In the opening scene of George Romero’s 1968-horror classic “Night of the Living Dead,” two characters ― Barbra and Johnny ― drive along a convoluted rural road. They’re visiting a desolate cemetery where their father lays buried. He has been dead for many years ― in fact so long that Johnny doesn’t even remember what he looks like.
Barbra and Johnny are both adults now, living in a big city, far away from the place where they grew up. They’ve been making the annual trip to their father’s grave many times ― out of a sense of duty rather than grief. While laying the wreath at the grave, they argue and tease each other, like siblings do; the mood is relaxed, jovial ― perhaps even a tad disrespectful.
After all, they’re visiting the home of the dead. Or so we thought ― because soon the quotidian atmosphere is broken when a strange-looking person starts harassing them for no apparent reason. Strange-looking, that is, because the person is in fact already dead. At this point, the film turns into a shocking tale of gory zombies, cannibalism and a desperate struggle for survival.
Romero’s film caused a great deal of controversy when it came out in 1968. Several critics advised kids and people with weak health to avoid it. Others argued that any normal, sane person ought to avoid it as well. Labeled “pornography of violence,” “Night of the Living Dead” set a new standard for the horror genre, a standard to which every decent horror film director has since aspired. And despite its age, the film still has a remarkably modern feel. That’s of course why it is considered a classic, although one may also surmise that it has something to do with the genre itself. For there is a sense in which the most shocking aspect of the film ― at least for a contemporary audience ― is its brutal exposure of how little the horror genre has managed to evolve over the years. Accustomed to the horror genre’s tricks and gimmicks ― the genre’s endless variations of the same monotonous shocks and thrills ― one wonders if a contemporary audience can ever be as profoundly shocked as the virginal viewers who watched Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” when it premiered in 1968. After all, there are only so many ways a body can be mutilated, and we’ve seen them all by now.
But the genre remains popular as ever, despite its repetitiveness. Or perhaps precisely because of its repetitiveness ― for there is something obsessively repetitive about the horror film. There is a sense in which any recent film about zombies eating human flesh is merely a slightly altered remake of an older one ― even if the manuscript is supposed to be original.
But why is it that we happily watch a new horror film in which people die in more or less the same way as they’ve always done, whereas few would be willing to re-watch a particular horror film?
Perhaps because the zombies essentially represent the same thing, something monstrous, and clearly something we fear; something we compulsively need to encounter and overcome ― in whatever form it comes, and however unpleasant it might turn out to be.
In the essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” from 1920, Sigmund Freud wondered why certain patients of his repeatedly relived painful episodes. He came to the conclusion that they unconsciously attempted to master and control traumatic experiences ― if only in an imaginary sense ― by repeating them, again and again. Freud called this “repetition compulsion,” and it is a concept which helps us understand ― albeit in a more general sense ― the compulsion to watch zombies and other unpleasant personalities on the screen.
There is, in other words, something pathological about repeatedly exposing oneself to fear and horror ― evidence of something we’ve never quite managed to master, and therefore are doomed to relive. To master fear gives us a sense of satisfaction, pleasure even ― the pleasurable feeling of breathing a sigh of relief after the horror film has come to an end. A similar feeling occurs when we wake up after a terrible nightmare.
Ernest Jones’s 1931-book “On the Nightmare” adds another dimension to the fascinations of horror. Jones asks why it is that one simultaneously feels drawn toward as well as repulsed by horror. Discussing the horror of a nightmare, Jones argues that it consists of a combination of two things ― a secret, immoral wish fantasy, and a censoring, prohibitive mechanism. Through this profoundly ambiguous construction one is permitted to pursue a socially unacceptable desire while also censoring it ― at one and the same time. Because of its immoral, transgressive character, the wish fantasy can never appear in its direct representational form ― which explains why it has to be disguised (or deformed) as a monstrous, sadistic body. Jones’ argument is thus that the nightmare embodies a kind of give-and-take dialectic, a compromise that reconciles two opposed forces. It is as if this give-and-take logic suggests that we can have our innermost, repressed desire fulfilled, but only in the form of sheer horror; horror is the price to pay for our forbidden pleasure. What we desire most becomes our greatest fear. Thus, we can indulge in the desired object without feeling any guilt ― just horror.
But what is our innermost desire? To Sigmund Freud, what we desire most is related to the lawless, the transgressive, the pre-oedipal; that which lies before the establishment of law and order. In his essay “Civilization and Its Discontents” from 1929, Freud outlines three basic taboos on which all civilized societies are based; incest, cannibalism, and murder. The observance of these taboos is essentially that which holds society together, according to Freud; transgression equals the destruction of civilization. Culture, rationality, and normality begin with the prohibition.
In the act of disobeying prohibition, horror begins and culture breaks down. The horror genre circles around this breakdown, this original transgression of the taboo. For example, Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) is essentially an incestuous fantasy about a boy who can’t let go of mom ― although the trouble is that the boy is a grown-up man, and his mother has long been dead.
A similar theme we find in “Night of the Living Dead,” where a little girl devours her own mother, as though she wanted to possess her forever. Barbra and Johnny visit their father’s grave, but the dead father comes back to eat them, as if he wanted to possess them forever. “Night of the Living Dead” begins with a scene weighed down by the humdrum of normality, and which is suddenly interrupted by transgression, violence and monstrosity; the film ends with normality being restored. And yet, something about the ending doesn’t feel quite right. The film’s main character, the only moral hero of the film, is a black guy called Ben, who bravely fights off swarms of zombies to protect a small group of human survivors, holed up in an old country house.
However, when the rescuers finally arrive, they ironically think he’s a zombie and shoot him in the head. It is here the film’s greatest insight lies. For what the horror genre implicitly questions is what actually constitutes normality and what constitutes monstrosity.
Normality may be restored, but only at a certain cost; the horror genre asks us what we actually get for our money. Underneath this question we feel the uncertainty, the doubt ― the suspicion that things might in fact be the other way around; that we are not dealing with a normal society dreaming, momentarily, while watching a horror film, of a world suddenly become monstrous ― but rather a monstrous society dreaming, momentarily, of a world suddenly become normal.
By Eli Park Sorensen
Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.