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Uncanny
The effect generated by supernatural horror depends to a large extent on a sensation of the 'uncanny'. In one of his seminal papers, Freud defined the uncanny as something familiar in the subject's history that has, however, been de-familiarized by repression so that the encounter with the uncanny object appears to strike a chord in the subject's unconscious while conscious perception somehow remains uncomprehending, 'lags behind'. Only the cultural, divided subject is therefore capable of uncanny experience. According to Freud, the fear that is induced by the uncanny object is thus always a fear of castration, the agent of the original repression. Thus, the uncanny 'sandman' in E.T.A. Hoffman's fairy tale, who induces the irrational fear of having one's eyes gouged is seen to connote an underlying castration anxiety.
Frequently, an object in a horror movie is perceived as uncanny when there is a sense that there is something 'in the object more than the object itself'. This can be illustrated in terms of a device which is common in Gothic horror movies such as the Hammer films: A old portrait in an historic mansion bears an uncanny resemblance to one of the current inhabitants.
This 'phallic detail', holding the key to an unexplained mystery, facilitates an interpretation of present events and charges that process of interpretation on part of the viewer with desire. In Richard Stanley's Dust Devil (1992), the demon in that movie appears to have been vanquished at the end of the film as the heroine walks serenely into the sunset. However, an uncanny detail, the way in which the heroine bends down to place her ear on the asphalt of the road she is walking, evokes the well-known behavioural pattern of the 'dust devil', suggesting that he may have possessed her body.
The conclusion we may draw here is that a sense of the uncanny in supernatural horror is always associated with some form of dislocation, either in terms of a historic or a spatial dimension that is focalized in a single object, thereby reflecting the dislocation introduced into the subject by the phallic signifier.
Repressed desires and taboos
Horror movies as a 'debased genre' may also concern the return of a repressed religious or mystical tradition which has become an 'illegitimate' subject in other art forms. From that perspective, the pleasure of viewing horror movies results from their connection to a mystical or occult tradition that has become taboo elsewhere.
Moreover, in our relation to horror movies there appears to be a strange tension between an unbearable, traumatic enjoyment on the one hand, and the pleasure of interpretation and signification as the modus operandi of the cultural subject on the other. When no equilibrium is restored at the end and the enjoyment appears predominantly traumatic, pleasure may be generated retroactively as existential insight and aesthetic appeal are factored into account.
Today, mortality is lessened and negated whereas in the same time becoming more blatant and spectacular. While conflict and unrest are always with us, it has traditionally been those times when Americans feel threatened in their own homes — the A-bomb anxious '50s, the economic upheaval of the '70s and today's terrorism-tormented times — that horror benefits most.
The Void
However, in analyzing the uncanny in horror movies, we shall adopt the Lacanian perspective of symbolic castration as the intervention of the paternal metaphor of the name-of-the-father which subjects the pre-existing orders of the real and the imaginary to a radical revision, instead of Freud's more literal conception. In this light, the uncanny effect characterizing many horror films may well rest on a retroactive signification of the 'phenomenal surface' delineated in a movie. The attention of the viewer is thus captured by some 'phallic' detail sticking out that casts a different light on the passage of events up to that point, introducing abyssal double meanings, creating a new meaning which has never been made explicit but depends on repressed desire. The uncanny moment in a horror movie is thus the point at which the 'naive' perception of the phenomenal surface is supplemented with desire.
According to Lacan, the horror film's monstrous figures of abjection and scenes of terrifying destruction and chaos, “in engaging us in a compulsive return to look, to watch, to know what we dread, snare us in the uncanny, in the pleasure/unpleasure of repetition. That is, snare us in the repeated re-encounter of the jouissance of the Other which I serve insofar as I find my enjoyment, my jouissance, in the desire of the Other, and resist by attempting to master the Other, to abject her. What is required is not the destruction of the monstrous Other—as we know, she always returns! Rather what is necessary is a re-figuring of my relation to the desiring Other through symbolization and not as jouissance.”
From this perspective, the site of the monsters in horror films and horror fiction in the psychic economy can be defined precisely: it is at a point of intersection between a social and a psychological space.
In the same manner in which time and space as the fundamental coordinates allowing the universe to function collapse within the monstrous singularity of a black hole once the 'event horizon' has been crossed, the pivot around which the human universe of meaning is structured is a void. It is an abyss in which determinate meaning comes to an end, and as such associated with an overwhelming force, threatening the stability of the psyche with psychosis, if it is approached too closely.
As we pointed out above, the emergence of the symbolic universe as a complex, differentiated realm in which meaning derives from a system of structural differences depends on the repression of jouissance as the substance of enjoyment. While in a non-pathological universe, all objects have a different signification that set them apart from all other objects, the paranoid, deluded subject deprived of a master signifier detects the same meaning behind everything and associates that meaning with jouissance.
Thus, perfectly ordinary details of our everyday world are taken as evidence for his conspiracy theories by the paranoid subject, so that fragments from arbitrary radio or television broadcasts, for instance, are taken as signs that society is ruled by evil aliens.
Source: Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror - Stefan Gullatz
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