Configuring the Monster

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Configuring the Monster

• Horror films of the twentieth century mirror anxieties
• Contemporary horror illustrates phobias of the new world, industrialized, technological, and economically deterministic
• It explores change effects and reacts to social, scientific, and philosophical narratives.
• Fred Botting indicates that the eighteenth-century gothic narratives gave way to ambivalence, shaping the location of evil and vice
• The locus of evil shifted from individuals to social conventions restricting them
• Moral/ethical tension between individuals and socio-political order significantly changed across the 19th and 20th centuries
• Evil was reconfigured in horror texts to be cinematic and literary, exceeding fantasy and ideology and challenging cultural values.

Social Discourses and Horror Films

• Theories of political economy, like Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) on proletarian identity and power were transformative
• Marx believed class struggle was necessary due to working-class alienation amidst industrial and capitalist objectives
• Horror films implicitly critique this by presenting alienated and disadvantaged "monsters" against bourgeois orthodoxies
• Social revolution themes are explored From Nosferatu (1922) to Night of the Living Dead (1968), with bourgeois orthodoxy transgression
• Films revealed oppression of the "working class" in Weimar Germany, Depression-era America, and Franco’s Spain
• Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) influenced these issues with the concept of natural selection and "survival of the fittest"
• Darwin's ideas challenged Christian orthodoxies and promoted imperialist racial superiority assumptions
• Darwin felt natural selection is superior to man's efforts, raising issues of humankind artificially imposing itself

Humanity and Nature in Horror

• Humanity imposes itself on material existence, while nature changes the world organically, but often invisibly
• Mankind selects according to their own needs and nature operates for the benefit of the world
• Nature will modify something enough to be useful for it
• Slight differences in structure and constitution dictate survival
• This tension is a key theme in horror films including films like Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (1931) and King Kong (1933)
• Humankind has engaged with the natural order, particularly in revenge-of-nature films like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963)
• Friedrich Nietzsche posited humanity's spiritual crisis and degeneracy, desiring to impose order and facilitate destruction in a secular context
• Nietzsche suggests people have drawn back the curtain of the depravity of man when animals lose their instincts
• Nietzschean perspective says humankind doesn't contact reality at any point
• Nietzsche's is relativist stating no certainties exist to humans in an amoral universe.

Central Themes in Horror

• Lack of true consensus is the fundamental theme of horror
• The monster (Dracula (1931), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), The Blair Witch Project (1999)) represents the archetypal struggle for order
• People seek to evidence and maintain structure or something to believe in to justify existence
• Modernity has sacrificed faith and purpose so socio-cultural context gives rise to deep psychological, emotional, and physical malaise
• Psychoanalysis transformed human perception, with Freud's work revealing more primal existence levels beneath socialized behavior
• Repressed feelings and unconscious thoughts were found to be at the heart of dreams about true human identity
• Psychoanalysis helps understand cinema, suggesting films operate like dreams, revealing underlying issues
• Freud’s ideas have helped create self-consciousness in horror which has deliberately engaged with madness, dysfunctionality and psychosis.
• Grand narratives in horror encompass social alienation, collapse of spiritual/moral order, crisis of evolutionary identity, and inner imperatives

Exploring Fears

• Horror explores fears in the contemporary world, creating new fables/fairy tales revealing wisdom and collapsing hierarchies
• Contemporary horror plays along boundaries between fictional forms and social rules
• It oscillates between politicized critiques and playful engagement with conventions, facilitating postmodern freedoms
• Horror film analysis has been done in theoretical paradigms and discourses, including theological, sociological, and psychoanalytic approaches
• The genre lacks clearly defined boundaries, overlapping with science fiction and fantasy
• Horror is concerned with death and past impacts, while science fiction is future-oriented, dealing with humankind's self-destruction
• Science fiction is utopian, while horror is dystopic and nihilistic
• Science fiction concerns the external and macrocosmic, while horror is internal and microcosmic
• Horror disrupts the status quo, representing alternative perspectives on gender, race, class, ethics and social issues
• There is no complete uniformity in the genre's narratives across the years as it has different responses.

The Monster and Duality

• Character Configuration defines the horror genre.
• Genre History has reshaped the 'monster'
• The Monster represents the limits of the human existence.
• The Devils is the archetype of monster that shows struggles between civility and barbarism.
• The "doppelganger" theme is a theme found in the horror genre where an individual confronts their nemesis leading to a inner conflict.

Psychological and Social Impact of Horror

• Duality in horror represents sexuality, gender and the power struggle.
• A double represents the attempt to save yourself.
• The idea of "doubling" can heighten the moral signs, the motif and is seen in horror texts.
• The Genre creates a visual metaphor that show threats and fears.
• Monsters are like a direct expression of the horrors around us and destabilize the view of what is human.
• A double symbolizes good vs evil.
• The role of the monster is to break down the status quo.
• Major Theme- Individual maintain and take control of live to confront the status quo.
• Horror texts engage with society and is collapsing due to social interaction.

Fundamental Fears and Societal Impact

• Any Level of Identity is impacted by a change that had occurred by the Monster and is either radically changed or destroyed.
• Order and peace collapse and cannot contain themselves and create forces.
• The main fear in is death and can show its viewer extinction.
• It shows every model of the horror being a death and a demise.
• Horror remains relevant because the society is trying to address the problems being done by the horror images.
• King Listed Top 10 Fears: the dark, squishy things, deformity, snakes, rats, closed-in spaces, insects, death, other people, and fear for another person
• The Fear- A Threat, is deeply rooted within Primal Emotions and creates the basis of the texts of horror.