating ideological concepts directly
and explicitly. But most of the time the assumptions of value inherent in a
culture's ideology are tacitly accepted as "givens." Their meaning is expressed in
the symbolic narratives of mythology and is transmitted to the society through the
various genres of mythic expression. It is the mythic expression of ideology that
will be our primary concern ("Gunfighter", 5)
49 Myths, in this sense, are meaning-giving narratives. This does not excuse them however from ideological criticism. Slotkin's definition remains attuned to distortions and dangers of myth in the sense that ideological critics highlight. As Slotkin puts it, his primary concern is "the mythic expression of ideology" much of which is "tacitly accepted as
'given'", a definition that clearly owes a debt to Roland Barthes. Yet, his approach to ideology owes more to Clifford Geertz's anthropological conception of "ideology as a cultural system" than it does to Barthes' Marxist orientation.
For Slotkin, contemporary myths are intimately tied to national identity, history and storytelling. They are "stories drawn from a society's history that have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society's ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness" (Slotkin, "Interview"). Mythic figures take on over time a life of their own, becoming powerful symbolic constellations that belong to no particular person or social group. They may be put to use explicitly by a dominant class in order to support a political or ideological agenda, but they also always exceed this use because they have become genuinely public symbols thanks to their continued use.
Slotkin's project is to investigate the use of the set of symbols that together form
America's "myth of the frontier", illustrating how it relates to history, how it developed and the various ways it has been employed over the nation's history. In doing so, he successfully balances an ideological notion of myth without reducing the symbolic nature of popular narrative entirely to a political project of the dominant class.
50 Robert Ray's analysis of American movies in his book A Certain Tendency of the
Hollywood Cinema: 1930-1980 shares a number of assumptions with Slotkin's work. For
Ray, the American silent film borrowed a mythology mainly from European culture. It was not until the 1930s that what he calls "the thematic paradigm" of a genuinely
American myth appears in Hollywood. Although he is not specifically interested in tracing its origins, he suggests that it owes its existence to a shift in the sources that the movies drew upon to tell their stories after the introduction of sound. Eschewing more and more the historical costume dramas of the silent period, the new films turned to
American popular literature for material. "For," says Ray, "while the American silent film grew demonstrably out of the Victorian melodrama, the talkies clearly derived from an alternate mode, the romance form that Richard Chase has shown to be the basis of nineteenth-century American fiction" (56). This is the same pool of narratives that
Slotkin examines in order to isolate and understand the evolving meaning of the
American frontier mythology.
Like Slotkin's, Ray's notion of myth is informed by a sensitivity to its ideological function without however reducing it to nothing more than this. He invokes anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss's highly influential structural analysis of myth in order to account for "Hollywood's basic thematic procedure" (57). By this he means the manner in which the films repeatedly "raised, and then appeared to solve, problems associated with the troubling incompatibility of traditional American myths ... This
51 reconciliatory pattern, itself derived largely from American forms, increasingly became the norm of the American cinema" (57). Levi-Strauss believed that every culture's mythic narratives served this same reconciliatory function. As any set of values, beliefs and assumptions is bound to contain contradictions and difficult-to-resolve tensions, myths, he argued, came over time to form responses to these tensions, communicating narratives that represented their reconciliation. Whether this is good or bad will depend on your perspective as well as your assessment of the particular form the myth takes.
Ray, for example, criticizes Hollywood's ceaseless treatment of America's social problems in terms of individual crises and its continued "denial of the necessity for choice" (63). In film after film, including both right-wing and left-wing films of the 60s and 70s, Hollywood mythologizes the potential of "having it both ways." We will see the same pattern of resolution in the contemporary horror film cycles examined in Chapters
Four and Five.
What both Slotkin and Ray provide then are theories of myth that address the ideological aspect of popular narratives without dismissing their ritual character, that part of myth that expresses and affirms social meaning. The meaning comes from both the top and the bottom and it serves both ends. As Ray says, "the source of this mythology becomes less enlightening than an understanding of the historical circumstances that sustain and modify its particular incarnations" (56). In other words, the study of popular movies as myth is most valuable where we examine their relationship to history. Myth is
52 not just a lie force fed to us by dominant ideology. There is also what Colin Grant calls
"living myth" (13), the stories we live by and that express the shared hopes, dreams, and concerns of the social group. Myth's complexity is the result of the manner in which it negotiates between these two roles. Perhaps the best formulation of this idea in film genre studies belongs to the work of Richard Dyer on the musical. The key to his theory's success is his introduction of the idea of "utopia" to this discourse, a notion borrowed from the Marxist Ernst Bloch's study of popular culture.
In his essay "Entertainment and Utopia", originally published in Movie in 1977,
Dyer strikes a similar balance between "ritual" and "ideological" approaches to genre. In an analysis that has had a great impact on our understanding of the musical but has rarely been extended to the study of other genres, Dyer offers a useful extension to the notion of myth in Slotkin's and Ray's work. As Bill Nichols notes in his introduction to the essay in the collection Movies and Methods, Volume 2, Dyer "enables us to link what is often considered pure entertainment...with the very real contradictions of everyday life...In this way, musicals, like myth, attempt to resolve contradictions" (221). We see again here the popular reading of genre cinema as performing Levi-Strauss' reconciliatory function of myth. But Dyer does not simply carry over a ritual function for popular culture from anthropology. Instead, he carefully investigates the particular characteristics of the film musical and the particular functions it performs for its audience.
53 For Dyer, the musical belongs to the broad category he calls "entertainment", the
central thrust of which is utopianism, offering the public that consumes it the image of
something better (than their day-to-day reality) to escape to. The musical, however, does not so much present Utopian worlds but instead embodies Utopian feelings.
It presents, head-on as it were, what Utopia would feel like rather than how it
would be organized. It thus works at the level of sensibility, by which I mean an
affective code that is characteristic of, and largely specific to, a given mode of
cultural production (226).
The categories of the Utopian sensibility that Dyer sketches correlate with genuine inadequacies found in the society being escaped from (227). He presents a set of oppositions (scarcity-abundance, exhaustion-energy, dreariness-intensity, manipulation- transparency, and fragmentation-community) that the musical, and entertainment in general, employs. The genre addresses the tension/inadequacy/absence suggested by the first term by representing its "utopian solution", the second term, in the film.
The advantage of this approach to genre analysis is that, as Dyer puts it, "it does offer some explanation of why entertainment works" It shows that it "responds to real needs created by society" (228). But Dyer is careful to point out that it only addresses certain needs, and leaves others unrepresented. In doing so, it is helping to define what our needs are and, conveniently, most of the needs it defines for us are ones that
54 capitalism (our society) promises to take care of. In other words, "at our worst sense of it, entertainment provides alternatives to capitalism which will be provided by capitalism"
(229). Thus, the Utopian sensibility of the musical, and its imagined solutions to social tensions, can in this sense be complicit with a dominant ideology that seeks to maintain the status quo. The theory is able to address how genres perform two separate, indeed nearly opposite, functions. Entertainment "does not simply 'give the people what they want' (since it actually defines those wants)" but neither does it "simply reproduce unproblematically patriarchal capitalist ideology. Indeed, it is precisely on seeming to achieve both these often opposed functions simultaneously that its survival largely depends" (222).
The middle ground achieved here between a reductive ideological reading and an apolitical ritual reading draws on the work of Ernest Bloch. Bloch's reading of popular culture and his insistence on taking myths, legends, and folk tales seriously proved a unique approach to the study of art, politics and culture. Douglas Kellner emphasizes the way in which Bloch positioned his reading of myth, superstition and folk tales in opposition to dismissive ideological criticism. Instead of the limited knowledge this approach arrived at, Bloch aimed for a more complete understanding which "criticizes any distortions in an ideological product, but then goes on to take it more seriously, to read it closely for any critical or emancipatory potential" (Kellner, "Ernst Bloch"). What so many political theories of art and culture (including the dominant "political approach"
55 to the horror film) miss is the significance of this Utopian element, something positive, affirmative and hopeful. Bloch offers us a politics of hope that is a stark contrast to the emphasis on the negative of so much ideological film theory. As Kellner puts it, Bloch believed that such an approach was mistaken "by thinking that truth and enlightenment can be obtained solely by eliminating error rather than offering something positive and attractive" ("Ernst Bloch").
It is the notion of "utopia", borrowed from Bloch, in Dyer's approach to the musical that grounds his work in a critical materialism without however leading to a dismissal of the value of the images and narratives of popular culture. Despite his significant influence on the work of Fredric Jameson, Bloch remains underappreciated in film studies and cultural studies today. If we are to move past the dismissive political approach to the contemporary horror film and attempt instead to appreciate its own distinct character and appeal, a consideration of horror's Utopian aspect could provide a starting point. That is the goal of this project.
2.3 Conclusion
In summary, genre films resemble myths for contemporary society in that they, like myth, organize social experience and the beliefs, values and assumptions of the social group into familiar and recurring narrative forms. Where there occur tensions and contradictions in the experience and the ideology represented, these genre narratives, again like myth,
56 function to reconcile or resolve them. Ray calls this the "reconciliatory function" of
genres, film studies having borrowed the notion from the studies of myth by the likes of
Claude Levi-Strauss. These imagined resolutions, despite their potential to be used as a panacea that allows for the continuation of the very problems they imagine resolved, also contain what Bloch would deem emancipatory potential, popular narrative's Utopian impulse. As Dyer shows us with the musical, popular genre narratives, while always constrained by the ideology and the political economy of the film industry, still manage to give expression to the perceived inadequacies of society as well as offer hope by imagining what overcoming these inadequacies would feel like.
Turning to horror, Andrew Tudor is certainly right in insisting that there is no simple answer to a universal question like "why horror?" Instead, there are multiple particular answers. And so we must rephrase the question as "why do these people like this horror at this time?," or better yet as "what function does the experience offered by this horror serve for these people at this time?" What tensions and oppositions does the horror genre seek to reconcile or resolve for today's audiences? My argument is that in a secular age when the feeling of disenchantment is common, stories of the supernatural function mythically, imaginatively overcoming contradictions for people who find themselves hoping for reenchantment.
Three decades ago, Robin Wood recognized how the new independent horror films of the 1970s relied on their marginal status to function as progressive, even
57 revolutionary, political critiques at a time of great cultural upheaval. His intervention illuminated the value of the films at a time when most critics and scholars dismissed or ignored them altogether. Today's films require a similar intervention. Framing them politically entirely misses their value. The contemporary horror film uses the supernatural the way the films of the 1970s used their marginal status, as a way to address as only the horror film can a pressing socio-cultural concern. Only by framing today's films in terms of contemporary dilemmas of religion and spirituality instead of politics can we begin to appreciate the changes the horror genre is going through and the contributions it is making today.
This is in fact what ideological criticism should do but often doesn't. Once we see that a mythic approach to genre includes recognition of the role of ideology, we can move on to historicize and particularize these genre texts, locating some of the specific tensions that specific films or cycles of films address. In addition, we can ask how they address them and why, as well as what sort of reconciliation they offer, and what the consequences of that may be. These are the subjects of my next chapter.
58 3. "I Want to Believe": The Dilemmas of the Secular Age and the Meaning of Reenchantment
In the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have succeeded in
dismissing from our minds anything that, rightly or wrongly, could be regarded as
superstition or myth; and we have proscribed every way of seeking the truth
which does not conform to convention.
- Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism
The Surrealists took umbrage with the repressive clarity of diurnal rationalism,
instead devoting themselves to the reenchantment of nature, and of man, through
a mythopoeic, totalizing investigation of existence's shadow side.
- Paul Hammond
We begin with an image...
The poster decorated the wall of Special Agent Mulder's dark, cluttered office in the depths of the FBI headquarters in Washington DC. A grainy blown-up image of a flying saucer accompanied by the words "I Want to Believe." At first only a subtle element of set design on The X-Files, this poster and its frank confession rose to iconic status over the course of the 1990s; a representation of Mulder's state of mind that turned out to be a reflection of his viewers' feelings as well. Yet what exactly was Mulder
59 searching for? In what did he want to believe or did he just want to believe in something, anything? And, why? And, what was preventing him? Finally, how and why did his dilemma resonate so with fans of the series? In a sense, these are the fundamental questions of this entire project. The X-Files, in fact, dramatized an important and still much overlooked predicament of contemporary life: the struggle between the disenchanted condition of secular society and the persistence of the individual's desire to believe in "something more."
Keen observers of modern life have long recognized this tension between the historical process of secularization and the meaning, value and persistence of belief.
Their deliberations animate a significant portion of the art and philosophy of the nineteenth century from the Romantics through Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy.
Many pioneers of psychology also tackled the problem. Freud thought belief persisted in the face of science and reason because it was a comforting illusion. For Jung, the yearning toward the transcendent was practically an innate human drive, while William
James championed the "will to believe." By the early twentieth century, many thought religion as it was known was headed for extinction. Who could believe in God after
Darwin? But here we are one hundred years later and the same tensions exist.
Everywhere scholars and intellectuals debate publicly why religion persists and why the desire to believe hasn't been drowned out by science, technology, and consumer society.
60 Philosophers even echo Mulder's iconic poster in the titles of their books! In this context, the concerns of The X-Files' central character become much more than a plot device. They speak to a very important issue in contemporary society and in doing so stand as a vivid example of how popular culture interacts with our most pressing social concerns. The program's popularity and its profound influence on the horror films of the last two decades are compelling evidence that a link exists between contemporary horror and the dilemmas and anxieties attendant to the conditions of belief in the secular age.
In Chapter Two, I discussed how political/ideological criticism misses a significant function of contemporary horror because it so often fails to consider the complex religious and spiritual concerns of modern audiences. While horror films can and often do serve a variety of functions, the manner in which the genre responds to what
I am calling "disenchantment" needs more attention. But just what exactly is going on in the spiritual lives of today's viewers? Where does one begin a description and analysis of such a subject? In this chapter, I develop a framework that answers these questions and presents some key terms for considering the "reenchanting function" of the contemporary horror film. What is disenchantment? What is reenchantment? What do belief and faith mean in today's world? I sketch in this chapter what the dilemmas of belief look like today, and how they shape the contemporary social imaginary, so that we can better see the relevance of today's supernatural horror films. The chapter consists of three sections.
'The reference here is to Julia Kristeva's new book entitled This Incredible Need to Believe. 2I mean this in the sense Charles Taylor uses it: "the way that we collectively imagine, even pre- theoretically, our social life in the contemporary Western world" (146). 61 In the first section, I look at the broad social context of secularity. In the second section, I look at the dilemmas engendered by this context, by life in a secular age, and how contemporary narratives both reflect upon and respond to this. In section three, I discuss in more detail just who the audience for these films might be.
3.1 Secularization and the Secular Age
There are perhaps as many definitions of modernity as there are sociologists and historians who have attempted to define it, but no such definition is complete without acknowledging the changing place of religion in social and intellectual life. If the recognition in Western culture of something like "the modern era" reaches back to the
Renaissance, and begins when some first sensed and expressed a distinction between their day and the times that came before them, then one significant development in this period was the emergence of humanism. The humanists, a network of learned scholars corresponding across Europe, influenced by the recent discovery and translation of ancient texts, developed a discourse that, although by no means entirely secular, was noticeably different from the intellectual discourse of the pre-Renaissance period. Man began increasingly to turn an eye, one that for centuries had focused on God, to himself and the natural world around him. By the eighteenth century, most of the pieces were in place for the emergence of a secular philosophy that explained the world, and our place in
62 it, with very little need to reference God, or any mysterious or transcendent power as
such.
One aspect of the Enlightenment, as a consequence, was a denigration of
traditional religion as an oppressive institution, one that simply impeded man's freedom
rather than offering him grace and salvation. From this perspective, the process of
secularization appeared to be a positive development. Humanity could be viewed as casting off unnecessary and outdated beliefs, arriving at a clearer and truer understanding
of reality. For Charles Taylor, this last assumption, that humankind was "growing up" and no longer needed religion, and that it could simply remove it from society, forms a widely-accepted "subtraction story" of religion's relationship to modernity (26-27). A little further on, we will see both why Taylor rejects this narrative of how we became
secular as well as what sort of explanation he offers in its place. Before this, however, I want to examine more closely the most familiar and influential reference to secularization as subtraction in the Western canon. This is Max Weber's description of modernity as
"the disenchantment of the world." By taking a closer look at what Weber meant and how he framed it, we can get a better understanding not only of its influence on how we have since imagined modernity, but also what exactly is being invoked today by authors with an explicit agenda of "reenchantment." I too invoke this definition when I use the terms
"disenchantment" and "reenchantment," as I have in the title of this chapter. But Weber's
3 For examples, see the list of books mentioned in the introduction. 63 idea of disenchantment and Taylor's use of the term are not identical, and so it is
important that we understand their differences before looking at contemporary horror
films and their function for viewers. First, a look at Weber's formulation.
The phrase "the disenchantment of the world" appears in the published text of a
lecture Weber gave at Munich University in 1918 entitled "Science as a Vocation." That the original German expression literally means the "de-magic-ification of the world" is quite significant. For Weber captured with this phrase a crucial yet often overlooked change brought about in modernity. Along with industrial and economic upheaval, the rise of the nation-state, the middle-class, and new communications technologies, to name just a few of the commonly cited changes, modernity also meant the transformation in our relationship to mystery, wonder and the supernatural. This was not intended as a lament by Weber. He saw it as a potentially positive change for mankind, but he also understood that it came at a cost.
For Weber, science played a role in the "disenchantment of the world" by reorienting our position vis-a-vis knowledge. From a scientific perspective, there were no longer any ultimate mysteries; anything and everything could, and given enough time would, be answered by science (13). Time, as a consequence of this view, now appeared exclusively as linear and yoked to the notion of progress.4 For the individual, this affected
4Taylor (426) notes, as others have, that the notion of scientific progress was not wholly responsible for the shift to a linear conception of time. Christianity itself had long emphasized linear time. Nevertheless, Taylor insists that the pre-reformation Christian world featured a delicate balance of linear and sacred time (96). More on this below. 64 the existential meaning of life by positioning it as a finite moment within the infinite expanse of time (14). Science, in this way, contributed to the hollowing out of the meaning of life for the modern individual. Having said all this, Weber wondered: Does science offer anything worthwhile in place of this? It certainly provided much practical knowledge and increased power and control over our environment (25-6). These discoveries were of value, were they not? As a vocation, science presupposed so; it had to in order to go about its task. But, importantly, it could not prove so. The judgment of value, including its own value, was in the end outside its boundaries. If there was a final judgment of what is "good", and a final ultimate answer to whether life has meaning, and what that meaning might be, it could only be found in another sphere (23). Weber understood that science helps people negotiate in that sphere by helping them to think clearly, recognize relationships and consequences of various positions, and acknowledge their own presuppositions, but it rests finally with each individual to make a choice about where they stand and which set of values they will follow in a disenchanted modern world.
Importantly, Weber's discussion of disenchantment ends on a quite sober and pessimistic note. He questioned the sincerity of those "hunting for experience" (23) and the new prophets of his age (including barely-concealed criticisms of theosophy and avant-garde art) (30). He suggested that any academic or scientist who had trouble taking
"this destiny of the age like a man" (32) give up his profession and return to the arms of
65 the church. And finally, he said that, while it remains possible a new prophecy (akin to the appearance of Jesus that lead to the rise of Christianity two thousand years before) might emerge and completely alter the situation he described, it seemed far more likely that what he called "disenchantment" would carry on indefinitely. For Weber then,
"nothing is gained by yearning and waiting alone, and we should act differently. We should go to our work and do justice to the 'demands of the day' both in human and in professional terms" (31).
By the end of the Second World War, America's intelligentsia, especially its post war social scientists, accepted Weber's characterization of modernity as disenchanted and his pessimistic forecast for the future of religion. There was a growing consensus that modern life and a religious worldview were fundamentally incompatible. This became known as "the secularization thesis." In the 1960s, even some theologians came on board, believing that only by acknowledging the secularization of society and bringing theology in line with it could the traditional religious institutions survive. This meant explaining away anything supernatural in Christianity, transforming it from a religion of transcendence to an entirely immanent system of moral teachings.
At the same time, however, resistance and the seeds of change were everywhere.
In America, evangelical Christianity, which had lost an earlier battle with science and secularization that culminated in the Scopes trial on evolution in the 1920s, found new energy under the leadership of the dynamic preacher Billy Graham. At the same time, as
66 the baby boom generation came of age it created, in the counter-culture, a reorientation of
values for much of western industrial society. As Wade Clark Roof shows, a significant aspect of the 60s generation was its search for an alternative experience of the sacred (67) and McLoughlin considers this era "the Fourth Great Awakening," a reference to
America's tradition of periodical religious revival (179). Peter Berger's work, mentioned briefly in my introduction, coincides with these important historical changes.
Berger's early studies of modern society and secularization investigated the condition of disenchantment and set out to explain via the sociology of knowledge just how modern society leads to the end of religion. Though they depart in important ways from Weber's classic analysis, they stand as paradigmatic texts of "the secularization thesis." Berger's analysis begins by noting that there are several key dilemmas faced by all modern men and women ("Towards", 71). These dilemmas combined leave people fraught with ambivalence over modern life. The dilemma of secularization is just one of these, but it is of special significance because it affects us at the deepest levels, at our core beliefs and values, upon which are later built ideologies, systems of ethics, and political philosophies (76). The sociology of knowledge, Berger's principal framework, places particular emphasis on the way in which religion gives meaning to people's lives, especially in the face of "existential" questions that address suffering and death. A large part of this is accomplished by providing plausible explanations ("Social Construction",
154). And, this plausibility is fundamentally social in nature; it needs to be continually
67 nourished by affirmation and protected as much as possible from challenging alternatives, from the contestation of other, opposing beliefs. The story of religion in modern life is largely one of its increasing inability to do this effectively, to operate as an effective
"meaning-giving" system, in the face of particular changes to modern society
("Towards", 80). Berger associates this crisis of meaning with the condition Emile
Durkheim called "anomie". And what causes anomie, what erodes traditional religious explanations of the world, is not so much science and technology, as Weber discussed, but the nature of a pluralist society ("Canopy", 105-26). A pluralist society is one in which multiple options are presented to the subject, a myriad of choices are on display, and even when one chooses among these, daily interactions occur with others who have chosen differently. In other words, any one worldview, let alone any one belief, has today more and more difficulty, as compared to the past, in (a) finding affirmations and (b) ignoring alternatives. Berger says that this co-extensive process of modernity- pluralization-is the defining character of our contemporary life, and it, not science, is the cause of secularization.
When we compare Berger and Weber, two things stand out. One, Berger's conception of pluralization is absolutely inseparable from progress and modernization and so secularization, though no longer attributed directly to science, remains inherent and inevitable in modernity. Berger updates the secularization thesis but does not abandon it at this point in his work. Second, his picture of a pluralist society is actually
68 not far from the one described by Weber. It is a world of competing value systems or as
Weber says figuratively, competing "gods." Social science then had just fine-tuned the
original Enlightenment argument that religion would fall away because it was a set of
false beliefs. Instead, it falls away now because the ability to hold these beliefs erodes in
the modern world. Either way, however, the beliefs fall away, and they do so inevitably.
This inevitability is the core of the secularization thesis; and, it is precisely this predominant theory of the place of religion in modern life that has come under criticism
in the most recent work on religion and society, in particular over the last fifteen years or
so.5
Berger is just one of many scholars studying the relationship between modernity,
religion and secularization, and all have contributed to our understanding of this important area. Taylor pulls much of this material together in what now stands as a definitive look at just what it means to live in our secular age. He begins with the question, "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in 1500 in our Western
society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?" (25).
The standard answer to this is the secularization thesis, but it remains unclear, he insists, as to exactly what secularization really means. Taylor therefore offers a three-part definition of secularization: (1) a retreat of religion from public life, (2) a decline in
5Berger has since admitted that this conception of secularization and modernity is flawed and much of his work since the 1970s has been dedicated to the study of the persistence of religious belief in a secular world. I mentioned some of this work in my introduction, but Charles Taylor's recent work covers much of the same ground (and more) and so I will rely on Taylor for this next section. 69 religious belief and practice, and crucially, (3) a broad general change in the conditions of
belief. The observations about the impact of both science and pluralization as discussed
above help to explain parts 1 and 2 of Taylor's definition but those explanations miss the
importance of aspect 3. This third aspect of secularity is the key to understanding what it
means to be secular according to Taylor.
The pivotal moment in the emergence of modern secular society is the appearance
of an alternative conception of the world, one that presented for the first time in more than a millennium an alternative to a God-centered world. This alternative (Taylor calls it
"exclusive humanism"), now altogether familiar to us, first became possible and then plausible for the intellectual elite of Europe and America in the eighteenth century (21).
The reconstruction of the timeline and the identification of the various aspects of this worldview, including how they interact with each other, make up the bulk of Taylor's argument. Secular "exclusive humanism" consists broadly of a collection of shifts in the conception by humans of themselves, their world, and their idea of the meaning of life.
The most important results of these changes are what Taylor calls "the buffered self,
"the immanent frame" and a new definition of "fullness" and the good life.
The "buffered self changed modern humans' notion of their relation to the world around them and it is here that disenchantment occurs (131). Importantly, Taylor defines
"disenchantment" much more narrowly than Weber. This is a crucial difference in the meaning of disenchantment compared to the broader use of the term above, one that must
70 be clarified carefully here. For Taylor, "the enchanted world" is one where nature is understood as being alive, as having mind or consciousness, and one where there is no clear division between us and this world (34-6). The ideas of modern philosophy and the scientific worldview certainly contributed to the systematic separation of human subjectivity from its environment. This subject-object dualism, most famously conceptualized by Descartes, changed our participatory holistic experience of the world, setting us at a remove from everything around us. But importantly, Christianity itself contributed to this shift as well. The entire Judeo-Christian tradition, as a monotheistic religion that emphasized man's personal relationship to a single god, itself encourages disenchantment. Taylor emphasizes the way in which the Protestant reformation drew out this latent quality of the tradition whereas the Catholic world of the Middle Ages had developed what was for him a productive balance between enchantment and disenchantment (77). This equilibrium was in large part Christianity's compromise with the indigenous folk religion of Europe that preceded it. A critical shift then towards a secular age is the change from an enchanted world filled with seen and unseen forces, threats and consciousness to one where the self is "buffered" from the world around it.
Disenchantment, for Taylor, means principally the shift to this "buffered self but the
"buffered self alone does not make for a secular society. Other aspects, other changes, must also be taken into consideration.
71 Science, along with Enlightenment thought, also closed off the world from any
notion of transcendence. For exclusive humanism, there is only the "here and now".
There is nothing beyond this world, nothing that can not be explained and understood in terms of science (542). This is another element of modernity that Weber covers in his
definition and comes close to his observation that, in the eyes of science, there no longer remain any mysteries its methods will not eventually solve. Another way of phrasing this is to say that science simply disregards as non-existent anything that can not be measured by its instruments. Taylor's very evocative term for this outlook is "the immanent frame."
The frame as metaphor captures vividly the manner by which the secular worldview brackets off reality and encloses us within a measurable, material existence that is entirely immanent. This "closed world structure" contrasts with outlooks and worldviews that remain open to the possibility that "something else" exists beyond this world, both beyond the explanations and the models that we currently use to understand experience as well as beyond the immanent determinations of value and "the good" in contemporary life (557). This latter point leads to the third aspect of exclusive humanism that Taylor describes.
These changes to our conception of the self and its relation to the world and to the definition of reality combine in the secular age with a shift in what we see as our goals for happiness or fulfillment, our highest sense of the meaning and purpose of life. Within the immanent frame, the notion of fullness becomes entirely focused on this world,
72 creating a radically different set of values for modernity as compared to what came before it (260). For Taylor, this is finally the most important change. "We have moved," he says, "from a world in which the place of fullness was understood as unproblematically outside of or 'beyond' human life, to a conflicted age in which this construal is challenged by others which place it...'within' human life" (15). With the emergence of exclusive humanism and the secular age, there existed for the first time in human history the idea that humans were entirely self-sufficient, that we could achieve true happiness completely on our own. Of course, not everyone adopted this belief right away. Instead, its appearance led to an intense cross pressure for any educated person who came in contact with it. A great portion of the intellectual discourse of the nineteenth century was the result of this tension about how to conceive of the higher goal or meaning of life (338). It affected everything from philosophy and theology, to political science, art and literature. The story of the twentieth century, on the other hand, is story of how the same cross pressure regarding the meaning and purpose of life began to be felt not just be the educated elite but by everyone in society (300). Today, every individual— devout believer, avowed atheist, and all those in between—live amidst and in relation to the consequences of these three changes: the buffered self, the immanent frame and the crisis of meaning over the notion of fullness or human flourishing.
Taylor provides the most complete definition yet of just what is meant by secularization but the question remains: why hasn't religion gone away? Why hasn't
73 "exclusive humanism", with all its momentum, simply overtaken and replaced previous conceptions of world? Why do so many elements of the latter, though increasingly in the minority, persist? This is truly a fascinating question and it has captured the imagination of many thinkers recently. There is no easy answer but several observations can be made.
First of all, by tracing the emergence of the secular age through the gradual adoption of a new set of beliefs, we can see that it was not at all inevitable and not, as a certain simplistic conception of the secularization thesis implies, a kind of default reality upon which a false set of religious beliefs had accreted, obscuring this truth until the
Enlightenment caused them to fall away. Instead, in Taylor's work (and, to a degree, in some of Berger's later work) the emergence of secular society is radically historicized, shown to be a series of shifts and changes that occurred over several hundred years. To be secular is to hold a certain set of beliefs (including "the buffered self, a closed conception of "the immanent frame", etc.) and most of these beliefs have alternatives that, though they may seem implausible to many today, are by no means illegitimate. For example, Cartesian dualism may make the most sense to you or me, but it does not finally rule out other conceptions of the relation of self to world. The historical record is full of accounts of mystical experiences, Taylor points out, during which the subject felt dissolved into the world, destroying any sense of their selves as "buffered" (5, 728-30).
The same can be said of the "immanent frame" or of our modern sense of the highest goals or the meaning of life.
74 Instead of disappearing then religious belief is changing and adapting. It exists
now "in a field of choices which include various forms of demurral and rejection;
Christian faith exists in a field where these is also a wide range of other spiritual options," says Taylor. "The interesting story is not simply one of decline, but also of a new placement of the sacred or spiritual in relation to individual and social life. This new placement is now the occasion for recompositions of spiritual life in new forms, and for new ways of existing both in and out of relation to God" (437). Others too note this shift from "religion" to "spirituality" (Roof, Wuthnow, Heelas and Woodhead, Wexler), finding it useful for describing how contemporary subjects negotiate the complexities and dilemmas around belief today. The idea also has particular applicability for the study of film; Paul Coates argues that "cinema is a closer ally of 'spirituality' than it is of
'religion'" (17) in large part because the medium does not lend itself to the concrete nature of doctrine and argument.
Berger and Taylor also note that the secular age, despite all its achievements, produces its share of disquiet, restlessness and discontent as well. For Berger, pluralism forces modern individuals to make a choice where a more insulated society offers only one plausible set of beliefs. Making choices can be difficult, but it is also a fundamental part of the freedom that modern political and social thought fought so hard to achieve. It is not something many of us wish to give up but at the same time we often wish that life wasn't filled with so many questions and so many different answers. The result is a deep
75 ambivalence about modern life in a secular world ("A Far Glory", 123-43). The dilemmas of secularity on which Taylor focuses also produce ambivalent subjects. One is the "horizontal" nature of, the apparent "flatness" of, modern life (391-2). A closed acceptance of the immanent frame and a focus only on the fullness of life here and now can result in a feeling of emptiness; a lingering sense that "this can't be all there is", that there must be "something more" (311). This can be phrased another way, as a sense that something is missing, that there is a lack associated with life presently, and this too causes modern subjects to feel deeply ambivalent about the world they inhabit.
Together these two things, the sense of a lack and the state of ambivalence, account for the reenchanting function of the contemporary horror film just as they account more generally for the persistence of religious belief and spirituality in a secular age. Most religions, both old and new, of course address both of these problems in one way or another. They attempt to overcome the dilemma of pluralism and the ambivalence about what to believe by presenting a set of beliefs and values that represent the "truth."
Comfort comes in knowing that there are no choices to be made; there is only one correct path. Of course, this can and increasingly does lead to troubling forms of fundamentalism, intolerance and violence but the appeal of fundamentalism as an easy way out today makes some sense in light of the pressures and demands of pluralism.
Religions of different kinds also address the dilemmas associated with the "flatness" of the most common versions of exclusive humanism. They promise access to another
76 sphere of experience, something sacred or transcendent (the two are not synonymous, since there are ways in which the sacred can be understood as immanent), that can help overcome the feeling that there must be "something more": something bigger or greater than the everyday life that we know and the typical goals that motivate us. And so traditional religions, new interpretations of old systems, brand new religions, and perhaps most significant of all, vaguely articulated personal spiritualities live on and even thrive amidst a widely secularized society, with various beliefs and values of the former contradicting and constantly in tension with those of the latter. The cross-pressured, ambivalent subject, pulled in different directions and in search of that something that is missing from life, can locate a little relief in the reenchanting function of the horror film.
3.2 Reenchantment and the Ambivalent Subject
To exist today...is to stand in this open space, where the winds blow, where one
can feel the pull in both directions. To stand here at the mid-point of the cross-
pressures that define our culture.
- Charles Taylor
The kinds of discontent associated with secularization and the disenchantment of the world mentioned above appear in the work of poets, artists and philosophers from the very beginning of the process in the eighteenth century. Conversations, in the form of
77 intellectual, aesthetic and popular discourse, measure the gains and the losses of modernity all throughout the process of secularization. Narratives of horror and the supernatural draw on all these discourses, responding to the upheavals of modernity through a combination of generic convention and aesthetic invention, and mirroring the debates of philosophers, social critics, religious representatives, and scientists. One authority repositions the Gothic tradition as a part of this discourse of modernity by designating at as an "expression of the Counter-Enlightenment" (Davenport-Hines, 2).
Today, the Gothic in the guise of horror and the supernatural pervades popular culture.
My goal is to illustrate how contemporary cycles of the horror film carry on this response to secularization and disenchantment in ways that speak to the particular tenor of the present situation.
In Chapter Two, I discussed how film studies approaches popular film genres from two basic directions. From an ideological perspective, genre stories appear to be little more than products of the film industry, their recurrent themes and iconography reproducing the values and assumptions of the dominant classes. An extension of this approach, one especially common to horror film criticism, attempts to locate and celebrate those rare films that appear to resist this system. In the 1970s, The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), for example, warranted this kind of praise. But a second approach to genre, Rick Altman's "ritual approach" (27), attributes the authorship or meaning of a genre to a wider community that includes not
78 only the filmmaking personnel but the audience as well. In this sense, horror films will
resemble public myths, like those studied by anthropologists such as Claude Levi-
Strauss. Pioneers of ritual or mythic analysis of film genres, including John Cawelti,
Thomas Schatz, Michael Wood and Richard Dyer, drew attention to the way the movies represented and attempted to resolve the pressing social and cultural anxieties of the era that produced them.
This approach has much to offer; in cases like Dyer's study of the musical, it leads to a greater understanding of the genre. Too often, however, as Altman and Tudor both warn, a mythic approach universalizes the meaning or function of genres, overlooking historical contexts and concluding, for example, that the Hollywood western is simply ancient myth dressed up in cowboy gear. Will Wright was not wrong in recognizing that the western called for such a mythic analysis, but his erasure of history is typical of the period. Absent from much of the early genre studies was a more rigorous analysis of how mythic themes intertwined with ideology or, more specifically, with the historically-shifting cultural values, social issues and politics of America. Richard
Slotkin's epic analysis of the "frontier myth"—begun in the early 1970s and now three volumes long—achieved just this balance.
Treatments of the horror film as myth are notorious for falling into this
"universalist" trap. The literature abounds in discussions of horror films as expressions of
"mankind's deepest fears" and failed attempts to answer unanswerable questions like
79 "why horror?" My contention is that we can rescue and revive the mythic study of the horror film as long as we are careful to strike a balance—as Dyer did with the musical— between Altman's ideological and ritual approaches. In fact, we must revive this approach because the horror film today no longer features the barely-concealed social and political critique of American society that pulsed through the genre in the 1970s. Instead, horror films have returned to their supernatural roots, concerned with religious and metaphysical subjects like the nature of belief, the existence of the soul or life-after- death, and the reality of evil. Moreover, this shift can not be dismissed so easily as an evacuation of the genre's social and political relevance. The supernatural turn is an example of the genre functioning in its mythic capacity, searching for solutions to the very cross-pressures described above by Taylor and others.
My term for this mythic function of the contemporary supernatural horror film is
"reenchantment." By this, I mean the imaginary overcoming of, or resolution to, the particular cross-pressures of life in a secular age. The films do this principally by offering audiences opportunities to imagine the possibility of a reenchantment of their world without abandoning science, logic and reason. In other words, they resolve the conflict between belief and skepticism. In choosing to use the term "reenchantment" for this function of genre narratives, I have in mind the same sense of the term that Paul
Hammond has when he uses it to capture the goal of surrealism (2). It is no coincidence that the surrealists loved the early Hollywood horror films. They recognized the potential
80 in the genre's stories and imagery to activate an audience's capacity for wonder. Today's
horror films respond both to a lack that characterizes modern life, a sense that there must
be "something more", as well as an overall state of ambivalence in the face of the cross-
pressures of belief. Modern individuals can easily feel pulled in two directions; one
direction entertains the possibility that the supernatural, the spiritual or transcendent
could actually exist while the other associates such ideas with childish, irrational thought
and insists that a closed world is all that exists. The reenchanting function of horror aims to reconcile this opposition.
This notion of reenchantment is slippery enough to require further careful
explanation. The various analyses of secularization discussed above all refer to or use terms similar to "reenchantment" and so it is worth considering what a few of them mean, and how they relate to my use of the term.
For Peter Berger, the possibility for "reenchantment" is very real and extremely important. He uses the term in reference to Weber when he points out that the man who proclaimed the "disenchantment of the world" did not "sufficiently perceive the possibilities of a re-enchantment of the world" (A Far Glory, 29). However, when he turns to discussion of what this might entail, his ideas have a much more specific theological meaning than my notion of reenchantment. Berger has written a number of books that set sociology aside and venture plainly into Christian theology. His insights there, though they are Christian in sentiment, can perhaps be extrapolated to some degree
81 beyond that specific faith. His key insight is that the sociology of knowledge that he knows so well, which as part of the Enlightenment has lead directly to secularization, actually opens itself to a critique using its very own discoveries. Similar to Taylor's thesis that exclusive humanism is a historically contingent worldview, Berger says that sociology demonstrates not only that religions are sets of assumptions but that the scientific worldview is as well. Consequently, he encourages people of faith to "relativize the relativizers" to assist them in strengthening their beliefs in the face of pluralism. No matter what your religion, there is no particular reason to close oneself off from transcendence because science can no more prove to religion that transcendence does not exist than religion can prove to science that it does. This is whole point of faith, he says
("Rumor", 31-53). But what about those who lack faith, who are far more ambivalent but wish that there was "something more"? What could reenchant them, so to speak? In response to this question, Berger offers the notion of a "signal of transcendence," a glimpse within everyday life of something that might stand as evidence that there is indeed "something more." He suggests that this "inductive approach" to faith might help those who yearn for reassurance ("Heretical", 135). His "something more" remains, however, deeply indebted to Protestant theology and means, ultimately, a loving and personal Christian God. This is more specific than I intend "reenchantment" to mean here. Though I borrow many concepts from Berger's discussion of religion and secular society, his definition of reenchantment is too precise for the films examined here.
82 I have already discussed above what Charles Taylor means by "disenchantment"; it is one aspect of the process of secularization, and it is an aspect that is not foreign to
Christianity itself. As monotheistic religions with a long tradition of imagining time as linear and progressive, the Judeo-Christian faiths all have contributed to the disenchantment of the world. The "enchanted world" was one where humans' conception of time and their relation to their environment as well as to the sacred was very different than it is in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Taylor, reenchantment would have to mean some kind of return to a totally different conception of ourselves and our world.
This is certainly not what he recommends in A Secular Age, which like Berger's work, favors a reinvigorated Christianity, although for Taylor this would be Catholic not
Protestant.
Other authors use the term "reenchantment" in similar but also unique ways.
Morris Berman, who wrote what is perhaps the first extended argument for reenchantment of the present period, did indeed go where Taylor doesn't. In his book The
Reenchantment of the World (1981), he insisted that a return to a participatory consciousness like that which preceded Taylor's "buffered self remains possible today.
To do so would be to undo the subject/object split that destroyed this mode of existence in the first place. Berman's book certainly has an air of 1960s energy and optimism to it, which is not surprising given the date of its publication. It feels positively Utopian when read beside the more prudent and measured discussions published in the past decade.
83 Though it is a very good survey of the cracks in our disenchanted society, its revolutionary program of reenchantment far exceeds the function of the horror films I am dealing with here.
Jane Bennett seems to best capture what most contemporary authors mean when they use the term "reenchantment". Similar to Taylor, her intention is to demonstrate that the "disenchantment tales" of Weber and others are not necessarily correct, that enchantment remains possible in modernity and that, in the case of her specific argument, it offers hope for a rethinking of contemporary ethical philosophy (12). For Bennett, enchantment is an experience and a mood that energizes us and ties us affectively to life and to our world. "To be enchanted is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday" (4), she writes. Those aspects of modernization that contribute to disenchantment do the opposite: they are alienating, depressive and lead to cynicism and nihilism. Enchantment often hits us unexpectedly, via an encounter with nature or perhaps with another person, but it can also be cultivated. Some strategies she suggests for doing so might be "to give greater expression to the sense of play...to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things... (and) to resist the story of the disenchantment of modernity" (4).
While Bennett's work is a good example of what I call "the reenchanting turn" in contemporary thought, its scope, like many of the others, is much broader than mine is here. In a review of the book, Stanley Bates finds Bennett's broad array of examples,
84 mixing some drawn from real life with others drawn from fiction, to be confusing. He complains that at times she seems to suggest that the world can be objectively enchanted while at others that the subjective experience of enchantment is what is possible. With reference to fiction and subjective experience, he mentions in passing, "It might be revelatory of the human psyche to develop a theoretical account of why certain genres of fantasy have been capable of 'enchanting' people." In fact, this, rather than Bennett's much larger project, is very close to what I mean when I use "reenchantment" here in reference to the function of horror narratives today.
And so, by arguing that horror films offer audiences ambivalent about life in a secular age opportunities to consider the "the possibility of reenchantment", I do not mean modern subjects can be whisked back in time to an experience of the world resembling that of a premodern man or woman. Nor do I think in most cases that the experience of the audience in these films offers any help, in Bennett's sense, for a rethinking of ethical philosophy. Films about the supernatural do not actually bring back an enchanted world or recreate the experience of such a world in the present. Instead, reenchantment in this dissertation is a social function of narratives and other forms of entertainment unique to the present conditions of contemporary life, and brought about in fact by these very conditions.
Notice yet again, however, that Bates, by using the term "human psyche" reproduces the universalist bias of genre studies. We will be concerned here only with the psyche of that historically situated human subject ambivalent about the secular age. 85 Life in a disenchanted world leaves many deeply dissatisfied because it forecloses something that we seem to need; its flatness leaves us yearning for the opposite. The part of humans that opens up towards the infinite, towards the "big questions" traditionally the domain of religion and philosophy, finds little nourishment today. This creates a dilemma, call it "the dilemma of secularization", that appears to be eased, though certainly not solved, by entertaining the possibility of "something more." Reading a ghost story, marveling at a stage magician's performance, having one's future told by an astrologer or a palm reader, or watching a supernatural film, all these modern activities represent ways that disenchanted subjects ambivalent and cross-pressured between skepticism and belief entertain the idea that "something more" might exist, without actually going so far as to believe that it does. Here is Taylor once again,
these compromises (between Christianity and materialism) arise from a deep
cross-pressure, between the unacceptability of Christianity for those who have
deeply internalized the immanent order (or come to see themselves totally within
it), on the one hand, and a strong dissatisfaction with the flatness, emptiness of the
world, and/or the inner division, atomism, ugliness or self-enclosed nature of
human life in modernity, on the other" (390-1).
It is this person, feeling this kind of cross-pressure, who responds to the reenchanting function of the horror film. How many people really feel this way? Taylor offers little in
86 the way of empirical data, but the widespread popularity today of the kinds of films
discussed here certainly backs up his argument. Popular genres engage with and attempt
to resolve present anxieties, and the contemporary horror film circles incessantly around
the desire to believe, the conversion of skeptics, and the affirmation that the empirical
order is not "all there is," that there is indeed "something more."
3.3 Who is Reenchanted? Audiences for American Supernatural Horror films
The tensions engendered by the conditions of belief in contemporary secular society exist
globally, but they share a particular character across the North Atlantic world where
Christianity long reigned. At another level, however, they are without question felt with a
particular intensity in America. Religious scholars and sociologists have long debated the
"American exception," the fact that numerous statistics indicate a significantly less
dramatic pace of secularization among United States citizens as compared to other
western nations. While this might suggest that the American audience is markedly less
ambivalent and less cross-pressured than elsewhere, such a conclusion would miss an
important point. The existence of so many vocal "believers" in the U.S. actually
increases the social tensions at play here.
The so-called "culture wars" are the best example of this. The 1990s in America meant the birth of the World Wide Web and the economic boom that followed it, the
sudden end of the Cold War, and a new "cultural civil war," one usually phrased in
87 religious terms. While the divisions highlighted in this battle had been developing for quite some time, it is likely no coincidence that the escalation to all-out "war" occurred directly in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Deprived of its traditional enemy,
Communism, the Republican Party in the 1992 presidential election campaign, turned its attention to a new one, "Secular Liberal Culture", best captured in conservative candidate
Pat Buchanan's National Convention address that year. That speech included lines like these:
My friends, this election is about much more than who gets what. It is about who
we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we stand for as Americans.
There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a
cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold
War itself.
Such rhetoric should remind us that while the dilemmas of secularization are felt everywhere, nowhere more than in American are they played out so spectacularly in the news media, talk radio, and the political public sphere.
Hollywood has a complex relationship to all of this. The cinema grew mainly out of urban popular culture in the first decades of the twentieth century and its content reflected its origins. In the 1920s, as movies became a national pastime and Hollywood a lucrative industry, the studios shaped their product to better reflect the shared values of
88 the nation. In the classical studio era of the 1930s to the 1960s, Hollywood movies struck a successful balance that promoted American values with very little explicit religious content but without offending religious sensibilities. Even in this period, however, the most committed believers in America, evangelical Protestants, began to create their own media culture. For example, Terry Lindvall, in his book Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry, traces the roots of an alternative evangelical cinema back to the era of the silent film. The real break, however, occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, when
Hollywood abandoned the Hayes code and increasingly reflected the values of the counter-culture. Evangelicals began to reject outright all of contemporary popular culture, creating and consuming their own instead. Today, evangelicals boast a remarkably successful film, music and publishing industry, featuring stars, genres, and best-sellers virtually unknown to the rest of North America. They have no need for Hollywood films.
The audience then for the popular genre film cycles discussed in my next chapters is not an audience of confident believers. It is, first of all, an America minus its most committed religious citizens. It would include then a wide range of personal positions towards belief and faith, from lapsed Catholics, to secular Jews, to many more who go to church but aren't sure they "really believe in all that stuff." And while this category might make up a smaller percentage of people in America than elsewhere in the Western world, it is still a very large audience. Most importantly, however, it is an audience all too aware of the explosive and divisive culture wars gnawing away at their national
89 consensus. When a filmmaker with the widespread appeal and popularity of Tim Burton
creates an impassioned plea for balance between science and reason on the one hand, and
belief, magic and enchantment on the other, as he has in Sleepy Hollow, we can see how
deeply concerned Americans are about the effects of these cross-pressures on their
culture.
Additionally, we must not overlook that Hollywood is today a global film
industry. The shift in the industry that occurred in the 1960s may have lost the American
evangelical audience but it gained new audiences. American studios always exported
their films around the world but when the classical studio system broke down, the global
audience surpassed the domestic audience for the first time. Today, American-produced films make the majority of their money overseas. All Hollywood films today then must consider the values and the desires of this enormous and varied global audience, a
significant portion of which, in the world's industrialized nations, is statistically more
secular than America. My contention then is that these American film genre cycles arise in response to the extraordinary cultural tensions around belief that exist in America and that reached new heights in the 1990s, but that the general concerns they address are felt by more than just Americans; they are endemic to all of secular society.
3.4 Conclusion
90 And so there are two things here. First, there is a lack that results from the flatness of modern life, life inside the immanent frame; second, there is a state of ambivalence because there seems to be no easy way to overcome this lack. After all, it is not so easy for a skeptical individual to simply believe in "something more," something that would alleviate the lack. A central function of popular narratives is to respond to and offer imaginary solutions to social anxieties like this. The ambivalence of the modern subject and the conditions of belief today find expression and resolution in contemporary supernatural narratives. The following chapters investigate how this happens in some key cycles of the contemporary horror film.
The decade of the 1990s witnessed a distinct shift in the tone and subject matter of American horror, one that continues to shape a significant part of the genre into the present. The major cycles and themes of the 1970s, the family horror film, the eco-horror or "revenge of nature" film, and the psycho/slasher film carried into the early 1980s and then began to run out of steam. The slasher film lasted the longest, although it had sunk to embarrassing depths by 1990. New cycles in the 1980s introduced the rather broad camp of films like Child's Play (1988), horror/comedy hybrids such as Ghostbusters
(1984) and Beetlejuice (1988), and what Barry Grant calls "the Yuppie Horror film". The latter included such popular sexual psycho-thrillers as Fatal Attraction (1987) and Basic
Instinct (1992).
91 At the turn of the decade, when the genre seemed to have nowhere left to go, three highly influential new horror texts appeared that significantly reoriented the genre, offering a sincere, frightening and disturbing picture of gothic darkness and evil that continues to be a template for the genre two decades hence. In Twin Peaks (TV, 1990-2),
Silence of the Lambs (1991), and The X-Files (TV, 1993-2001), slashers turned into serial killers, and monsters become more realistic, often emerging from the fringes of the possible and the paranormal. In their wake, ghost stories and possession narratives reappeared. The success and influence of The X-Files is of particular importance.
Filmmakers began to copy its gothic style and tone and before long the horror genre seemed reborn. Respected and award-winning directors tried their hand at horror like never before, mounting dark, moody and realistic remakes of classic gothic tales. Francis
Ford Coppola remade Dracula (1992) with an all-star cast. Over the next few years,
Kenneth Branagh followed with Frankenstein (1994), Neil Jordan adapted Anne Rice's classic Interview with the Vampire (1994), Stephen Frears retold "Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde" in Mary Reilly (1996), and Mike Nichols cast Jack Nicholson as an urban werewolf in Wolf (1994). So much changed in fact that Hollywood came up with new terms for their horror films, calling them "supernatural thrillers" and "psychological thrillers" so that audiences tired of 1980s horror movies wouldn't be frightened off. The new supernatural horror film in turn reflected the Zeitgeist of the 1990s and the new millennium, a period characterized by a growing public debate and ongoing tensions over
92 the complex conditions of belief in a secular age. It is here in this connection between the genre and its social and historical context that two cycles—the Supernatural Investigation cycle and the Serial Killer Profiler cycle—command our attention.
The Supernatural Investigation cycle represents these tensions through the confrontation between a skeptical detective and evidence of the supernatural. The detective or investigator symbolizes what Taylor calls a "closed world structure" while the possibility of the existence of the supernatural symbolizes the "something else", the mystery and wonder missing from modern secular society. In the Serial Killer Profiler cycle, the tensions appear in the two possible readings of the killer: as deranged but entirely human threat, or as a monster driven by something inside him that can only be explained as truly metaphysical evil. The detective or "profiler" who tracks the killer mirrors his prey in that she herself can be read two ways. Her method of "profiling" criminals by entering their minds can be read as a scientific endeavor, an extension of psychology, or as a kind of psychic ability or sixth sense. These cycles are the subject of the following two chapters.
93 4. Discrediting the Immanent Frame: Converting Skeptics in the Supernatural Investigation Cycle
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet's Admonition
Horror films from the earliest days have found Hamlet's caution to Horatio in Act
I, Scene V a difficult line to resist. The genre often uses two characters, one a skeptic and one a believer, to bring the sentiment behind this bit of dialogue to life. Numerous films will even put Hamlet's words into a character's mouth, as Edgar Ulmer does to Bela
Lugosi in the Universal chiller The Black Cat (1934). Such debates between skeptics and believers of course set up pay offs in the storyline later on when the believer is shown to be correct. It is a horror films after all and so there are indeed more things than are dreamt of in our philosophies. It is not hard to see in this long-standing motif of the genre a rebuke of the rational and empirical conception of the world that Charles Taylor associates with "exclusive humanism".
In one sense, all supernatural narratives address the cross-pressures and dilemmas of belief in the secular age. The horror genre broadly speaking, from its origins in the gothic tales of the eighteenth century through the ghost story of Victorian age and up to the present, is "about" secularization and the disenchantment of the world. Yet, phrased 94 this way, the study of the genre creeps dangerously towards the kind of generalization that loses sight of the differences of time and place. The limitations of "genre" as a category become apparent when dealing with horror's long history and many variations.
There may be no way to entirely avoid this problem but focusing on genre cycles allows us to sidestep some of its troublesome spots. While a genre remains a notoriously difficult to define category, a cycle of films within a genre is significantly easier to pinpoint and investigate. My definition of a genre cycle consists of three parts.
First, genres relate to history through cycles. A cycle is to a genre as species is to genus. It is a sub-category identified by its selecting and foregrounding of a few characteristics of the broader genre to which it belongs. A genre then is an iconographic and thematic warehouse built up over many years. A particular cycle chooses a few of these motifs, characters, and/or themes, employing them to create a narrative that addresses the interests and concerns of its contemporary audience. How a cycle does this, what it chooses and how it uses it, tells us a lot about the particular social context it is meant to address—in other words, its mythic function.
Secondly, cycles almost always appear as a series of imitations or variations on a single popular film or "template." Often, we can identify a cycle's starting point by locating this hit template film. Producers and studios recognize a successful genre text, such as The X-Files1 or Silence of the Lambs (1991), and proceed to capitalize on its
'Throughout this study, I have included The X-Files (a television series) amidst my discussion of the horror film. Some may find this mixing of film and TV inappropriate but The X-Files was perhaps the first 95 popularity by making more films that play up the same genre elements. This pattern of a hit template followed by a series of imitations does not alone explain why cycles appear, however, since a mythic approach to genre assumes that the way a film addresses its audience's concerns plays a significant factor in success. For example, it is not enough to say that the Supernatural Investigation films were popular because they copied the formula of the hit series The X-Files. This only begs the questions: Why was the The X-
Files popular? The appearance of a successful cycle only confirms that its template narratives tapped into something important.
Finally, cycles have a limited lifespan. Rarely do they span more than a decade or so before they run their course. As their audience grows tired of the formula and ready for something new, filmmakers and studios will either transform cycles by mixing them together or turning them inside-out, or new cycles will emerge to take their place. The raw violence of the Survival Horror cycle of recent years, featuring the surprise hit Hostel
(2005) and the incredibly successful Saw series (2004-2009), appeared in part because the Serial Killer Profiler cycle had reached a late baroque stage, and in part because the
Survival cycle's images of torture resonated deeply in a post-9/11 America. But, the
network program to definitively blur the two media. As I will argue below, the show was heavily influenced by horror movies and in turn influenced that film genre for more than a decade. Also, while its long-running conspiracy storyline made effective use of television's episodic structure, many critics noted that its style and the experience of watching it was closer to cinema than to traditional notions of TV as "flow." Finally, it was also one of the first series to be released in its entirety on home video, further blurring the distinction between television shows and movies. 96 television series Dexter (2006 -) also energized and salvaged the Profiler cycle by giving its formula a spectacular twist, combing the killer and detective into one character.
This chapter examines what I am calling the Supernatural Investigation cycle, the first of two key cycles of the contemporary horror film treated in this research. The following chapter examines the Serial Killer profiler cycle. A typical Supernatural
Investigation film features a detective or amateur sleuth conducting an investigation that brings him or her into contact with the supernatural. The investigator, man or woman, professional or amateur, is always an enlightened rational skeptic. When confronted with what may appear to be evidence of the supernatural, such skeptics demonstrate their fundamentally closed conception of the universe by immediately offering plausible immanent explanations. "I'm sure," he or she might say, "that there is a rational explanation for this." Over the course of the film, however, during their investigation, evidence continues to mount that strains the explanatory power of their empirical approach. Gradually this evidence of the supernatural proves too difficult to explain away and our skeptic becomes a believer. Immediately the repercussions of this conversion are evident. The investigator learns what life as a cognitive minority feels like as friends, family and co-workers start to question his or her sanity. At the same time, a new kinship arises with all of those other believers who understand that there really are strange and supernatural forces at work in the world. In most cases, now that that the skeptic is a believer, the mystery may be solved, the monster defeated, or the evil banished (at least
97 temporarily) and the narrative may come to an end. The popularity of this particular
investigation-centered approach to supernatural narratives in contemporary cinema draws our attention. Why are supernatural films told in this way today? What function is this investigation cycle serving?
As I discussed in Chapter Two, genre narratives, in their mythic capacity, take up and attempt to resolve pressing social concerns. These concerns often appear as a contradiction in two fundamental values, or in a pair of conflicting desires. The movies build a narrative around this, representing the oppositions through generic characters and situations and aiming to reconcile the opposing terms in various ways. This mythic function is perhaps clearest in the Western, the most thoroughly investigated genre in film studies. The American conception of the frontier was fraught with contradictions throughout the nineteenth century. The land to the west was both fearsome and attractive.
It was lawless, uncivilized and still mainly the abode of indigenous peoples whom
Americans had long feared. At the same time, it represented the promise of a new life, immeasurable natural resources and the fulfillment of the nation's manifest destiny. As studies of the Western genre (Kitses, Slotkin) have shown, dime novels and movies were a means by which society could reconcile or imaginatively overcome these contradictory images. We can see this in the genre's representation of Native American characters, for example. The Indian's lack of civilization makes him both a frightening savage, representing the frontier's dangers, and Rousseau's "natural man", living an edenic
98 existence on the land and representing the frontier's allure. Generic characters—the
"good Indian," and the "Man Who Knows Indians," a white frontiersman who has learned Indian ways—appear whose function is to overcome this contradiction. Both bridge the divide and reconcile the oppositions that represent the broader social tensions at play.
Richard Dyer's analysis of the musical also finds success with this structural mythic approach. Dyer demonstrates how the genre operates on a structural contrast between a set of terms representing the shortcomings of modern life—scarcity, exhaustion, dreariness, manipulation, and fragmentation)—depicted in the films' dramatic scenes, with their Utopian opposites—abundance, energy, intensity, transparency, and community—expressed in the musical numbers. This is the genre's solution to the same basic problem of the Western, how to solve the contradictions found at the root of social tensions and anxieties. Generally then, popular narratives function as myth when they attempt to forge consensus out of social tension by finding means symbolically and narratively to reconcile or smooth over fundamental oppositions.
Similarly, the films of the Supernatural Investigation cycle build their narratives on a series of contrasts terms—belief/ skepticism, supernatural / natural, transcendence / immanence—representing the central tensions arising from the complex conditions of belief in today's society. These contrasts reflect both the cross-pressured individual's ambivalence as well as the broader debates between open and closed world structures in
99 contemporary society. The cycle aims to resolve these tensions by reconciling the pairs of contrasting terms it presents, framing its representation of the supernatural in the terms of science, reason and level-headed skepticism. With its doubting protagonists and a narrative focused on inquiry and evidence, it carefully mirrors the audience's desire for— as well as its indecision about—the possibility of reenchantment. Reconciliation occurs here when it gives us what we want (belief) on exactly the terms that we need it
(skepticism).
This chapter examines the characteristics and the reenchanting function of the
Supernatural Investigation cycle. First, I contextualize the cycle by outlining its emergence in the early 1990s in the successful and influential television series, The X-
Files. The X-Files establishes the format and the themes of the cycle and I will introduce these through a closer look at the series. Then I will illustrate how the Supernatural
Investigation cycle undertakes the task of reenchantment through these themes by performing a close analysis of two representative texts of the cycle: the films Fallen
(1998) and The Blair Witch Project (1999). Finally, an evaluation and a discussion of the implications of this cycle conclude the chapter.
4.1 The X-Files and the Emergence of the Cycle
Precursors to the Supernatural Investigation cycle began to appear at the end of the
1980s. Alan Parker's supernatural detective thriller, Angel Heart (1987), starring Mickey
100 Rourke and Robert De Niro looks in retrospect about five years ahead of its time. It impressed critics but failed to find an audience for its unique blend of 1940s film noir and occult horror. The First Power (1989), starred Lou Diamond Philips as a hard-boiled police detective hunting a demon that jumps from one host body to another, committing murders along the way.2 Also in 1989, William Peter Blatty, the author of The Exorcist, wrote and directed a sequel, Exorcist III, involving the hunt for a serial killer possessed by the same demon that appeared in the original film. Finally, in the spring of 1990, ABC broadcast David Lynch's television drama Twin Peaks.
At the time Twin Peaks premiered on ABC, there was nothing like it on television. Lynch successfully imported his unique sensibility from the cinema to the small screen at a time when few American filmmakers deemed television worthy of such effort. Following his lead, Chris Carter created The X-Files two years later. Fans, critics and scholars all noticed the similarities between Twin Peaks and The X-Files. Both series featured a protagonist who was both an FBI special agent and a "believer." Both revolved around investigations of ambiguous representations of the supernatural. And, importantly, together they introduced an entirely new tone to the horror genre, a tone that remains common today. Before Twin Peaks and The X-Files, the supernatural in American television had long lacked any gothic pedigree. Programs of the 1970s and 80s like
Fantasy Island, Highway to Heaven, or The Greatest American Hero drew on every kind
2 Fallen (1999), which I discuss in detail below, put a very similar idea to use a decade later, with much better results. 3For example, see the essays in Lavery (1996), especially Malach. 101 of popular genre but horror (light fantasy, science fiction, "heavenly" angelic comedy/drama). Today, dark gothic supernatural drama is a mainstay of American television. The progeny of Twin Peaks and The X-Files include the series Millennium
(1996-9), Profiler (1996-2000), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Roswell (1999-
2002), Six Feet Under (2001-5), Lost (2004-2010), Medium (2005 -), The Ghost
Whisperer (2005 - ) and Supernatural (2005 - ).
As well, for perhaps the first time ever, television exerted a distinct influence over the style, tone, and subject matter of the movies. In the wake of Twin Peaks and The X-
Files, the American horror film began a renaissance in no small part because the films of the 1990s imitated the tone and style these series. The Supernatural Investigation cycle has been a large part of that renaissance. Examples of the Supernatural Investigation film over the last two decades include Fallen (1999), The Blair Witch Project (1999), The Last
Broadcast (1999), Stir of Echoes (1999), Stigmata (1999), Sleepy Hollow (1999), The
Ninth Gate (1999), The St. Francisville Experiment (2000), Bless The Child (2000), Lost
Souls (2000), From Hell (2001), The Ring (2002, based on the Japanese film Ringu,
1998), The Mothman Prophecies (2002), Dragonfly (2002), Heartland Ghost (2002,
Made for TV) White Noise (2005), Revelations (2005, Made for TV) and The Exorcism of
Emily Rose (2005).
Supernatural horror films and thrillers come in a variety of styles and structures, but a combination of three elements lend the Investigation cycle its unique character.
102 First, the protagonist of the film is a skeptic at the outset of the story. Second, an
investigation structures the narrative around the search for clues, evidence and proof, blending elements of the detective genre with the horror film. Third, a turning point occurs with the conversion of the skeptical protagonist into a believer. Nowhere did these characteristic elements of the supernatural investigation cycle find a more definitive expression in the 1990s than the Fox Network's Emmy-winning series The X-Files.
Certainly for a time and arguably even today, the cult hit series made the names Mulder and Scully synonymous with the words "believer" and "skeptic" respectively. The friction between the two detectives' approaches defined the series, explicitly tackling questions of truth, belief, doubt and faith throughout its nine-year run. And of course, The
X-Files was not just about a skeptic and a believer, but about investigations of the supernatural, and so, while it was not the first supernatural investigation narrative of the period, it perfected a template the influence of which we still see today. In this section, I combine a close look at each of the three defining elements of the cycle with a discussion of their place in The X-Files, the template of the Supernatural Investigation cycle.
The heart and soul of The X-Files was the special bond between the two lead detectives, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. There was no more compelling relationship between two characters on American television in the 1990s. Scully, with her scientific and medical training played the role of the skeptic. Mulder, a former star of the FBI's
Behavioral Science Unit (the serial killer profilers), was the passionate and obsessive
103 believer. Mulder combined an open mind with brilliant detective skills and an
encyclopedic knowledge of the paranormal. His work, however, seemed driven by a
personal quest to prove at all costs that the abduction of his sister, an event he witnessed
some 20 years ago, involved a government cover-up of extraterrestrial life. Mulder's passionate nature and his insistence on this interpretation of his sister's disappearance
sometimes threw into question his credulity in face of unexplained but not necessarily
supernatural cases. Scully, ever the voice of reason and restraint, proved on more than one occasion to be right: that Mulder's desire to believe clouded his judgment.
And so The X-Files epitomized the Supernatural Investigation film's structural tension between disenchanted and reenchanted explanations of its central mysteries. Each
X-file began with a mysterious set of circumstances, enough so that the FBI's special unit was called in to assist local law enforcement, followed by an investigation conducted by the skeptic and the believer, both framing the evidence and the circumstances via their own set of assumptions. So common has this investigative narrative, this horror/detective genre hybrid, become today that it is easy to forget that there are other ways to tell a supernatural story on television. While TV detective programs have long been successful due in large part to their amenability to episodic presentation, making The X-Files a
*Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an example of different kind of supernatural narrative. Buffy and her friends were essentially a monster fighting team rather than investigators, although the distinction between these two roles is not always clear. Anthology series like The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Night Gallery represent a once-common but now nearly forgotten third kind of supernatural television series. 104 detective series served other purposes as well. The show's detective/horror genre hybridity was critical to its mythic task.
Detectives solve mysteries in the same manner that scientists conduct research.
Both apply logic, reason, an attention to facts, and a positivist stance to the pursuit of knowledge and truth. Indeed, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, science was conducting one large investigation into the mystery of life and the universe. As Max
Weber put it in his definition of disenchanted modernity, science assumed that "there are in principle no mysterious, incalculable powers at work" (13) and that given enough time, it could solve any mystery. In one sense, Scully perfectly embodies this positivist stance.5
It resembles what Charles Taylor calls a "closed world" stance (557) because it brackets off anything that could not be explained or solved by science. Mulder, on the other hand, doesn't so much reject science, as he does this extreme positivism. Mulder remains
"open," and insists that his position is more true to the original spirit of science. In an early debate with Scully ("Conduit"), he defends his position by insisting that "this is the essence of science". As Joe Bellon puts it, "the object of critique [in the series] is not science itself, but rather the way authority has invested certain scientists and certain theories with the exclusive right to determine truth" (144).
That we arrive at truth via the scientific method, through induction based on evidence, is something upon which Mulder and Scully agree. In fact, Mulder completely
5That Scully is also deeply religious, and so privately does not subscribe to a strictly "closed world" perspective, is typical of the series' blurring of boundaries and refusal to promote simple dichotomies. 105 rejects all organized religion. Mulder's search is always for evidence and concrete proof of the supernatural, of alien life, and of the circumstances behind his sister's disappearance. By presenting the supernatural as a mystery to be investigated on these terms, The X-Files places it within the frame of modern science, our modern method for arriving at truth. Importantly then, rather than ask the audience to simply accept the existence of the supernatural by suspending disbelief, the narrative cues us to think about the supernatural as something up for debate, as something that can be proved or disproved. The X-Files and the films of the Supernatural Investigation cycle take as their subject the possibility of the existence of the supernatural. By offering viewers opportunities for considering this possibility, they function mythically to ease the dilemmas or cross-pressures of secularization. The ambivalent cross-pressured subject today wants to believe that there is "something more" and just the very possibility that something supernatural could be real opens a crack in a dissatisfying immanent frame.
These narratives and the possibilities they imagine don't solve our problems, but that is not the task of genre films. Their social function is only to ease them.
Along with belief and truth, a third characteristic concern of the Supernatural
Investigation cycle is conversion. Certainly a great part of the pleasure, the richness and the complexity of The X-Files came from watching the transformation of Scully's skepticism. In fact, one could argue that the series was really always Scully's story, right from the beginning. She is the first character to appear on screen in the series' pilot
106 episode. In the show's very first scene, Scully enters the office of a senior director at the
FBI. She is a young inexperienced agent who is just following orders. In the meeting, she learns that she has been assigned to the X-Files with Mulder in order to report back on the "validity" of Mulder's work. Her seniors make explicit that she has been chosen because of her medical and scientific background; in other words, her skepticism. In this way, we are introduced to the program's premise through Scully's eyes.
Mulder, his reputation now having preceded him, appears in the next scene, again via Scully's point-of-view, as she enters his office and introduces herself. Everything about Mulder is meant to be an aberration. He works in tiny cluttered room in the basement. His co-workers refer to him as "Spooky". He was a brilliant criminal profiler with a bright future who gave it all up to work on the X-Files. He lives alone, has no friends and no relationship. And this is all without even mentioning his credulity, all of the strange things in which he believes, nor the childhood trauma he carries with him.
Simply put, Mulder seems too odd to expect audiences to identify with him, too odd to be the series' protagonist. And so, as the narrative of the series begins, it is through the eyes of Scully the skeptic that we enter this world.
But something happened over the program's first few seasons. Mulder and his quest caught the public's imagination and he quickly became the hero and the protagonist, the face of the show. Now, it was up to Mulder to help Scully see that there are indeed "more things than are dreamt of in [her] philosophy." Scully's conversion
107 occurs gradually over these early episodes. A key event comes in the poignant episode
"Beyond the Sea" when her father dies suddenly of a heart attack. Scully receives a visit from her father's ghost, and encounters a psychic who might be in contact with his spirit, profoundly shaking her empirical worldview. After this, her confidence in the immanent frame is never quite the same. Here, as is so often the case, the skeptic's conversion requires a first-hand experience. No amount of debate with Mulder, testimony of witnesses or second-hand evidence can bring about such change. In "End Game", an episode from Season Two, she reflects that "many of the things that I have seen have challenged my faith and my belief in an ordered universe but this uncertainty has only strengthened my need to know, to understand, to apply reason to those things which seem to defy it." Such is the complex state of ambivalence into which the series worked to place its protagonists. Over the course of many seasons, The X-Files was able to create and sustain this tone of uncertainty that made it so representative of the Zeitgeist.
And so gradually the stark typecasting of Mulder as believer and Scully as skeptic would fade into the background, although the tensions between their fundamental perspectives remained. Scully never ceased questioning Mulder's enthusiasm and intuition and Mulder never gave up his quest, but over time they shared a series of experiences that drew them together and placed them both on the fringe of society: both had near-death experiences, both lost a parent, Scully was abducted just as Mulder's sister had been, and many times both witnessed things that nobody else saw and which no
108 one would likely believe. All of this can be understood, if we imagine The X-Files as
Scully's story, as part of the ongoing conversion of this skeptic into a believer. The conversion turns her, like Mulder, into an outsider, removing her from the institutional position she was supposed to hold as a representative of science, reason, and most importantly the FBI's "eyes" on Mulder, and placing her next to him on the fringes of belief.
And while The X-Files reveled at times in teasing ambiguity, and in undermining the agents' quest for the Truth by suggesting more than once that, as postmodernism argues, there are only "truths" and no "Truth," ultimately the series confirmed Mulder's beliefs. Our planet had indeed been visited by alien life and the government (or some agency above the government) was indeed covering it up in a massive conspiracy. Thus, the series, however much it cleverly danced around the issue, ultimately did tell us that the supernatural was real and that reality exceeded the parameters insisted on by institutional science. Importantly, this truth was joined to the verification of Mulder's conspiracy theory. One way in which the series made realistic its discrediting of the immanent frame was by linking it to the already widely accepted discrediting of the government's claims to honesty and transparency. How could such mysteries escape our attention in today's world? In part because the institutions that are supposed to provide us with knowledge hide that knowledge from us instead. As a massive and powerful institution that influences and even controls the flow of information in society, the
109 government's very existence makes the possibility that "the truth" may be hidden from us more plausible.6 But while The X-Files does demonstrate a concern with the relationship between knowledge and power in contemporary society, a critique along the lines of
Foucault is not its primary concern. Most fundamentally it seeks to access the sense of wonder and the feeling of hope that comes with the openness to mystery and the unknown at the edge of reality. This is why, in the end, for all its ambivalence, it finally says there is something more out there, the supernatural is real, the immanent frame can be surmounted.
Having now introduced the themes of the cycle and their interaction in The X-
Files, the cycle's influential network precursor, I will turn now to a closer textual analysis of some representative films in order to illustrate the different ways that the Supernatural
Investigation film, in the footsteps of The X-Files, functions mythically by discrediting the immanent frame.
4.2 Fallen and The Blair Witch Project: Analysis of Two Supernatural Investigation
Films
6My interpretation has some parallels with Slavoj Zizek here. For Zizek, this attitude makes Mulder an ideal example of a postmodern subject, one who compensates for the loss of faith in the traditional institutions that gave life meaning (which Zizek calls "the Other") by imagining an even more real and powerful Other pulling the strings behind the scenes ("the Other of the Other"). Zizek notes the manner in which the paranoid individual holds simultaneously the contradictory attitudes of cynicism and belief (18- 19). This resembles my notion of the ambivalent subject cross-pressured between belief and skepticism.
110 In Fallen, Denzel Washington plays John Hobbes, a star detective on the Philadelphia police force. Hobbes' nemesis, the serial killer Edgar Reese, has just been executed but now the murders have begun again. A riddle Reese gave Hobbes just before the execution appears scrawled on the wall of a new crime scene. Hobbes begins receiving calls at home in the middle of the night, which resemble those Reese had made to taunt the detective while he was alive and on the loose. Hobbes suspects an accomplice of Reese or a copycat of some kind, but the theory doesn't fit the facts. Meanwhile, Hobbes works on the riddle, which leads him to a highly decorated cop who mysteriously committed suicide 30 years ago. Hobbes tracks down the cop's daughter, Gretta, and pays her a visit.
She tells him her father was hunting a killer, but was eventually framed for the murders himself. He committed suicide in despair. As the Reese murders continue, the same thing appears to be happening to Hobbes. People are beginning to suspect Hobbes, since Reese is dead and the new crime scenes contain information that only Reese and Hobbes could know. Convinced something extraordinary is happening, but skeptical of supernatural explanations, Hobbes travels to the cabin in the woods where Gretta's father killed himself. There he discovers a book about demons and the name "Azazel" written on a wall. The next day, Gretta admits to Hobbes she knows more than she was letting on.
God, angels and demons exist, she tells him. Azazel is a fallen angel, a supernatural force of evil that jumps from one body or host to another at will. Azazel was inside Edgar
Reese until he was executed. Now he continues to kill, and to taunt Hobbes, using other
111 hosts. It may be possible to stop Azazel but a very special person and just the right circumstances will be needed. Hobbes, it seems, is that person. But as he develops a plan to stop the demon, the demon turns the screws on Hobbes, setting up the good cop to appear like a murderer until everyone in the city believes that he is.
In The Blair Witch Project, our viewing of the film begins with a disclaimer that provides the following information: "In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found." What follows is about 90 minutes of seemingly unedited footage that may be divided roughly into three sections: footage of the filmmakers preparing and driving to Burkittsville, footage shot in and around
Burkittsville including several interviews with local townsfolk, and finally, in what makes up the bulk of the film, footage shot over seven days while in the woods outside
Burkittsville. All of this footage reveals three teenagers: Josh, the cameraman; Mike the sound man, and Heather, seemingly the director of the documentary who also serves as its on-screen narrator. Ostensibly, the documentary is an investigation of the local folklore surrounding "the Blair Witch," which includes some local history about witchcraft, contemporary sightings of what may be her ghost, and a potential connection to some serial murders of more recent heritage. After gathering interviews and other footage in town, the crew set out for their main goal, which is to film segments in the woods where various events connected to the legend occurred. While in the woods
112 however the group get lost, begin to argue, become increasingly disoriented and finally reach the verge of mental breakdown. They have close encounters with what may be the witch or ghost or may just be locals playing pranks. Finally, after Josh goes missing,
Mike and Heather enter an abandoned house in a state of panic in the middle of the night, where they are subsequently attacked. Their cameras capture what appear to be their deaths, although it is unclear who has attacked them in the house and the film's disclaimer indicates only that the three have "disappeared."
In the next sections, I will discuss in more detail each of the three characteristic elements of the Supernatural Investigation cycle—the skeptical protagonist, the uncovering of evidence, and the conversion scene—one by one. I include examples from various films while focusing on a close analysis of these two representative examples of the cycle, Fallen and The Blair Witch Project.
4.2.1 The Skeptical Protagonist
The standard Hollywood narrative features a single lead character or protagonist. The
Supernatural Investigation film, centering as it does around the possibility of the existence of the supernatural, must establish its protagonist as a skeptic for two reasons.
Firstly, classical film narrative involves a lead character with whom the audience typically can identify. Achieving identification in this sense means endowing the protagonist with traits likely to be shared by the audience. As discussed above, this
113 requirement made Mulder quite an unlikely hero at the outset of The X-Files. Instead,
Scully was the recognizable and sympathetic protagonist in the series' pilot episode. By emphasizing skepticism as a character trait of its protagonist the films assume that most viewers are also skeptics when it comes to these matters of the supernatural. Secondly, the protagonists' skepticism must be established because a key intention of the narrative is to build towards and finally depict their conversion. A good deal of the drama and tension in the supernatural investigation film comes from watching the cognitive shift that takes place in the mind of the protagonists as they reorient from skeptic to believer.
Many of the weaker examples of the cycle establish this skepticism rather heavy- handedly. The 2000 Supernatural Investigation film Bless the Child opens on Christmas
Eve with Maggie O'Connor (Kim Basinger), the protagonist, riding a city bus. An older lady with a Jamaican accent sitting next to her says, "The star of Bethlehem is in the sky tonight. It's just like the night that Jesus was born." Maggie replies, a bit embarrassed,
"I'm not sure I believe in that sort of thing." The Jamaican lady tells her, "Ii doesn't matter if you believe. It's there anyway." In 1999's Stir of Echoes, Kevin Bacon plays the protagonist, Tom Witzky. Tom is a blue-collar dad living in Chicago, whose wife's best friend claims to be psychic. She also practices hypnosis. In an opening scene, at a party,
Tom claims not to believe in any of this New Age nonsense. Believing nothing will happen, he agrees to let her hypnotize him.
114 It should come as no surprise that these opening scenes establishing the skepticism of their protagonists will lead to supernatural encounters. In Bless the Child, after the scene on the bus, Maggie arrives home to find her runaway drug-addicted sister at her door. She has a baby that she wants to leave with Maggie to look after. The baby, the child of the title, will turn out to be an angel meant to save the world from the coming
Anti-Christ. Meanwhile, in Stir of Echoes, Tom's skepticism is shattered when he begins seeing ghosts after being hypnotized. He asks his wife's friend what she did to him. "I guess I opened 'a door'," she says. Maggie goes on to investigate the circumstances of her niece's birth and the possibility of the coming apocalypse while Tom goes on to investigate the death of a girl whose ghost he now keeps seeing in his home. These are just some of the examples of the standard narrative setup of the Supernatural
Investigation film cycle.
In both Fallen and Blair Witch, the lead characters' skepticism emerges in less explicit but nevertheless important and telling ways. Denzel Washington's gifts as an actor bring John Hobbes' skepticism to life in the opening scenes of Fallen with little need for dialogue. The film begins with a first-person voiceover narration in the style of traditional hard-boiled detective fiction and the film noir. The opening scene is set up when we meet Hobbes and watch his calm, detached interaction with the killer Edgar
Reese moments before Reese's execution. The combination of generic signifiers and
Washington's performance tells us exactly what kind of detective this man is. The
115 protagonists of such crime stories are grounded, no-nonsense practical men. They deal with facts, people and concrete circumstances, not with abstract ideas and philosophical riddles. There is no hint of Mulder in John Hobbes as Fallen begins. He is a pure, down- to-earth, hard-boiled crime fighter.
Later, Hobbes visits Gretta at her apartment, whose decorative taste leans heavily towards pictures and paintings of angels. She reveals some information about her father but does not let on yet that the mystery involves anything supernatural. However, as
Hobbes turns to leave she calls out to him, "Do you believe in God?" An odd question it would seem but Hobbes answers politely, "I try to go to church on Sundays, but I guess the answer is 'no'." Here then is the very same expository scene found at the beginning of Bless the Child. But in Fallen, it appears further into the narrative and is, admittedly, a bit redundant. The audience already understands that Hobbes is not a religious man but instead a typical modern skeptic. All this will of course soon begin to change.
Pinpointing a protagonist in The Blair Witch Project is a little more difficult.
Certainly one of the great pleasures of this film is its atypical narrative structure. The mock-documentary approach means that the film must establish and develop character in unconventional ways. Nevertheless, it still performs this task, giving us individuals with whom we may identify as well as experience the events depicted. Rather than one protagonist, the film more or less spreads that role across the three young filmmakers' characters. Though careful to distinguish each of the teens' personalities, one trait they all
116 share is their attitude towards the subject of their documentary. Rarely discussed and frequently overlooked, the film's opening sections are of the utmost importance to the story. All of the setup for drama and tension to come appears here in the film's first twenty minutes. In fact, without these scenes, the film could not perform its reenchanting function. We must see how flippant and skeptical the kids are about the folklore around the Blair Witch to both recognize a part of ourselves in them and to savour their
"conversion" later in the film.
Take, for example, Heather's on-camera persona. In these segments, as she acts as a
"host" of sorts for the documentary, her voice and body language resemble little of the
Heather we know from behind the scenes. Stilted and over-performed, the persona she adopts here rings particularly hollow. These scripted moments suggest to us just what type of documentary Heather envisioned; she appears more interested in contrived horror cliches than in a sincere investigation of her subject. Worse still are the interviews she conducts with the local people. All of them drip with sarcasm and contempt. Heather is condescending to Mary Brown, the "crazy lady" who claims to have witnessed the witch.
Afterwards, the group makes jokes at Mary's expense. The same barely-concealed sarcasm makes the interview with the two fishermen painful to watch. The filmmaker's attitude here points to their closed perspective. It does not enter their mind that the stories might be true. All belief in the supernatural is treated as superstition. We only need compare these with any episode of The X-Files to recognize the different attitudes that an
117 investigator might display towards eye-witness testimony. One of Mulder's most characteristic traits is his willingness to believe people's stories. The footage presented in the opening sections of Blair Witch, before the trio enter the woods and get lost, establishes clearly the protagonists' skepticism towards the supernatural.
Both Fallen and The Blair Witch Project present us with characters who begin the film as skeptics and remain skeptical of the possibility of the supernatural as it begins to confront them during the narrative. Of course, most horror films that deal in representations of the supernatural have an element of this concern with skepticism and belief. In fact, one common distinction made between the horror genre and the fantasy genre is that fantasy takes the supernatural for granted while in horror there remains a distinction between the natural and the supernatural. As Robin Wood puts it, a basic equation for the horror film is "normality is threatened by the monster" (203). Fantasy purports to present the world as it was understood by premodern man. Horror, on the other hand, is necessarily modern. Thus, the reality of the supernatural in horror is always in some way questioned. For example, a character will encounter the monster but recounting the experience later he finds nobody will believe him. The special distinction of the Supernatural Investigation cycle however is the emphasis placed on the cognitive drama of the protagonists: how they struggle to process and understand their encounter with the supernatural, what it takes to convince or convert them, and what their experience is like now that they are a believer and nobody will believe them.
118 4.2.2 Investigations, Evidence, and Conversions
Once these investigators' characters have been established, strange things begin to occur.
In Fallen, a copycat murder scene after Reese's execution hardly raises an eyebrow until
Hobbes opens the door to the bedroom and finds scrawled on the wall the same riddle
Reese posed to him before his execution. Immediately, the detectives propose hypotheses that could explain such a situation. Reese has an accomplice? Who else heard him pose the riddle? What about the footage shot by the documentary crew? Who has seen it?
Because the moment in the jail cell was recorded, the possibility remains that someone other than the deceased killer put the riddle at the crime scene. In this instance, film's status as a truth-capturing medium lends credibility to the skeptic. But when a videotape of the documentary footage is brought in to the station, we see that film's indexical relation to reality can cut both ways. It turns out that some "mumbo jumbo" (as Hobbes calls it) that the convict ranted while in his cell was in fact an authentic form of Aramaic.
An expert explains to them that this is a language nobody in the world speaks today.
Captured on film, and verified by an authority, this is evidence of something strange that is not easily dismissed.
Still, the skeptical protagonist holds onto immanent or natural explanations in the face of the supernatural for as long as possible. The films pose the question, "just what will it take to change this person's mind?" How much evidence or what sort of evidence will it take? How long can their skepticism hold out? In this way, the Supernatural
119 Investigation cycle takes as a subject our shared definitions of evidence, belief, and truth, illustrating how specific occurrences of these terms in the detective genre are linked to broader metaphysical and epistemological concerns.
In Fallen, the moment of conversion for Detective Hobbes occurs in a striking scene that takes place at the precinct. Neither the audience nor Hobbes understands yet that a demon is at work in this story, but the viewer does know that something is moving from body to body before Hobbes realizes this. The film provides this information through a combination of editing and sound, in particular the use of the Rolling Stones song "Time is on My Side." Reese sings this song before his execution and after he dies something seems to move from his body to other living people, who then hum or sing the song. Now it appears this is a demon moving from one host to another. When the demon enters the precinct and taunts Hobbes by jumping from the body of one policeman to another, singing the song out loud for him to hear, Hobbes races through the building following the song from person to person, still not quite sure why. He simply remembers that Reese had sung it before. Finally, the demon turns to him outside the building, in the body of an old lady, and speaks directly to him. Hobbes knows there is no way that this tiny senior citizen can be saying the things he hears. She must be possessed or inhabited by something. Hobbes' days as a skeptic are over.
In The Blair Witch Project, the same gradual progression of anomalies and strange events occurs. But it is really at another level, the framing device of the mock-
120 documentary itself, that the film raises these questions about the definition of evidence and belief. As we saw in Fallen, the film medium's relation to reality puts it at the center of modern investigative technique. As Stuart Hall says, a photograph tells us "this really happened" (241). Today, police rely on surveillance cameras not just to deter crime but as critical evidence when a crime does occur. And even as digital technology diminishes our trust in the mechanically-reproduced image, a photo or some video of a UFO or a ghost remains a compelling piece of evidence for paranormal investigators. In many ways a product of the rational project of the Enlightenment, mechanical reproduction soon after it appeared was recruited to contribute to this project. As science "fetishized 'facts'... the camera became an apparatus through which the natural world could be accurately documented and recorded" both contributing to and satisfying "the new thirst for facts"
(Roscoe and Hight, 9)
The earliest films were simple documents of reality that dovetailed with this project. But, of course, as cinema adopted fictional narrative as its principal mode, it needed a way to bracket the medium's indexical relation to reality, to separate fact from fiction. Generic codes were quickly established that allowed viewers to understand, without even thinking, whether to look at the image as a record of reality or as symbolic communication. Once clearly separated, the fiction film became the domain of art and entertainment while the documentary remained yoked to the rational project of science
121 and the pursuit of truth. It is the codes and conventions of documentary that a mock-doc such as Blair Witch manipulates to achieve its impression of reality.
The Blair Witch Project, a unique but important example of the Supernatural
Investigation cycle, raises the same questions as Fallen, and in much the same way, but it poses them more directly to the audience. An investigation in the form of a documentary has gone awry. The filmmakers have vanished. Now, a new investigation into their disappearance has been launched and the audience is invited to participate. The only evidence in this second investigation, the only trace of the filmmakers, is this footage. Is it evidence? And if so, of what? Is there something supernatural in the woods outside
Burkittsville or not? The crew themselves had no intentions of using their equipment to capture evidence of the supernatural because they did not believe there was any to find.
Instead, they appear interested only in the atmosphere and the folklore of the area. When they stumble upon something more, they try desperately to record it for posterity but concrete proof of the supernatural mostly slips from their grasp. As we watch this raw found footage, we are encouraged to consider carefully what we see. The film recreates the experience of encountering photographic evidence of the supernatural at the same time that its codes of realism recreate the experience of the filmmakers themselves.
Unlike most Supernatural Investigations, Blair Witch ends on an ambiguous note.
It doesn't confirm, as Fallen does, that the supernatural does indeed exist. There remains a way to read everything we see in the film within the immanent frame. Nevertheless, the
122 film's powerful final moments also offer us the opportunity for our own conversion experience. As the transitions from day to night scenes become increasingly abrupt, and the attacks on the tent become more terrorizing, Blair Witch builds an altogether different kind of tension than the traditional horror film. One moment the kids are setting up their tent, the next moment they are awake in the middle of the night listening to sounds outside in the darkness. As they run screaming into the dark, they have only the lights attached to their cameras with which to look around. The pitiful use that the cameras and the lights are to them as they shine into the endless darkness of the woods emphasizes their helplessness. The viewer, whose perspective is limited to only what the camera has captured, recognizes the limitations of this device for recording reality. As Heather and
Mike rush into the deserted house in the final scene, and first Mike, and then Heather is struck down from behind and (presumably) killed, their cameras lie on the floor still recording for a moment. We glimpse a shadowy figure standing in the corner facing the wall. The shot lasts just long enough for us to realize that, for the first time in the film, we are seeing something now that none of the characters saw. We have inhabited their heads the entire film, seeing everything through their eyes. What better way to make us feel their absence, their death? And then, suddenly, we realize we are alone in this house in the woods with their attacker... The moment is both terrible and uncanny. Before we can completely make sense of it, the film ends, leaving us with a sense that some mysterious
123 power or force may indeed hover in the woods outside Burkittsville. We have been converted.
4.3 Conclusion
The detective represents for us a figure who "gets to the truth" and does so in ways that parallel that other nineteenth century investigator—the scientist. A key characteristic of modern society has been its investigative nature. In place of a world explained by scripture, we began in the Renaissance to reinterpret reality as a mystery again, but at the same time an entirely solvable one. This attitude towards the world takes as a central belief that, via the scientific method, humankind can and will penetrate this mystery and re-explain the world on a new set of terms. As Charles Taylor insists, we may accept this perspective and still see that nothing here precludes the possibility of "something more."
In fact, science at its outset was a deeply religious endeavor. The mysteries were understood to have been placed there by God and so solving them was a way of getting closer to Him. God Himself however remained a mystery nobody expected to solve. It is only with the gradual assembly of the immanent frame, which Taylor says included a combination of beliefs only some of which had to do with these early presuppositions of science, that all else becomes excluded altogether. The key assumption that separates these two stances towards the immanent frame—one open, the other closed—is the idea that not just some or most but all mysteries can and will be solved by human
124 investigation. God is removed entirely from this perspective, as is any spiritual notion that might take His place. Nineteenth century positivism put it this way: only that which can be quantified in scientific terms can be said to exist. And if it can be quantified or measured, science can and will eventually do so, and thus understand and control it.
There is nothing else, only what is here and now.
The investigation then, from the initial mystery, through the gathering of evidence and the sifting of facts, the posing of hypotheses and their verification, to the eventual solution and explanation, is a microcosm of the project that leads to the disenchantment of the world. Scientists, as investigators of nature, were busy unveiling her mysteries at the same time that modern police departments were forming (S. Knight, 289). Criminal justice began to employ scientific methods, adopting the newest technologies and scientific discoveries to aid in crime prevention and detection. While the activities of scientists for the most part do not make for compelling drama, detective narratives do.
Thus, the detective story came to animate and dramatize the scientific method and all of its epistemological assumptions like no other popular narrative. That the supernatural horror film might merge with the conventions of the detective narrative may at first surprise us. After all, horror is anything but scientific and rational. But such an assumption overlooks the complex interplay between codes of horror and codes of realism found in the genre. The Supernatural Investigation cycle relies on this interplay to achieve its task of reenchantment. It sets out to explore the possibility of the existence of
125 the supernatural via the conventions of science and reason, and ask audiences ambivalent themselves over such a possibility, "what would make you believe?" By converting skeptics into believers, or simply proving them wrong, the cycle also offers the pleasure of discrediting the immanent frame, that set of assumptions about reality that leaves modern subjects forever wondering, as Charles Taylor puts it, "Is that all there is?" (507).
But if the films provide an opportunity to imaginatively overcome the cross- pressures attend to the conditions of belief today, they also make some simplistic assumptions about what belief means. Peter Berger, discussing the transformation of society in the modern age, identifies the changing role and meaning of belief.7 As modernity brought separate peoples increasingly together, the most significant result was massive pluralization of cultures. Berger conceptualizes pluralization succinctly as "a move from fate to choice" ("Far Glory", 89). In a certain ideal version of a pre-modern society, an individual is born into a world that has a very secure, built-in set of explanations, an enveloping protective yet constrictive set of beliefs, or ideology. This meaning structure moreover can be maintained precisely because one rarely if ever encounters anyone who doesn't share and reaffirm these central beliefs. Crucially, without access to other ways of seeing things, doubt or skepticism rarely arises.
What comes as a package with this secure meaningful universe however is a high degree of predestination. If you are born into this world, you can count on your class,
7This discussion of Berger's argument is taken from Chapter 4 of A Far Glory entitled, "The Solitary Believer." 126 your job, your prospects, and your identity to be pretty much predetermined for you.
Modernity traded that safety and security for freedom and choice. Ideally today, everyone shares an open future to do with as they please. Nothing is predetermined and a buffet of choices awaits us for every aspect of life. We value this freedom above nearly all things but with this freedom comes the requirement that we make choices. Yet, choosing turns out to be a hard thing to do. Berger insists that for belief or faith to be meaningful it must be something that we work towards of our own volition, something that we choose. How we do this is up to us but we must not sit back and wait for someone to prove something to us, or for a "religious experience" to come along and convert us. This difficult decision leaves us understandably ambivalent about our situation and this ambivalence finds expression in our narratives. In the Supernatural Investigation cycle, the question "what evidence would it take for you to believe?" is a trap. If belief remains contingent on proof, either via irrefutable evidence or first-hand experience, well then it is not really belief at all.
This should remind us again of Mulder's poster and its confession, "I want to believe." Belief, in fact, means acting as if something is true without knowing for sure.8
Faith, in this sense, is just a strong word for belief. Both faith and belief require by definition that we not know for sure, but the films discussed above only explore the relation of belief to evidence or proof. It seems today that what John the Apostle knew so
8 At least, this is what it means today. The word's meaning has changed over the centuries in line with the rise of exclusive humanism and science, as well as the shift in importance of faith in a pluralized society. 127 well still holds true: "Unless they see signs and wonders, they will not believe" (John
4:48) But today, even these are not likely to succeed. Secular society is too cynical and skeptical to ever trust anything presented as conclusive evidence of the supernatural or the transcendent. And yet, we still, like Mulder, "want to believe," perhaps not in a traditional religious sense, but in something. Where does this leave us?
Really, Mulder doesn't so much want to believe. He does believe. What he wants is proof. He wants validation for his belief in his sister's abduction. Mulder, though he pretends it doesn't bother him, hates being called 'spooky' by his peers and wants to prove to people that his beliefs are not eccentric or crazy but justified and true. Mulder's poster should say "I want Proof." But, as Berger would tell us, we can't have proof for some beliefs. We can't have total validation in the world we live in today. There is great value in doubt even, for believers as well as skeptics.9 If we want to believe, we can either wait for something to come along and convert us with undeniable evidence or we can make a conscious choice to believe.
The Supernatural investigation film owes its popularity to its enacting of the former, and notably easier, of the two scenarios. The skeptic's conversion is central to these films. Whether it is Denzel Washington's detective in Fallen realizing that demons do exist, the teen documentary crew in The Blair Witch Project realizing that there is indeed something in the woods with them, or Scully finally realizing that Mulder is on to
9 See Berger's most recent book, In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic. 128 something, the Supernatural Investigation narrative appeals to our search for meaning and our desire to believe. We enjoy watching the skeptic converted into the believer and we imagine what sort of experience would convert ourselves.
But Berger suggests that waiting for proof to come along to hit us in the face is the wrong thing to do. After all, what exactly would constitute proof for Mulder anyway?
What would constitute proof for me or you? What would it take to make you believe in
UFOs? Or ghosts? Or God? No snapshot, film or video footage of a UFO, or a ghost for that matter, is ever going to serve as proof for anyone that aliens or the afterlife exist. We must instead, Berger says, work towards it ourselves and, most of all, we must actively choose to believe. It is in the choice that we express our freedom and affirm our commitment to modernity. Otherwise, we turn our backs on everything modernity has achieved, asking to return to the safety of a world without freedom. This is why the
Supernatural Investigation cycle, with its emphasis on evidentiary proof and first-hand experience leading to the conversion of the skeptic, while understandably appealing, may be pointing in the wrong direction.
In the end, it should not surprise us that the old motif of the debate or disagreement between a skeptic and a believer in the supernatural moves to the foreground in today's supernatural horror films. When authors and screenwriters employ such a contrast, they are directly acknowledging the audience's ambivalence about the
129 immanent frame. The dialogue between the skeptic and the believer mirrors the audience's own interior dialogue or contemplation about whether there could be something beyond the here and now. While many viewers feel pulled in both directions, the outcome in the Supernatural Investigation film is nearly always the same; the skeptic is proven wrong and the believer proven correct. In this sense, the films target the audience's ambivalence, and aim to resolve it. The cycle functions mythically to reconcile our desire to believe with our socially-ingrained skepticism about the possibility of belief. To accomplish this, it adopts a hybrid nature, combining the detective film and the horror film. This allows it to confirm that there is "something else" beyond the immanent frame but in terms of a scientific investigation, one that converts a staunch skeptic into a willing believer. By employing the tropes of the rational detective genre, the films in this cycle can acknowledge skepticism, and the demand for proof, all the while exploring the reality of the supernatural.
130 5. Denying the "Denial of Evil": Looking into the Abyss in the Serial Killer Profiler Cycle
[In the American gothic mode] the world of appearances is at once real and a
mask through which we can dimly perceive more ultimate forces at work
- Leslie Fiedler
The serial killer has been a favorite monster of the horror film at least since
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960. The story of Norman Bates made the "realist horror film"—a film in which the threat is not supernatural but real—the modern heir apparent to the fantastic fears of the classic monster movies. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and
1980s, the cinematic psycho terrorized audiences. Slashers from Friday the I3th,s Jason to Halloween's Michael Myers became synonymous with the horror genre. During these same years, criminal psychology and law enforcement developed new theories, categories and definitions in their quest to understand and prevent violent crime. Out of this context emerged a new term—"serial killer"—that referred to a particular type of violent and disturbed individual. A serial killer is someone who murders strangers repeatedly and in a pattern over a span of many months or years. Once established and popularized, this definition influenced the representation of killers in the realist horror film. In the 1980s
'Just how to distinguish "real" from "supernatural" is addressed by Noel Carroll, who defines the supernatural as "things not acknowledged to exist by science" (41). Though not without its problems, this definition serves my purpose here. 131 and 1990s there occurred a noticeable shift away from the generic cinema psychos descended from Norman Bates to representations based upon the voluminous literature of the new serial killer culture (defined in detail below). The principal cycle within this new serial killer cinema has been the Profiler film.
The Serial Killer Profiler film is a serial killer narrative featuring a protagonist, usually a detective but sometimes a psychologist or independent investigator, who hunts down a multiple murderer using an investigative technique called "criminal profiling".
Profiling involves the use of crime scene evidence to "get inside the mind" of the unknown subject and reconstruct the psychological makeup of the perpetrator. The resulting "profile" of the criminal's mind can then help police narrow down a list of suspects, make educated guesses about where and when the next crime may occur, or recognize a pattern across seemingly unconnected crime scenes. Importantly, profiling of this kind in Serial Killer films is not an invention of Hollywood but instead a real technique used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Thus, as Cynthia Freeland argues, profiling and profilers in the movies are not separate from the case-histories and autobiographies of the real-life FBI serial killer experts, popularly known as
"mindhunters" ("Realist Horror", 126). The cycle could not exist and can not be understood without this context.
Moreover, the Profiler cycle, like the Supernatural Investigation cycle, represents a crucial aspect of a broader shift in the American horror film occurring since the 1990s.
132 The characteristics of this shift are a renewed interest in supernatural and metaphysical horror as opposed to political allegory, a concern with the limits of the immanent frame, and a dark, serious gothic style and tone. Due to their realistic subject matter, it might appear odd to group the Profiler films together with the new wave of supernatural films.
However, I contend that the two cycles are actually deeply intertwined. I will demonstrate here that they share numerous stylistic and narrative elements, and most importantly, they function in very similar ways as reenchanting narratives in a secular age. For these reasons, they are best appreciated in light of each other. In this chapter, I examine the Serial Killer Profiler cycle by first linking the films to the broader social and historical context in which ideas about serial killers circulate. I call this context "serial killer culture." I follow this with an analysis of two representative films, From Hell
(2001) and Suspect Zero (2004), both of which endow their detectives with paranormal profiling skills and their killers with an evil of supernatural dimensions. Before developing these arguments, however, I will take a closer look at the how the cycle functions in a similar manner and with similar goals as the Supernatural Investigation cycle, but with some critical differences.
Like the Supernatural Investigation film, the Profiler film provides ambivalent modern audiences an experience of reenchantment by questioning the credibility, or at least the closed nature, of what Charles Taylor calls "the immanent frame." However, the reenchantment enters the narrative in the Profiler film in a different, more complicated,
133 manner. Instead of an opposition between belief and skepticism leading to a revelation that the supernatural does indeed exist, Profiler films offer principally a sustained meditation on the serial killer as an embodiment of evil. In this, they belong to a long tradition in American literature and myth fascinated with the reality of evil and the degree of its power over mankind. As Leslie Fiedler argued in Love and Death in the American
Novel, the gothic mode in American fiction, the mode that gave the nation its greatest literature, assumed both that "in Man and nature alike, there is a diabolical element" and
"that is evil is real" (435). Revived in the context of the serial killer narrative, such assumptions today have an impact similar to the denial of the immanent frame in the
Supernatural Investigation cycle. They contradict the secular assumption that evil is an inappropriate subject. The Profiler film reenchants in fact by denying the "denial of evil" in a secular age.
Claudia Card calls "the denial of evil" an "important strand in of twentieth- century secular Western culture" (28). The notion arises from the same basic empirical perspective that denies religion in general. In this tradition, both religion in general and the notion of evil in particular are conceived of as human projections, social constructions that carry no objective truth. Worse still, from this perspective, these projections often support oppressive social and political agendas wherein an appeal to a transcendent idea of "the Good" justifies one set of values while the demonization of others as "Evil" excuses acts of violence and domination. Thus many contemporary thinkers aim to empty
134 a word like "evil" of any transcendent connotation or even to replace it entirely with more precise terms for the use and abuse of power and violence in society. Looked at this way, belief in the reality of evil becomes, in fact, nothing but a remnant of premodern conception of the world, associated with fundamentalists who cling to such worldviews.
However, just as the desire for reenchantment persists in the face of secularization, the sense that evil is real refuses to disappear. The frequency with which popular texts contemplate the reality of evil reflects its continued relevance for more than just committed fundamentalists. If we take them seriously, cinematic serial killers and the detectives who hunt them offer an ideal opportunity to observe popular culture as myth, working through and attempting to reconcile contemporary ambivalence about the possibility of transcendence and the desire for reenchantment. It is in this sense that the
Profiler film resembles the Supernatural Investigation cycle. Both attempt to negotiate a path between the real and the supernatural, the immanent and transcendent, the disenchanted and the reenchanted in a secular age.
Like the Supernatural Investigation cycle, the Profiler cycle tackles these concerns through the use of some recurring themes and motifs. Two in particular reward a closer look—the hunter, and the abyss. A hunting metaphor appears frequently in profiler texts, used to allude both to the actions of the killer towards his victims and the actions of the profiler towards the killer. The ambivalence of the metaphor contributes to the blurred boundary between the detective and criminal, good and evil, in the narratives.
135 The abyss, and other terms that describe an empty or bottomless darkness, appear frequently in profiler narratives as a symbol for the kind of metaphysical or transcendent evil embodied by the killer. Importantly, these motifs appear across serial killer culture, appearing not just in the films of the Profiler cycle but in the autobiographical writing of the real-life profilers themselves. I turn now to a look at this wider serial killer culture, drawing out the themes of the hunter and the abyss before exploring them in an analysis of some representative Profiler films.
5.1 FBI Profilers and Serial Killer Culture
An effective way to understand serial killer culture is to trace the history of the term
'serial killer' itself. The use of the term dates to the mid-1970s, when agents of the
Behavioral Science Unit at the FBI's Quantico training center began teaching new approaches to what had long been called 'stranger murder' and/or 'lust murder'.3 Up until then, this crime had been relatively rare but, as several studies have since shown, in the
1960s cases of multiple murder began to rise significantly. Highly-publicized cases that decade included those of the Boston Strangler and San Francisco's Zodiac Killer. The most notorious examples of the serial killer, however—Ted Bundy in the Northwest,
John Wayne Gacy in Chicago, David Berkowitz in New York, and The Hillside Strangler
2 While the exact definition of a serial killer is debated today, the one provided in the Crime Classification Manual, and commonly cited, will suffice: "three or more separate events in three or more separate locations with an emotional cooling off period in between the homicides" (21). 3Other terms used would include "sadistic murder", "sex murder", "psycho killer", "compulsive killer", "thrill killer", "recreational killer", "motiveless murder/homicide", "multiple murder", "mass murder". 136 in Los Angeles—were still to come in the 1970s.
The FBI's academy in Quantico, Virginia is both a training center for new agents and a school where law enforcement officers from all over the country travel for courses on criminology and police methods. The BSU in the early 1970s mostly taught
Psychology and Sociology 101 courses as well as a course on hostage negotiation
(Douglas, "Mindhunter", 95-96). This demonstrates the rather limited use to which principles from human psychology were put up until that time. There had been one famous crossover between psychology and police work in recent American history, however. In 1957, the New York police were struggling with a domestic terrorist known as "the Mad Bomber" who seemed impossible to catch. A New York clinical psychiatrist,
Dr. James Brussel, offered a character sketch of who he believed the Bomber would be.
After nearly 18 years of hunting, detectives apprehended George Metesky in part thanks to Dr. Brussel's uncannily accurate description: his probable appearance, his job, even where and with whom he likely lived. Brussel became a role model for the first agents in
BSU, who consulted with him on how to psychologically profile other cases in the manner in which he had profiled Metesky. In this way, Brussel established the prototype for what would become known as 'criminal profiling': an approach for apprehending violent criminals and solving difficult cases that became the standard at the FBI by the early 80s (Douglas, "Mindhunter", 21-22).
The agents who first employed this method of profiling systematically—John
137 Douglas, Robert Ressler and Roy Hazelwood—were also the ones who popularized the term 'serial killer' and began interviewing incarcerated killers in an attempt to "see into their minds". These interviews in 1978 became the start of a joint FBI-academic project
(the Criminal Personality Research Project) designed to learn more about criminal motive and behavior by talking to criminals themselves, something rarely done before by law enforcement. At the same time, profiling and profilers reached mass attention when novelist Thomas Harris researched the ideas and exploits of the FBI profilers and featured them in his best-selling novels Red Dragon (1981) and later Silence of the
Lambs (1988).4 Today, Douglas and Ressler, now retired, are sought-after speakers and best-selling authors, contributing to a burgeoning literature (true-crime, fictional, theoretical, and clinical) on serial killers. I will look more closely at how their books contribute to the Profiler cycle in the section that follows this one.
As the Behaviorial Science Unit at the FBI was taking shape, American society was creating a demand for their services. Violent crime began increasing dramatically in the United States in the late 1960s and the increased media coverage of the age only magnified the population's perception of a crisis. The Manson family case horrified the nation as it played out in the press in 1970-71 while violence and murder became a fixture on the nightly news, even as the US engagement in Southeast Asia wound down
ARed Dragon was published in 1981 and adapted to film in 1986 as Manhunter. Silence of the Lambs was published in 1988 and adapted to film the following year. Released in early 1991, it swept the 1992 Academy Awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Actress. The success of the film lead to a new adaptation of Red Dragon in 2003, this time retaining the novel's title. 138 in 1974. Films like Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971) and Death Wish (Michael Winner,
1974) capture America's anxiety in the 1970s over crime and violence in its urban centers. Public pressure built up throughout the decade until it crested during the Reagan administration. Peter Vronsky describes the atmosphere in the early 1980s: "the press darted like schools of fish to Senate hearings and the various press conferences. Articles in large-circulation magazines ... painted a picture of the United States plagued by an
'epidemic' of senseless random homicides committed by roaming anonymous monsters"
(28). Philip Jenkins has shown that much of this was unwarranted panic caused by misrepresented statistical data, aggressive lobbying, and sensational media coverage, all of which served a conservative political agenda.5 Yet, even a skeptical and sober reading of crime statistics suggests that people were increasingly more likely to be murdered by a stranger throughout this period than in the decades before - from less than 10% in the 60s to close to 25% by 1986 (Vronsky, 16). Warranted or not, in January of 1984, in a move that remains controversial to this day, the U.S. government declared publicly that
America was experiencing "an epidemic of serial murder."
5The convergence of stranger murder, mass media, lobbying and profiling can be illustrated by the case of John Walsh. On July 27, 1981, the abduction from a shopping mall of six-year-old Adam Walsh made international headlines. Two weeks later, the boy's severed head was found nearby. His father, John, who fought to keep the search for Adam in the media spotlight, became after Adam's death an advocate for victims' rights and increased crime legislation. In 1988, he became the host of the new Fox Television series America's Most Wanted, and remains the host to this day. Although nobody was ever charged with Adam's murder, the convicted serial killer Ottis Toole, long considered a suspect, confessed to the crime before his death in prison. Police closed the case in December 2008, confident Toole was the killer. The connection between missing children and serial killing in the mind of the public came about during this and another media-saturated case of the same year, that of the Atlanta Child Murders, the case that first brought to national attention to the FBI's profiling methodology. 139 Nineteen-eighty-four was a pivotal year for serial killer culture. Besides the declaration of an "epidemic", the year also saw the arrest of Henry Lee Lucas, whose exaggerated confessions, had they been true, would have made him the most prolific serial killer of all time. Regardless, he became the newest serial killing bogeyman and his story inspired the influential film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, produced 1986, released 1990). Studies of serial killing began to appear on bookshelves that year as well. The Canadian anthropologist Elliott Leyton completed his pioneering academic study of mass murder that he had begun in the late 70s. The project resulted in the book Compulsive Killers, published by NYU Press in 1984 and republished as a mass market text in 1986 re-titled Hunting Humans. In it, Leyton used trial transcripts, published interviews, and books written about individual killers to explore their motives and draw conclusions about the growing "epidemic," Leyton argued that most killers were driven by economic and social frustrations associated with modern life. He also distinguished between mass murderers, who killed several people in one act of violence, and serial murderers, who killed several over an extended period of time. Here we see, at last, roughly a decade after it was coined, the use of the word "serial killer" moving from an institutional definition into public discourse and marking the true birth of America's serial killer culture.
In the wake of all the activity in the period between 1974 and 1984 that combined to create not only a public awareness of, but genuine panic over, serial murder, film and
140 television drama played a part in this culture as well. Several cases inspired network television drama. In February of 1985, CBS aired the mini-series The Atlanta Child
Murders, featuring a cast including James Earl Jones, Jason Robards and Morgan
Freeman. Later that year, the network aired Out of the Darkness starring Martin Sheen as the lead detective on the 1977 Son of Sam murders. The following May, NBC broadcast the high-profile two-part drama, The Deliberate Stranger with night-time soap star and sex symbol Mark Harmon as serial killer Ted Bundy.6 While these television dramas drew their stories from the real-life exploits of notorious serial killers and the detective work that lead to their capture, the key texts of the Profiler cycle appeared on movies screens in 1986.
Michael Mann's adaptation of Harris's Red Dragon as Manhunter (1986) and
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer were the first films about serial killers produced and viewed within the cultural context described above, one that recognized serial murder as a tangible aspect of modern life, not just as a bizarre anomaly. In this sense, they represent the beginning of the modern serial killer cinema. That cinema can be broken down into two main cycles: the Serial Killer bio-pic7 and the Profiler film. McNaughton's film notoriously told its story through the eyes of the killer, making it a vivid example of the former, as its title suggests. Mann's adaptation of Red Dragon, on the other hand, is the definitive beginning of the latter, the Serial Killer Profiler cycle. Its story revolves
6Harmon starred on CBS's St. Elsewhere at the time and had previously appeared in the short-lived NBC soap Flamingo Road. He was named People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" in January of 1986. 7This cycle, though important, will not be addressed here. 141 around an investigation of serial murders by a genuine criminal profiler, inspired as mentioned above by Thomas Harris' research at the FBI. The detective, Will Graham, has an uncanny gift for "entering the minds" of monstrous killers and using what he sees there to catch them. But Graham is mentally unstable and both the original novel and film emphasize the fine line between hunter and hunted, and the danger involved in this proximity to evil. These themes become characteristic of the Profiler cycle as it explodes in the 1990s.
The template was set but it took a box-office hit to generate the cycle. Manhunter failed in this area but its follow-up did not. In 1989, Thomas Harris published his sequel to Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs, and the film adaptation of the bestseller struck gold in 1991. Jonathan Demme's film, starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, inspired a decade's worth of imitations in the 1990s. Examples of the Profiler cycle include Jennifer
8 (1992), Citizen X (1995, about a real-life Soviet case), Copycat (1995), Kiss The Girls
(1997), The Bone Collector (1999), The Cell (2000), Blood Work (2002) and Taking
Lives (2004), to name just a few. Many of these films shared features with another realist horror cycle of the time, the psychological thriller, or erotic thriller, often featuring a psycho killer of one kind or another. Barry Grant calls this cycle, which includes Fatal
Attraction (1987), Pacific Heights (1990), Basic Instinct (1992), and Single White Female
(1992), the "yuppie horror film." Grant's cycle is distinct however because it lacks the profiler character, and the overall representation of the killers rarely reaches the gothic
142 extravagance of the Serial Killer Profiler cycle.
For the profiler film, 1995's Copycat, starring Holly Hunter and Sigourney
Weaver, represents a turning point. The plot revolves around knowledge of the last two
decades' worth of serial murder cases and features a profiler character who is a renowned
expert in their history and motives. The murderer himself is a serial killer 'fan' (just as a
certain core audience for the film would be at the time) who imitates his predecessor's
crimes, reflecting the sort of "canonization" of famous killers happening in society during
these years. In 1995, Seven, directed by David Fincher, added another key text to the
genre. Its cinematography, editing and sound design created an atmosphere and a "look"
for Serial Killer film that would reappear in dozens of examples to follow. A year after
Copycat and Seven, American television premiered two dramatic series, Millennium
(1996-99) (from the creator of The X-Files) and Profiler (1996-2000), both about serial
killer hunters with a gift for entering the killers' minds.
The flow of Profiler films slowed at the end of 1990s, although television has a
new successful profiler drama, Criminal Minds (2005-present). The first decade of the millennium saw instead a noticeable increase in the Serial Killer Bio-pic cycle, the films
often announcing their subject in the title: Ted Bundy (2001), Ed Gein (2001), Dahmer
(2002), Nightstalker (2002) and Speck (2002), Gacy (2003), Hillside Strangler (2004) and The Hillside Sti-angler (2004), Helter Skelter (2004), Karla (2005), The Boston
8I am thinking here in particular of the infamous "serial killer trading cards" produced by Eclipse Comics and the publication of various exploitation titles like "World's Most Evil Killers" and "The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers". 143 Strangler (2005) and The Zodiac (2005). The difference between this cycle and the
Profiler cycle is again the absence of the detective figure; these films' narratives center instead on the killer's point-of-view. Most of these were low-budget low-impact independent productions but there was at least one cross-over to the mainstream: Patsy
Jenkins' Oscar-winning Monster (2003), starring Charlize Theron as the female serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Other big-budget features that don't quite belong to any cycle include Summer of Sam (1999) and Zodiac (2007). Finally, HBO's successful new drama
Dexter (2006-present) adds a new twist to Serial Killer cinema and the Profiler cycle by making the profiler a serial killer himself, an idea familiar to viewers of the film Suspect
Zero (2004) to be discussed below.
5.2 The Serial Killer Profiler Cycle: Themes and Motifs
As mentioned above, the single most important development in the shift from general horror films featuring a psycho-killer to Serial Killer films is the emergence of the profiler as a familiar genre character. The profiler becomes the central protagonist of most serial killer narratives and his or her investigative techniques, known as "profiling", provide the recognizable rules by which are played the cat and mouse games of criminal and detective. First fictionalized by Thomas Harris based on his research with the FBI in the late 1970s in the novel Red Dragon (1981), by the early 1990s, in the wake of that novel's sequel Silence of the Lambs and its successful film adaptation, profilers (both real
144 and fictional) became recognizable pop culture figures. Our understanding of what profilers do and the significance of their role is a result both of the films depicting them and the broader popular discourse of killers and FBI detectives that I have called "serial killer culture." Thus, we can best locate the central themes and motifs of the Profiler cycle by examining the true-crime literature of the real-life profilers alongside the film cycle itself.
Two FBI agents, Robert Ressler and John Douglas, have been central to the emergence of serial killer culture. Their influence in large part is due to their status and position as former elite profilers at the FBI and to their extensive writing on their methods and experiences in mass market true crime bestsellers since their retirement in the early 1990s. In what follows, I will look closely at their autobiographical writing to establish a context for the analysis of some key Profiler films below. A full understanding of the film cycle must appreciate the relationship between the cycle and the writing of the real-life profilers that contributes so much to the larger canvas of serial killer culture. In particular, two tropes in the books published by Ressler and Douglas stand out as central to the iconography and the themes of profiler films: the presentation of the detective as a hunter, and the recurring metaphor of the abyss.
Of the two former agents, John Douglas has been the more prolific writer.9 Since
9His mass market books include Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit, published in 1995, Journey into Darkness (1997), Obsession (1998), The Cases That Haunt Us (2000), The Anatomy of Motive (2000), Anyone You Want Me To Be: A True Story of Sex and Death on the Internet (2003), as well as several fictional works. 145 his first book, which takes the form of an autobiography, the term "mindhunter" has become a popular synonym for a profiler. It has been used as the title of a film
{Mindhunters, 2005) and can be seen in the description of many films, books, documentaries and television programs about profiling and serial killers, wherever detectives and FBI agents are described as "entering the mind" of killer in order to catch him. As Douglas explains, the essential insight upon which profiling is based is recognition of the role of fantasy. The first profilers realized that seemingly motiveless violent crimes (the victim was a stranger, nothing was stolen, etc.) were not in fact motiveless. The motive is just hidden from view, inside the killer's mind. The motive is the fulfillment of the killer's secret personal fantasy. Thus, the emphasis on the "mind of the killer", and the attempt by the profiler to "get inside" there and "walk in his shoes" is not just a metaphor, but rather founded upon this crucial theory of fantasy.
In order to understand the fantasy, the profiler, as Douglas describes it, ventures into dangerous territory. "I have to put myself in the position of the attacker, to think as he thinks, to plan along with him, to understand and feel his gratification in this one moment out of his life when his pent-up fantasies come true...I have to walk in that killer's shoes," he writes ("Mindhunter", 172). Here, in the connection between minds, we have the seeds of a "sixth sense" or psychic connection, as well as a blurring of boundaries, ideas that recur throughout the Profiler cycle. But while this description of projection and empathetic association of the detective with the criminal is suggestive of
146 the complex relationship between the two, it is when the figurative use of "hunting" is added that the situation's narrative potential takes hold.
Douglas employs the metaphor of the hunt in his writing in a deeply ambiguous manner. He uses it to capture the danger, the skill and the relationship to criminals that characterizes his work, but he also uses it to describe the killer and the killer's pursuit of victims. For example, consider the following passage:
Put yourself in the position of the hunter. That's what I have to do. Think of one
of those nature films: a lion on the Serengeti Plain in Africa. He sees this huge
herd of antelope at a watering hole. But somehow—we can see it in his eyes—the
lion locks on a single one out of those thousands of animals. He's trained himself
to sense weakness, vulnerability, something different in one animal out of the
herd that makes it the most likely victim. It's the same with certain people. If I'm
one of them, then I'm on the hunt daily, looking for my victim...It's the thrill of the
hunt that gets these guys going. ("Mindhunter", 12-3)
After anointing himself in the title as a hunter of minds, he begins his book with an extended metaphor of the killer as a hunter as well. There are careful distinctions made, of course. The killer as hunter is an animal, a predator, acting on animal instincts, while the hunter of minds is clearly human, profiling being a procedure grounded in human reason and social-scientific research. As well, the pairing of profiler and criminal is, on
147 one level, done intentionally, as Douglas and Ressler both emphasize continually that the key to catching killers is developing this empathetic connection. However, the ambiguity of the passage is striking. Douglas even goes so far as to say that "if I'm (a serial killer)...I've got to be a profiler, I've got to be able to profile that potential prey"
("Mindhunter", 12).
This is such a rich, provocative terrain to explore that it is disappointing, though not altogether surprising, that the former FBI agent neglects to elaborate on it. Serial killer and profiler fiction on the other hand does so regularly. Suggestions of the fine line between cop and killer, and by extension, between man and animal, sanity and madness, and good and evil, are a common theme in the stories. Left latent in the material written by law enforcement officials, it has been the task of authors and filmmakers to develop its potential. The horror genre is a natural fit for this task as it has always exploited anxieties about borders and boundaries for both entertainment and insight. And the archetype of the hunter, a figure that reaches back into the earliest American literature, has always been associated with this theme. The Profiler cycle mines this material for the purposes of reenchantment. When presented as a hunter, the profiler takes on mythic resonance, becoming a modern version of the ambiguous hero figure of American literature and popular story.
In his work on the frontier myth in American culture, Richard Slotkin highlights the abiding importance of the hunter archetype—the solitary figure whose heroism
148 involves knowing and infiltrating the enemy in order to save society. Originally he was the "Man Who Knows Indians", a frontier character who could protect the white settlers from the native "savages" because he had lived among them and understood their culture.
Later he would become, in an urban context, the hard-boiled detective. Slotkin explains that the mythic function of this character was to reconcile a nation divided over its identity—halfway between Europe and the wilderness on the far side of the frontier. By embodying the best of both worlds ("Gunfighter", 11-16), the hunter figure, because of his mixed status, part white and part native, reconciled this division and thus became a mythic hero canonized throughout American popular narrative.
However, the hunter could never be a normal member of society. Because he mixed two worlds, his destiny was always to be an outsider in both. Liminal figures like this have the potential to reconcile oppositions but they also blur boundaries. The line between "us" and "them", between the savage and the civilized, between crime and justice, or between good and evil is questioned by such characters. The best storytellers capitalize on the built-in ambivalence of this rich symbolic figure of American myth to explore such issues. The serial killer profiler, an outsider who risks his life and his sanity by "entering the mind" of the evil serial killer, represents a striking contemporary example of this hunter archetype. Through this special kind of detective, the Profiler cycle develops a gripping conception of evil as real and present in contemporary life. A
149 frequent symbol of this evil found throughout serial killer culture is the abyss. For an example of this, we turn to another former FBI agent's memoirs.
Before John Douglas retired from the FBI and began writing, Robert Ressler, originally his superior at Quantico as well as his partner in developing profiling, published his own reflections in Whoever Fights Monsters (1992). The book revolves mainly around cases he worked on and what he learned from each of them. Only one chapter is set aside for a brief autobiography, but in it, Ressler discusses the origins of the phrase that provides the title of his book:
At around this time, I came across a quotation from Nietzsche that stuck with me.
It seemed to pinpoint both the fascination I had with this research and the dangers
it posed. Thereafter, I put it on a slide that I always showed during my lectures
and presentations. Here it is: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the
process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the
abyss looks into you." It was important for me to keep such sobering thoughts in
mind as I proceeded to muck about in the depths of human criminality (39).
In so far as Nietzsche's words are presented in the form of an aphorism and therefore not directly contextualized by a larger line of thinking, the quote, from Beyond Good and
Evil, remains typically elusive and open-ended. Whatever Nietzsche meant by these lines,
150 even if it could be pinned down, is beside the point here. What matters is how Ressler, and other profilers, have appropriated the quote as a way of expressing their own experience. Moreover, what is even more important is that the figure of the abyss has captured the imaginations of those who create serial killer fiction as well. What is it about the phrasing in this quote that makes it such a central one to serial killer culture and the
Profiler cycle? I will focus on the admission of fascination in the aphorism, in combination with two images: the monster and the abyss. The notion of "fighting monsters" and the ambiguous experience of "looking into the abyss" become the key motifs that run not only throughout Ressler's reflections but throughout the films of the
Profiler cycle as well.
At least as far back as the famous "criminal's court" scene in Fritz Lang's proto- serial killer film M (1931), we see a tension between the characterization of killers as human beings—as the child-predator Hans Beckert's defender calls him—and as inhuman monsters-—"Biest!" as the crowd shouts in rage. The FBI profilers' books are no different. Above I discussed John Douglas's use of a hunting metaphor, comparing the killer to a predatory animal. Elsewhere in his books, Douglas maintains that serial killers like Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper can be charming and intelligent human beings. Ressler's writing reveals the same tensions. He spends much time carefully explaining how and why violent criminals do what they do. All of the factors involved (childhood trauma, the role of fantasy, dysfunctional sexuality etc.) are undeniably and exclusively human, and
151 his observations grounded in psychology and sociology. Yet, both Ressler and Douglas continually resort to the use of the word "monster" in reference to the killers. The title of
Ressler's follow-up to Whoever Fights Monsters is even more explicit in its use of
Nietzsche's aphorism as a theme and its exploitation of the figure of the monster to characterize serial killers. The full title is I Have Lived in the Monster: a Report from the
Abyss (1997).10
The temptation to characterize as monsters what are really just damaged human beings reveals the deep ambivalence society feels toward serial killers today. A desire to expose them to the cold light of science, to understand so as to contain, control and prevent them, conflicts with a desire to condemn them as radically evil. Hans yells to his
"judges" in M, "There's something inside me!" Today, society is torn between studying that something, or just peeking at it and turning away with a shiver. This conflicted approach is another striking example of the ongoing struggle between disenchanted and enchanted worldviews in the secular age. Modern science, philosophy and social thought deny the reality of evil, while horror and gothic narratives remain unrepentantly fascinated by the possibility of its existence. Not surprisingly, fans who cultivate an interest in serial killers will readily admit to a fascination with evil. What is surprising, however, is that Robert Ressler reveals this same fascination in his writing.
Numerous times in his books Ressler suggests that the dangerous proximity to
10Here the phrasing in the first person presumably unintentionally, but appropriately, recalls the notorious B-horror exploitation titles of the 40s and 50s such as / Walked With a Zombie (1943), / Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), ox I Married a Monster From Outer Space (1958). 152 "the abyss" is not something that has been thrust upon him as a cross to bear for society; rather, it is something that he has consciously sought out. "I wanted to better understand the mind of the violent criminal, first of all to satisfy my own curiosity" (37), he says of his decision to begin those famous interviews with incarcerated killers in the 1970s. The early interview subjects were chosen somewhat randomly depending on where Ressler and Douglas found themselves teaching a class around the country. But Ressler admits to relishing meeting one subject in particular, William Heirens, "the Lipstick Killer", imprisoned since the late 40s after a killing spree in Chicago. Ressler first mentions the case at the outset of his autobiographical chapter, just pages before introducing the quote from Nietzsche. The chapter begins "There was a monster on the loose in Chicago and I was intrigued. It was 1946, and I was all of nine years old" (23). He goes on to describe the impact that this case and the media coverage had on him. "What kind of person would kill and cut up a little girl? A monster? A human being? As a nine-year old boy I couldn't imagine what sort of person would commit such a heinous crime, but I could fantasize about catching [the] killer... I think I was more fascinated than afraid" (23-4). The words
"intrigued", "curious" and "fascinated" appear repeatedly in relation to Heirens, and crop up again later in the book as Ressler describes his state of mind before finally meeting
Heirens in prison. "I was really primed for my interview with this man whose life I had been following since childhood" (51). Upon meeting him, he says "I explained to him that I'd been intrigued by his crimes since childhood, and that in a sense we had grown up
153 together in Chicago" (49). The profiler, supposedly conducting research in the name of social science, criminology and crime prevention, sounds conspicuously like a fan meeting a childhood idol.11 Those who fight monsters, it would seem, are drawn to them in much the same way that horror film fans are drawn to vampires, werewolves and zombies. Profilers choose their profession because the view into the abyss, though dangerous, is also fascinating. The experience of looking down into it offers a sublime experience that, while terrifying, is also reenchanting. I turn now to how these ideas operate in particular films.
In the excellent introductory essay to his reference work, Serial Killer Cinema,
Robert Cettl points out that a kind of embryonic profiler figure appears in narratives about serial killers even before the FBI profilers gave the role its name and identity.
Comparing, as mentioned above, the serial killer to the traditional gothic monster12 — vampire, werewolf, etc.—he notes that the investigation of such a crime "demanded specialized knowledge outside of normal criminological experience.... The police were simply not equipped, qualified or capable enough to either apprehend this kind of sex killer or even comprehend the threat posed to society by him" (8). Though Cettl doesn't mention him by name, the gothic prototype would be the monster-hunter Professor Van
11 John Douglas tells a similar story about the influence of the killer Ed Gein on his interest in violent crime. See Mindhunter, p. 87 12It is a favorite insight of popular histories of serial murder that vampire and werewolf legends might be attributed to naive folk explanations for early serial killings. 154 Helsing in Dracula. The special individual to whom society turns to slay the monster is of course older than the gothic novel and might be traced back to the beginnings of
English literature. In Beowulf, a kingdom cowering in fear and terrorized by a monster that strikes in the night requires the services of a gifted outsider to destroy the evil and restore balance. In American culture, as touched on above, the hunter character takes on mythic proportions. From Daniel Boone to Cooper's Leatherstocking to Captain Ahab, and on into 20th century literature, the figure of the hunter, his liminal status between civilization and the wilderness, and the importance of his role in slaying the Indian, the beast or monster, form a tradition that Slotkin argues constitutes the national myth of
America. These two figures, the monster hunter of the Gothic and America's mythic
Indian hunter, are closely related. The two crucial aspects of this character are: 1) his liminal status, and 2) his relationship to the monster, including a sharing of characteristics with or a special connection to his prey. Cinema's serial killer profiler is the most recent example of this archetype.
Evidence of the profiler's archetypal nature appears in the striking example of The
Boston Str angler (Richard Fleischer, 1968). This film, made more than a decade before the themes of the Profiler narrative began to appear in the novels of Thomas Harris, nevertheless contains a powerful profiler prototype that anticipates the entire cycle. Based on the sensational real-life case of the killer who stalked women in Boston in the early
1960s, captured in 1964, the film stars Tony Curtis as the Strangler and Henry Fonda, as
155 John Bottomly, the assistant to State Attorney General Brooke, who, as in real-life, was asked to head up an unprecedented task force on the case. Robert Cettl, in his analysis, focuses on the final confrontation between Bottomly and the Strangler, in part because his reading of the profiler is ideological. For him, in that the profiler "originated in a climate of disillusionment with governmental authority [in 60s and 70s]," he represents
"the last hope of a troubled patriarchy" (28), and the final confrontation allows the upset balance of society to be restored by the hero. Yet, the most striking moments in the depiction of this proto-profiler are elsewhere, in two brief scenes that sketch Fonda's character for us. Both anticipate the themes I have highlighted in the FBI autobiographies and which run through the future Profiler cycle.
The first scene is Bottomly's introduction. It takes place in the Attorney-General's office, as Bottomly, an introverted intellectual only interested in arcane legal issues, is asked by his boss to take command of the Strangler case. He feigns ignorance, and the dialogue continues as follows:
Brooke: Oh c'mon, Jack. You must have some contact with the everyday world.
You do read the newspapers.
Bottomly: Only the editorial pages.
Brooke: Don't you look at television?
Bottomly: Can't. It hurts my eyes. You know, I can actually see that electronic
beam scanning the tube.
156 This is a very strange comment; it is given no particular emphasis and doesn't play a part
in any plot developments later in the film. Nevertheless, it is striking in its applicability to
the central importance of vision to the profiler in the more developed narratives to come.
Not only does Bottomly have good eyes, but they actually work too well, preventing him
from being able to look passively at the television screen.
Another scene towards the end of the film highlights further the profiler's
sensitivity and penetrating (in)sight. It comes between two dramatic interrogation
sequences featuring Bottomly and the Strangler and it represents the only other peek we have into the detective's character beyond the day-to-day events of the investigation. Late
at night, he sits in the darkness of his study, drinking tea at his desk in a pool of
lamplight. His wife enters and sits down across from him.
Bottomly: He's about to crack
Wife: I'm glad
B: He's suffering
W: You don't seem to be jumping for joy either
B: No, but I don't have to face anything that monstrous about myself
W: What do you have to face inside you that's a little bit monstrous?
157 B: Well... at this hour of the night, you look at yourself and... the truth has a way
lying there on the rug in front of you. (pause) I'm enjoying this. I don't like
myself for it.
W: Don't be so hard on yourself.
B: It's a hell of a thing to find out at my age that you're not what you thought you
were.
This is a remarkable scene, not only because it stands so far apart from the rest of the film but because we see here, in embryonic form, a central theme of the future Profiler cycle.
The profiler reflects upon the danger of getting so close to evil, of looking into the abyss, and he admits both to having glimpsed there a frightening reflection of himself, and to enjoying it.
Robert Cettl mentions this scene briefly, arguing that "this crucial point removes the Fonda character from [his colleagues]" (28). But having not taken note of the earlier scene, which already sets Fonda apart from other investigators, he misses the fact that, as a profiler, Fonda is marked as different from the outset. He sees more clearly, and this is exactly what leads to his distress in the later scene. He is more aware than the others of the darkness in the Strangler and its reflection in himself, even though his colleagues have also witnessed the crime scenes and participated in the interrogation of the
Strangler. This notion of supernatural vision, which allows the Profiler to see the reality of evil, both in the killer and in himself, will be taken up fully and dramatically
158 throughout the Profiler cycle of the 1990s when profilers often literally become gifted with paranormal vision.
Finally then, the Serial Killer Profiler film reenchants by turning the realist horror film into a supernatural narrative. Sometimes this is done indirectly or symbolically, but when it emphasizes the profiler's difference from regular detectives and his gift/insight, it is a small step to simply endow him with psychic powers. The Profiler cycle contains several examples of this: the network television series, Millennium and Profiler, the 1999
HBO film Eye of the Killer, the BBC series Wire in the Blood, as well as the films discussed below, From Hell and Suspect Zero. In From Hell, the profiler's psychic gifts are primarily visions that come to him in his dreams. In Suspect Zero, psychics are called
'remote viewers' and work on a secret project inside the FBI. In addition to discussing their representation of supernatural powers, my analysis of these two films will highlight how the themes of "the hunt" and "looking into the abyss" help us to understand the reenchanting function of the Serial Killer Profiler narrative.
5.4 From Hell and Suspect Zero: Analysis of Two Serial Killer Profiler Films
The film From Hell, directed by Alan and Albert Hughes, and released in the fall of
2001, is an adaptation of the graphic novel of the same name by the acclaimed writer
Alan Moore and the illustrator Eddie Campbell. It retells the familiar story of the murders
159 of five prostitutes in London's poverty-stricken East End in the late summer and autumn of 1888. Traditionally, the murders have been attributed to a single killer, who became known as Jack the Ripper due to a signature on letters taunting the investigators and claiming responsibility for the killings. It is unknown whether the letters were sent by the killer or were hoaxes, and nobody was ever arrested and charged with the murders.
Mainly due to the vicious nature of the crimes, the sensational press coverage of the case, its uniqueness (serial killers were essentially unknown at the time), and most importantly the fact that the killer was never caught and identified, Jack the Ripper has become a sort of modern myth. The case has inspired hundreds of writers and filmmakers as well as amateur and professional sleuths. There is so much interest in the story and so many theories about the identity of the Ripper that amateur societies of "ripperologists" exist and at least one website offers an exhaustive and comprehensive guide to all of the details of the case. It would not be stretching the truth to say that the identity of Jack the Ripper is one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time.
From Hell takes as its starting point a popular "conspiracy theory" explanation of the Ripper's identity that incriminates the Royal Family, the Freemasons and Sir William
Gull, the Royal physician. This theory, rather outlandish and generally dismissed, surfaced in a book called The Final Solution by a young journalist, Stephen Knight, published in 1975. It claimed that the Ripper murders were part of a elaborate cover-up of a royal secret. Prince Albert, the Queen's grandson, so goes the story, had secretly
160 married and fathered a child with a prostitute, who was on top of this, a Catholic, thus putting the succession to the throne in jeopardy. The Freemasons, the secret brotherhood that really controls society, oversaw the cover-up and Gull, the royal physician, carried out the murders at their behest. From Hell uses this story as the basis of its narrative.
The film adaptation revolves around the investigation of the murders by the gifted
Scotland Yard Detective Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp) and his partner, Peter
Godley (Robbie Coltrane). Abberline sees visions in his dreams that help him to solve cases. (Significantly, this aspect of the character was not in the original graphic novel.)
The detective also has a destructive addiction to opium, which he developed coping with the recent death of his wife. Assigned to the Ripper murders, Abberline immediately begins to see the victims in his dreams before they are killed. He senses a cover-up but his boss, a high-ranking Mason, discourages him from following up on it. Pressing on unofficially, eventually earning a suspension for insubordination, he nevertheless, with the help of his partner, uncovers the conspiracy, though he is powerless to do anything about it. Meanwhile, in the midst of his investigation, he has fallen in love with one of the prostitutes, Mary Kelly (Heather Graham), whose life is threatened by the Ripper, and he manages to help her escape to safety. Rather than join her to start life over far from the city, he returns to the opium den and dies, apparently of an overdose, in the film's final scene.
In the unique profiler film Suspect Zero (2003), written by Zak Penn and Billy
161 Ray and directed by E. Elias Merhige, a hunt for a killer, with the help of psychic powers, leads again to the discovery of a monstrous and radical evil. The film is set in the present day in the American Southwest. FBI agent Thomas Mackelway (Aaron Eckhart) has finished serving a 6 month suspension for his reckless behavior on the job. Reassigned to
Albuquerque, New Mexico, he has barely settled in, when he catches a case of an apparent serial killer who has murdered two men, leaving an unexplained symbol (a circle with a slash through it) carved into their flesh. Joining him on the case is his ex- girlfriend, Agent Fran Kulok (Carrie-Anne Moss), who seems to have ended their relationship due to Mackelway's deteriorating mental health. Mackelway suffers from migraines and battles nightmares and unwelcome visions. Together, the two agents come to realize that the killer wants to communicate directly with Mackelway. He faxes him dossiers on missing persons cases and leaves a trail for the agents to follow. It turns out this killer is a former FBI agent named O'Ryan, who was once part of a secret government program, Project Icarus, using people gifted with telepathy to capture criminals. The agents realize that the men O'Ryan kills are all serial killers themselves and that this psychic vigilante appears to have a plan to help Mackelway realize his own inherent telepathic gifts. At the same time, tortured by the images in his head, O'Ryan wants to die, hoping to commit "suicide by cop", forcing Mackelway to shoot him to 'turn off his mind. Both goals are achieved by the end of the story. Woven into this narrative are the actions of another serial killer, called "Suspect Zero", who appears to be
162 responsible for thousands of missing persons reports over the past decade or more. At first, seemingly just a rather paranoid theory to explain the missing persons developed by
O'Ryan, it becomes clear throughout the film that "Suspect Zero" does indeed exist and his capture represents another aspect of the film's climactic moments. With O'Ryan dead and "Suspect Zero" captured, the film ends.
5.4.1 The Hunter
Both From Hell and Suspect Zero are transparently profiler films— detective-centered serial killer films featuring a gifted mindhunter paired with an elusive killer. In each case, the central character is a detective whose gift of extraordinary vision allows him to see something about the killer that his colleagues can't see. This leaves him charged with the dangerous task of tracking down and apprehending the serial killer on his own. As he conducts his investigation, we see that this hunter figure, like his archetypal predecessors, exists in a liminal space between the safety of society and the darkness of the
"wilderness", the abode of that which he hunts. Both films convey the character's liminal status by presenting him as an outsider and by mirroring the profiler and the killer via editing, mise-en-scene and the sharing of character traits.
In its adaptation from graphic novel to screen, the structure of From Hell was changed. Unlike its source, in which Alan Moore reveals the Ripper's identity at the outset and makes him the central character of the story, the film has the generic structure
163 of a detective story, keeping the identity of the killer a mystery to be solved by the profiler. Moore has distanced himself from the adaptation for this reason, as have many fans of the novel, but clearly the changes were made intentionally to position the film in the Profiler cycle. Within the first 30 minutes, there are at least three generic scenes that any keen fan of the serial killer films will recognize: an autopsy, a crime scene investigation, and debriefing on the case at headquarters (featuring a information board with all clues and suspects pinned to it). In addition, Johnny Depp's Detective Abberline features all the characteristics of the cinematic profiler.
The profiler's liminal status as a hunter is conveyed by his drug addiction, his poor physical and mental health, and his supernatural vision. We are first introduced to
Abberline in an opium den, before we even realize he is a policeman. The previous scene features the film's first vicious murder of a prostitute in a darkened foyer, the identity of the knife-wielding killer obscured by the darkness. The camera cranes up to a stone gargoyle above the door and then dissolves to the opium den. The camera moves forward over a series of "customers" strewn across the parlor's floor, like dead bodies, and comes to a stop above Abberline, who rolls onto his back to face the camera. Given what we have just witnessed in the scene immediately preceding this, the film encourages us here to imagine we are being introduced to the killer. He opens his eyes and looks off into space and we are treated to the first of his "visions" of future crime scenes: an eerie montage of distorted color, sound and image, blood, flies and a corpse. As this nightmare
164 ends, the police (including his partner) arrive, slap him out of his stupor and take him away. It is only in the following scene, back at Scotland Yard, that we learn this man is an Inspector, and not a criminal being brought in for questioning. Here is the first of many sequences that emphasize Abberline's liminal status as a policeman who lives outside the law. It also suggests that his "visions" are induced or at least reliant on this dangerous drug addiction that so jeopardizes his physical health. His mental health is not much better. He is severely traumatized, we'll later learn, by the recent death of his wife.
The overall impression is that this is a man on the verge of breakdown, very much like the archetypal profiler Will Graham in Manhunter. But along with the suffering, addiction and illness, comes vision, and Abberline clearly sees things that the other policemen don't. His partner refers to him as "the genius" and remarks that men with his
"talents" used to be burned alive. And yet, like Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks and Fox
Mulder in The X-Files, he demonstrates the penetrating intellect and reason of a crime scene analyst and traditional detective. He sees the significance of the grape stems near the victims' bodies, the pattern in the location of the murders, the real meaning of the graffiti about "the juwes," and ultimately unravels the conspiracy.
Finally, Abberline and the Ripper continue to be paired throughout the film, as we
ljRobert Ressler tells the following anecdote about Graham's creator, Thomas Harris: "I asked Harris why he had made his hero a civilian [retired from the FBI]... He told me that he had wanted the man to have mental problems that would have disqualified him from being an agent. I thought this was comical, given the weight losses, the pseudo heart attacks, and other problems that many of us in the BSU had experienced" ("Whoever Fights Monsters", 272-3). Indeed, Ressler's colleague John Douglas begins his autobiography with an account of his collapse and near death from job-related stress. 165 see the killer but are always kept from discovering his identity. We see them each listening to music at home on a gramophone, a rare item in 1888, and both share a taste for laudanum, a liquid form of opium. Both wear dark overcoats and hats, which though common at the time, are used in the film to link the two characters. For example, after
Annie Chapman's murder, the final shot presents the Ripper, lit from behind by an eerie green light, emphasizing his coat and hat. The next shot, after a fade to black, is
Abberline approaching the crime scene from the shadows, again lit so that we only see his outline, with a similar coat and hat. These details blur the distinction between the profiler and the killer, and position the detective as an outsider, somewhere between cop and criminal, sick and well, sane and insane, normal human and supernatural hero. It is this status that makes him an archetypal hunter figure, and it is this that will allow him to find, to see, and face down the killer. Here is the structure that gives the Profiler film its particular identity.
In Suspect Zero, the twist given the profiler narrative is the splitting of the profiler/killer pair into a triangle. The protagonist Mackelway investigates what at first appears to be a typical serial killer. But the murders are being committed by the rogue profiler O'Ryan, a former FBI agent, who murders serial killers that he hunts with his psychic abilities. The narrative pairs Mackelway with O'Ryan throughout the film, most clearly in that they share the same psychic gift for "remote seeing". As well, both are vigilantes, Mackelway having recently been suspended for chasing down and illegally
166 arresting a serial rapist who skipped bail and fled to Mexico. These actions put both profilers into that grey area between right and wrong, despite their good intentions, raising the question of where justice ends and criminality begins. This is of course the traditional territory of the hunter figure, from the Western gunfighter to the hard-boiled detective of the American pulps and the film noir.
O'Ryan's role in the film is also as mentor to Mackelway, helping him to understand his gift, to see that he is a seer, like O'Ryan himself and the others who were part of Project Icarus. While Mackelway, like Abberline, is provided with a partner, the film makes clear that he is ultimately on his own. Not only does he regularly ignore
Agent Kulok's attempts to work as a team but he seems to understand that he is on a solitary journey. In a particularly poignant scene, he goes to his Kulok's hotel room and confesses his fears and his vulnerability. She holds him tenderly in the doorway and reassures him, then, in what must be a significant decision for her, invites him inside. As much as it is clear that he still loves her (indeed, he tells her so), he knows that he can not accept her offer. The hunter's role condemns him to isolation. The hunt must be conducted alone.
The hunting metaphor is made explicit in the Suspect Zero in a key early scene.
When Mackelway and Kulok locate and investigate O'Ryan's former residence, a rooming house filled with odd characters, one man confronts the agent with the question,
"Ever see a fifty foot shark?" Confused, Mackelway manages to sputter, "no". The man's
167 response: "Doesn't mean there aren't any". What at first might seem like a nonsequitor becomes clear in the context of the Profiler cycle. Not only is Mackelway a hunter, but he's a hunter who has yet to comprehend what it is he hunts, searching for something that may or may not exist. The "50 foot shark" represents what the profiler must track down and destroy, just as Sheriff Brody hunts the shark in Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and
Captain Ahab hunts the white whale in Moby-Dick. The connection is highly appropriate.
Richard Slotkin notes that in Moby-Dick "the American epic takes the form of a colossal hunt [in which] all the elements of the hunter myth are developed to their archetypal extremes" ("Regeneration", 539). Here, in Suspect Zero, the hunt begins with a question about sight—"Ever see a fifty foot shark?"—-just as "fighting monsters" for Ressler (and
Nietzsche) means "looking into an abyss." But we must remember that seeing, in the film, means more than the traditional use of your eyes, since the remote viewer sees with his mind as well. The meaning of the strange shark comment gains clarity in a later scene when Mackelway learns of O'Ryan's theory of "Suspect Zero" (described below).
5.4.2 The Abyss
The serial killer provides the perfect opportunity to affirm that evil is real, that it exists here and now in the form of this human monster. The films situate the profiler protagonist in the traditional role of the mythic hunter, who heroically patrols the liminal space between civilization and darkness. There as part of his journey he confronts and struggles
168 with this real evil. The figure of the abyss, or a similar symbol of endless or bottomless darkness, appears repeatedly in this cycle, standing for the radically transcendent evil inside the serial killer. Structurally, it resembles the yawning wilderness beyond the frontier that hides the Indian in American mythology, but here the notion of evil is less a projection of otherness used to justify the oppression of a social group and more an example of our need for reenchantment tempting us to believe in evil again, in spite of its denial by secular culture. In each film there is a moment, similar to the conversion scene in the Supernatural Investigation cycle, when the profiler "looks into", and thus realizes the true nature of, the abyss. In this moment, the reality of evil is affirmed, its secular denial denied, and an experience of reenchantment provided to the audience.
In Suspect Zero, the moment when the profiler looks into the abyss occurs during the scene when Mackelway begins to piece together the nature of Suspect Zero's crimes.
Investigating O'Ryan, he interviews a former mentor of the rogue agent. This man, memorably played by screenwriter Robert Towne, explains to Mackelway that O'Ryan had developed a theory about the existence of a serial killer whose criminal activities were so prolific as to be nearly inconceivable. This killer, the one hunted for years now by O'Ryan, may not even exist. Nobody has ever seen him. His existence remains only a theory, and a rather paranoid one, developed by the obsessive O'Ryan. He called this killer "Suspect Zero".
Professor: He posited a theory that a serial killer could cross the entire country
169 without ever getting caught. Look, what makes a killer catchable?
Mackelway: Patterns, repetition of behaviour...
P: Well he imagined someone with no patterns, no telltale rituals, no fetishes. Just
a random killing machine that never leaves a clue
M: Yeah, but a serial killer by definition is condemned to repetition, isn't he?
Isn't that what he's all about?
P: Well, he is until he isn't.
M: And this Suspect Zero, is that something that you believe in doctor?
P: It's something O'Ryan believed in. I mean he swore guys like that existed, only
we couldn't see them because they didn't obey the usual laws
M: So now you're saying a guy like that could exist
P: (Removes his glasses) Do you know the definition of a black hole? ... It's a
celestial body with a gravitational force so strong that nothing escapes it,
not even light.
M: Then how do you find something you can't see?
P: Well, it was there ... and we found it.
Only in this scene, the turning point in the film, do both Mackelway and the audience realize, what is really going on. The fifty foot shark, Mackelway's white whale, the serial killer who must be caught, is not the vigilante O'Ryan, but a much more sinister killer of unspeakable evil, Suspect Zero. This black hole of a man, this abyss, has been abducting
170 and killing children on such a scale and for so many years that the very thought he could exist never occurred to investigators before. Nobody has even connected all the cases until now. Now, with the glimpse offered here, the investigator sees, and understands, that evil is real.
From Hell takes its title from one of the many letters sent to the press, the police and other public figures claiming to be written by The Ripper. The letter places the words
"from Hell" at the top left, where a writer would normally put his address. What did the writer of this letter, whether the actual killer or hoaxer, mean by this? John Douglas, in his analysis of the case in one of his book The Cases That Haunt Us, suggests that this is a likely place for a killer of this type to imagine himself located. For this reason, he feels the From Hell letter is probably the only one of the Ripper letters that might be genuine
(55). In one memorable scene, the Ripper, identity still unknown, refers to this "location" himself directly in an exchange of dialogue with his servant Netley, who is distraught over the killings he has helped execute.
Netley: (quivering) I don't know where I am anymore, sir.
Ripper: There, there Netley. There, there. I shall tell you where we are. We're in
the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A radiant abyss
where men meet themselves.
Netley: I don't understand that. I don't understand, sir.
Ripper: Hell, Netley. We 're in Hell.
171 Here the words of the Ripper echo the very same sentiments former profiler Robert
Ressler finds in the aphorism he borrows from Nietzsche. Hell, the abode of evil, is an
"abyss" but one located inside the mind. According to Ressler, the burden of the profiler is to look into this abyss when he looks into the mind of the killer, and what he sees there is partly a reflection of himself—"where men meet themselves". In Nietzsche's words,
"the abyss looks back", as our reflection in the mirror does. Like the proto-profiler figure played by James Stewart in The Boston Strangler, getting so close to evil, looking into the abyss, provides an unexpected insight for the profiler into his own nature. What he learns is that evil lay in heart of every man, which is the abiding lesson of all American gothic fiction.
As frightening as this scene is, the final moments of the film, when the Ripper's identity is finally discovered by Abberline and revealed to the viewer, leaves the greatest impact of all. We have been lead to believe that Sir William Gull, the Royal physician, is a kind, gentle person, who must be ruled out as a suspect if for no other reason than his damaged hand could not possibly wield the Ripper's knife. So it is jolting and upsetting to learn abruptly that he is indeed the killer, watching him transform into a monster in this climatic scene. The transformation is accomplished economically yet forcefully by the pools of blackness that replace the irises of his eyes, a tiny abyss in place of each instrument of vision. If the eye is truly the window to the soul, nothing could be more horrifying than to be trapped in a room with Jack the Ripper and, looking into his eyes,
172 see nothing but darkness. Here Abberline finally looks into the abyss, learns the true nature of the crimes and the conspiracy he has been uncovering, and it is truly an evil of supernatural proportions. The eyes of killer, and his sudden transformation from a frail old man to a powerful monster, confirm as much. The profiler is finally powerless to stop him.
5.5 Conclusion
In both Suspect Zero and From Hell, the affirmation of the reality of evil, and thus the access to reenchantment, occurs within what appears at first to be an entirely immanent situation—the modern phenomenon of random serial murder and the efforts of modern social institutions to both comprehend and prevent it. The Victorian age detectives confronted by the crimes of Jack the Ripper are at a loss to understand them. Luckily, there is a man at Scotland Yard who sees things they don Y. Unlike these colleagues, the viewer does have access to Abberline's visions but the narrative has prepared a twist for the detective and the audience. Abberline's paranormal abilities aid him in unraveling a seemingly "immanent" political conspiracy and locate the very frail and very human killer only to watch him transform into a monster of pure evil before his eyes. Likewise,
Mackelway, also a gifted seer, thinks he is on the case of a typical serial killer, then learns that he is chasing a rogue FBI agent, and finally unearths an insidious and almost
173 inconceivable evil. Nearly all of the unsolved missing children cases in American can be traced back to one "black hole" of a killer.
This is the key to the Profiler cycle's mythic task. The films interpret the real life effort of these gifted serial killer hunters as more than just police work, as nothing less than a struggle with the very real existence of evil in our world. Put another way, this time purely in genre terms, the Profiler film's task is to reenchant the realist horror film, to make it supernatural. To do so, it presents otherwise real characters and situations as nearly, or entirely, supernatural. In such a context, the serial killer becomes the face of evil in modern life, his crimes so heinous as to be inhuman. Naturally, to fight such monsters requires superhuman qualities, explaining why the profilers, with their special skills/technique, wind up elevated in these genre narratives to nearly superhero status.
Their ability to enter the minds of those they hunt represents a special kind of vision or literally, in the examples above, a sixth sense.
As with the Supernatural Investigation film, the detective protagonist is vital to the cycle's mythic function. Although the idea of serial killers as monstrous embodied evil reenchants these narratives, the story of the film is always the investigation or
"journey into darkness" of the profiler in his pursuit of the killer. Located here are the particular strengths of the Profiler cycle relative to the Supernatural Investigation cycle.
Far from drawing a simple distinction between the criminal and the police, between pure good and pure evil, the profiler figure provides an opportunity to question such black and
174 white notions. As a result, many Profiler films become reflections on the unity of, rather than the stark opposition of, good and evil. In this cycle, profilers are tortured souls, torn apart by the constant presence of evil in their lives and the dangers inherent in "entering" disturbed minds. Serial killers, meanwhile, are frighteningly real and blend in with the fabric of society such that who might be one becomes impossible to know for sure. Evil is everywhere and nowhere; it both transcends us and exists in each and every one of us.
A frightening thought, to be sure, but one that is a compelling antidote to ambivalence.
By allowing a hint of "something more", a "mysterious, incalculable force" of evil to creep back into otherwise secular "realist horror" narratives, the cycle responds to the cross-pressures of belief in the secular age.
These rich gothic meditations on the reality of evil serve a reenchanting function by affirming its existence in an age that denies it. This denial of the "denial of evil" serves the same purpose as the discrediting of the immanent frame I have identified in the
Supernatural Investigation cycle. Both negotiate the relationship between what is real and what might be real, addressing an audience cross-pressured between open and closed worldviews. Whereas the Investigation cycle resolves this opposition quite explicitly by converting the skeptic to a believer, the Profiler cycle has fewer easy answers. In this respect, it succeeds where the Supernatural Investigation cycle fails. The latter grant us our wish for a conversion, to simply be provided with evidence that "something more" exists and make belief not a choice but an inevitability. Profiler films, at their best, refuse
175 to do this. They will take us to the edge and show us the abyss, but the abyss simply
"looks back". It turns our gaze back onto ourselves, as Nietzsche warned it would. The evil that fascinates us exists inside us as much as it exists in the serial killer. This is the long-abiding truth found throughout the American gothic tale, from Poe and Hawthorne through Melville, to The Boston Strangler, From Hell and Suspect Zero.
176 6. Reenchantment and Utopia: Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow
If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing mysterious and
supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and
ridiculous. ... Two excesses: excluding reason, admitting only reason.
- Blaise Pascal, Pensees
Nowhere is the contemporary horror film's concern with reenchantment more apparent than in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow (1999). Here Hollywood's principal auteur of the gothic, working with screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, re-imagines Washington
Irving's classic American tale as both a serial killer film and a supernatural investigation film. Ichabod Crane, a credulous Yankee schoolmaster in the original tale, becomes instead an enlightened "scientific" detective sent from New York City to investigate murders in a tiny rural village. Instead of being chased away by Brom Bones, his rival for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, in this adaptation he wins her love and leaves with her to live happily ever after in New York. And most importantly Ichabod encounters in Sleepy
Hollow not merely folklore and superstition, but the startling reality of the supernatural.
The Headless Horseman, nothing but a legend in Irving's story, is in Burton's film a very substantial specter conjured up by magic to wreak havoc on the hamlet. This chapter will examine the consequences of the changes made in the adaptation from page to screen in
177 light of the film's relationship to the cycles and themes of the contemporary horror film presented in the preceding chapters. Doing so uncovers the intentions as well as the logic behind Burton and Walker's adaptation and reveals the clearest example yet of the reenchanting function of the horror film as a supernatural genre in a secular age.
Burton's Sleepy Hollow opens in classic detective movie fashion: with a murder.
Peter Van Garrett (Martin Landau) and his son are fleeing Sleepy Hollow by carriage when they encounter a horseman who decapitates them both. Following this, we are introduced to young Constable Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) of New York City. An establishing shot of the city informs us the year is 1799.1 Crane has found a corpse in the river and he complains to his superior that he should be allowed to conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death. "If you find them in the water, the cause of death is drowning," he is told dismissively. The primitive police station looks more like a medieval dungeon and it is clear that these surroundings are representative of the approach to justice that prevails there. Fed up with these circumstances, Crane preaches to a judge (Christopher Lee): "The millennium is almost upon us. In a few months we will be living in the nineteenth century... Why am I the only one to see that to solve crimes, to detect the guilty, we must use our brains to recognize vital clues, using up-to- date scientific techniques?" The judge, in an effort to rid himself of this pest, offers the idealistic young constable a mission. In the village of Sleepy Hollow two days travel
'The film moves the date of the events in the story so that it is set exactly 200 years before its release date (1999), plainly encouraging us to see a parallel between the story and the present. 178 north, he tells him, "three people have been murdered there, all within a fortnight...you will take these experimentations of yours to Sleepy Hollow and there you will detect the murderer and bring him here to face our good justice."
And so begins the adventure of Constable Ichabod Crane of New York City as he attempts to solve the mystery of the serial murders by decapitation occurring in the superstitious little hamlet of Sleepy Hollow. Upon arrival he learns that the townsfolk are all convinced that the murderer is the demonic spirit of the Headless Horseman, a blood thirsty German mercenary killed and buried there twenty years ago during the
Revolutionary War. He also meets the beautiful Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci), with whom he falls in love but also suspects of using witchcraft to cause him harm. "You have bewitched me," he tells her in a typically ambiguous line. At first confident that he can locate the "flesh and blood" human behind the murders, he soon learns in a terrifying firsthand encounter that the Headless Horseman is real and that magic and the supernatural seem to reign over reason in this part of the world. To make matters worse, this strange place stirs up long-buried memories of his childhood with which he would rather not deal. Three separate dream sequences depict his mother's torture at the hands of his father when he was a young boy.
Once the ghostly reality of the killer can no longer be denied, and Crane accepts the existence of the supernatural, the townsfolk assume he will flee Sleepy Hollow in terror. Instead, he gathers his courage and surprises them with the announcement: "I have
179 faced my fears and come out determined ... to pit myself against a murdering ghost."
Importantly, as he persists in his investigation he continues to apply his skills of deduction and scientific reasoning. This leads him to discover an additional human motive and a "natural" explanation for the crimes. Lady Van Tassel (Miranda
Richardson), the new bride of the town's richest man, is using black magic to call up and control the spirit of the Horseman from the grave. She is intent on claiming inheritance of her new husband's estate and has commanded her supernatural servant to kill everyone who stands in her way. The beautiful Katrina represents the last obstacle to her ambitions but Ichabod puts the pieces of the mystery together and rescues his love in the nick of time. No longer suspicious that she was involved in the plot—indeed, realizing she has protected him with white magic the entire time—Ichabod brings Katrina with him to begin a new happy life together back in New York City.
How does this narrative compare to the classic American tale that inspired it?
There are certainly more differences than similarities between the two stories.
Washington Irving's tale forms a part of his much-loved The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey
Crayon, Gent. (1819-20), a collection of short essays, character sketches and other writings, mostly on the subject of English life, composed by the author while living in
Britain. Irving was a native of New York, the youngest son of a large successful middle- class family. He chose not to follow his father and brothers into the typical careers of law, business and the church; instead he sought the life of a writer, a rare profession for
180 someone of his generation, the first born in the new United States of America. The idea behind the Sketch-Book was to present an American's observations about British life in such a way that it would appeal to literary tastes on both sides of the Atlantic. A few of the sketches, however, are set in America and the most famous of these, "Rip Van
Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", feature a celebrated blend of American folklore with elements of European legends and traditions. Both stories captured the imaginations of Irving's countrymen and became American classics in the nineteenth century, making Irving the nation's first celebrated professional writer.
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", we are told by Crayon (Irving's pseudonym and imaginary traveler/narrator), was not composed by him but instead found among the papers of the eccentric historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. The latter was in fact another pseudonym of Irving's, this one first used for his satiric A History of New York (1809), which had been his first widely read publication. To further complicate things, in a postscript to the story, Knickerbocker has written that his account is a transcription of a story he heard told by a New York gentleman "at a Corporation meeting." Finally, within the tale itself, the New York gentleman, while narrating, admits that he received the story from "an old farmer, who had been down to New-York on a visit several years after (the events)." As a result, the reader is several steps removed from the supposed facts of this tale, filtered as it is through three different storytellers. A central theme of the tale is thus the relationship between storytelling and truth.
181 The story as Knickerbocker's papers recorded it goes as follows. Ichabod Crane was a schoolmaster from Connecticut who came to the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town to teach the children of the town and its surrounding areas, including Sleepy Hollow. He was an "odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity", combining an educated urban sensibility with fascination for the supernatural. He governed his schoolhouse (his
"little empire") with an authoritarian countenance by day and charmed the ladies with his singing and dancing by evening. It impressed everyone that he had read many books but his favorite, Cotton Mather's "History of New England Witchcraft", was an out-dated
Puritan tome filled with superstitions. One of his favorite activities was to sit with the old
Dutch wives around a fire and exchange accounts of witches from Mather for their
"marvelous tales of ghosts and goblins." This original Ichabod Crane may have come and gone from Tarry Town without the slightest notice had he not fallen in love with Katrina
Van Tassel. She was the daughter of a wealthy farmer and, more importantly, also the object of another's affections. The local roustabout Brom Bones too had eyes for Katrina.
Brom is much more central to this, the original story, than he is to Burton and Walker's adaptation. As the schoolmaster wooed Katrina away from Brom, the jilted suitor plotted a memorable revenge. One night, on his way home alone from a party at the Van Tassel estate, Crane simply vanished without a trace. The climax of the Irving's tale is a terrifying tour de force. It describes Crane's chilling encounter that night on horseback with a silent horseman who follows and then chases the schoolmaster through the
182 woods2. Although the narrator never explicitly says so, he strongly hints that what
Ichabod Crane thought was the Headless Horseman that night, causing him to flee Sleepy
Hollow in terror never to be seen again, was instead merely Brom Bones, dressed up as the legendary specter to take advantage of Crane's credulous nature and frighten off his rival for Katrina's love.
The changes made to this story in the film adaptation by Burton and Walker fall into three broad categories. First, they have expanded Irving's short tale by including the complicated mystery of the serial murders. Accompanying this mystery is an elaborate history of the village of Sleepy Hollow and large cast of characters and relationships, most of which are not found in the original tale. Second, the occupation of Ichabod Crane is no longer schoolmaster but detective. This change leads to a significantly different protagonist in the film. The credulity of living's Ichabod was central to both the original story's plot and its central themes. Burton's Ichabod, however, is now the familiar skeptical detective of the Supernatural Investigation film. Finally, the filmmakers completely re-imagine the romance between Katrina and Ichabod. Whereas the first two changes bring the film in line with the two key cycles of the contemporary horror genre, the Serial Killer film and the Supernatural Investigation, the transformation of the love story forms the heart of the new narrative, providing its thematic structure, its emotional weight and its mythic core. Irving's Katrina was little more than a generic object of
2It is not clear how these details could be known to the narrator, but a postscript positions the tale as a mixture of fact and folklore anyway. 183 affection. Now she is our protagonist's savior. She represents the very things the skeptical Ichabod represses in himself—both his memories of his mother, and his belief in magic—and which he must confront and overcome in order to be happy. Tim Burton has said about his film, "It's basically hopeful. It's about...being open to things"3, and this is registered in the film's conclusion. The new ending, in which Ichabod and Katrina live happily ever after, points to our hero's achievement, and hints at a new and hopeful world that includes both scientific reason and the supernatural.
Sleepy Hollow is in fact the very best example of the contemporary horror genre's concern with reenchantment. The "happy ending", with its symbolic union of science and magic in the characters of Ichabod and Katrina, captures better than any other moment in any other recent film the "utopian" tenor of the supernatural narratives that I have highlighted throughout this study. Contextualized in this manner, it becomes apparent how the changes to the original story made by Burton and Walker all build logically towards this crucial final scene. The substantial revisions and the reversals in character and plot begin to make sense once we understand the film's ending as a hopeful image of reenchantment, of "being open", as both Burton and Charles Taylor put it, to "something more". In order to illustrate this, my analysis must first highlight how the narrative draws upon the generic associations of character, figure and theme found in the genre's recent cycles, the Supernatural Investigation film, and the Serial Killer Profiler film.
3From an interview contained on the DVD release. 184 Comparison between the original tale and the adaptation brings these details into relief.
With its thematic structure securely in place thanks to these generic connections, the full meaning of the love story and its denouement fall into place. The rest of this analysis will take a closer look at each of the major changes one at a time.
6.1 The Headless Horseman and the Reality of the Supernatural
The first critical difference between adaptation and original involves the reality of the supernatural. Irving's tale is a story about stories. The events it recounts are at several remove from the facts by the time its readers encounter them. The supernatural is never presented as real. Instead it exists only as a belief held by an individual or as part of the folklore of the region. Consequently, its central theme is the way stories are told and legends are formed. Ichabod himself, frightened off from Sleepy Hollow by its folklore has become, because of his sudden disappearance, a part of that folklore4. At the same time, we are made to understand that nothing supernatural happened at all, that the ghostly rider was simply a vengeful Brom Bones aided by a well-aimed pumpkin5. If the
Headless Horseman were indeed real, this would be an entirely different story. Burton's film is exactly that new story. The film's title, which drops the "legend" from the title of
Irving's tale, hints at the direction this adaptation will take. In this version, the Headless
4Irving's last paragraph, for example, tells us "The old country wives...maintain to this day that Ichabod was spirited away by supernatural means; and it is a favorite story often told about the neighborhood round the winter evening fire" (317). 5The story's postscript ends with the story-teller admitting "I don't believe one-half of it myself (320). 185 Horseman is most definitely real, as all those poor souls who meet his sword soon discover. Such changes are perfectly in line with the shift to reenchantment in the contemporary horror film.
One might argue that the Headless Horseman's reality in the Sleepy Hollow is just a consequence of the filmmakers' decision to make their version something of a fairy tale. Perhaps, but even so, this is a very modern fairy tale. While the film admittedly conjures up a fairy tale world where such supernatural things quite naturally exist, it nevertheless aims squarely at our modern ambivalence about the reality of the supernatural by dropping a skeptical protagonist in the middle of it all. In other words, it makes the debate over the reality of the supernatural the subject of the narrative in the same way that The X-Files did by teaming Scully with Mulder. This debate is the new theme of the film, and on the night of Ichabod's arrival, the terms of the debate are set during the meeting in the Van Tassel's drawing room.
As the elders of the Sleepy Hollow gather to meet the emissary from the city, enchanted and disenchanted worldviews confront each other. Baltus Van Tassel (Michael
Gambon) recites the spectacular legend of the Horseman (played by Christopher Walken) accompanied by a vivid flashback sequence. As he concludes, Ichabod's hands are shaking, but he gathers himself and asks skeptically, "Are you saying...Is that what you believe?" "Seeing is believing," replies the notary Hardenbrook ominously. Crane responds, "The assassin is a man of flesh and blood and I will discover him." Moments
186 later, the town's spiritual leader, the Reverend Steenwyck (Jefferey Jones) speaks up:
"They tell me you have brought books and trappings of scientific investigation." He drops a massive bible on the table next to Crane and says "This is the only book I recommend you read." Crane immediately opens it up and finds a clue in the family tree printed on the inside front cover. "I see," he says. If Crane will be forced to see that the supernatural is real, he will also demonstrate to the villagers that his modern investigative skills help him see things that they do not see as well. In one compact scene, the thematic structure of the adaptation is laid bare. This will be a film about two opposing worldviews: one enchanted and one disenchanted. Which one is correct, the one that accepts the reality of magic and supernatural or the one that dismisses them and believes only in science and reason? To its credit, Sleepy Hollow does not offer easy answers.
Instead, both seem valid throughout the narrative and the ending symbolically unites them.
This tension between skepticism and belief on the other hand does not concern the author of the original tale. Washington Irving's Sleepy Hollow has a magical ambiance but the Headless Horseman is never more than a legend, one that his Ichabod is foolish enough to believe. Some context can help us understand why this is so. For Irving, the pressing issue in America was not the reality of the supernatural or the need for reenchantment, as I argue it is today, but rather the shape of his new nation's identity.
This involved questions about the meaning of the past, the present and the future, the
187 relationship between the classes and the relationship of the United States to the European
society from which it had emerged. The rising American middle-class, whether they were committed to the new rational philosophy of the Enlightenment or to one of the emerging revivalist factions of Prostestantism that opposed it (McLoughlin, 99) would not be drawn, as we are today, to the idea that the Horseman could be real. Instead, in the early nineteenth century, belief in witches, demons, and magic was a sign of backwardness, naivety and lower class status, as we see clearly in Irving's tale. While Irving romanticizes the little Dutch settlement of Sleepy Hollow, Stanley Orr (following Von
Frank) argues that this is done not to praise the culture and beliefs of the people but to create an American pastoral scene that can support the construction of a much-needed national mythology. A sense of timeless settlement in the Hudson River region conjured up by the Dutch villages helped cover up the very real and recent violent wresting of the land away from Native Americans (46). While some gothic writers and Romantics of this era employed representations of the supernatural for reenchanting purposes, this is not at all what Irving had in mind. As an author with aspirations to respectability, he follows the formula established by the most successful author of the Gothic, Anne Radcliffe. Her stories would include some supernatural elements for entertainment value but then reveal their, for her, proper natural causes in the final pages. Irving paints a picture of an enchanted world and terrifies his readers with a tour-de-force horror sequence but then diffuses the supernatural with an entirely natural explanation at the end.
188 The context then for the two narratives is of significant difference. Both the quaint folklore of Irving's Dutch settlement and the sixteenth century Puritan superstitions of
Ichabod are outdated perspectives for educated Americans of this era. Neither took account of the new philosophy of the Enlightenment and the changing modern world that was reshaping the culture and values of the United States (McLoughlin, 99-110). My contention is that belief in the supernatural today has a very different meaning. As we have seen in previous chapters, whole cycles of horror narratives revolve around the vindication of the believer in the face of skepticism and empiricism. The representation of the supernatural in popular culture is now primarily directed at our own ambivalence about its existence. And the majority of the time our narratives resolve that ambivalence with the message that it is okay to believe again. Burton's adaptation of Irving exemplifies this vindication of the believer in contemporary horror.
6.2 From Believer to Skeptic: Ichabod and the Supernatural Investigation Cycle
A second crucial difference between the original story and the film is found in the specific character of the protagonist Ichabod Crane. Like the changes to the Horseman, the changes to Ichabod reflect the film's reorientation of the story towards reenchantment and its new context within the contemporary horror genre. In this section, I will discuss
Burton's Ichabod Crane in relation to the two key reenchanting cycles of the horror film, the Supernatural Investigation and the Serial Killer Profiler film. The former emphasizes
189 his skepticism and his conversion, the central concerns of that cycle. The latter positions
Ichabod as a mythic hero by associating his role as detective with that of today's serial killer profiler, a figure who hunts evil in order to "save" society.
Washington Irving undoubtedly made Ichabod a schoolmaster in order to set up a contrast between two worlds. According to Hoffman, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" gave America "its first important statement of the clash of regional characters—the
Yankee vs. the backwoodsman—who had already emerged as dominant types in our regional folk traditions" (425). His occupation situates him as an outsider and a representative of an educated city culture dropped into this charming but backward village. However, Ichabod's authority and superiority is undercut by his personality, in particular his credulity. The fact that he believes in both Cotton Mather's history of witchcraft and the ghost stories of the Dutch wives leaves him vulnerable to Brom Bones' prank, thus providing the story with its conclusion and its implicit moral: "don't be credulous". Irving's Ichabod, though he in many respects stands in contrast to the villagers, shares with them a belief in the supernatural. "It was often his delight," we are told, "to con over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk of the evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes." He, like the inhabitants of the town, is a believer of tales and legends, although his legends are of a different class and a different nature. He carries into the nineteenth century a distinctly eighteenth century Puritan worldview, one convinced of the reality of witches and demons. This is the outlook that
190 originally gave America its sense of purpose and identity but also led to incidents like the
Salem witch trials. For Irving' s nineteenth century readers, such a strict and enchanted
Puritanism was as outdated as the peasant beliefs of Sleepy Hollow. Irving wrote at a time when America was searching for a way to temper the severity of its Puritan ideology so that it could grow and prosper in a modern progressive world (McLoughlin). And so, in the original story, Ichabod, though in one sense distinguished from the superstitious country folk, is in another sense aligned with them as improperly credulous.
Burton's Ichabod is the polar opposite of Irving's. No longer a schoolmaster with a credulous streak, he is instead a New York City constable frustrated by the medieval form of justice practiced in his precinct. "I stand up for sense and justice," he declares in the film's opening scenes. In his notebook, a page covered with sketches of torture devices and the words "criminal investigation by forced confession" faces a page containing images of his scientific inventions and expressions like "Reason + Deduction:
Detect the Truth!" and "Careful observation of the crime scene yields clues to manner + circumstances of death". This Ichabod seems to embody perfectly all those qualities we have come to associate with the Enlightenment, and it seems to be his intention to do so.
He is one of those young men of that era captivated and energized by the Age of Reason.
In this sense, he has a bit of historical authenticity. But Burton and Walker's film is not particularly concerned with accuracy. Their Ichabod is pointedly also a humorous anachronism, as if Sherlock Holmes had appeared 100 years sooner, or a modern crime
191 scene investigator had been dropped into a time machine and shot two centuries backward. Essentially, the changes to Ichabod's character and his occupation situate
Sleepy Hollow directly within the Supernatural Investigation cycle of the contemporary horror film.
As discussed in Chapter Four, the Supernatural Investigation cycle has three identifying characteristics and a consistent theme. Each film features a protagonist who directly or indirectly identifies as a skeptic, ie. someone who does not believe in the supernatural. The plot of the film revolves around an investigation. The skeptical protagonist, who is usually a detective or police officer, but can sometimes be an amateur investigator, comes across evidence in the course of their investigation that points to the supernatural. The skeptic of course dismisses this at first but eventually more evidence follows. This leads to the third characteristic of the cycle: the conversion. The conversion of the skeptic into a believer is the goal of the Supernatural Investigation narrative. By proving the skeptic wrong, the film, which has set up a contrast between open and closed interpretations of "the immanent frame", sides with the open interpretation. The cycle persistently undermines or discredits the closed world structure that Charles Taylor associates with the dominant perspective in the secular age (557). The popularity of the films, that which has allowed them to develop into a recognizable cycle over the last two decades, derives from the ambivalence that contemporary audiences feel towards the immanent frame. In today's world, the message that there is "nothing more" appears
192 nearly impossible to deny, and yet many find such an idea deeply dissatisfying. In such a context, a narrative that discredits skepticism and affirms belief offers pleasure by acknowledging and then resolving that ambivalence.
Framed this way, as an example of the Supernatural Investigation cycle, Sleepy
Hollow's reinterpretation of Ichabod Crane begins to make sense. This perspective reveals the intentions behind the filmmakers' drastic overhaul of Irving's tale to bring it relevance for today's audiences. Genre fans familiar with the cycle would instantly recognize the setup provided by the drawing room scene. Ichabod's skepticism upon hearing the legend of the Horseman echoes Agent Scully's typical response to Agent
Mulder's theories: "Is that what you believe?" And as in most episodes of the X-Files, we know how this confrontation will be resolved. When Crane goes on to lecture this room full of grown men on the silliness of their beliefs, the genre audience savors every word.
"Murder needs no ghost to come from the grave," intones Ichabod. "We have murders in
New York without benefit of ghouls and goblins." Johnny Depp delivers his lines here with patronizing perfection. The greater the arrogance of the skeptic, the better; the audience knows his conversion is not far away.
The payoff of this delicious set up comes several scenes later. Ichabod can no longer deny the existence of the Headless Horseman as he has witnessed the menace firsthand. After having fainted, he wakes up in bed, still terrified. He looks like he's seen a ghost and in this case he has indeed. Burton presents the scene, like many others in the
193 film, with a comedic touch. Depp again hits just the right notes. Ichabod curls up into a ball, pulling the covers up to his face like a child. Baltus and Katrina Van Tassel stand over him, trying to comfort him and calm him down. The whole town wants to know if their savior has lost his mind or if he'll flee Sleepy Hollow without helping them lift the curse of the Horseman. "It was a headless horseman!" cries Ichabod. "Of course it was.
That's why you are here," replies Baltus. "No, you must believe me. It was a horseman, a dead one. Headless! It's all true!" shouts Ichabod in a panic. "Of course it is," insists
Baltus calmly. "I told you. Everyone told you."
And then Burton and Walker do something very surprising, something that allows the film to shift into another gear. Just when we think that this Ichabod is a coward, a skeptic who has gotten his just deserts for his arrogance and has been shattered by his encounter with supernatural evil, the tables are turned as he announces, "I have faced my fears and come out determined ... to pit myself against a murdering ghost." Say what you will about this fellow but this is a courageous decision. It also contributes to the carefully modulated balance the film maintains from beginning to end, and which in fact becomes its final message. As Ichabod goes forth to hunt the monster, he seems to draw his courage from his belief in reason and the power of scientific investigation. Although he has been forced to admit the existence of the supernatural, he remains confident that he can go toe-to-toe with it on the strength of his deductive techniques. As it turns out, he is right, although he will receive some much needed magical assistance along the way.
194 6.3 The Heroic Monster Hunter: Ichabod and the Serial Killer Profiler Cycle
Contemporary horror films with reenchantment on their mind often feature protagonists as detectives conducting investigations. I have discussed in Chapter Four why this is so.
The detective genre and the investigation plot foreground the definition of and the nature of evidence and proof, and ultimately belief and truth. Investigative narratives thus make good vehicles for contemplating the edges of the immanent frame. What does the empirical scientific approach to reality include, and what does it exclude? What constitutes proof of existence? If we believe that something supernatural exists, take ghosts for example, how might we prove it? If we don't believe, what if anything would anything change our minds? A secondhand account from a trusted friend? A photograph?
In most Supernatural Investigations films, it takes a concrete firsthand experience for the protagonist to undergo conversion. In Sleepy Hollow, this is certainly the case. But
Burton's film doesn't contain the slow build up of evidence found in most films in the cycle. The only scene that resembles this aspect of the cycle is the crime scene investigation of Young Masbeth's father on the morning after Ichabod's arrival.
In this wonderfully ambivalent sequence, Depp plays Crane as both supremely confident in his ideas but still hesitant in their execution. He resembles here the young
Clarice Starling during her first days on the job in Silence of the Lambs, especially in the way his stomach turns at the sight of the corpse. The residents of the village look on in amazement at Crane's gadgets and the manner in which he recreates the events by
195 analyzing the evidence at the scene. But, ironically, his scientific conclusions only confirm the superstitions of the townsfolk. "The wound was cauterized in the very instant, as if the blade were red hot, and yet...no blistering, no scorched flesh," he announces, thinking out loud. To which the magistrate responds with terror, "The devil's fire..." A close-up of Crane's countenance suggests he doesn't entirely disagree. The comparison of Ichabod with Clarice Starling is not without justification. While the investigation narrative added to Irving's story situates the film in the Supernatural
Investigation cycle, this aspect of Burton and Walker's adaptation also transforms "The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow" into a Serial Killer Profiler film.
That there are multiple victims of the Headless Horseman, an ongoing series of murders, makes Burton's adaptation more than just a detective film. Turning Irving's story into a murder mystery might have been accomplished with only one person perishing at the edge of the Horseman's blade. Certainly many detective narratives, especially the classics of Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie, involved a single murder for the investigator to solve. Burton's collaborate^ the screenwriter Andrew
Kevin Walker, wrote the influential serial killer film, Seven (David Fincher, 1996) however, and here he has imported the themes of that cycle into his adaptation. As a result, Ichabod, in addition to being a skeptical detective, takes on some of the characteristics of the serial killer profiler. While he doesn't actually "profile" the killer,
6 That the Horseman removes and collects the heads of his victim's might even be seen as a nod to the infamous ending of Walker's Seven. It is also behavior reminiscent of several real-life killers, most notably Jeffery Dahmer. 196 the narrative nonetheless draws upon the Profiler cycle to lend meaning to Ichabod and his role in this story.
As discussed in the previous chapter, the Profiler cycle consists of serial killer films centered not on the killer but on the journey of the detective in charge of the investigation. As he employs special techniques for identifying and capturing the killer, most importantly the construction of a psychological profile of the unknown crimnal, the detective risks his sanity by "entering the mind" of the serial killer. He does this because, according to this modern theory of criminal behaviour, the serial killer's motives for murder are not the common ones of greed or revenge but instead the fulfillment of a fantasy. The profiler must reconstruct that fantasy from the evidence at the crime scene, putting himself or herself in the shoes of the killer and attempting to imagine what motivated this particular murder. The cycle commonly employs a hunting metaphor that describes the actions of both the killer and the detective. The killer hunts his victims and the detective hunts the killer by attempting to imagine how and why the killer hunts. The ambiguity here is intentional. The Profiler film always emphasizes the dangerous liminal space that this serial killer hunter must occupy, dangerous because of the possibility that the profiler will identify too much with the killer, that he will enter and not be able to exit the killer's mind. This fear stems from the recognition that there resides a "heart of darkness" in each of us, that each of us has "a shadow" as Jungian psychology teaches,
197 and that we are all then potentially serial killers, an idea continually reinforced when real- life killers turn out to be the "guy next door."
That such ferocious violence lurks so near the surface of everyday life challenges society's ability to make sense of it. The whole serial killer culture, from its true-crime best-sellers to its heroic FBI profilers, represents our attempt to gain some control over the phenomenon. This mass of information and specialized language informs the films of the Serial Killer Profiler cycle, providing a rich palette that screenwriters and television producers continue to rely on. At the same time, however, the cycle also resorts to seemingly simplistic labels like "monster" and "evil" to characterize serial killers and their crimes. Despite applying what are meant to be social-scientific theories to serial murder, society can't seem to resist also reenchanting the killer. The darkness inside the killer's mind is characterized as a bottomless pit of evil, a black hole, or an abyss, and the killer, though human, is also a "monster". Profilers become, in this context, modern
"monster hunters", descendants of Beowulf, called upon by the kingdom, town or city under siege to do what no regular man can do: rescue them from the terror of the monster.
Is this a failure of imagination and of reason? Is it a reactionary mentality elbowing aside science in favor of a disturbingly medieval explanation? The fact that this process exists alongside and even in the very same texts that promote a social-scientific approach to serial murder suggests a different interpretation. Our ambivalence about how to explain serial killers is a reflection of our larger ambivalence towards secular life. In a society
198 that generally denies the reality of evil because of its metaphysical/religious connotations, serial killers fascinate us in part because they give some credibility to the notion that true evil, in a metaphysical sense, does exist.
In American popular culture, the serial killer and the profiler, as monster and hunter, tap rich veins of national myth and ideology. American mythology has its own tradition of monster hunters, those brave souls who risked their lives to open and then protect the frontier against the "monster" in the endless forests of the new world. The frontiersman or "Indian hunter" of American myth and literature shares a number of striking similarities to the modern profiler. He too confronted darkness, and he too lived a sort of liminal existence on the edges of society. In order to survive on the frontier, it was necessary to adopt some or many of the habits and characteristics of the natives of that land. In doing so, such a man had to "go native" in a sense, similar to way that the profiler has to "enter the mind of the killer". And like the serial killer today, the Native
Americans were the ultimate example of "pure evil" for the settlers and founders of the
United States. In this sense, they were both terrifying and fascinating to those who read about them and followed the stories and myths about the men who lived among them, hunted them, and protected society from them. Richard Slotkin explains that as the "man who knows Indians," this frontier figure played a crucial role in American mythology. He embodied the actual struggle of the nation itself to both subdue and assimilate the native population. The great anxiety about the Indian on the part of the white settlers arose from
199 the knowledge that they themselves, not just their frontier hero, had to "go native" in order to create America. The nation in search of an identity needed to find a balance between the characteristics of European and the Native American, and the frontier Indian hunter became the recurring hero of American storytelling by representing and embodying this balance ("Gunfighter", 11-16).
The serial killer profiler brings this heroic figure into the present. He still hunts evil monsters and lives a life on the borders of society, risking his life by facing and indeed coming to know the darkness. In most Profiler films, that is where the comparison ends, however. The profiler is a remnant of sorts, a modern monster hunter fighting a modern conception of evil. His reenchanting function relies on his special status as a crime fighter of nearly supernatural abilities, who can understand and conquer evil. The mythic scope of the "man who knows Indians," the hero who in the nineteenth century embodied the tensions or opposing characteristics the nation needed to balance, is missing from most of the films in the Serial Killer Profiler cycle. It is in this context, however, that Sleepy Hollow''s disparate elements come together in striking fashion.
Burton and Walker's re-imagining of Ichabod Crane as serial killer hunter breathes new life into this familiar character of American literature, turning him into a contemporary version of the heroic reconciliatory figure of the nation's popular mythology. To achieve this, the film must rely on the audience's ability to recognize the genre elements of the Profiler cycle. Because by 1999 there existed an established cycle
200 with established characters and themes, the filmmakers can draw upon these, including the unique status of the profiler as a "special" person with special skills. The consequence of turning "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" into a serial killer narrative and casting
Ichabod Crane in the role of the detective is to invite an association between the New
Ichabod, the profiler figure, and the profiler's archetypal mythos. While Ichabod does little actual "profiling" in the film, he does occupy the profiler's role as a monster hunter within the film's thematic structure, inviting us to read him as a mythic hero who will reconcile the nation's divisions and restore balance. But if the profiler's journey in Sleepy
Hollow does not involve "entering the mind" of the killer, then what generates the drama and tension in this Profiler film? For this, we have to look to the struggle occurring inside
Ichabod's heart and mind. He can not slay the monster until he overcomes an imbalance that threatens to destroy himself. In the last section, I will show how this works itself out in relation to the love story between Katrina and Ichabod.
6.4 Ichabod and Katrina: The Utopian Union of Science and Magic
In the small amount of attention given to Sleepy Hollow by film scholars, little has been said about the character of Katrina and her role in the narrative. Stanley Orr, for example, examines the film from the perspective of post-colonial studies, concluding that Burton's film implicitly critiques its problematic source material. By overlooking the film's love story, his analysis offers a partial understanding of the film at best. At worst, it
201 completely ignores Sleepy Hollow's strengths. Most of the film's character development
and its thematic depth are located in those scenes that interrupt the course of the investigation, in particular the three dream sequences depicting Ichabod's childhood, and two extended dialogue scenes between Ichabod and Katrina. Like the Enlightenment itself, which the rational and skeptical detective here is meant to represent, Ichabod represses his magical side. On the outside, this takes the form of his resolute commitment to reason and empiricism—to a closed reading of the immanent frame. On the inside, we see the results of his repression bubble up in his restless dream life. Throughout the narrative, the dream sequences and the love story are elaborately intertwined.
The first and longest dream sequence occurs after Ichabod falls from his horse after being chased by Brom Bones in the recreation of the climax from "The Legend of
Sleepy Hollow". In this dream, we see a woman (played by Lisa Marie) in blue dress in a yard, with pink blossoms on the trees. The color is a striking contrast to the rest of the film. The woman spins around, wearing a blindfold, as if she is playing a game.
Significantly, this is very similar to what Katrina was doing the first time Ichabod saw her. In the dream, a voice quietly chants "Ichabod, Ichabod". A boy enters and the woman gently touches him. She removes her blindfold and he hands her some blue flowers. She smells them deeply as the music swells. Then, a cut to a brief shot of a white room with a red door, followed by the woman looking into the camera and gesturing to follow her. A point-of-view shot takes us inside a stone room with a fireplace. The woman tosses the
202 blue flowers into the fireplace, closes her eyes and draws a spiral pattern in the sand on the floor as the boy watches. Another cut, this time to a man in black cloak with a white wig. The sequence, previously saturated with color, is now drained nearly to black and white. The music becomes more menacing. There is thunder and lightening. Cut to the boy, now in his bed in the corner of a room, frightened. The woman tucks him in. Is she his mother? To comfort him, she shows him a little optical toy: a disc on a string depicting a red bird in a cage. It makes him smile. But a shadow appears outside the window in the background. The man in the black cloak is watching. A brief shot of the white room with the red door again. Then the door opens... a short shot, only four frames, but long enough for us to glimpse strange iron devices inside the room. Then
Ichabod wakes up. The first dream sequence lasts a total of one minute and three seconds.
The first important scene between the two soon-to-be lovers occurs when Ichabod awakes from this dream. He goes downstairs from his guest room in the Van Tassel house and finds Katrina up late reading. When she sees him, she hides her book under a cushion. He notices her do this and asks her why. "They were my mother's books. My father believes tales of romance caused the brain fever that killed her. She died two years ago come midwinter," she replies. In 1799, "tales of romance" would mean Gothic novels, especially ones depicting the supernatural. Her mom, like Katrina herself, is associated with magic and enchantment. Katrina goes on to tell Ichabod about the history of Sleepy Hollow and how her father came to own the land they live on. Then she reaches
203 into her nightgown and pulls out a book. She passes it to Ichabod saying, "It is my gift for you." The book's title is "A Compendium of Spells, Charms and Devices of the Spirit
World". He stiffens up, looks away and refuses, "No, I have no use for it." Katrina takes him to task: "Are you so certain of everything?" Feeling a little ashamed, he reluctantly accepts her gift. Next, the two venture outside where Katrina shows Ichabod the place where her family's old cottage once stood. She stands before the hearth and begins to draw a spiral in the sand next to some blue flowers. Ichabod recognizes, perhaps unconsciously, the images from his dream and is taken aback.
The second dream sequence immediately follows Ichabod's encounter with the real Horseman, i.e. his conversion scene. In this dream, the woman in the dress spins in the yard again and then floats up into the air. Cut to the stone interior. The man in the cloak grabs her and points to the spirals in the sand by the fireplace. He throws the bible down on them and opens it up. Cut to a long hallway with the red door at the end. A brief shot of an iron torture device, not unlike those we have seen in Ichabod's notebook. Then he awakes. In the third and final dream, we see the white room and the red door again.
Clearly now it is a church. The man in the cloak comes approaches the camera and walks past us. In the reverse shot, he has no head. The boy watches him go by. The camera then tracks forward to the red door. It opens and the camera enters. A voice chants "Ichabod,
Ichabod". The boy sees his mother inside a terrifying coffin-life torture device. It opens and her body falls out, blood spilling everywhere. The boy jumps back and falls against
204 another torture device leaving marks on his hands. These are markings we've seen on
Ichabod's hands elsewhere in the film. Now we know for sure that the boy is a young
Ichabod. He awakens with a start.
The third and final dream sequence is, like the first, followed by an important scene between Ichabod and Katrina. Here the dreamer offers an explanation, albeit a limited one, of his dreams. When he awakes, Katrina asks him what he was dreaming.
"Things I had forgotten and would not like to remember," he replies. "My mother was an innocent. A child of nature. Condemned, murdered by my father. Murdered to save her soul by a bible-black tyrant behind a mask of righteousness. I was seven when I lost my faith." This throws some light on what we have seen but it mainly confirms what the dream images had already told us. What it doesn't tell us is more important. Ichabod calls his mother "a child of nature" but she is clearly more than that. She is a witch, but one who practices "white magic." He also doesn't tell Katrina that his mother was tortured and killed in such a gruesome and medieval manner. If he had, she would understand much better why he is so committed to reason, science and progress. When she asks him,
"What do you believe in?" he responds, "Sense and reason. Cause and consequence. I should not have come to this place, where my rational mind has been so controverted by the spirit world." Katrina asks, "Will you take nothing from Sleepy Hollow that was worth the coming here?" "No, not nothing," he replies "A kiss from a lovely young
205 woman, before she saw my face or knew my name." "Yes," she says, "without sense or
reason."
What should we make of all this? First of all, poor Ichabod! He is committed,
with very good reason, to the principles of the Enlightenment, but he finds himself falling
in love with a witch. He is not entirely sure until the final moments of the film whether
she practices white or black magic. Meanwhile, his orderly empirical worldview, which
he relies on to help him cope with the traumatic death of his mother, has been torn open
by his discovery of a supernatural monster where he expected to find only a "flesh and
blood" killer. The challenge our hero faces in the film is how to negotiate all these
tensions and still carry out his role as monster hunter for the besieged village. Ichabod's
problem, the one he must overcome in order to be able to save Sleepy Hollow from the
evil of Lady Van Tassel and the Horseman, is that his perspective on life is too one-sided.
He has rejected enchantment and completely embraced disenchantment because of this
traumatic event in his childhood. But what both his dreams and Katrina make clear is that
in his rigid adherence to the Enlightenment he has thrown out the good with the bad.
Rather than recognize a difference between his father's "bible-black tyranny" and his mother's white "nature" magic, he has tossed them both aside as damaging illusions.
Katrina's love for him, like his mother's love, is an overwhelmingly positive force in the
film, and the spells she casts protect him throughout his journey. Her role in the narrative
206 is to force him to reflect on his beliefs, examine why he has rejected his mother's world, and reconsider the power and the value of believing in magic.
Simultaneously, I would argue that all of this can be read symbolically as well.
Ichabod's problems are America's problems; indeed, all of secular society's problems.
Burton and Walker suggest that we, like Ichabod, are too blindly committed to reason, that we repress the supernatural and that we must find a way to "open up" and rebalance our perspective. Broadly speaking, skeptics today in their struggle with religious fundamentalism reject all notions of magic, wonder and transcendence. The film's plea for reenchantment acknowledges this contemporary debate by condemning Ichabod's
Puritan father as much as Lady Van Tassel's vengeful black magic. It does not simplistically embrace magic and denigrate science and reason as misguided or somehow at fault. Instead, its message, embodied in its hero, is that hope resides in a balance of opposites, a union of science and magic.
This balance appears throughout the film as Ichabod remains committed to rational detective techniques even after his conversion scene and his acceptance of the supernatural. When he enters the Western Woods with Young Masbeth, they come across a witch's cave. While his assistant waits outside, Ichabod enters and gathers information from the witch that leads him to the Tree of the Dead. Then, upon inspecting the tree and the surrounding area for clues, he comes very close to "profiling" the Horseman when he notes that "the ground has been disturbed" and that the horseman's head is missing from
207 his skeletal remains, and then concludes that "the horseman returns from the dead to claim heads and will do so until his head is returned." Later, when he and Brom encounter the Horseman in the village, Ichabod's detective skills enable him to see that
"the horseman does not kill at random". In other words, someone is controlling him and sending him to attack specific victims. Brom can not see this and dies valiantly, but futilely, trying to stop the Horseman. These examples of Ichabod's ongoing commitment to reason—even while opening up to magic—represent the importance of balance between the two opposing perspectives that structure the film. It is essential that he undergo his conversion, that he believe in the supernatural in order to catch the killer, but at the same time, he must retain his scientific investigative skills to complete his task. In the end, the opposition between enchantment and disenchantment that was set up in the opening scenes of the film, is resolved not by championing one or the other but by combining the two. The solution to the mystery is both a natural and a supernatural explanation. The killer is both a supernatural being, as the townspeople insisted, and a person "of flesh and blood" (Lady Van Tassel) as Ichabod insisted.
6.5 Conclusion
At the outset of this work, I argued that the appropriate framework for understanding contemporary supernatural horror films was not a political criticism concerned with unmasking ideology but instead a myth criticism informed by an understanding of the
208 dilemmas and cross-pressures felt by the modern subject in the our secular age. Myth criticism does not dismiss ideology but instead understands popular films as what
Richard Slotkin calls the "mythic expression of ideology" ("Gunfighter", 5). Here, in these symbolic narratives, society addresses problems arising from contradictions in its deepest values and assumptions, searching for new symbols or new interpretations of old symbols in an effort to imaginatively overcome these contradictions. While this process will undoubtedly have a conservative, even reactionary element, the unorthodox Marxist critic Ernst Bloch encouraged us to mine it also for its emancipatory potential by paying attention to the Utopian sentiment contained in popular culture. More than thirty years ago, Richard Dyer, in the spirit of Ernst Bloch's work, offered a mythic analysis of the film musical that has never been extended to the horror film, until now. In his essay,
"Entertainment and Utopia", Dyer illustrated how the musical presented social concerns in sets of oppositions—scarcity/abundance, isolation/community—built into the structure of the narrative. The musical's song-and-dance sequences and happy endings expressed a
"utopian sensibility" that explained their appeal to audiences and indicated their value in the sense that Bloch championed.
Many of today's horror films come to life when considered in Dyer's terms. The ambivalence felt by modern viewers towards the cross-pressures of life in a secular age is imaginatively overcome in the films' treatment of the supernatural. While the Gothic mode in literature and film, as an expression of the Counter-Enlightenment, has always
209 demonstrated a concern with the disenchantment of the world, today's horror films more than ever directly engage our dissatisfaction with the immanent frame. Like Dyer's pairs of oppositions in the musical, they do this by telling stories that pit skeptics against believers, closed interpretations of reality against open ones, and then resolving the dispute usually by affirming the existence of the supernatural. They do this however in the terms of science and reason that audiences otherwise feel uncomfortable abandoning.
Supernatural Investigation films discredit the closed interpretation of the immanent frame but they do so through the conversion of a skeptic who represents the audience's own ambivalence about the nature and context of conversion. Serial Killer Profiler films deny the "denial of evil" in the secular age by presenting modern multiple murderers as proof of the reality of pure metaphysical evil, and anointing their hunters, the criminal profilers, as heroes.
Sleepy Hollow offers an exemplary case study of this process in action. Every significant change made to Irving's classic tale telegraphs for us the intentions of the filmmakers. The film relies on a set of contrasting terms—science/magic, skepticism/belief, closed/open, "This is all there is'V'There is something more"—and offers us a new version of an old American protagonist, Ichabod Crane, who embodies all of these contradictions. The narrative's mythic task is to reconcile the oppositions, the difficulty of the task represented in the new Ichabod's own divided state of mind. His rational philosophy and his repression of his magical childhood symbolize modern
210 society's dilemmas about secularity. As the heroic monster-hunter, called upon to protect the village, if he fails, society fails; his success is their only hope. Here, the importance of
Katrina comes into play. For Ichabod, she represents the opportunity for him to get back in touch with the part of himself he associated with his mother. This means believing in magic again and by extension believing in love again, something that was crushed by his father's murder of his loving mother. Thematically, Katrina represents the Utopian element in the narrative, those terms—magic, belief, "something more"—that anyone disenchanted with secular society desires. We long for reenchantment but without abandoning entirely the principles of the Enlightenment. As we have seen, Ichabod achieves his goals, and the film achieves its reconciliation of magic and science by emphasizing Ichabod's combination of deductive reasoning and openness to belief and by offering a solution to the mystery that is both natural and supernatural.
The film's grandest Utopian gesture comes, however, in its final scene. This is where we can see with the utmost clarity how the principle of reenchantment in the contemporary horror film is Utopian in character. After solving the mystery of Sleepy
Hollow's murders, rescuing Katrina from the evil Lady Van Tassel, and helping the spirit of the Horseman finally rest in peace, there is nothing left for our hero to do but return home. But rather than leave as he came, alone, Ichabod travels the same road along the shores of the Hudson, in the same coach, with both Katrina and his young servant
Masbeth by his side. A painful contradiction for society, the division of science and
211 magic, now resolved, Katrina and Ichabod may go on to live happily ever after. In his
DVD commentary, Tim Burton mentions including the happy ending because the film seemed to need some "light" after all the "darkness" that preceded it. But he doesn't elaborate on why this should be so. The answer, however, is obvious. In spite of its
"darkness", the entire film has been hopeful from the beginning.
Like so many of its contemporary texts, Sleepy Hollow is about the hope for reenchantment. In light of this, the happy ending surely makes sense. But what might not make sense on a first viewing is the film's final line of dialogue. When the coach arrives in New York and they disembark onto a busy sunlit city street, the new family walks past the camera into the crowd as Ichabod says to Masbeth, "Ah, just in time for a new century. You'll soon get your bearings, young Masbeth. The Bronx is up, the Battery's down, and home is this way." Is this just a throw-away line, as Ichabod anachronistically quotes a line from the Bernstein musical and MGM film, On the Town (Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949)? Certainly, this is meant to add a touch of humor to finish the story on a whimsical note. But, in light of my framework, it is also so much more. I can think of no better way to end this most hopeful of reenchanting modern horror films than with a nod to On the Town, that most Utopian of New York musicals. Burton and Walker must have foreseen my connection of Dyer's analysis of the musical to today's reenchanting horror film ten years before I wrote about...Or, at least, I want to believe they did.
212 7. Concluding Remarks
Horror aims for reenchantment. That was the assertion I made at the outset of this
discussion. Here, at its conclusion, allow me to step back and summarize my own aims.
The argument I have presented here has three targets. First and foremost, it challenges the
typical approach to the contemporary horror genre in film studies. To the extent that any
sustained consideration of the genre even exists today, it dismisses most of films
produced over the last few decades. But why should this be so? I can think of no good
reason why today's horror films deserve less attention than the previous generation's.
The genre is alive and well; it continues to command a significant share of film revenues,
enjoys a global audience and a year-round calendar of genre film festivals. Yet, very little
is said about these films. A flurry of publications appeared around the turn of the
millennium, many of which presented comprehensive overviews of the genre's history
and the history of horror film theory and criticism. But most of these had nothing to say
about anything produced since the decline of the slasher film cycle of the 1980s. There
remains very little work on the contemporary horror film and the most popular cycles of the last twenty years. My intention has been to reorient both our attitude and our
approach to these films.
When we do stop and consider today's horror genre, the concerns expressed in the
films escape the sorts of theories and critical approaches developed by film studies to talk
about horror. The most distinctive characteristic of the contemporary horror film is the
213 return of the supernatural narrative. In the 1970s and 1980s, "real" threats dominated the genre, from violent psycho killers and deranged cannibals to every conceivable animal species seeking revenge against mankind. Slasher films begged for a gender analysis or other reflections on the sources and causes of violence in contemporary society.
Cannibalism was a clever metaphor for capitalism and offered the potential for an indictment of class in America. Eco-horror films commented on modern industrial society and clearly expressed growing anxieties about our treatment of the environment.
All were appealing material for film scholarship. But the return of the supernatural horror film beginning in the 1990s has been met with a blank stare by genre scholars. Most, if they said anything, said: it's escapist; it's conservative; it has nothing to say. And the explosion of interest in the serial killer seemed most dangerous when the profiler films abandoned the social context of mass murder and hinted instead at the killer's
"monstrous" nature, his deep metaphysical evil.
These are all valid points, but they also involve some significant assumptions.
They take for granted that horror should challenge dominant ideology by employing its transgressive and monstrous iconography to comment upon of the horrific abuse of power, repression and violence of modern life. The genre can, and does, still perform this function, but it also does other things. We should approach horror with fewer preconceptions about what it should do and be attentive instead to what it does do.
Frameworks designed to divide films into progressive and reactionary groups wind up
214 writing off too many suggestive and rewarding titles, leaving significant gaps in our understanding of how popular cinema engages with social and cultural concerns. Few
Supernatural Investigation films received any notice from film scholarship, and many of the most interesting Profiler films have been ignored because their metaphysical treatment of evil could be dismissed too easily. My framework seeks to account for these films on their own terms.
My second target is an extension of the first. I intend for my work here join a broad shift taking place in film studies and cultural studies. This is the challenge to
"thing-centered" approaches of film theory and criticism initiated by Jeffery Pence and his subsequent call for attention to "the ineffable", or what Dennis Taylor calls the "need for a religious criticism." The throttling of discourse on the horror film by a focus on politics is an example of this absence of a critical language for treating concerns beyond the secular in scholarly textual analysis. The significance of reenchantment, for example, far exceeds the boundaries of the horror genre. My framework could and should be extended to other films, to the work of the today's best auteurs, and elsewhere throughout popular culture.
One might begin by simply extending a study of the reenchanting function beyond the boundaries of the horror film. A list of recent films that didn't fit the scope of this research but seem to me clearly concerned with reenchantment include: Phenomenon
215 (1996), The Ice Storm (1997), Magnolia (1999), Signs and Wonders (2000), Donnie
Darko (2001), the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-3), National Treasure (2004), Children of Men (2006), The Da Vinci Code (2006), Stranger than Fiction (2006) and Angels and
Demons (2009). Recently, the creators of The X-Files even gave us a new Mulder and
Scully adventure and, not surprisingly, it was titled The X-Files: I Want to Believe
(2008).
Some of today's most important film artists also seem to me engaged with reenchantment. In America, a close analysis of the work of David Lynch from this angle has yet to be done. Recently, the films of the Coen Brothers, especially their award- winning No Country for Old Men (2007), touch on concerns similar to those discussed here. A notion of reenchantment lurks in the body of work produced by screenwriter
Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze and awaits someone to tease it out. Finally, a significant omission from this dissertation has been the oeuvre of M. Night Shyamalan.
This was a difficult choice because no other Hollywood filmmaker seems to me more disturbed by the disenchantment of our world than Shyamalan. Nevertheless, his work is so unique1 and each of his film so deserving of a more involved analysis, that I felt I could not do it justice here in a study principally concerned with genre cycles. Finally, among international filmmakers, the work of Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier and Abbas
Kiarostami certainly come to mind.
1 For example, his films might loosely be categorized as horror but they are entirely lacking in gothic character. This, I believe, is what makes them stand out so distinctly from the rest of today's supernatural genre cycles. 216 Other recent horror genre cycles that would benefit from my framework include the new zombie cycle—two new Romero films, a remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004),
28 Days Later (2002) and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007)—and a reinvigorated horror- mockumentary cycle—Clover field (2008), Diary of the Dead (2007), The Poughkeepsie
Tapes (2007), Quarantine (2009), Paranormal Activity (2009). The latter cycle extends the focus on realism and evidence first developed The Blair Witch Project. The superhero film, which has outgrown being labeled a cycle at this point, increasingly reflects on the crisis of values in America and what, if anything, might save the nation. The Dark Knight
(2008) explicitly evokes the importance of belief and the power of reenchantment in its remarkable concluding scene. As Batman flees Gotham City, having sacrificed his heroic image in order to preserve Harvey Dent's, he says "Sometimes people deserve more (than the truth). Sometimes they deserve to have their faith rewarded."
Finally, the connections I draw between popular texts and what Charles Taylor calls "the strange and complex conditions of belief in our age" (727) make an important contribution to the larger scholarly dialogue about religion, belief and society. Taylor's work, for example, contains very little discussion of the role played by film, television and other mass-media narratives in our understanding and our critical engagement with the world. A third aim of my analysis of the reenchanting function of these popular films is to connect the work done by film and media scholars to the broader studies of social
217 scientists and political philosophers. My work, in fact, provides compelling evidence for the assertions Taylor and others make about the conditions of belief in the secular age.
My message to these scholars is this: more attention to the dilemmas of secularization may open up new ways of thinking about movies but more attention to movies also extends and sharpens our understanding of the dilemmas of secularization.
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