[25 years ago this coming weekend, The Blair Witch Project was released in theaters. Blair is one of the most prominent and successful examples of a longstanding genre, the found footage story, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such examples, leading up to a weekend post on what Blair can tell us a quarter-century later!]
On the limitations and the possibilities of scary stories.
I don’t have any problem thinking of
genre fiction and scholarly conversations about literature in the same
ballpark, or even on the same base—I’m the guy who wrote one of my earliest
posts here about Ross
MacDonald’s hardboiled detective novels, and am also the guy who created an Introduction
to Science Fiction and Fantasy class and has had an unabashedly good time
teaching it six times now (including the
latest section this past semester). When you get right down to it, it can
be pretty difficult to parse out what qualifies as genre fiction and what
doesn’t in any case—Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
owes a lot to detective fiction, Twain’s Connecticut Yankee (1889) is in many ways a Jules Verne-esque time
travel sci fi novel, and, as critic David
Reynolds has convincingly argued, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850) has a great deal in common with contemporary
potboiler works of religion, romance, and scandal. So while I’m not averse to
making judgment calls about whether a particular text is worth extended
attention (in a class, in scholarly work, etc), I try not to base those calls
on whether it’s been put in a particular generic box or not.
And yet, I’ll admit that I have a bit
of an analytical prejudice against works whose primary purpose—or one of them
at least—is to scare their audiences. I suppose it has always seemed to me that
a desire to frighten, while very much a valid and complex formal and stylistic
goal—and one brought to the height of perfection I’d say by Edgar Allan Poe,
whose every choice and detail in a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)
contributes to its scariness, making it a perfect example of his theory of
the unity of effect—, is nonetheless a desire that requires an
audience to turn off their analytical skills, to give in entirely to primal
responses that, while not insignificant, are to my mind a bit more passive than
ideal. (I’d compare this for example to humor, which certainly does tap into
primal responses as well but which nonetheless can still ask an audience to
think as well as laugh.) This isn’t necessarily the case when it comes to
Weird
Tale kinds of scares, ones that connect an audience to deeply unfamiliar worlds and
force them to imagine what they might entail and affect; but the more
mainstream horror, tales of vampires and zombies and ghosts and the like, does
often ask an audience mainly to react in terror to the artist’s and text’s
manipulations.
But like any reasonable person who
recognizes his or her prejudices, I’d like to challenge and eventually
undermine this perspective of mine, and a text that has very much helped me to
begin doing so in this case is Mark
Danielewski’s postmodern horror novel House of Leaves (2000). Postmodern is a must-use
adjective in any description of Danielewski’s novel, which features, among
other things, at least three distinct narrations and narrators (one of whom
does much of his narrating in footnotes, and another who does the majority of
his narrating in footnotes on those
footnotes); pages with only a single word, located in a random location;
elaborate use of colored type to signal and signify different (if vague and
shifting) emphases; and a large number of invented scholarly works, fully and
accurately cited both parenthetically and in the aforementioned footnotes
(alongside some actual works). Yet—and I know that scariness is a very
subjective thing, which is perhaps another reason why I have a hard time
analyzing it, but nonetheless—the novel is also deeply, powerfully,
successfully scary. And moving, for that matter—certainly to my mind the best
horror (and Poe would qualify here for sure) reveals and sympathizes with
humanity even as it threatens and destroys many of its human characters, and
Danielewski’s novel does each of those things, to each character at each level
of story and narration, very fully and impressively. Yet I believe that the
book’s principal purpose, first and last, is to scare its readers, and for me,
at least, it has done so, not only the first time I read it but the second and
third as well (another mark of the best horror I’d say).
So what?,
you might ask. Well, for starters, you should check out House of Leaves, perhaps beginning with this fun and, yes, scary companion website. But for
me, I suppose the ultimate lesson here is that the more I’m open to the
potential power and impressiveness of any work of literature (and art in any
medium), both emotionally and analytically, the more I can find the greatest
works, of our moment and every other one. Nothing scary about that! Next found footage
studying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other example of the genre you’d highlight?
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