The Haunted City: on Horror Fiction

I have always loved horror.  When I was a wee lad, my favorite television show was Fantastic Features, which presented horror movies each Friday and Saturday night.  The host wore a vampire costume with cape and medal included.  He announced himself this way: “I am Sivad, your Monster of Ceremonies!”  You can see the lead clip at the link above. 

I mentioned my theory of genres in a previous post.  I repeat it here. 

I have a theory about genres.  Each is centered on some essential idea, usually attached to certain special signs.  Westerns, for example, are essentially about the frontier: the grey land between civilization and the utter lawlessness of the uncivilized territories, coupled with the signs of horses, hats, and handguns.  The samurai movie genre is very similar, if you trade swords for guns and modify the architecture.  Horror is about the idea that evil can be a real force in the world, like gravity or electricity.  Science fiction rests on the idea of a constantly expanding scientific view of the Kosmos and the surprises that such a view might hold.

Horror fiction is very popular.  Scan the Apple Movie Trailers site and you will always see a few horror offerings, even when Halloween is not approaching.  But it is approaching, as so my mind turns toward the October side of life.  It is a good time to think about the dead.  Summer is sinking as fast as the sun in the west, and much of what makes life rich is sinking with it.  Death, I read somewhere, is always behind us; but sometimes it turns off its lights.  In October, its lights are one and glowing with an orange titled just a bit to the side of crimson. 

Horror, as I say above, is about the idea that evil is a real force in the world.  It is frequently personified, as in all the vampires and devils that populate the genre.  Occasionally, it gets biologized.  In a very good film, The Creeping Flesh, starring two horror superstars Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, evil is a microorganism with a nucleus and tentacles.  That same idea animates almost all zombie films, including a recent superb offering: The Girl with All the Gifts. 

The above are examples of the cross-pollinization of horror and science fiction.  A lot of science fiction falls into this category overlap.  Consider “Who Goes There?”, the novella that was filmed as The Thing from Another World and John Carpenter’s brilliant remake, The Thing.  In the novella, a scientist and a military officer are looking at the frozen corpse of the monster.  The scientist can see only a hopeful possibility.  Perhaps the scary look on its face is only scary to us.  Maybe on its world that was a look of compassion.  The soldier is not fooled.  He recognizes it as malevolent, and unfortunately, he is right. 

More often, horror depends on premodern notions of good and evil.  In Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the vampire and his henchman worship the Devil.  “I bring you spoiled flesh…”  Even then, modernity presses in.  In Salem’s Lot as in almost all horror rooted in ancient mythology, evil is very vivid and personal.  The vampire has a name and speaks.  Good is perhaps more powerful, but it is anonymous and silent.  When the hero finally faces the vampire, he pours holy water over his axe.  The water glows with eerie green light but we are told that it is older than any mythology we still have. 

Why do we like this sort of thing?  I have an idea.  It’s the same reason I like English beer.  It’s bitter.  Our response to bitter is an evolved psychological mechanism.  It alerts us to a possible poison in what we are tempted to eat, just as the smell of spoiled meat alerts us to the same.  Pregnant women are especially sensitive to both, so much so that they sometimes faint after exposure to the latter. 

And yet, most of us can adjust to the taste of bitter, if we consume it without ill effects.  This is another of our great gifts: the ability to adapt to new items on the smorgasbord.  Genuine fear is hardly pleasant; however, fear in small doses, in a context where we feel safe, stimulates us.  More exactly, it engages us.  We sit around the fire and listen the story.  By scaring us, the evil binds us together.  All of us are threatened.  We get behind the hero as we listen and so invested, we enjoy his triumph. 

That is an interpretation of our horror genre as an adaptation.  A lot of our pleasures are not adaptations but by-products of such adaptations.  The hero does not always triumph.  We enjoy tragedy as much as triumph.  That is a consequence of our extraordinary capacity for adaptation to new environments.  We can put together our emotional responses and assemble tales and tastes that have no adaptive value; they merely please us. 

We are fond of stories that end well and of stories that end badly.  The latter may teach us something and that may be one reason we tell them.  It is not why we enjoy them.  We enjoy them because they speak to parts of our souls that add up to the beautiful.  This is what makes it possible for us to appreciate being human.  Horror fiction composes its tapestries from such materials as I have described.  It is occasionally edifying.  It is always entertaining. 

Horror fiction may be edifying in so far as it teaches us to stand together against evil.  It is also edifying in so far as it teaches us that evil is real.  Most of the bad things that people do they do for reasons that all of us can easily understand.  The thief wants money.  The jilted husband wants revenge.  It is easy to dismiss such things as just human nature.  Someone firing down on a crowd, someone neither insane nor motivated by a murderous ideology or religion, that is something else. 

Evil is real.  It is best to remember that.  Happy Halloween.  

The City without Gods: on Noir Fiction

Last week I had dinner at John’s Grill in San Francisco, with several friends from the APSA convention I was attending.  I ordered “Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops” from the menu, because I like lamb chops and noir fiction.  It was superb.  Six or seven lamb chops with a baked potato and sliced tomato.  In Dashiell Hammett’s most famous work‑The Maltese Falcon‑that is what Spade ate in that venue.  The restaurant had a small shrine to Hammett’s novel in the back, toward the latrine where everyone would pass it.  I didn't know it at the time, but I was constantly on streets mentioned in the novel: Stockten, Bush, Geary, and Kearny.  

Later, alone, I walked up Kearny to the Occidental Cigar Bar.  This is one of the last civilized places in California.  Apparently, it was “grandfathered in” when the same wise solons who are trying to promote the smoking of marijuana were trying to stamp out the smoking of tobacco. 

It is a narrow room with tables and chairs arranged in the space not occupied by the bar.  When I entered, there were two men dressed in pin stripped suits and hats smoking at the bar.  I had more or less walked my way into Hammett’s world. 

I sat at a table next to the big window, where I could watch people walk or drive by.  I lit a fine, square bodied cigar with a Maduro rapper and sipped on an excellent IPA.  The scotch was unaffordable.  I downloaded the first chapter of The Maltese Falcon and read, occasionally looking up at the passersby.  That is how I do San Francisco.

I have a theory about genres.  Each is centered on some essential idea, usually attached to certain special signs.  Westerns, for example, are essentially about the frontier: the grey land between civilization and the utter lawlessness of the uncivilized territories, coupled with the signs of horses, hats, and handguns.  The samurai movie genre is very similar, if you trade swords for guns and modify the architecture.  Horror is about the idea that evil can be a real force in the world, like gravity or electricity.  Science fiction rests on the idea of a constantly expanding scientific view of the Kosmos and the surprises that such a view might hold. 

So, what about noir fiction?  I submit that the genre is centered on the city without gods.  Almost all of the noir films I have seen or fiction I have read take place in modern cities.  Even those that take place outside it presuppose a larger civilization.  The city is a relatively recent innovation in human history, meaning that it appears only about 12,000 years ago.  For most of that time, cities were watched over by gods.  To be a citizen of ancient Athens was to be a member of the cult of Athena Nike, the goddess of wisdom and victory.  The gods reinforced the social contract on which each city depends and give the citizens‑those who must stand against the city’s enemies‑some reason for confidence and comfort. 

Noir fiction takes place in a realm that is utterly demythologized.  There are neither gods nor ghosts in world laid out by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.  The streets are dark and foggy, with nothing but black overhead.  Death is a constant presence, but there is not even a hint of anything beyond it.  Death is the big sleep. 

Evil, on the other hand, is very real.  Nearly everyone is morally comprised and knows it.  “I’ve been bad,” says Brigid O'Shaughnessy to Sam Spade.  What is true of Brigid is true of both the gaggle of lowlifes and the police.  There is no sense of any higher order, no confidence in patriotism, the rule of law, etc.  One wonders what meaning evil might have if there is nothing else in the human world. 

But of course, there is something else.  That is the hero.  Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Hammett’s Spade are heroes.  Neither is a saint or the ideal boy scout.  Yet each has a set of moral rules that he strictly follows and each is the best man in the story.  Both of these heroes risk their lives to defend those who deserve to be defended, or mostly deserve it. 

When I was, very briefly and a long time ago, a psychology major, I was taught that morality was socially constructed.  We only behaved according to moral rules because we were taught to do so by the other human beings amongst whom we lived.  If that were true, noir fiction would be impossible.  The bad would have no sense that they were bad and the good, no sense of what it means to be good. 

Human beings are moral animals.  We think in terms of right and wrong as naturally as we think in terms of pain and pleasure.  Even in a city without gods, we still act as though we are obligated to someone or something with authority over us.  Biosocial theory can explain how we came to be such creatures. 

It cannot tell us whether we can make morality work in the absence of gods or God.  In noir fiction, the hero is a small island in a sea of iniquity.  That is small comfort.  It is nonetheless comforting.  We love the story because the hero is beautiful.  That, perhaps, is what we have to concentrate on.