Chamber of Horrors
IntroductionStep into the Chamber of Horrors. Here is where we will conduct certain, shall we say, interrogations, in search of possible answers to a seemingly, yet deceptively, simple question. Posed innocently enough, out of natural curiosity by an interested friend, the question remains thus: "Why do you like horror movies so much?" Why, indeed! No plain and worthy answer sprang immediately to mind. It was rather like asking me why I'm so fond of ice cream - quite obviously because it tastes so damn good. But the query seemed to demand a more penetrating answer and, as many hours as I have spent searching out and devouring horror flicks, contemplating that very deliciousness of which we speak, it was not a question I had ever paused to ask myself; I was caught uncomfortably off-guard. Ever try to justify your passion with reason, or explain your peculiar obsession in a way that seems rational to someone not equally disposed? It's like having someone ask, "Yeah but why exactly does Breyer's Chocolate Fudge Twirl taste like heaven to you?" Dunno. Maybe it's because of the particular taste buds I was born with, or maybe it's just something I learned...
I was a "monster kid:" suckled at the glass tit of TV's Shock Theater and the original Universal fright flicks; nurtured on Uncle Forry Ackerman's "Famous Monsters of Filmland" magazine; nourished on Hammer and AIP quickies. If horror entertainment is food, I seem to have been born hungry, and it has never been a hunger which can be sated more than momentarily. How come? Why not a healthy interest in sports or cars or sports cars or some acceptably mundane fascination like the other (presumably "normal") kids? Why the incessant need to deal with fear and horror; what's really going on here? How does this need (as palpable to me as the need for food, water, shelter) arise in the first place? How did I get this way? How did I become a (gasp!) horror junkie?!? The initial response to my friends casual question, after some awkward hesitation, was: "Horror films take me beyond." Meaning beyond the arbitrary confines of our dreary notions of what constitutes "reality" (another word that should always be contained in quotation marks), to something (if the film-makers are skillful) far more interesting. True enough as far as it goes, but entirely insufficient. If the most obvious intent of the genre is to frighten and shock, why is the experience of same as an artistic effect something to be desired? What is the use of that to us? It is a commonplace observation that the experience of a horror story is cathartic; that we deal with our everyday fears safely and manageably via the horror film experience, and that this process is arguably healthy; a natural way to cope with natural anxieties. Won't argue with that, but it also seems insufficient as explanation. Something is going on at yet a deeper level. I've seen about as many horror flicks as anyone living or undead. A few favorites I've seen dozens, maybe hundreds of times. Here's a little something just between you and me, gentle reader - I have occasionally been disturbed by the contents of a film; sometimes jolted or downright disgusted; I have been surprised and awed, pleased and disappointed, filled with admiration or repugnance, but I have never, not since I was maybe ten or eleven years old, been genuinely frightened by a horror film. Agitated, disconcerted, even angry - but spooked to the core? Nope. Movies don't scare me - they are artificial dreams, representations of experience in which I may freely choose to indulge or not. Yet I keep watching, searching and re-searching relentlessly, looking for that uniquely transcendent moment of inspired fear, like an addict devoted to attaining the perfect high. And the only reason to keep doing that day after day, year after year for a lifetime, is that somehow, at some level, I need to be afraid. It is important to be afraid. Important for all of us. Important for our survival, important to our success and our evolution as a species. We need to be afraid now. Think about it: films and stories that communicate a sense of horror have become increasingly central to our culture and our mythology (the tales we tell to explain how the world works) over the last century or so, and exponentially so over recent decades. My shelves bulge with books detailing the origins, history, trends, styles, personalities and specific artifacts of the genre/business of Horror. From Freudian analysis of genre tropes, through studies of promotional techniques, to nostalgic reverie or intimate biography, we do seem to be interested. The critical study of horror film is itself now an ensconced publishing genre. The popular appeal of horror as a genre, historically cyclical and designated as low-brow stuff, has in recent decades exploded, bringing with it increased critical acceptance and legitimacy. In another age, Americans used to represent themselves with the Western; a sunny, spacious dream of gallant cowboys, savage injuns, mustachioed bad-guys, wide-open landscapes and home-spun ideology. Now we represent ourselves with tales of torture and madness, psychosis and brutality, and grim, bloody pasts that keep intruding on our present. If the movies we make help define us, what do we really think of ourselves now? More and more, as individuals and as part of a mass-cultural ritual, we need to be horrified. What does this reflect about the world we live in? If these films speak to growing numbers of us, what are we listening for so intently? What is it we really need to hear and see? Dreams are a way we communicate with ourselves, exploring and questioning the wonders and frustrations, the joys, pains and fears of our existence; employing strange yet familiar images, symbols, characters and scenarios; conveying messages and allegories. Dreams are how we tell ourselves stories that mean something to us, that need to be told, even if one portion of our awareness is unable or unwilling to interpret what the other portion is saying. In our dreams we process and examine our experience through a different lens than that of what we naively refer to as the "conscious" mind, and through this lens it is possible (for those who can see beyond their own smug certitudes) to obtain useful insights unavailable to our ordinary vision. Dreams are often a vehicle through which our larger and wiser awareness may point to truths about ourselves that we have lost or have been conditioned not to acknowledge, that we may recognize them by looking at them in a different guise, from a different perspective. The dreams we dream with our eyes closed in sleep arise naturally out of the perplexities, complexities and contradictions of our day-to-day lives: an ongoing dialogue we have with ourselves as individuals. The dreams we craft communally, that come unspooling from our collective dream projector and are encountered with eyes wide, are a conversation we are having with each other. It also is a conversation which arises out of our shared delights, anxieties and confusions. It is a conversation shared across space and time and between dimensions, in which echo the contributions of both living and dead. Our consciousness is inhabited at least as much by the dead and what they have willed to us as it is by anything truly alive, but all have things to tell us. We cannot understand ourselves unless we understand our dreams. We cannot understand ourselves unless we understand why we continue to dream such horrible dreams. We conjure up the dreams and call down the visions because we must; because it is in our nature to do so (and Nature is Insistent); because they are a vast resource of self-knowledge, a survival strategy, an evolutionary mechanism, and because, thankfully, we have not yet learned how not to. It is at the crux of the human situation, it seems, that we are no more able, as a species, to keep from trying to uncover the truth than we are able to keep from bullshitting ourselves about it. So we dream our little dreams and make our little flicks and wonder what it all means. The nature of truth is that it is alive. The nature of truth is that it is fluid. It is existential; as transient as life itself. It cannot be grasped, held frozen and immobile for our leisurely study; admired like some ancient, sacred museum artifact. It cannot be contained by doctrines, philosophies, ideologies or paradigms. It is permeant (not permanent, permeant - look it up), indefinable, and, while it may be eternal, it is an eternal flux. It cannot be understood (as conventional minds understand things - and every mind is conventional), it can only be encountered, experienced. But the truth can be pointed to (as those clever Buddhists remind us) in the way that a finger may point to the moon. And if we are alert enough to discover the moon, rather than gaze dumbly at the finger, there is the possibility that we may encounter truth and be amazed. That is what our most urgent, insistent recurring dreams do for us - it is their function to be a finger pointing at something we need to recognize. That is what great fiction does, what myth does, what great storytellers have always done; what Jesus and Buddha did when speaking in parables to masses of people with little understanding: fabricate a finger of functional lies (a story) with which to point at the truth. All words are lies in that they are feeble representations of truth, not the thing itself. But some lies (fictions) are more useful in pointing to the truth than any attempt at direct apprehension could ever be. The reason we have developed such a strategy for delivering apprehension of the truth should be self evident to the discerning: we can't handle the truth. We just don't want to know. That's 'cause we're completely full of shit. Our mundane consciousness (what we erroneously think of as our waking mind) is itself a monumental prison of misconception, illusion and self deceit. This is the case for every human being everywhere. We are, above all else, a species of bullshitters living in a world of our own bullshit. We make our livings bullshitting each other and live with that by bullshitting ourselves. We live, murder and die by bullshit creeds, bullshit politics, bullshit ideologies, bullshit economics; bullshit theories of everything, based on utterly bullshit assumptions. Bullshit fouls the air we breathe, poisons our water, rots the flesh of our bodies, clogs our ears, blurs our vision, fills our sad, whimpering mouths with its flavor, our nostrils with its stench. We are suffocating; drowning in a morass of bullshit -and we made it this way. Worse, we seem to want to keep it this way. No one is responsible but us. Not God. Not Satan. Not a cabal of evil aliens. Just us. This is largely so because we prefer our fevered bullshit (after all, some among us seem to profit in the most extreme manner from propagating a bullshit world) to the difficult and odious task of self-examination. And let us not forget that, for the most part, nothing in this world is punished more swiftly than honesty. Far better, far simpler, far easier to fit in with the crowd by embracing our decayed and putrid delusions, marrying the thousand corpses of our beliefs and anointing ourselves with bullshit. It is the Law: what we run from pursues us. What is repressed will return, in one form or another. What we refuse to acknowledge clings to us with the tenacity of shadow. Our waking minds flee from the revelation of what we have become, what we have done to ourselves, the hideous disfigurements we impose on ourselves. But we are stalked relentlessly in our dreams, shadowed in nightmare. Our dreams have something to show us, if we are willing to not look away. Our nightmares instruct us, if we are open to the terrible knowledge at which they so dramatically point a finger. At the deepest level of our awareness, we already know the truth. We simply, like an addict in denial, prefer to ignore, prefer to look away. Because it is uncomfortable, because it is scary, and because please-oh-please-fucking-god I don't want to have to take responsibility. But our dreams call to us, as insistent as nature herself. Sometimes they scream. They scream to us that we live in a fucking horror movie! We are the desperate treacherous characters, the clueless heroes and the screeching monsters, victims and villains in turn, all in one hapless, demented amalgam. We make and watch horror movies because they reflect (through manipulation of metaphor) upon the world we have created, as it actually is, in exactly the horrifying way we need to understand it. "You may think me mad." That is how the tale traditionally begins, our tormented narrator doomed to disbelief by the very nature of his tale, yet driven to deliver his warning, knowing he is to be branded a mere lunatic, or some pathetic example of mental breakdown. Still the sheer weight and momentum of horror spurs him on: a pitiful unfortunate, fated to carry his message to minds that will not comprehend. H.P.Lovecraft (arguably the most important writer of the 20th century [an argument I hope to put forth in some later entry]) wrote this story many times. Many others have put forth countless variations on the tale. It is a successful template, when approached with conviction, because we recognize its authenticity. You may believe yourself sophisticated, educated, well aware of the dangers and chaos threatening us. You may cite a dose of the evening news as communicating sufficient horrors to sate any appetite or challenge anyone's notions of sanity. But, as the pitchman says, wait! There's more! Even now, as you consider yourself snug and secure, perhaps even smirking in amusement, we are being cultivated as food for slavering, soulless behemoths. Even now, hordes of ravenous zombies roam and ravage the countryside, motivated only by the unquenchable need to consume. Even now, vampires (alone and in packs) stalk us malevolently, with no greater goal than to suck everything of value from us. Even now, our every vital institution is infested with relentless, single minded automatons of corruption, bent on the institutionalization of our enslavement. Even now, our destiny is presided over by insidious, chuckling demons. Are you at all sympathetic to the madman who declaims these unthinkable things, or are you given to mockery? Would you cross the street to get away? Or do you simply think me mad? The undisputed, indispensable master of horror, H P.Lovecraft, prefaced one of his most beloved tales with the profoundly unnerving admonition that, "The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all of its contents." In other words, if we were truly able to understand what is actually happening to us, we would recoil in despair and seek refuge in madness. What a pretty summing up. While the reputable sages intone that the truth will set you free, Lovecraft reminds us that we can't handle the truth. Are we doomed no matter which way we turn? For Lovecraft's protagonists, there was no happy solution. Most often they were destroyed or permanently debilitated, unable to come to terms with their bitter discoveries, their awful knowledge. If this is our unavoidable fate, what is the point of such an investigation as this? How horrible is the truth? George Orwell (in his brilliantly perceptive novel, 1984, a genuine horror story if there ever was one) wove his insights into the mad world of his own time into a nightmare of eternal human damnation and degradation. The fruition of his prophetic premonition is the world we have made; the world we inhabit; the world we are conditioned to think of as normal, as "reality." We are scarcely able to speak of it, the very words of our language corrupted in meaning and distorted beyond recognition by the ceaseless, remorseless hyperbole of consumer culture, and the hysterical, excessive blather of an overbearing and omnipresent media onslaught. We have grown to expect to be lied to - all day, every day, battered into submission by bludgeons of bullshit. We can no longer hear ourselves think, but it hardly matters, since what we think most often merely echoes the ignorance, stupidity and confusion by which we are surrounded. Petrified politics , mummified religion, and the mouthings of the pitiless professional con artists who inhabit our public institutions assault us 'round the clock with a perpetual, brain-numbing bombardment of deliberate lies, hateful rhetoric; coded, emotionally charged disfigurements of language that mean entirely the opposite of what they say; the language of brain-washers, bunco artist and bureaucrats. The swifter and more technically dazzling our methods of communication become, the less we seem able to say anything truly meaningful about ourselves or our world; the less we seem able to truly communicate (a word which, to my mind, implies genuine understanding) with each other. The complexities and subtleties of our language are crudely hammered and brutally blunted; the delicate tool of our understanding refashioned into a clumsy battle club. We huddle beneath an interminable barrage of information, misinformation and dis-information, and all we can experience is angst. Our so-called educational system has been focused to ensure our continued vapidity, docility and general dullness. We are entitled to our opinion, we repeat to ourselves as mantra, but we are largely, in fact, far too utterly and willfully ignorant to be entitled to an opinion. The horrible truth is that we have taken on as our "reality" a debased and demented vision in which human beings have been re-defined and re-valued as "consumers." Consumers! What a terrible and monstrous race of beings these must be, with drooling jaws hanging agape, yellow fangs smeared with goods 'n' gore, devouring everything in their path, leaving nothing behind but barren waste. "The Consumers will soon overwhelm us, Captain; it's escape into hyperspace or face a grisly digestion!" Is this what we are now: conscienceless, one dimensional beasts on a rampage of uncaring, indiscriminate destruction? The Gospel of Thomas is an ancient text of (until relatively recently) hidden knowledge such as might be a prop in any good horror story. It might even be called a forbidden text, as it remains unrecognized by official guardians of institutional theological bullshit. In it, Jesus is asked by his disciples about heaven - what it might be like, when they will see it, know it, experience it. "The kingdom of Heaven," he replies, "is spread out upon the Earth, but men do not see it." This is the essential mystical truth explained. Our consciousness creates our world, in collaboration with existence itself. Beauty and harmony are the natural habitat of a beautiful and harmonious consciousness. The story of our consciousness, though, is an entirely different story: a horror story. What we experience of the world is a heady concoction, brewed up out of our distilled perceptions and mis-perceptions. We process information through layers of filters made up of our various and innumerable limitations, beginning with the limitations of our senses and proceeding through our conceptual and linguistic inadequacies, our opinions, prejudices, definitions, dispositions (genetic, cultural, moral, psychological), education, training, emotional or psychic states, and the endless, sundry cultural and social conditioning that informs our every thought, word and deed, and characterize out distinctly stunted world-view(s). What we call "reality" is not an objective state in which we find ourselves, it is an inter-action; an act of co-creation. In short, the "reality" we inhabit contains pretty much whatever we are capable of bringing to it. It has been the function of the traditional mystical teacher to point to our personal responsibility in this area - to help us understand that heaven and harmony are available beneath the surface of our feeble, twisted mis-perceptions. Heaven is real. It is all around us; not on some puffy white cloud hovering uselessly in some distant eternity, but available to us in this very life, in this very moment, within us and without us. We need only let it be so. But the sword has two edges, and the coin always, always has two sides. So...what we are mostly busy creating is an extravagant, boundless hell-on-earth. It is here. It is real. Not out of our sight in some eternal flaming underworld, but here-now; in this world, in our heads, in our hearts. We make Hell, and we make it every goddam day. It is the function of another style of teacher than the traditional mystic to point to the malignity that lies beneath the surface of our "normal" world, and to make us as uncomfortable about it as possible. Because we are responsible for it. So here we are. We make our little movies, tell our little stories, dream our collective dreams, and huddle together to watch them play out in wondrous variation, over and over, mesmerized, captivated, spellbound; drawn to the telling by forces larger than logic. These horror stories we seek out, they fascinate us not because we are lost in foolish fantasy, but because we are desperate for some way of understanding. The movies we make, the dreams we dream, tell us that we are in mortal peril; our souls, our humanity. To ignore or trivialize them is foolish. Implicit in the question, "Why do you like horror films so much?" is a vague underlying refutation of their validity. We assume that movies, though they may most often be as crass and commercially motivated as any other popular form of expression, are at least a valid and proven form worthy of our attention and sometimes attain to what we classify as "Art." Yet the assumption historically made about horror films is that they somehow fail to be an acceptable form, that they have nothing to offer but thrills for the empty-headed. More accurately phrased to express its veiled cultural assumptions, the question might be put thusly: " How can you be so depraved as to find enjoyment in those tawdry, tedious, trashy, trivial, silly, dreadful, degenerate, indecent, immoral, ugly, unpleasant, rude, repulsive, bloody shameful and crappy films that have no value?!?" Horror flicks are the impudent bastard child of the movie biz, disreputable because they attempt to speak of the unspoken and the unspeakable; a societal nuisance always pointing out the clothes-less emperor; a breaker of taboos and a dancer on the brink of the abyss; explorer of forbidden territories whose position in conventional culture is perhaps only slightly superior to that of (gasp!) pornography. To explore forbidden realms is at the root of our nature: it may be our most truly human attribute. I don't know about you, but this is how I am: for me, the most enticing, seductive configuration of letters in the entire English language is the word, "forbidden." I am unable even to think the word without an accompanying tingle of excitement and a hint of lustful smile. The word has a powerful attraction; it provokes me, challenges me. The need is strong to see what I will see and know what I will know. This stance of defiance is more a part of my identity than my name, an integral part of what it means for me to be whole and thriving. I want a little bite of that apple, Lord, 'cause that's the way you goddam made me. I have another friend who won't watch horror films because, he says, he doesn't like to be scared. Can't say I blame him. I've been genuinely afraid in my life, and it's not an experience any sane soul would look forward to repeating. But movies don't scare me. What scares me is that millions of people look to be informed by Fox News. What scares me is the apathetic indifference with which we accept, even justify, a way of life that robs the poorest and weakest to fatten the richest and most powerful. What scares me is that we now live in a society which sees law enforcement and the so-called "criminal justice system" as a source of revenue. What scares me is the dissolution of individual rights at the hands of corporate power and greed. What scares me is the institutionalization of corruption engendered by a "war on drugs" that is in reality a war to suppress any notion that we are free individuals, or that there can be any other world than a world of repression, depression and enslavement to 'Authority." What scares me is you. People. Ordinary people, a world full of them, arrogant and ignorant enough to take their own blinkered vision for a true picture of the world. Stupid enough to accept the putrid posturings of political pundits and religious hucksters as anything but the repulsive bullshit it is. Vile and venal enough to vote George Bush into the presidency. Twice. Goddam you, you know who you are. Do you think me mad? If this world we have made is sane; if our political leaders are sane; if our religious leaders are sane; if our business leaders and Wall St. gurus are sane; if our institutions are sane, our values are sane, our history is sane, our beliefs are sane; if our behavior as a species is sane, then perhaps, gentle reader, a touch of madness might be refreshing; a healthy dose of it nourishing, a surrender to it revitalizing. I grow ill with sanity. Enough. I've come all this way, decades on this twisted road, to arrive at the castle. There is no turning back for me, just exploration to be done. Come and go mad with me, naked and delirious. And if something screams, howling ferociously to be heard, just keep repeating to yourself... ...it's only a movie. |
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