[On June
16th, 1960, Alfred Hitchcock premiered his new
film Psycho in New York. So to
celebrate that anniversary, this week I’ll contextualize Psycho and other horror films, leading up to a crowd-sourced
weekend post on your own spooky story studying!]
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.
Steven
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: 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 horror
story studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other horror films or stories you’d highlight for the weekend post?
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