OPHELIA OF THE SPIRITS EP - DRUM MEDIA REVIEW

By Michael Smith:

1 July 2008: Issue 912: P44 Here’s a piano-playing female singer/songwriter who hasn’t resorted to the contemporary penchant for emphasising her Australian accent, yet isn’t singing with an American accent. Her limpid vocal delivery is studied and articulate, often haunting, even as her accompanists on a track like ‘Nothingness’ hurtle into chaos. There are hints of Enya & Loreena McKennitt, even Maggie Reilly circa Mike Oldfield’s ‘Moonlight Shadow’, without being twee or cloying. Rather, there’s a certain elegiac quality that invariably recalls her Shakespearian namesake. All very pre-Raphaelite really, in an impressionistic musical way.

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To truly appreciate art we must understand its symbolic significance, its past and its present, its history and its future, its connection to ourselves and the world around us. Never does there exist only one layer of meaning. Nothing is what it seems. As Oscar Wilde once said, “All art is at once surface and symbol.” Nothing is by accident, and everything is one. “There are many philosophical systems – such as Taoism and Buddhism – which make no distinction between creator and creature. People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life, but choose instead to be part of it…The Spirit finally merges with the Material, and the two are united and transformed.” (from ‘The Witch of Portobello’ by Paulo Coelho)

In our society we are taught from birth to trust the logic and rationality of our conscious mind. But many of us exist without ever understanding that “completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious. They grow up from the dark depths of the mind like a lotus and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche.” According to Jung, we can unlock our unconscious through our dreams. “One cannot afford to be naïve in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature – a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies, or the fables of the primeval forest, than in the consciousness of modern man. I am not denying that great gains have resulted from the evolution of civilized society. But these gains have been made at the price of enormous losses, whose extent we have scarcely begun to estimate.”

Many of us have lost touch with the ritual, the spiritual, the mystic, the sacred. Many of us have lost touch with emotion, experience, empathy and humanity. It is art which reminds us that we must once again embrace “the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass.”It reminds us to feel again, to lose ourselves in something which is both beyond reason and before reason – something both primeval and eternal in the same moment.

A visit to the mountaintop village of Bokor Hill is a reminder of the contradictions which define the history of this place. Built by the wealthy French as a residential village and holiday refuge in the early days of the twentieth century (the air was cooler there because of the elevation), the winding road upwards is shattered by the gaping holes left by landmines 30 years earlier, when it became a vital strategic stronghold for the Khmer Rouge due to its three hundred and sixty degree views of the surrounding land and sea. Reaching the village, I look around and see the burnt out ruins of a church, and two casinos (the second casino was built because the first one was too close to the edge of the cliff and legend has it that men who had bet too much of their money had a habit of walking to the end of the balcony and never coming back). Standing amongst the buildings, it is a surreal feeling - like being in a ghost town of a past golden age – in my mind’s eye I can almost conjure up the sound of the waltzes and lavishly dressed couples swirling around the old casino’s grand ballroom as I stand there amongst the burnt out ruins, shattered glass and the words of dead or dying soldiers scrawled across the walls.  

Elsewhere, there are children. Everywhere. They are by turns endearing and playful and they cause me to feel a sense of great sorrow. Many of them are forced by their parents to sell on street corners, beg, borrow and steal before they can barely walk or talk. There were many nights that I lay down to sleep and my face was hot with tears of frustration and injustice that so many of them were forced to grow up so early, that they had such an enormous fight just to survive. The sense of personal futility can be overwhelming.

Equally as overhwleming in a different sense is the sheer natural beauty of the place. Just out of the town of Siem Reap are the temples, many in ruins, thousands of years old, whispering secrets, offering up dark passageways and crumbling walls that beckon you to clamber over them, feeling the smooth surface of the rock and touching the intricate carvings that ancient hands inscribed. Some of the temples have succumbed to the forces of nature and the stone has cracked and molded to become almost a part of the enormous trees and above-ground roots which have overpowered the man-made structures.  On the way to the temples further towards the outskirts, driving down dirt roads in the middle of nowhere, after miles of wooden squat houses on stilts and languid palm trees, suddenly a Buddhist wat (temple) rises out of the haze and the monks stare shyly at my white skin and strange clothes.  They are dressed in orange robes with shaved heads. During the days of the Khmer Rouge many of the monks were exterminated and their wats destroyed but they have sprung up again all over the country in recent years, like a wellspring which will always continue to flow. There is a spirituality which seems to pervade this country and I can see it in the wise eyes and gentleness of many of the people I met on my journey there.

My friend Asahel Bush has been working with an organisation called Sustainable Cambodia. It is a nonprofit, grassroots NGO operating in Pursat Province, Cambodia, and with an office in Florida, USA. SC runs a primary and secondary school for children from the poorest local communities in Pursat. It also operates a range of development projects in these communities, including water sanitation (wells and filters), latrines and hygeine, nutritional supplements, preschool and adult education, and livelihood projects (such as animal pass-on, community gardens, irrigation, organic farming, vocational training, and microfinance). SC employs a model of sustainable, participatory development which empowers communities to develop, grow and provide for themselves through education and quality-of-life improvements.

SC is funded entirely by private donations and by funding grants from international aid foundations such as Rotary. In keeping with SC’s model of community empowerment SC’s projects are run by local Cambodian community members. SC’s non-Cambodian staff, inlcuding its directors, are all unpaid volunteers.

For more information, please visit http://www.sustainablecambodia.org/

It is interesting that every person who offers me an opinion on the question of what truth is does so by telling me what they ‘believe in’, religiously or otherwise. It is here that we see the intertwining notions of ‘belief’ and ‘truth’. They do not mean the same thing, but it would seem that they are in many ways co-dependant terms (for example, in order for something to be considered the ‘truth’ it must be believed to be true). There are important distinctions to be drawn between these two terms – just because I believe in something does not necessarily mean that that something is true (take, for example, Santa Claus). But if that something cannot be proved to be untrue, is it not plausible that, to me, it would represent the truth until it was proven to be false?    

Let us take a significant example. Some people believe that God created the universe. Others say that the universe was created suddenly in a Big Bang. Still others believe that the universe has existed for an infinite amount of time and thus was never begun – and all of these people think that what they believe is the truth. And who is to say that it isn’t? How can we say that it is not the truth until we are certain that it is false? Humanity is not yet at the stage where we can definitively determine who or what created the universe, or whether it was created at all.

This brings us to the problem of certainty and proof. What is certainty? Many people would argue that certainty and proof can only be delivered to us through science and common sense, not religion. If religious (or spiritual) certainty does exist, it must by nature be a very different thing to the certainty of science and common sense, for it cannot be physically proved in the way that these can. In using these terms, I make the connection of science and common sense to the physical world around us, and religion to the world of the abstract and mystical (although we shall see that religion can too often become a corrupt social construct within the physical world). Philosophy is somewhere in between these two worlds – the best way to describe it seems to be that it seeks to explain the world of the abstract by relating it to the physical world around us. It links the world of science to the world of religion.

How does the notion of truth, then, relate to these different worlds? Are there different types of truth, gleaned from different types of experiences? Are there degrees / variations of truth – that is, the notion of truth is not black and white? Humphreys (1974:24) puts forward the view that “there is absolute Truth, which none of us will fully know until we rise in consciousness to its own level, and relative truth, which is all that most of us know about the Truth.” Bur if truth is relative, how do we know that we are all heading towards the absolute Truth (that is, the same truth)? And how can we be as sure as Humphreys is that an absolute Truth even exists?

The element of the question which deals with the notion of absolute Truth is paradoxical – that is, if the absolute Truth is that there is no absolute Truth, there will never be any resolution to either of these statements because they will eternally contradict each other. I would argue that such a situation mirrors the situation which competing belief systems face. The paradox of the question mirrors the paradox of a vast number of contradictory belief systems who all claim to hold the key to ultimate meaning – for if we have a number of groups all claiming that their belief is the only true belief, and that their way is the only right way (take for example Jesus’ “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”- John 14:6) an impossible situation arises. There cannot, in reality, be 10 ‘only ways’, for obvious reasons. This brings us again to the ever-present question of whether believing in something which has not been proven false can constitute belief in some sort of truth. And if this is the case, does this mean opposing beliefs on the same issue can be simultaneously true?

This predicament seems most aptly summed up by Bertrand Russell (1952:4), in his article, “Is There A God?” -  “If we are Protestants, we know that there are absurd beliefs among Catholics. If we are Catholics, we know that there are absurd beliefs among Protestants. If we are Conservatives, we are amazed by the superstitions to be found in the Labour Party. If we are Socialists, we are aghast at the credulity of Conservatives. I do not know, dear reader, what your beliefs may be, but whatever they may be, you must concede that nine-tenths of the beliefs of nine-tenths of mankind are totally irrational. The beliefs in question are, of course, those which you do not hold.”

The question of opposing beliefs can only be discussed (I refrain from saying ‘answered’!) when we examine religious, scientific, and commonsense beliefs, and the different ways in which they help us to form notions of truth.

First and foremost, we must decide what our terms refer to. We have established that, in the most general sense, religious beliefs relate to the abstract and mystical, whilst scientific and commonsense beliefs relate to the physical world around us. These distinctions have become somewhat blurred, however, with science increasingly seeking to explain the metaphysical world in recent years – such as Davies’(1992:40) mention of an attempt to explain the origin of the universe “within the framework of physics” – and religion (as a system) having always possessed an element of the social and political. Even within the realm of religious belief we will see that it becomes important to draw distinctions between personal religion (that is, belief in and worship of God(s)) and religion as a system.

“I think, therefore I am.” Davies (1992:34) notes that Descartes’ statement of the irrefutable reality of his existence contains within it a paradox which stretches throughout the history of human thought. “Thinking is a process. Being is a state. When I think, my mental state changes with time. But the ‘me’ to which the mental state refers remains the same.” Davies argues that this same paradox can be seen to occur in the world around us – although it is constantly changing over months, years, centuries, milleniums, the world itself continues to exist. He argues that “the present fades into the past, and the future ‘comes into being’: the phenomenon of be-coming. What we call ‘existence’ is this paradoxical conjunction of being and becoming.” Davies cites this as the vital reason that people turn to religious beliefs – “People come and go, trees grow and die, even mountains gradually erode away, and we now know the sun cannot keep burning forever. Is there anything that is truly and dependably constant?” When faced with the lack of dependability in the physical world, many people feel that the best thing to believe in is something mystical and abstract, something transcendent. McGrath (1999:29) notes that many people define religion as “local culturally-conditioned responses to the same basic transcendent ultimate reality.” Such a view could be said to relate to Voltaire’s comment that, “If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.” Although probably intended in a different sense, Voltaire nevertheless indicates the fact that people turn to religious belief because they need to believe that there is something greater than themselves. They cannot accept that their own flawed and fallible selves are the ultimate reality, so therefore must either attempt to elevate themselves to the status of a higher being (for example, Buddhism) or believe that they will be saved by a higher being (for example, Western Christianity and Islam).

McGrath (1999:44) claims that one of the fundamental questions we must ask ourselves when dealing with the fields of science and religion is: “Are the insights of science and religion contradictory or complementary?” I would argue that they can be both. Davies (1992:23) states that “science demands rigorous standards of procedure and discussion that set reason over irrational belief.” In this way, scientific beliefs could be said to be in complete opposition to religious beliefs. However Armstrong (1994:200) makes the point that “science demands the fundamental belief that there is a rational explanation for everything; it also requires an imagination and courage which is not dissimilar to religious creativity.” Armstrong (1994:269) further states that “today many people in the West would be dismayed if a leading theologian suggested that God was in some profound sense a product of the imagination. Yet it should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as the ability to think of what is not.”  Davies (1992:28) notes that “the key to major scientific advances often rests with free-ranging imaginative leaps or inspiration” rather than logical reasoning, that is, scientific beliefs are often founded on the ability to think of what is not. William James, in his lecture “The Reality of the Unseen” (p13) expresses this phenomenon most clearly: “instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”

Such a description must also apply to what we call commonsense beliefs, since they are not formed through logical deduction or formal experimentation, but are those beliefs which appear to come naturally to us, often through our everyday experiences. Davies (1992:23) states that “what we call common sense is the product of thought patterns deeply embedded in the human psyche, presumably because they confer certain advantages in dealing with everyday situations, like avoiding falling objects and hiding from predators.” Davies (1992:27) uses the rising of the sun as an example of a common sense belief (or inductive reasoning) which is only true because of the “dependability of nature.” However, who is to say that nature could not change its course? Therefore, according to Davies, “on the basis of induction [common sense], we may conclude only that it is very probable that the law will hold the next time it is tested.” Common sense, therefore, is based only on the way the world happens to be at a certain point in time, whilst science is intent on finding out how all the parts of the world work together and why they work the way they do. If common sense is acceptance, science is inquisition.

We must return to the notion of truth, however, and again we also return to the distinction between the notions of truth and belief. As outlined, scientific beliefs and religious beliefs could be said to be similar in many ways. But this does not mean that scientific truth is the same as religious truth – in fact these two notions could be said to be complete opposites, since one must be proved, and the other cannot be proved. This takes us to a discussion of the relative merits of cognitive knowledge and conative (experiential) knowledge. Stan Rosenthal, in his introduction to the Tao Te Ching (p14) maintains that experiential knowledge is far superior to cognitive knowledge, because “when we seek cognitive knowledge of a thing, that is, understanding of it, the knowledge we gain of that thing is understanding only of its manifestations, which is not knowledge of the thing itself.” Rosenthal is of course speaking about understanding the Tao, and such a concept could be said to represent the essence of personal religious worship (not collective religion). However, such a statement begs the question: is scientific truth more valuable than religious truth? That is, is cognitive thinking (or deduction) more valuable than conative (inductive) thinking? Kung (1996:xxi) asks, “Can we not doubt everything except mathematics and what we can observe, weigh and measure?” This brings us to the issue of doubt and certainty.

Armstrong (1994:1) states that “there is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them.” Any belief in a transcendent reality or being requires a leap of faith, for we cannot be certain (in any mathematical or scientific way) that such a reality exists. But is faith a different type of certainty? A conative certainty rather than a cognitive certainty – not ‘knowing’ but ‘understanding’? In his article “Wittgensteinian Fideism and Religious Skepticism”, Matt Talbert (p17) quotes Wittgenstein as saying, “The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” – that is, we must be certain of our own beliefs to doubt someone else’s. But what happens when we doubt our own beliefs? Armstrong (1994:218) notes that “[Islamic philosopher] Al-Ghazzali was as aware as any modern skeptic that certainty was a psychological condition that was not necessarily objectively true.” In matters of religious belief this notion is particularly apt, as there is no objective way of proving beliefs (in a scientific sense) and thus any beliefs held are highly subjective. Kung (1996:xxi) notes the problems that this creates when he states that “many are at a loss between belief and unbelief; they are undecided, skeptical. They are doubtful about their belief, but they are also doubtful about their doubting. And there are many who are even proud of their doubting. Yet there remains a longing for certainty. Certainty?”

Pascal [in Kung (1996:61)] states that, “If we must never take any chances we ought not to do anything for religion, for it is not certain. But how many chances we do take: sea voyages, battles. Therefore, I say, we should have to do nothing at all, for nothing is certain. And there is more certainty in religion than that we shall live to see tomorrow. For it is not certain that we shall see tomorrow but it is certainly possible that we shall not. We cannot say the same of religion. It is not certain that it is true, but who would dare to say that it is certainly possible that it is not?” 

Like the notion of truth, certainty is a relative notion. Perhaps the question of whether there is absolute Certainty is just as relevant as that of whether there is absolute Truth. And of course it must be noted that these two notions intertwine. Finding the absolute Truth (if such a thing exists) would provide us with absolute Certainty – for how can anything be more objectively certain than that? Until we are able to know Truth and Certainty, however, we must accept that, in many ways, religious beliefs are often used as a tactic to allay doubt rather than to create certainty. This brings us back to the issue earlier discussed of believing in a transcendent reality only to escape the triviality and imperfection of our own flawed existence. It is this fear of our own mortality which has allowed religious leaders over the centuries to corrupt and control. We shall soon see that the truth achieved by personal worship is an entirely different thing to the ‘truth’ offered by religious systems, the leaders of whom seek to use their power in ways completely contradictory to the ‘beliefs’ which they represent. For we have already seen that truth is a relative notion.

Smith (1963) describes the way in which the meaning of the Latin word religio changed over time, originally representing concepts such as piety, reverence and worship, whilst the modern term ‘religion’ has greatly deviated from this interpretation to mean a belief system which preaches set doctrines. As an example of this, Smith (1963:28-9) cites the title of St. Augustine’s book, De Vera Religione. “Modern predispositions are betrayed in any impulse to translate the title as ‘On the True Religion’, and to suppose that the writer, since he is known to have been a Christian, would believe that the true religion is Christianity. In fact, this would be a misrendering. A closer translation would be ‘On True Religion’; the idea is the order of ‘On Proper Piety’ or ‘On Genuine Worship.’” The book itself makes little mention of Christianity, but strongly emphasises “a warm, reverberating and sustained affirmation of a personal relation to [a] transcendent God.”

Similar ideas on worship were in practice long before St. Augustine’s time and indeed long before the time of monotheism, however. Armstrong (1994:109) states that in the Roman Empire, “people worshipped the gods to ask for help during a crisis, to secure a divine blessing for the state and to experience a healing sense of continuity with the past. Religion was a matter of cult and ritual rather than ideas; it was based on emotion not on ideology or consciously adopted theory.” These ways of worshipping are in keeping with ideas of relative belief and truth. One can hold their own beliefs and worship in their own way without persecution. We could say that personal religious worship is an affirmation of (conative) certainty for believers. Unfortunately, religious systems throughout the ages have often twisted the notion of truth, and have used followers’ fear and uncertainty as powerful weapons against humanity.  Religion as a system, in the wrong hands, can achieve the opposite of what it purports to strive towards.

Many have argued that a symbolic, rather than literal, interpretation is the only way that religious texts can be relevant to a contemporary audience, however, it becomes obvious that lateral symbolic interpretation can, in the wrong hands, be an extremely dangerous tool. Armstrong (1994:449) notes that “Compassion is a particularly difficult virtue. It demands that we go beyond the limitations of our egotism, insecurity and inherited prejudice.” Unfortunately such a thing has proved impossible for the human race. From Joshua’s 6^th Century BCE ‘reformation’ of the Canaanites and their pagan religions (smashing shrines and idols, killing and burning priests) to the Holocaust, “the idea of a personal God, like one of us write large, is fraught with difficulty. If this God is omnipotent, he could have prevented the Holocaust. If he was unable to stop it, he is impotent and useless; if he could have stopped it and chose not to, he is a monster.” (Armstrong,1994:431)

Confucius (Trans. Raymond Dawson, 1993:6) says, in Book 2:3 of the Analects,

“If you lead them by means of government and keep order among them by means of punishments, the people are without conscience in evading them. If you lead them by means of virtue and keep order among them by means of ritual, they have a conscience and moreover will submit.” The keyword to note here is ‘virtue’. Many systems are able to disguise their evil under the veil of ‘virtue.’ Weil (1979:9) describes this on a personal level: “There were some saints who approved of the Crusades or the Inquisition. I cannot help thinking that they were in the wrong. I cannot go against the light of conscience. If I think that on this point I see more clearly than they did, I who am so far below them, I must admit that in this matter they were blinded by something very powerful. This something was the Church seen as a social structure. If this social structure did them harm, what harm would it not do me, who am particularly susceptible to social influences and who am almost infinitely more feeble than they were?” (Weil, 1979:9)

A similar situation arises when we look at the way Copernicus’ and ultimately Galileo’s research into the structure of the solar system was condemned by the Church because such research contradicted their Scriptures. According to Kung (1996:9), “what had to be defended was the legally assured supremacy of theology in the hierarchy of the sciences, the authority of the church in all questions of life and finally – purely and simply – blind, obedient submission to the church’s doctrinal system.” Surely such behaviour could only be seen as an attempt to stem the progress of knowledge and truth, rather than to nurture it – an attempt seen time and time again in the history of organised religion.

In the face of the doubts, the criticisms, the permutation of religion (personal worship) into corrupt social structure, the incompatibility of multiple systems who all lay claim to being the ‘only true’ system – is the idea of an absolute Truth impossible? And even if it was possible, in accordance with Wittgenstein’s idea of the ‘language-game’ and its limitations as discussed in Talbert, the absolute Truth (if there is one) may be something entirely beyond our cognitive comprehension. In this case we could not describe, but only experience it. Perhaps I am experiencing it now, in this very moment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armstrong, K. 1994, “A History Of God: The 4000-year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam”, Ballantine Books.

Dawson, R. (Trans) 1993, “Confucius: The Analects”, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Humphreys, C. 1974, “Exploring Buddhism”, George Allen & Unwin, London.

James, W.  Lecture 3, “The Reality of the Unseen” from “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature” (WWW)

http://human-nature.com/reason/james/chap3.html

Kung, H. 1996, “Does God Exist?” SCM Press, London.

McGrath, A. 1999, “Science & Religion: An Introduction.” Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.

Rosenthal, S. “The Tao Te Ching: An Introduction by Stan Rosenthal” (WWW)

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/taoism/ttcstan2.htm

Russell, B. 1952, “Is There a God?” , taken from “The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 11: Last Philosophical Testament 1943-68″ (WWW)

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/rusisgod.htm

Smith, W. 1963, “The Meaning and End of Religion”, Macmillan, New York.

Talbert, M. “Wittgensteinian Fideism and Religious Skepticism” (WWW)

http://www.ai-studio.com/meteorite/pdfs/2.Wittgensteinian.Fideism.pdf

Weil, S. 1979, “Waiting on God”, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.

I first became interested in the monster of the horror film not long ago, when I was speaking to a friend. We were discussing Wolf Creek, and the fact that it had disturbed her so much that she had considered leaving the cinema. Even without having seen the film, her description of the serial killer portrayed by John Jarratt was (obviously) very disturbing to me also, but more importantly it made me wonder – why is it that almost all recent, popular horror films have been centered around a psychotic killer, who mutilates, violates and maims, a killer who could be walking down the street right next to us (Hostel and Saw were two other examples that came to mind), a killer who, in its ultimate and most fearful manifestation, could reside within our own “dark, unnatural, hidden self.” (Skal, 1993:17).

When I thought about the history of the horror genre on the screen; its development from the Gothic novel, its original fantastic, supernatural, other-worldly beasts like Frankenstein and Dracula; I realized that both society and the horror genre have come a long way together – as Skal  (1993:18) so eloquently puts it; “so much of our imaginative life in the twentieth century has been devoted to peeling back the masks and scabs of civilization, to finding, cultivating and projecting nightmare images of the secret self.”

And what is ultimately the most fascinating aspect of the evolution of the horror film monster is the shift, which Tudor (1989) identifies, from an ‘external’ threat to an ‘internal’ threat, a shift which parallels society’s evolution from ‘security’ to ‘paranoia’ (these are key terms of Tudor’s analysis, which I will later explore and define in greater depth). It is this relationship between the evolution of the horror film monster and the evolution of our own society (and our individual consciousness within that society) which I wish to explore.

Firstly, the issue must be addressed of how to frame such an analysis. This is an enormous area of research to cover, and of course there are numerous perspectives from which we can observe and interpret the symbolism of the monster in the horror film. The main frameworks of analysis that I encountered were sociological (for example, David J. Skal’s The Monster Show), psychoanalytical ( Robin Wood’s American Nightmare), and statistical (such as Andrew Tudor’s Monsters and Mad Scientists) – although of course, there are significant interrelations between all three forms – for example, Tudor’s analysis encompasses both statistical and sociological elements, and Wood’s psychoanalytical perspective by default also encompasses sociological concerns. Therefore, I have attempted an analysis which uses a somewhat chronological description of the significance and representation of the monster in the horror film as a springboard from which to launch a discussion on each perspective as it becomes necessary and relevant. 

The roots of the horror film as a direct offshoot from the Gothic novel have been well-documented, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein being the most well-known and enduring examples. Skal (1993) identifies four original horror movie monster archetypes, including the two mentioned above, as well Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, and Tod Browning’s Freaks. It is worth pausing to reflect upon each of these for a moment, as they do irrefutably rear their ugly heads again and again throughout the development of horror movie history, and in many ways serve as a template for everything to come. Dracula, the supernatural, blood-sucking, life-draining vampire, the undead outcast forced to walk the earth until such time as humanity, firm in its Christian beliefs, promptly dispatches him to the afterlife; Frankenstein, the mad scientist and his spawn, the mechanical monster who is somehow more human than the man who made him; Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the original doppelganger, the physical embodiment of man’s inner bestiality laid bare; and Freaks, the blurring of the line between what is human and inhuman, the outward appearance of beauty and the fact that it masks an inner rottenness, and, ultimately, the implication of the audience in this parade of morbid fascination (are we freaks ourselves for even watching and enjoying this?). These archetypes and the issues and questions they raise have been central to the development of the monster throughout the history of the horror film, resulting in a culmination which Skal (1993:382) reads as an amalgam of all four of his original monster archetypes; the character of Hannibal Lecter. “Like Dracula, Hannibal Lecter has a pronounced taste for human blood; like Frankenstein, he is a brilliant, but mad scientist; he has two personalities, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both civilized and savage; and, like some sideshow super-geek, he is held and exhibited in a succession of zoo-like enclosures. The Silence of the Lambs itself proved a sideshow-like diversion in which all the traditional headliners in the monster show reassembled themselves like the pieces of a broken mirror. And the monster, this time, looked very much like us.”

Therefore, let us examine more closely the monster in the mirror.

The line between psychoanalysis and horror film theory is a fine (and perhaps somewhat ill-defined one). Where does one end and the other begin? There are seemingly endless explanations for and definitions of what the horror movie monster could signify or represent within a psychoanalytical framework, and there is seemingly no end to the possible depth of analysis once one begins approaching the subject from this perspective. For example, according to Tudor (1989:3), critic and theorist Robin Wood (1979) presents “an analysis based on the proposition that patriarchal capitalism demands certain forms of surplus-repression (of, for example, sexual energy, bisexuality, female sexuality and children’s sexuality) and that one way in which this is managed is by projecting that which is repressed outward onto the Other.” In other words, the monster in the horror film represents the inevitable ‘return of the repressed,’ and it is also the representation of the ‘Other’. The Other is that which is foreign to and threatening to the ‘Self’, the Self being a conforming member of a patriarchal capitalist society – referring to both the victims of the monster in the film and the members of the audience watching the film. Wood (1979:9) states that the psychoanalytic significance of the Other “resides in the fact that it functions not simply as something external to the culture or to the Self, but also as what is repressed (but never destroyed) in the Self and projected outwards in order to be hated and disowned.” The Other represents “that which bourgeois ideology cannot recognize or accept but must deal with in one of two ways: either by rejecting and if possible annihilating it, or by rendering it safe and assimilating it, converting it as far as possible into a replica of itself.” Thus, in horror films, the idea of the return of the repressed and the concepts of Self (normality) and Other (Monster) are inextricably interlinked. In Wood’s (1979:14) analysis, the figure of the doppelganger or alter-ego (such as the character of Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde) is the ultimate representation of this phenomenon; “The doppelganger motif reveals the Monster as normality’s shadow,” that is, “normality and the Monster are two aspects of the same person.” Tudor (1989:3) identifies two major problems with this framework of analysis for the horror film monster, namely; (a) the fact that it is extremely reductive (ie. once this has been established as the framework for analysis, the analyst immediately seeks to ‘assimilate the widest possible range of cultural variation to those terms,’ leading to a ‘revelatory reading’ of the films, ‘uncovering concealed significance’, which in turn leads to ‘esoteric readings of the texts it seeks to analyse, readings which definitionally could not be part of any audience’s conscious interpretive apparatus.”

Whilst I do hold Tudor’s concerns to be valid, there is much to be said for Wood’s (1979:14) idea that the basic formula for the horror film is that “normality is threatened by the Monster.” (Wood defines normality as ‘conformity to the dominant social norms’ – these being ‘the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them’).  According to Wood, “the formula provides three variables: normality, the Monster, and, crucially, the relationship between the two. The definition of normality in horror films is in general boringly constant…the Monster is, of course, much more protean, changing from period to period as society’s basic fears clothe themselves in fashionable or immediately accessible garments…It is the third variable, the relationship between normality and the Monster, that constitutes the essential subject of the horror film. It, too, changes and develops, the development taking the form of a long process of clarification or revelation.”

So, how has the relationship between normality and the Monster developed over time?

Wood (1979) identifies five recurrent motifs in horror movies since the Sixties: The Monster as human psychotic or schizophrenic; the revenge of Nature; Satanism, diabolic possession, the Antichrist; The Terrible child; and Cannibalism. Tudor (1989:27) notes that “while the pre-1960 horror movie is dominated by science and, to a slightly lesser degree, by supernatural threats, the years after 1960 witness the rise of the psychotic and the development of a more overt sexual dimension.” He defines this shift as if they are two different worlds; the years prior to 1960 being characterized by a fundamental (if relative) ‘security’ – “the large majority of pre-sixties horror movies presume a world which is ultimately subject to successful human intervention.. human beings possess significant volition, while authorities and institutions generally remain credible protectors of social order”) – and the years after 1960 characterised by ‘paranoia’ – “both the nature and the course of the threat are out of human control.. disorder often emerges from within humans to potentially disrupt the whole ordered world…Threats emerge without warning from the disordered psyche, possessing us and destroying our very humanity. Lacking control of our inner selves, we have no means of resisting, and there is a certain inevitability to humanity’s final defeat.” (1989:103). Related to this, Tudor uses three sets of oppositions to define the threat within horror movies, they are: (1) Supernatural / Secular, (2) External / Internal and (3) Autonomous / Dependent. As time has gone by, the Monster has become increasingly secular and internal, and as Tudor himself notes, “a shift from externality to internality is central to the long-term development of the genre.” (1989:10) Compiling a survey of 990 horror movies from 1931 – 1984, Tudor found that the vast majority of movie monsters (28% – or 271 of 990) were psychotics (followed by mad scientists at 17%). Tudor further states that “the fact that psychotics outweigh all other monsters is partly a consequence of the modern growth of the genre: over 90% of films involving psychotics appear after 1960.”

Therefore, how do we trace this change in the nature of the Monster and why it has occurred?

Perhaps one of our frameworks of analysis is at least partially to blame – the rise of psychoanalysis as a popular and socially acceptable form of catharsis has perhaps encouraged society to look further inward than ever before. But surely it goes deeper than this. Skal (1993) raises the possibility that, culturally, the psychological after-effects of the Vietnam War, the ever-increasing secularization of society (the fading role of the church and its attempts to reassert itself as a spiritual and social necessity, coupled with a newly open societal emphasis on sex – the war between the spirit and the flesh), the rise of self-obsessive consumerism, the disintegration of the family unit, and the alienation and isolation felt by many people as a result of one or all of the above – could be the culprits. Notable examples which spring to mind include The Exorcist, and the designer-label-clad, status-obsessed psychotic killer of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho amongst many others. One particularly interesting example here is Halloween (1979), the film which Tudor (1989:57) identifies as the shift towards the trend in horror films during the 1980’s featuring “male-upon-female voyeurism; a link between violent killing and sexual gratification; and..a predator- prey relation between male psychotics and female victims.” With reference to the same film, Wood (1979:26) notes that “the killer’s victims are all sexually promiscuous, the one survivor a virgin; the Monster becomes simply the instrument of Puritan vengeance and repression rather than the embodiment of what Puritanism repressed.” It is interesting to note here the fact that there are times where the monster is re-enforcing society’s repression rather than subverting it. In the world of horror movie monsters there exists a strange dichotomy of either reflecting ideological disintegration and laying bare the possibility of social revolution, or actually re-enforcing those social norms and ‘sealing it over again’. This confusing phenomenon can also be seen in The Exorcist, a film where, as Britton (1979:41) notes, “metaphor.. engenders and is engendered by misrecognition: the return of the repressed isn’t clearly distinguishable from the return of repression, the very image which dramatizes the one enforcing the other.”

This leads us to the notion of ambivalence. Britton (1979:38) notes that ambivalence works by “dissolving the habitual grounds of certainty.” For example: Is the Monster truly evil, or is he actually good? Perhaps he is mostly evil and a little bit good? What do the concepts ‘good’ and ‘evil’ really mean anyway? Maybe, just maybe, the threat to normality that the Monster poses is better than normality itself? Maybe it’s not the Monster’s fault he is the way he is…perhaps he is the product of an unusually repressive society, or a horribly dysfunctional family.. but we all need to take responsibility for our actions, and besides, who could possibly do those awful things to someone? It’s all too much…AAAAGGH! (That’s the simplified version of typical horror film ambivalence that usually operates on a number of much more complex levels). Wood (1979:32) poses a central question of the horror film: “the question of the extent to which it is possible to conceive and create a ‘positive’ monster.” As Wood (1979:15) notes, “Few horror films have totally unsympathetic Monsters.. in many (for example, Frankenstein) the Monster is clearly the emotional centre, and much more human than the cardboard representatives of normality…but the principle goes far beyond the Monster’s being sympathetic. Ambivalence extends to our attitude to normality. Central to the effects and fascination of horror films is their fulfillment of our nightmare wish to smash the norms that oppress us and which our moral conditioning teaches us to revere.” That is, the horror film monster becomes a catalyst for the question of whether someone or something is actually inherently evil or simply transgressing unreasonably stringent oppressive boundaries set by society – so in this way, the horror film can become a biting social critique, although Britton (1979:41) notes that “The great American horror movies [such as Psycho, The Birds, and Sisters ] …seem to me to be characterized not so much by ambivalence…as by the use of the monster as the focus, or the catalyst, for the critical analysis of everything that ‘normality’ represents.”

In conclusion, it appears obvious that whilst the physical form of the horror film monster has changed drastically over time, in response to a particular zeitgeist or societal trend, at heart, it is the fear of ourselves – of our own monstrosity as individuals and as a society – that has endured. The horror film monster represents a manifestation of our ambivalence about the nature and events of the world, even the universe, around us; about our primal, guilty preoccupations with sex and death and religion; about our perception of what is good and what is evil; about our shiny, transient exterior and our eternal, rotten core. But perhaps we, ourselves, the makers and the viewers of these films, are the ultimate doppelgangers. Because, as we sit safe and self-satisfied in our movie theatres, watching the horror unfold before us, we deny the reality which confronts us.  John Thomas (in Huss & Ross [ed] 1972:138) refers to Tod Browning’s Freaks, a film which questioned the (in)humanity of not only its characters, but also its audience – but his words ring true through the decades and generations that followed. Watching the horror movie monster, “we are plunged back into the abyss of our own sick selves, to recall once again that the most fearful inhumanity we can know is our own….each of them is one of us; each of us, one of them.”

References and Bibliography

Britton, A. “The Devil, Probably: The Symbolism of Evil” [essay] in Wood, R. & Lippe, R. [ed] “The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film” (Festival of Festivals, Toronto, 1979)

Clarens, C. “Horror Movies: An Illustrated Survey” (Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd, London, 1968)

Huss, R. and Ross, T.J. “Focus on the Horror Film” (Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey)

Prawer, S.S. “Caligari’s Children: The Film as Tale of Terror” (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980)

Skal, D. “The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror” (Plexus, London, 1993)

Thomas, J. “Gobble, Gobble…One of Us!” [essay] in Huss, R. and Ross, T.J. “Focus on the Horror Film” (Prentice Hall Inc., New Jersey)

Tudor, A. “Monsters & Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie” (Basil Blackwell Ltd, Oxford, 1989)

Wood, R. & Lippe, R. [ed] “The American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film” (Festival of Festivals, Toronto, 1979)