The Popular Uncanny

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction — “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” — just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.

Here’s the opening passage:

I. Introduction: Fear is Never Itself

The horror genre has many reasonable lessons to teach us, even though it is perhaps the literary genre most associated with irrationality. It is often construed around the emotional and physical responses it seeks to produce in its audience, from anxious fright to hair-raising chills, especially in the cinema, where aesthetic success is measured by the volume of spectator screams. The appeal of horror fiction and film lies in the ambivalent thrills associated with fear, suspense, and terror, no matter how significant its subtextual messages might be. Even when its practitioners mine the fields of philosophy, psychology, theology, and metaphysics in the deepest of intellectual ways, horror resists mastery by the intellect, privileges the emotional/physical response, and remains the primary venue for the literary expression of dread, anxiety, caution, shock, uncertainty, and the uncanny.

One might wonder, then, what business horror fiction has in the college classroom. If the point of horror is to scare readers, what lessons can it possibly teach them? When does fear and shock serve a pedagogical function? Is it ethical to horrify students in the hopes of teaching them something?

I delve into transformative learning theory to posit some answers to those questions. Go read “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” if interested… college teachers might also find my weblog on pedagogy of interest.

On Sarah Langan’s “Why I Write Horror” (The Humanities Review, Spring 2008)

All genres have their intended effects. In mysteries, readers are asked to analyze. They solve puzzles. In science fiction, they imagine new, and occasionally better, worlds. But in horror, readers are asked to feel. That is why, when they put the book on the nightstand and turn out the light, they imagine that the creaking floor might actually be the ghost from the novel, bursting through the fictitious world, and into their bedrooms. They are the Gepettos of the novels they read, and in feeling, they give Pinocchio flesh. — Sarah Langan, “Why I Write Horror”

Sarah Langan’s recent article, “Why I Write Horror”, is not only a great autobiographical reflection, but also an excellent overview of the appeal and significance — if not urgency — of horror fiction today.

On Vanneman, Alan. “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone.” Bright Lights Film Journal 42 (Nov 2003).

In the “Dead or Alive?” section of his photo essay, “Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone,” mystery writer/film critic Alan Vanneman gives us a veritable slide show lecture that reveals Hitchcock’s fixation with uncanny “inanimate objects that suggest life.”  To reveal Hitch’s fetishism of death, Vanneman especially is interested in the use of taxidermist art in the mise en scene: shot from below, cast in pools of shadow, or shot in extreme close-up, these inanimate bodies imply a sort of living, supernatural menace — whether to foreshadow a threat to a character (Jimmy Stewart encountering a stuffed tiger in The Man Who Knew Too Much) or to associate a character with that unnatural agency/threat (Norman Bates in Psycho, with a large stuffed bird peering down over his shoulder).

The stuffed dead bodies are evidence enough (and in Psycho they obviously all echo the role of Mother in Norman’s life).  But I particularly like this capture of Vera Miles as Lila Crane, virtually spinning in the mise en abyme of infinite reflection:

Of this shot, Vanneman writes:

Although Hitchcock used mirrors endlessly in his work, they are rarely used for overt drama. However, he achieves a phenomenal effect in Psycho when Lila Crane (Vera Miles) sees a double reflection of herself in two mirrors. Notice how the gaze of the “second Lila” (the far-right image) takes us deep into the center of the frame, where the gaze of the “third Lila” directs us back out of the frame toward the “first Lila” at the far left, who is turning around to confront who? Us? Someone behind us? Mrs. Bates?

Such fragmenting of personality is not only about us, but about the character implicitly experiencing an uncanny schizm of identity, encounter the self-as-Other — which is precisely what spectators do throughout a film, projecting their identities into character identification, while also introjecting them back into the self.  Uncanny moments like those in the shot above are moments where we recognize this process of doubling — when the world becomes a hall of mirrors and our self is palpably felt as always already being located — and dislocated — somewhere else.