[For this year’s Halloween series, right before a particularly scary election, I thought I’d focus on some of the many horror films that remind us of the genre’s inescapable intersections with political issues. Add your nominations in comments, please!]
On
defamiliarization, horror, and prejudice.
In his essay “Art
as Technique,” pioneering Russian
Formalist theorist Viktor Shklovsky (whom I never imagined I’d be
discussing in this space, but I am an AmericanStudier and I contain multitudes)
developed the concept of
“defamiliarization”: the idea that one of art’s central goals and
effects is to make us look at the world around us, and particularly those
things with which we are most familiar, in a new and unfamiliar light. Such
defamiliarizations can have many different tones and effects, including
positive ones like opening our minds and inspiring new ideas; but it seems to
me that one of their chief consistent effects is likely to be horror. After
all, the familiar is often (even usually) the comfortable, and to be jarred out
of that familiarity and comfort, whatever the long-term necessity and benefits,
can be a terrifying thing.
Stephen
King, by all accounts one of the modern masters of horror, seems well
aware of that fact, having turned such familiar objects as dogs and cars into
sources of primal terror. And Alfred
Hitchcock, one of the 20th century’s such masters (and, yes, a
Brit, but he set many of his films, including today’s two, in the U.S.),
certainly was as well, as illustrated by one of his silliest yet also one of
his scariest films: The Birds (1963).
The film’s heroine Melanie, played by the inimitable Tippi Hedren, asks her
boyfriend, “Mitch, do
seagulls normally act this way?”; it’s a ridiculous line, but at the
same time it nicely sums up the source of the film’s horror: we’re always
surrounded by birds of one kind or another, and there are few ideas more
terrifying than the notion that such accepted and generally harmless parts of
our world could suddenly become constant threats. I defy anyone to watch
Hitchcock’s film and not look askance at the next pigeon you come across.
The Birds was Hitchcock’s second consecutive
horror film, following on what was then and likely remains his
biggest hit: Psycho (1960). Psycho relies for its horror more on a combination of slow-burn
suspense and
surprising and very
famous jump scares than defamiliarization, with one crucial
exception (SPOILERS for the four people who don’t know the film’s reveal
already): the ending, and its
relevation of the killer’s
true identity and motivations. If that ending is meant to be the most
terrifying part of all—and the film’s marketing campaign suggested
as much very clearly—then there’s no way around it: the defamiliarization of
gender and sexuality that accompanies the revelation of Norman Bates’ cross-dressing is
presented as something fundamentally frightening, not only connected to
Norman’s murderous ways but indeed the titular psychosis that produced them.
That is, while those murderous birds are clearly deviating from their familiar
behaviors, I would argue that Bates is presented as deviant in his normal
behaviors—and that his gender and sexual deviancy represents, again, the film’s
culminating and most shocking, and thus troubling and prejudiced, horror.
Next
political horror tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other horror films you’d analyze?
No comments:
Post a Comment