“I believe that in our unthinkable destiny, ruled by such infamies as bodily pain, every bizarre thing is possible, even the perpetuity of a Hell, but that it is sacrilegious to believe in it.”
– Borges.
In her essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film,” Clover (1987) describes the phenomenon of what she calls the Final Girl. The Final Girl is the female hero found in most films within the “slasher” genre, starting with the seminal Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974. According to Dika (1987), her main attributes include sexual restraint, goal-oriented activity, and the willingness to commit violence to assert control. That the monster is only apparently destroyed is part of the code of these films: by merging her value system (since she is highly individualistic this often has to do more with her ability to resist sexual desire than to realize a maternal ethics of nurturing) with the single-mindedness of the monster, the Final Girl effects a reintegration of the monstrous projected Other. This reintegration, keeping in line with the notion that horror films represent an adolescent rite of passage (Payne, 1989; Zillman & Gibson, 1996) and Lacan’s (1948/1977) notion that the inherently paranoid structure of consciousness allows for maturation through aggression, points at the therapeutic value of the horror film, both in its seminal state as frightening folk tale (Zillman & Gibson) and in its apparently incoherent contemporary manifestation.
A great deal of critical work on contemporary horror films concentrate on the role of gender both in the films themselves and in audience reactions. Gender plays an important role in both the rhetorical structure of the film and in the audience’s ethical ability to decode generic intertextuality. On the level of the film itself, the assumption has been that slasher films are generally centered around repressed male desire, in the form of the monster, unleashed upon sexually promiscuous teenage girls, to the delight of a mostly male audience. Wood (1996) uses the example of Alfred Hitchcock to demonstrate how this repression is linked to “the anxiety of the heterosexual male confronted by the possibility of an autonomous female sexuality he cannot control or organize” (p. 82). Even Clover (1987) assumes that central to the horror genre is “a psychokiller who slashes to death a string of mostly female victims” (p. 187) and that “The audience for that story is by all accounts largely young and largely male,” (p. 192). Content analysis has invalidated these assumptions to a certain degree. Molitor and Sapolsky (1996) convincingly demonstrate that in the early eighties, violence against women in horror films, both in terms of number of violent acts and in the length of onscreen time devoted to portrayal of victimization was evenly distributed between males and females, although females were more often shown in a state of fear. By the late eighties onscreen violence was directed to a disproportionate number of male characters. Molitor and Sapolsky speculate that this is the result of feminist media critiques. The authors also find that themes of sexuality and violence are infrequently linked in contemporary horror films. The authors suggest that it’s our social conditioning that makes violence against women more prominent in our viewing experience.
Zillman and Weaver (1996) demonstrate that, while adolescent boys use horror films to demonstrate courage or desensitivity to horrific imagery, adolescent girls tend to register a higher level of enjoyment of these films. This is in keeping with Dika’s assertion that the audience for slasher films if 55% female (1987). Despite working from false assumptions, Clover’s framework for investigating gender issues in slasher movies is compelling. Clover suggests that the Final Girl is, in a sense, bisexual. While her restrained desires (for sexuality, knowledge, and power) are culturally gendered as female, her name (often masculine: Joey, Stretch, Terry (p. 204)), her violent and calculated behavior, and even her appearance (dark haired, muscular, dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt instead of provocative clothes) genders her as masculine. As a masculine figure, the Final Girl transcends the stereotypical virgin-whore dialectic. In this way, contemporary horror films mirror social discourse on gender roles. If the aggressive assumption of power is inherently patriarchal, then an overthrow of power, even by a biological woman, is merely a reinscription of the patriarchal order. This is in line with a Freudian, and more particularly, a Lacanian reading of the nature of the phallus, the Name/No-of-the-Father, and symbolic order. To speak the name, to inscribe oneself within the symbolic order, involves the Oedipal claiming of the phallus, which in Lacan is not the property of the biological male but of the Name/No of the Father, the Symbolic Law. In Lacanian terms, the hero, male or female, must claim the phallus to initiate the subjective fantasy of the Symbolic Law. It is obvious why feminist scholars would renounce such a vision, since Law itself is gendered, even if Lacan claims that this is done symbolically, rather than biologically (see Lacan, 1958/1977, p.282). Recent work by Zizek (1999) sets Lacan’s reading of the Law against “the culture of complaint,” in which an ever growing number of marginal or suppressed groups launch ideological critiques of he power structure, while at the same time rejecting practical political action as inherently a part of the existing order they are attempting to circumscribe. For Zizek, the culture of complaint is an instrument of late capitalism, as its prolific attacks on the status quo are concomitant with a reluctance to assume the responsibilities of political power. Thus, claims that power is inherently violent absolve the critic from participating in authentic political action. Zizek’s critique is damning when set against most ideological critiques of the horror film (see Sharett, 1993). These critics tend to find the Final Girl’s assumption of power as false, not because it doesn’t happen in “real life,” but because the will to control is inherently patriarchal. Lacan himself notes that there is a general cultural confusion between what he calls aggressivity and displays of brute force. For Lacan, who saw consciousness itself as having a “paranoid” structure (1948/1977), aggressivity against the “corporal dislocation” of the subjective mind was an efficient vehicle for maturation (1948/1977, p. 10). In effect, the subject must perceive a threatening object outside of itself if it is to grow, in the same way that migratory locusts and pigeons achieve a gregarious state or begin sexual maturation respectively, once they perceive an Other - even if this Other is merely a reflection of themselves in a mirror (1949/1977, p.3).
Given the complex and at times incoherent gender roles played out in contemporary horror movies, how can we account for the appeal of the genre among both sexes, given that it has been generally established that male and female responses and ethical positions to them are categorically different (see Zillman & Weaver, 1996). There appear to be three major points of emotional investiture in slasher films and other permutations of the contemporary horror film. There is investiture in the monster during the middle of the film, in the Last Girl at the end of the film and an in spectacle qua spectacle throughout. The horror film’s excesses and plays-against-the-code of previous films is part of the enjoyment of the genre. In fact, the first and third components are structurally almost identical. While the Final Girl is consistently bland and nearly faceless, in the more successful films, the monsters as spectacle are elevated to the status of icons, as empty signifiers. The faces of the Final Girls in Friday the 13th, Halloween, and other genres pictures are interchangeable, while Jason, Freddy Krueger (from the Nightmare on Elm Street series) and the chainsaw wielding maniac in Texas Chainsaw Massacre are immediately identifiable. The female hero is replaced throughout the sequels, while the monster is built upon - his mythos is developed, his techniques for torturing his victims become more elaborate, and his make-up is altered to accentuate his features, rather than to obscure them. In the first film in a sequential series, the monster is often relegated to the shadows. The victim and audience’s ability to see the monster is a source of delight akin to a freak strip show. This obscurity allows the viewer to use her or his own speculative power to conceive of the monster as a subjective expression of individual fears and desires. The obscured monster is thus often more real and immediate to the viewer than his subsequent manifestations. Sequels bring his past, as well as his physical body, into greater and greater light. It is as though the Final Girl is merely virtuous, whereas the monster is both an embodiment of an admittedly perverse ethical code and a sublime aesthetic experience. The monster is the locus of the majority of the film’s excesses, be they technological (through special effects), humorous, or tragic.
If the monster is the root of the audience’s aesthetic enjoyment of contemporary horror movies, why have a central female protagonist at all? We have yet to experience the triumph of a monster who destroys an array of faceless victims with ever more creative and clever methods while consistently asserting his own omnipotent order. Clover (1997) asserts that the central generic threat is the threat of incest, in which the monster is a patriarchal authority attempting to force itself on its symbolic offspring. Given this, she states that, “the makers of slasher films seem to know that sadomasochistic incest fantasies sit more easily with the male viewer when the visible player is female” (p. 212). Another way of framing this issue might be to note how both mainstream pornography and horror movies, as the most forbidden and “dangerous” genres of film, seem to accept depictions of lesbianism, while depictions of male homosexuality are rare. The male’s gaze upon the female hero is not compromised by feelings of inferiority. The female is ontologically Other and, in this case, not perceived as a competitor working for the same goals. Additionally, we might claim that female protagonists may invite our sympathy more than males. Since males are culturally conditioned to engage in a patriarchal power struggle, even the most virtuous male only ever gets what he deserves. The Final Girl, in contrast, finds herself caught in the struggle by accident.
I want to bring these theoretical concerns to bear upon a series of “postmodern” horror movies, beginning with the 1987 film Hellraiser. Based upon a story by British “splatterpunk” author Clive Barker, the original film has since had three sequels, Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), and Bloodline, commonly referred to as Hellraiser IV (1996) and a fifth installation is currently in post-production. These films achieved an immediate cult status, and spawned numerous lines of comic books, an unreleased video game, and even a “webring” known as the Hellbound Web. While more of an underground, cult phenomenon than his counterpart, Freddy Krueger, the central villain, known as Pinhead, is featured on Dutch rave posters and on tee-shirts sold in Manhattan record stores. At Halloween “fetish balls” in urban techno and Goth clubs, Pinhead is a common costume.
Part of Pinhead’s appeal lies in his liminality. His small group of followers, the Cenobites, resemble punk rock demons caught in the borderland between hell and earth. While most of the Cenobites are mute and grotesque (and thus more in line with the typical slasher monster) Pinhead speaks with an educated British accent. Dressed in a leather inquisitor’s costume (which looks like a long leather skirt, lending credence to Clover’s claim that the monster is also ambiguously gendered) his shaved head is covered with nails and the skin over his chest has been ripped and pulled back in two symmetrical place, synthesizing skin and costume. Pinhead represents a postmodern mixture of Christian theology, deviant sadomasochistic sexuality, mystical asceticism, and entrepreneurial spirit. He articulates one of the most anomalous aspects of the Hellraiser series: that overt sexual desire pales in comparison with the pleasures of pain itself. Although the S/M trappings create sexual tension, Pinhead never appears interested in the sex act itself, in fact, the pins and hooks in his body would seem to prevent it. This aestheticization of pain is also an aestheticization of power. Thus, Pinhead is, from one perspective, a sort of pure, primordial patriarch. He is the figure of law as denial.
Heba (1995) uses both Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossic and monoglossic discourse and Wood’s notion of ideologically incoherent and coherent films to show how contemporary horror films are multivocal, relative, and self- deconstructive. Whereas the coherent horror film offers a clear delineation between such dichotomies as “good/evil, humanity/nature, humanity/supernature, and humanity/science” (p. 107) the incoherent movies “focus on humanity’s limited abilities to control the horrors.” (p. 108) One of the major characteristics of the incoherent/heteroglossic horror film is that it lacks “definite closure or conflict resolution” (p. 108). This incoherent structure is thus a generic component to the horror film in its sequential permutations. I would hold that this incoherence also relates to the nature of authority itself, at least in the case of the Hellraiser movies. Pinhead’s marginal status posits him as beyond or against the status quo, whereas his role as enforcer of ethical balance clearly places him on the side of the regulative law. Wood’s description of the modern monster as more superego than id (1987) is apt here.
As with other slasher films, in the Hellraiser series, traditional authority figures are seen as either impotent, inept, or corrupt. Authority is unable to deal with the fragmentation, disorder, chaos, and ethical detachment required to overcome the monster. Arnzen (1994) points out that the technological aspects of these films, the quick edits and vertiginous camera angles the intertexual nature of serial movies point to the state of postmodern culture as a whole: “Authorial presence is subsumed by the presence of texts without identity; dislocated in their unity of fragments, simultaneously dependent and independent of their genre, splatter films pastiche both themselves and the culture that produces and consumes them” (p. 180). The two commands coming through the film are: don’t expect closure (the monster is never really dead yet) and, as Arnzen puts it, “Be ready for anything” (p. 183). If these are the messages articulated by the films, it is obvious why traditional authority is often portrayed as weak or predatory. Traditional institutions that previous served as regulative spheres, be they scientific, social, or religious, appear as outdated systems without practical potential in their various manifestations. These psychiatry (in the Hellraiser movies, as well as many of the slasher/splatter films, psychiatrists are either incompetent or part of a “second tier” evil - see below), family (absent mothers and fathers, step-parents, and pedophiles), or education (teachers are usually absent or another form of second tier villain.)
Three of the Hellraiser films feature a female hero of the type outlined by Clover. The fourth film features a male hero, but, as Freeland (2000) points out, he is gendered feminine by his sensitive nature and in his role as an artist. The Final Girl, in contrast to the impotent or malicious adults around her, is constantly in tune with shifts in the state of the world and often perceives them before any of the other characters do. Kirsty, the Final Girl in Hellraiser I and II, is the only character able to perceive the evil nature of her stepmother, who has been seduced by Frank, her husband’s undead brother who was sent to Hell after attempting to trick the Cenobites. In a scene towards the end of the first film, Frank has killed his brother, Kirsty’s father. He then removes his dead brother’s skin and uses it as a costume to trick Kirsty into trusting him. This is reminiscent of the “dead skin mask” of real-life serial killer Ed Gein. Kirsty, like the audience, has been trained to watch for cracks in the ontological world, and notices the slight imperfections in Frank’s disguise including his lowered and cynical tone of voice and, perhaps most importantly, his unusual confidence. Thus, she is able to escape his trap and to flee. She seeks out the Cenobites and offers Frank in exchange for herself, a deal which Pinhead accepts. Kirsty’s willingness to open herself up to impossible experiences results in a an entirely contingent world view in which nothing is stable and any given object is a variable that could assume different content under different situations.
This whole series of events is intertexualized in the sequel, in which Kirsty herself fits herself into the dead Julia’s skin to trick the second tier villain Dr. Channard (the reincarnation of Frank as a powerful male figure who seduces the wicked Julia.) Dr. Channard, after becoming a Cenobite, turns into a parody of his former self as the amoral psychiatrist. Instead of fingers he has surgical instruments. Two tentacles stretch from behind him open up into an array of unpleasant looking, gynecological-type instruments, emphasizing the relationship between instrument, phallic symbol, and the eye that wishes to see all. The Channard cenobite doesn’t walk - he floats around attached to a giant fleshy tentacle that at first sight appears to be a phallic symbol. Upon closer examination, however, it appears that this tentacle is actually a giant penis. When Kirsty (in Julia’s skin) tricks Channard and stands up to him instead of running away, the tentacle is cut and he dies. Both as a Cenobite and in his previous incarnation as a psychiatrist, patriarchal authority is seen as inflexible, overly concerned with not merely understanding secrets but somehow getting through to and controlling the shadow world of forbidden knowledge. While Kirsty’s biological father is merely bumbling, her father substitute, the undead Frank, is unequal to the world of secret power. I would argue that the female protagonists are able are able to survive because they are never able to control the numerous surprises and secrets they find. They achieve no true understanding of the symbolic order. However, the subject still must inscribe herself within this order. In Lacanian terms, she must speak the name of the father, to put herself in the position of control and responsibility. The Final Girl has to be vigilantly paranoid if she is to survive. Here is one of the central generic paradoxes - the Final Girl presents herself as willfully blind to the repressed parts of her unconscious, yet she is ultimately prepared, through a series of trials, to perceive its objectified figures everywhere.
The theme of corrupt or weak authority figures is endemic to postmodern horror films, and it is often figured in the image of fathers, mothers, and psychiatrists. Whereas the phallic monster seems to be somehow outside of the temporal order, particularly in the case of Hellraiser as the Cenobites inhabit an atemporal Hell filled with anachronistic imagery, temporal authority is shown as weak and corrupt, incapable of dealing with a world in which the center doesn’t hold for one of two reasons: either these second-tier authority figures aren’t strong, quick, paranoid, or flexible enough, or they embrace too readily the centerless world and thus come to represent a deviant ethical stance. For Lacan, the true pervert is not one who fetishizes the Other, but the one who allows himself or herself to be fetishized or made into an instrument by it. Channard, Julia, and Frank are all true perverts in this sense: they are always willing to become an instrument of the Law in return for visionary access to the psychic realm. The Cenobites, on the other hand, are at the coreless core of the decentered universe. Their dress evinces a blurring between pagan leather, ecumenical vestments, technology and organic flesh. They are thus beyond a stable value system, “Demons to some, angels to others,” as Pinhead explains it, and thus embody the critique of the Kant and Sade in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1999) and Lacan’s “Kant avec Sade.” Pinhead, like Juliet, is the advocate of a transcendent ethical system freed from the restraint of mere feeling. He is a force of ethical duty above desire, and his rhetoric is one of balance, hierarchy, and integrity. Desire itself is merely a sort of Kantian categorical imperative. Thus lies part of his appeal as the center of the audience’s curiosity. He is not, like Jason, an embodiment of mere vengeance. He is more like an aesthetic realization of post-Enlightenment instrumental reason. Unlike the film’s second-tier authority figures, he appears to be clear of misleading and illusory emotions and can see them with clinical autoscopic eyes.
Family, in the Hellraiser films, as with many other movies with in this genre, appears as correlative to postmodern relativism and decentered institutional values. Although the first and final scenes of Hellraiser I take place in an orientalized Middle Eastern market, the uncanny site of the film’s terror occurs in the suburbs in general and the attic in particular, as the depository of the shadowy underside where family and marriage photographs, newspapers clippings, pornographic Polaroid photographs, and old books are stored. The attic involves the fantasy of finding the frontier, the limits of experience, in the center of the seemingly stable world. In broken homes, this is where the pictures of previous families are often stored. It may even be the first place where pre-pubescent males encounter pornography. The attic, in this way, can be figured as suppressed suburban memories.
The shadowy nature of the attic hides the subject from the eyes of authority, while at the same time allowing him or her to indulge in activities whose pleasure is founded upon feelings of guilt. In Hellraiser I, the attic is where Julia first finds, and is intrigued by, Frank’s pictures of exotic lands and pornographic orgies. This is where she leads the men she seduces so that the undead Frank might feed upon them. This is also the entry point of the Cenobites into the phenomenal world. The semiotics of the attic: chains, a bloody mattress, the skinless Frank, murder weapons (tool-shed items such as hammers), the sounds of insects and the sudden appearance of maggots, Catholic religious icons, and old wedding photographs highlight this theme of secret guilt. It must be born in mind that the audience is just as often longing for illustration of secret guilt, just as much as they are recognizing it. In a sense, this recognition and longing are one in the same, if we accept the notion that the viewing experience is as much a rite of passage for the audience as it is for its hero.
In the first film, Kirsty’s mother has died and her father, a fragile and mildly pleasant man named Larry, has just married Julia, an English woman with cold features and dark hair. While Kirsty, in keeping with other slasher film heroes, her masculine transformation occurs at the end of the film, Julia is masculine at the outset. Her voice is deep, her manner is abrupt, and she speaks with a clear, educated accent, in contrast to her feminized husband, who speaks in a friendly and vague vernacular. Frank, a traveler in foreign countries and proto-techno-Zen mystic, finds a puzzle box in the beginning of the film and, set against candles and shadows, solves it. His body is instantly torn apart by chains and he is sent to hell. The puzzle box, throughout the film, serves as the central knot. When it is opened, the Cenobites come. When it is solved, they are temporary sent back to hell. Thus, initial recognition of the box engenders the “corporal dislocation” of the Cenobites, whether we accept that Freudian commonplace that the monster is a projected object of repressed consciousness or Lacan’s elaboration that this imago is necessary and vital part of the human process of maturation.
As the film progresses, the undead Frank returns to Larry’s house as a organic lump of tissue hidden under the attic floor. After Larry cuts himself on a nail, his blood falls into the floorboards and feeds the now vampiric and partially rehumanized Frank. Through her dreams, Frank seduces Julia, not, apparently, for sexual pleasure, but to manipulate her into bringing victims into the house so he can drink their blood and regain his full corporeal body. Thus we have, in a nutshell, a number of themes essential to the discourse of the suburban broken home: the absent parent, adultery, power uncoupled from morality, and even the radical, incestuous reshaping of the family structure itself. To follow Lacan, Frank is also acquiring corporeality as Kirsty, through her paranoid knowledge, begins to sense the presence of a knot, a puzzle in her consciousness. This puzzle slowly comes to be objectified in Frank as a projection of the Final Girl’s initial, adolescent fears.
Kirsty is an only child. She is portrayed as quiet, virtuous, and independent. These three attributes, along with her longing for her mother, serve to highlight her inherent isolation from her peers and environment. Her Oedipal conflict is, in keeping with her divided nature, split between the corrupt Frank and Julia and the light-bearing Pinhead, who embodies the next stage in her development in his unsystematized knowledge (he is neither scientist, priest, or father, and is thus beyond institutional corruption), sexual restraint, and goal-oriented activity. Unlike virtually everyone else who encounters the Cenobites, however, Kirsty has not consciously summoned them. The female Cenobite highlights the paradox of this denial when she states, “Didn’t open the box? And what was it last time? Didn’t know what the box was. And yet we still keep finding each other, don’t we?” The discourse of the slasher film often involves this denial of desire as a necessary masking of desire, as Clover (1987) has shown. This mirrors the structure of the horror film as a whole: if it is to be affective the audience must be repulsed and intrigued at the same time, as this repulsion gives the subject access to the forbidden with some cushion against the guilty feelings occasioned by pleasure. This discourse also highlights the Final Girl’s centrality as the focus of the film’s consciousness.
While Larry is feeble and Julia and Larry are corrupt, the second film brings in a new variant on the second-tier authority figure in the form of Dr. Channard, a clinical psychiatrist who runs the Channard institute. Like Julia, he has a foreign accent, and, like her, he is outspoken in his desire for power, in this case power over the human mind. He is an advocate of what might be called a pornographic science of autoscopic vision, in which, as he puts it, “We have to see what we have to know.” He is willing to kill for this insight, and even keeps a basement stocked with inmates who serve as guinea pigs for his experiments. Although he comes across as a sexual predator, like Frank, he uses sex only to further the ends of unfettered knowledge as power.
In this film it is Julia who returns from the dead in vampire form, and Channard who supplies her with victims. This leads to intertexual play on the first film, as well as added sexual ambiguity. The reviving Julia, who looks like an illustration from Gray’s Anatomy, is given a white suit to hide her extreme state of nudity. Her masculine clothes, combined with the masculinizing appearance created by her lack of hair and pronounced musculature, contrast with the excessive redness of her lips, thus revealing her previously obscured symbolic bisexuality. This is keeping in line with her unrestrained and apparent desire to possess the phallus and control the symbolic order. As Pinhead is always the order outside, the unattainable object of desire, she will not attain this ruling status, and the audience is aware of this. Neither will Channard, so the audience experiences their attempts to use each other for their own purposes as a game given to failure.
Family and psychiatry are not the only authorities that serve as only a pale copy of the true order found in the Cenobites. In Hellraiser III, there is a scene in which a priest tries to comfort the hysterical Joey, that film’s incarnation of the Final Girl, by telling her that the demons she is seeing “are not real. They’re parables. Metaphors.” Immediately thereafter, Pinhead appears. The priest holds his crucifix up in fear, and Pinhead smashes it before disposing of him.
Religion, family, and psychiatry fail the subject because they are not paranoid enough. Their weakness is their stability. Knowledge itself is founded on a structural imbalance that allows for change. Either through weak faith or an aggressive pursuit of power, these institutions forget that power is always “out there,” always ready to trick us into believing in a stable ontological order, only to rip it out from under us. The hero’s paranoia is seen by authority figures as madness, but the audience perceives it as the only safe strategy for coping with an uncertain and radically reified world. If the viewing of these films is, itself, a symbolic thrill seeking that safely allows for the viewer to participate in this paranoid strategy. This accounts for a number of themes explored in this paper, bisexual ambiguity, the breakdown of traditional institutions, and adolescent alienation from the power structure. Although the Final Girl must repress her desire to assume control of this world, she carries with her a new, flexible set of values that allow her the psychic flexibility to assume control, instead of having to be trapped within it. Of course, power is always part of another scene, and the hero, even by slaying the monster, finds herself locked away in the beginning of the sequel, her paranoia still brings with it a type of balance. She is able to, if only for the moment, expel the threat of an historical, instrumental Truth from the real world. It is necessary that this balance remain unstable if there is to be any growth that avoids the pitfall of Jung’s notion of “psychic inflation” (see Rushing & Frentz, 1989, p. 74).
To achieve this necessary and temporary balance, Kirsty and the other Final Girls in the Hellraiser movies, must solve the puzzle. Its solution is never permanent, as the solution both expels and brings forth the Cenobites. The Lament Configuration, the name of the box (which, by the way, according to the fourth sequel, was designed by an Enlightenment-era toymaker for a Marquis de Sade-type decadent aristocratic figure) is an allegory of the world. When the puzzle turns, the world itself turns. Windows shift and hallways lead to new, darker places. The fusion of hell and the real world is itself a maze that must be mastered if the hero is to return the world back to its more stable previous state. In fact, by the third film we find that Hell itself is shaped like a giant puzzle box. To manipulate the cube is to change the shape of Hell and of a giant tower-like structure with the same design as the box that lies in the center of the maze, endlessly casting out a mechanical search-light (another symbol of autoscopic vision). We are never given access to this tower - it is akin to the impenetrable noumenal realm. Through this juxtaposition it is clear that one of the attributes of Hell is its paranoid structure. Even here, power is an irreducible other and hell itself the borderland surrounding an impregnable core. Thus, it is relative, multivocal, and chaotic. It is a postconfiguration of the psychology that Bosch prefigured, fused with the confusion- as-order found in the works of Escher.
Rollo May, in his essay “Psychotherapy and the Daimonic” associates the daimonic with “Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power” (p.196). It is an atemporal force akin to Freud’s concept of eros. As May puts it, “It is this daimonic which is referred to when we adjure something seriously ill not to give up the ‘fight,’ or when we sadly acknowledge some indication that a friend will die as the fact that he has ‘given up the fight.’ The daimonic will never take a rational ‘no’ for an answer” (1970, p. 198). If the daimonic becomes too powerful, the subject is driven into “many diverse directions and into all kinds of relationships without regard for the integration of the self” (p. 197). This desire cannot be expelled, even if it is often uncomfortable and unpleasant. But by accepting it and reintegrating it back into the self, the subject, at least according to May, moves towards a state of universality. The universal state is that of the logos, the name or key that unlocks and conditions order. The daimonic is, according to May, “impersonal,” since it disregards the feelings of its object. The daimonic is, simply put, an affirmative. It says “yes,” in contrast to the logos or the phallus or the name/no of the father, which establishes the Law through denial and limitation.
In Hellraiser, the second tier villains are ruled by the daimonic, even if they perceive themselves as being in control. The daimonic must be made “out there” if it is to be dealt with, and this process begins, as May suggests, when the subject names the daimonic. His example is that of the alcoholic, but in our study it is the monster who must be made apparent and given phenomenal form. If the monster is within, as it is with Frank and Julia, who both at various points are literally skinless, then they cannot move towards the logos. They are caught in mere particular ends and desires, and cannot access a universalized state of balance.
Kirsty and Joey only make the first steps towards the logos. Their world is ipso facto fragmentary and paranoid. The Hellraiser films are not, ultimately, about bringing about conventional balance but about effecting a sustaining tension within a fragmentary, illusory, and contingent world. In the same way that feminist and Marxist scholars criticize these films on the grounds that the female hero never seems to achieve legitimate power, the therapist might note that she never achieves integrated balance either. The hero often ends up marginalized to a greater degree by the end of the film than she was in the beginning. The monstrous Other is always dispelled rather than integrated back into the psyche.
Can we then even begin to establish a therapeutic aspect to these films? I would argue that May’s integrated, universal personality is, from the viewpoint of an adolescent viewer, not yet a viable option. Alienation from a fragmented, distant world is quite often the reality for the cult audience these films attract for whom balance and acquiescence go hand in hand. The hero isn’t able to balance out the tensions of the world, but keeps the phenomenal universe fragmentary, chaotic and threatening, while still working within an apparently stable core of sexual and intellectual restraint, goal-oriented activity, independence, and a competitive desire to preserve the sanctity of a constantly threatened house.
That this solution appears feasible both for the adolescent as well as the culture industry raises a number of ideological concerns. Yet if we give the adolescent audience credit for any intelligence, depth of perception, or psychologically soundness whatsoever, I think it can be argued that the Hellraiser movies involve a practical, if unappealing, therapeutic strategy (and here I’m referring to Burke’s notion of the strategies and “equipment for living” found in symbolic representation (1941)). I hold that the strategies are unappealing in as much as the whole face of postmodern culture is unappealing. Yet in the end, even if the Final Girl never achieves stable power or is able to fully integrate her desires with her ethics, her constant struggle to do so implies some hope of transcending the Other Scene within the system we have now, and not within a yet-to-be-seen utopian world. The heroic female hero and the audience effect this transcendence against the grain of autoscopic vision, in a state of conditional and necessary blindness.
Arnzen, M. A. (1994). Who’s laughing now? The postmodern slasher film. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 21, 176-179.
Burke, K. (1941/1973). The philosophy of literary form. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Cantor, J., & Oliver, M. B. (1996). Developmental differences in responses to horror. In Weaver, J. B. & Tamborini, R. (Eds.). Horror films: Current research on audience preferences and reactions (pp. 63-80). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Clover, C. J. (1987). Her body, himself: gender in the slasher film. Representations, 20, 187-228.
Dika, V. (1987). The stalker film, 1978-81. In G. A. Waller (Ed.), American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (pp. 86-101). Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Freeland, C. A. (2000). The naked and the undead: evil and the appeal of horror. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Heba, G. (1995). Everyday nightmares: the rhetoric of social horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 23, 106-110.
Horkheimer, M, & Adorno, T. (1944/1999). Dialectic of enlightenment. Translated by J. Cumming. New York, Continuum.
Lacan, J. (1948/1966/1977). Aggressivity in psychoanalysis. In Écrits (pp. 1-7). Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1949/1966/1977). The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I. In Écrits (pp. 8-29). Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lacan, J. (1958/1966/1977). The signification of the phallus. In Écrits (pp. 281-291). Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
May, R. (1970). Psychotherapy and the daimonic. In J. Campbell (Ed.), Myths, Dreams and Religion (pp. 196-210). New York: E. P. Dutton & CO., Inc.
Payne, D. (1989). The Wizard of Oz: Therapeutic rhetoric in a contemporary media ritual. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 75, 25-39.
Rushing, J. H. & Frentz, T. S. (1989). The Frankenstein myth in contemporary cinema. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6, 61-80.
Sapolsky, B. S.& Molitor, F. (1996). Content trends in contemporary horror films. In Weaver, J. B. & Tamborini, R. (Eds.). Horror films: Current research on audience preferences and reactions (pp. 33-48). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Sharrett, C. (1993). The horror film in neoconservative culture. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 20, 100-111.
Tamborini, R. (1996). A model of empathy and emotional reactions to horror. In Weaver, J. B. & Tamborini, R. (Eds.). Horror films: Current research on audience preferences and reactions (pp. 103-125). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Tietchen, T. F. (1998). Samples and copycats: the cultural implications of the postmodern slasher in contemporary American film. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 26, 98-101.
Wood, R. (1987). Returning the look: Eyes of a Stranger. In G. A. Waller (Ed.), American Horrors: Essays on the Modern American Horror Film (pp. 79-85). Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Zillman, D., & Gibson, R. (1996). Evolution of the horror genre. In Weaver, J. B. & Tamborini, R. (Eds.). Horror films: Current research on audience preferences and reactions (pp. 15-32). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Zillman, D., & Weaver, J. B. (1996). Gender-socialization theory of reactions to horror. In Weaver, J. B. & Tamborini, R. (Eds.). Horror films: Current research on audience preferences and reactions (pp. 81-102). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Zizek, S. (1999) The ticklish subject. London: Verso.
Zuckerman, M. (1996). Sensation seeking and the taste for vicarious horror. In Weaver, J. B. & Tamborini, R. (Eds.). Horror films: Current research on audience preferences and reactions (pp. 147-160). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Doug Sparks teaches in the Interdisciplinary Social Science department at the University of South Florida. He received his Master’s in English and American Literature from New York University in 1998. He is currently working on his PhD in communications and rhetoric.
