Horror is so much more than simple entertainment, argues the Flemish philosopher Dimitri Goossens. His attempt to provide the horror genre with a philosophical basis is partly convincing.
Our modern Western culture has a problem with death, says the Flemish philosopher Dimitri Goossens. We prefer to cover that up; we just pretend it doesn’t exist. And of course that’s not possible. Because sooner or later death will catch up with us all. To deal with that nagging realization, we need outlets.
Horror, Goossens argues in his book In the Eyes of Medusa: Philosophy and the Dark Mirror of Horror, offers such an outlet. By framing horror philosophically, he hopes to clarify why the genre is so much more than cheap thrill-satisfaction.
In his book, Goossens takes horror from the obscure margins of popular culture and places it at the heart of our modern society. With a brief history of the genre, which takes him through novels such as Frankenstein, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula Goossens shows in an entertaining way how horror is a child of the Enlightenment. Because it is precisely a culture that places reason and progress on a pedestal that is susceptible to art and literature that attacks such matters (Goossens conveniently ignores non-Western horror).
Gods with anuses
In this way, horror holds up a mirror to us. One in which we see our cultural taboos and aversions reflected. But above all, horror confronts us with our mortality, says Goossens. In the myth of Medusa he finds a metaphor to explain this. Anyone who looked directly at this witch from Greek mythology was petrified on the spot. The hero Perseus defeated Medusa by only seeing her reflection through his shield. Horror, Goossens argues, is like Perseus’ shield a way to derivatively experience something to which we have no direct access.
So death. After all, we cannot experience it ourselves and we only ‘know’ it from images. Images like those shown to us in horror. Watching a horror film is therefore staring at our own vulnerability, Goossens writes. What we try to brush away as much as possible in everyday life can be brought to our attention through horror films: the realization that we are not gods, but ‘gods with anuses’, as Goossens quotes the American anthropologist Ernest Becker. So bodies. Bodies that cause discomfort, wear out, eventually stop working. That reality is the sensitive spot that horror presses viciously on, the Flemish philosopher emphasizes again and again.
A stimulating argument, but gradually the question arises whether Goossens does not ignore too many qualities that are inextricably linked to the genre – the grotesque, the eccentricity, the camp – that do not necessarily make death palpable. I can’t easily imagine a horror film that made me leave the cinema with a renewed sense of death.
So in which films exactly does this ‘grave ground’ manifest itself in which we look our mortality in the face? Is that a potential that all horror films have? Or do certain conditions have to be met? And which one? Unfortunately, Goossens hardly supports his story with concrete films. That is to say: he throws around titles, but goes into very little depth about few films. Yes, slashers are regularly mentioned, but don’t these films prove that with a whole bunch of deaths, death itself is not necessarily thematized?
Perhaps it is more interesting to In the eyes of Medusa can be read not so much descriptively as normatively: a starting point for what horror could be.
In abstract
Goossens supports his story with the work of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Julia Kristeva and especially Georges Bataille. Not the most accessible thinkers, what In the eyes of Medusa at times incurs heavy costs. Certainly in the second half of the book, in which Goossens extensively discusses the relationship between horror and the sublime, the hermetic language of cultural philosophy gains the upper hand. It contributes to the feeling that Goossens has developed his concept of horror mainly in the abstract, separated from what can be seen in the cinemas.
More powerful are the passages in which Goossens shows that horror can be about so much more than existential fear of death. For example, in a chapter devoted to zombie films, he discusses how this monster has its origins in the colonial history of the Caribbean and was later transformed in the films of George A. Romero into a vehicle for addressing racism and consumerism in American culture. Horror as a mirror, but one that shows something very different from the private fears of the individual.
In the Eyes of Medusa: Philosophy and the Dark Mirror of Horror Dimitri Goossens | Tree | 288 pages | €29.90
