The Twilit FringeAnthropology and Modern Horror Fiction

Martin Bridgstock
In this paper anthropological and social theory will be used to examine the place of horror fiction in modern culture. Some work has already been attempted in this direction by writers such as Cawelti, Clement$ and Punter.3 This paper is intended to extend and clarify the earlier work. One o the most influential theorists in recent years has been the f anthropologist Mary Douglas, particularly in the area of relationships between a societys structures and its co~mology.~ Douglas, a For cosmology is a grid of categories, reflecting social tensions and processes, laid across our perceptions of the universe. The boundaries between categories are often problematic, carrying implications not only for thought but also for the underlying social ~ t r u c t u r e . ~ Clements has used Douglas and other anthropological theory in an attempt to explain the nature of ogres-fictional characters whom we usually find frightening. He suggests that ogres are especially terrifying because they are interstitial.6 That is, they inhabit the borderland between mental categories, thus threatening our entire system of thought and, by implication, the society which generates it.
The real danger.. .of all ogres.. .is that no matter what immediate menace they may project toward other characters in their fictive environments, their very existence menaces the cultures system of distinctions, the categories of the universe which the culture has created.. .They articulate ultimate defiance to humanity by challenging, merely through the nature of their being, the founding constructs upon which all of culture

Clements major example, which he considers in some detail, is the character of Dracula.8 The latter is human in many ways, but completely anti-human in others. Draculas sleeping habits are the opposite of human, and his entire existence is a living death.9 However, it is easy to find interstitial characters in fiction who are not frightening at all. Tolkiens hobbits are half-human and half-elf, yet they are endearing rather than frightening. The Gethenians-from LeGuins The Left Hand of Darkness-are interstitial between male and female, yet they are estimable 115

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and sympathetic creatures. Star Treks Mr. Spock is half-human and half of another race, yet he appears to be the most popular character in the series. These counter-examples indicate that interstitiality is not, by itself, sufficient to turn a character into an ogre. Another problem stems from elementary logic. As thinkers such as Flewlo and Thoulessll have pointed out, anything can be portrayed as intermediate between other entities. In consequence, without a prior specification of the conceptual framework within which interstitiality is defined, there is a danger that the concept is so general as to be meaningless.

Znterstitiality and categorization Douglas appears to distinguish at least three different ways in which cultural categories may be violated. Although they are not labelled in a systematic fashion, these violations could perhaps be termed pollution, moral violation and chaos. Examination of these concepts will clarify the truth-and the limitations-of Clements theory, as well as giving insights into horror fiction. Pollution is the form of violation to which Douglas devotes most study. Her definition of pollution is simply matter out of placel2, but from this she develops a sophisticated analysis of the patterns of organization which different cultures seek to impose upon the material world. Concepts of pollution vary from culture to culture and also may differ from one subculture to another.13 Moral codes are less explicitly dealt with by Douglas, though it is clear that they involve expectations about human behavior generally, in particular with regard to the sacred and to their impact upon other human beings. Douglas, in Natural Symbols4 outlines two standpoints for assessing actions morally. These derive from Bernsteins concepts of positional and personal family backgrounds.15 For Douglas these correspond to different perceptions of morality. One, positional, sees cardinal sins as being formal transgressions of the social structure.l6 The other, personal, is based upon, .being made sensitive to the personal feelings of others.. .Why cant I do it? Because your fathers feeling worried.. .because Ive got a headache. How would you like it if you were a fly? or a dog?l7 Probably most people would accept that any moral system involves, to some degree, systems of rules and some protection for sentient human beings. Moral violations will therefore, presumably, involve either the breach of important moral laws or outrages against people, or both. Finally, and most profound of all, is the distinction between order and chaos. Douglas points out that the lapse into incomprehensibility is inherent in any socially-sustained system of categories.18 She summarizes the effects of a total failure of a cultural system these terms:

. .

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. .on that day there is no pollution and no purity and nothing edible or inedible, credible or incredible, because the classifications o social life are gone. There is no more f meaning.19
Elsewhere, Douglas discusses the major investments which go into a public system of classification, rendering i t conservative, and its participants reluctant to change.20 Clearly, this third category can vary from culture to culture in what it admits, and what i t excludes as chaotic. This applies also to subcultures within the larger culture. It appears to be the fear of many fundamentalist Christians, for example, that if they abandon any part of their strict adherence to the inerrancy o the bible, then their entire f belief-system will collapse.21 Further, many fundamentalist preachers argue that to abandon the biblical basis for morality entails abandoning all aspects of moral and social life.22 For this group, therefore, chaos lies close to the surface in ways that non-fundamentalists find difficult to comprehend. These three types of conceptual boundary are probably not exhaustive. However, they have especial relevance to the study of horror literature. They also enable light to be thrown upon Clements theory. Horror literature and its effects Horror fiction has been extensively commented on, especially by some of its better-known practitioners, such as Stephen Ki11g.2~The three types of category-violation discussed above are in regular use by horror writers, who ascribe a hierarchy of regard to them. The three effects discerned by horror writers are generally called the gross-out, horror, and terror. King-the most successful horror writer of all-has commented upon the three in these terms:
I recognize terror as the finest emotion ...and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify h i d h e r , I will try to horrify. And if I find I cannot horrify, Ill go for the gross-out. Im not

These terms are not peculiar to King. Herron25 gives definitions o each one, and actors such as Vincent Price have argued that horror f films should be renamed terror films, apparently in recognition of the higher status of the latter. Herrons definition of the gross-out runs as follows:
Grossness, in the King manner, is simply horror material which is not necessarily scary, but is piled on to the point where many readers become nauseated.26

This corresponds well to Douglas concept of pollution. Herron gives some examples o Kings use of grossness a little later: f

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His characters swear. They excrete. They often act crudely, grossly.27

Human body substances and products are used lavishly in modern horror fiction. Even apparently unrelated incidents may involve pollution. The boys building a dam in stream, for instance-in Kings It-suddenly discover that they are damming human sewage. Shaun Hutsons Breeding Ground begins with a description of a tramps eating habits which most people would find repulsive. Often, as Herron points out, this is simply a greater frankness about the way things actually are in the world.28 For example, frightened people do actually wet themselves-as in The Stand-or soil themselves-as in Salems Lot. However, this greater frankness also amounts to a systematic symbolic breaching of the pollution rules by which most people live. Herrons characterization of horror is similarly succinct, and encapsulates both the positional and personal aspects of morality outlined above:
Horror, on the other hand, is a reaction to unpleasant physical details or perilsuch as witnessing the slow, detailed dismemberment of a fellow human being.zg

It should be noted that the unpleasant fate of a human being outrages both the positional and personal components of our moral feelings. On the positional side, nobody should be subjected to this dreadful fate, and it also outrages human sympathies. Horror, in either of these senses, is the mainstay of much of the genre. People-as real as fictional characters can be-are almost routinely killed in the stories, often in unpleasant ways and usually the deaths are capricious and not remotely deserved by the characters. The heros girlfriend-in Salems Lot-is condemned to the living death of vampirism, and finally killed. The major drama of Cujo centers around the slow death of a young boy, in his mothers presence. The need to violate moral taboos in horror fiction leads to a paradoxical requirement in the genre. To destroy convincing characters, one must first be able to create them. It follows that a necessary skill of the horror writer is the ability to create believable, rounded people quickly. Indeed, many successful horror novels consist of little more than a series of vignettes, in which a character is created, lives for a page or two and then is horribly destroyed. Herberts The Fog is a good example of such a work. King can go further. As Hitchensso has remarked, Kings major talent appears to be the creation of believable people and whole communities.

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The third type of effect is terror. Terror corresponds very closely to Douglas conception of admission o chaos. King regards terror in f these terms:
Terror-what Hunter Thompson calls fear and loathing-often arises from a pervasive sense o disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking. If that sense of f unmaking is sudden and seems personal-if it hits you around the heart-then it lodges in the memory as a complete set?]

Herrons definition is phrased differently, but carries a similar import.

Terror is defined in the field of supernatural fiction as fear eating at the imaginative faculties, usually developed in storytelling through subtle hints and happenings which worm their way into the readers subconscious mind and later emerge, dragging all manners of phobias and unconscious psychological dreads out with them.8z

Terror is perhaps the most difficult emotion to arouse in large numbers of readers. The writer must be able to throw doubt upon the readers system of categories and distinctions. This seems quite a tall order, as the intellect is able to process and adapt new information to the pre-existing conceptual structure at an impressive rate. T o shake the categorical system, the readers thought processes must be rendered inapplicable. The readers attention must be engaged with the narrative, and the intellect prevented from engaging, and rationalizing, the threats, hints and suggestions as they appear. One technique is to avoid delineating the ogre too closely for as long as possible. The reader knows very little about what is actually going on, and so the wheels of the rational mind spin helplessly without anything to reason about. Some very fine terror stories apply this principle throughout the text. Henry James The Turn of the Screw, for example, is so inexplicit about the nature of the menace that, decades after the story, critics are still arguing about exactly what hap~ened.~S The problem with this approach is that, as a staple diet, it is unsatisfying. The occasional unresolved story seems acceptable to readers, but an endless diet of them is likely to produce some degree of frustration. Therefore, writers have to find some way of revealing what is going on without creating a let-down. King has expressed the wish to open the door on the monster at some stage in the proceeding^.^^ But how can it be done? In his best-seller Moon, James Herbert uses the minimuminformation technique for most of the story. The hero is aware of a gloating menace, closing in and performing ever more evil deeds, but insufficient information is given for either the hero or the reader to know exactly what is happening. At the climax of the story, however, Herbert performs a kind of double-shuffle. The true nature of the menace is revealed, there is an horrific payoff-and a new enigma is created. Thus,

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Herbert closes off one plot, but leaves the situation with an element of irresolution. The supernatural is another way in which terror can be maintained. By definition, the supernatural is unexplained and inexplicable. Therefore the use of supernatural elements is as far as denouement can go-or indeed is expected to go. However, the supernatural suffers from the same problem as simply leaving the story unresolved; it is unsatisfying in quantity. In general, horror stories end by restoring the status quo. Pollution is returned to its rightful place, moral transgressions are punished, or at least further ones forbidden, and the encroaching forces of chaos are restored to their appropriate places, out of sight. In this sense, as King has said, horror literature is essentially conservative.35

Culture and the Znterstitial Ogre Clements concept of the interstitial ogre can now be considered in this broader anthropological perspective. The first, and simplest, point is that not all forms of interstitiality are necessarily associated with horror. The counter-examples cited above-the Gethenians, hobbits and Mr. Spock-do not violate the three types of category boundary distinguished. They do not pollute, nor do they outrage morality, nor do they threaten chaos, and so they do not evoke any form of horror. It remains to be seen if ogrehood is characterized by any particular form of the three types of category-violation. The discussion of pollution largely centered upon matter out of place. The polluter is often used in horror fiction as an overture to the main horror theme. Often, early in a work, pollution is encountered which indicates that something is dreadfully wrong: there may be slime, or blood splattered on a wall, or a foul stench, as a warning that worse is to follow. This might indicate that pollution enhances a beings ogrehood, but is not a vital constituent of it. The second type of interstitiality concerns horror. An ogre, in this sense, can be defined as a character who breaches either our moral or sympathetic rules. Many-indeed most-literary ogres operate at this level. Dracula, for example, is indeed interstitial in the ways outlined by Clements, but he is also unfair. People should not be condemned to the living death of vampirism merely because Dracula needs to satisfy his appetites. Further, Dracula also outrages sexual mores. The sexual aspect has been pointed out by King and others? Vampire sex is exploitative, dangerous, indiscriminate, and threatens to overwhelm consensual behavioral patterns. Other monsters in horror fiction flout moral codes, and empathic sympathies as well. The monster in It, for example, begins by luring a child to a horrible death and treats a town as a kind of living meat-

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larder. The killer in Herberts Moon destroys without regard to decency, fairness or other moral considerations. The burning to death of the schoolgirls, in this story, is a good example. Earlier, the need for a horror writer to be able to create convincing characters quickly was mentioned. This enables some horror novels to be little more than strings of horrific vignettes. It is at the moral level that this type of story does its work. In general, the writer creates one or two reasonably sympathetic characters who have normal human flaws. Morally, the characters are not perfect, but they do not remotely deserve the fates which are meted out to them, such as being devoured by slugs or rats, or engulfed by green slime. Both our moral and empathic faculties are outraged by these vignettes, which constitute a staple part of many horror novels. From this standpoint, therefore, Clements is correct in regarding ogres as being characterized by interstitiality. The third-and most prestigious-level of effect in horror is that of terror. This is the attack upon our ways of thought, including the intrusion of chaos into what was thought to be most secure. As was discussed earlier, this can rarely, if ever, be achieved directly. It can, however, be hinted at by avoiding the full revelation of the monsters nature for as long as possible. Indeed, sometimes the monsters full nature is never clearly revealed. Randall Flagg, the villain of Kings The Stand, never stands before us in all his horror. We learn that he is a demon, that he has assorted supernatural powers, and that even an atomic blast cannot destroy him. However, we do not know him fully, and even at the end there are still hints of unguessable horror. Ogres in this third sense, who threaten the very basis of our thought, are much harder to portray than are ogres who achieve moral and personal outrage. They also correspond most closely to Clements conception, although they are less common than ogres who merely induce horror. In both cases, of course, pollution may be used to supplement the effect.
Discussion and conclusions This paper began with Clements suggestion that ogres-creatures in fiction whom we find frightening-can be characterized as interstitial. That is, they inhabit the edges, the boundaries of cultural categories, and so threaten the way we think. Consideration of Clements thesis reveals several problems. The term interstitial can be applied to virtually any concept, and is thus not useful by itself. In addition, many literary characters are interstitial without being in the least frightening. A more precise analysis o culture f and interstitiality is required to locate the characteristics of ogres, which make them interstitial.

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Douglas anthropological theory provides for at least three ways of breaching cultural categories. The simplest is pollution-matter out of place. There is moral violation, which Douglas has conceived as having a positional and personal component. Finally there is the threat o the f invasion of chaos, against which our cultural system is a primary defence; we haue to be able to make sense o the world around us. These three f types of breach are recognized by horror writers themselves, and characterized as the gross-out, horror, and terror. Clements ogres appear to depend, for their effects, upon the second and third types o cultural breach. They outrage our moral sensibitiesf often in both the positional and personal senses-and they may also threaten chaos. Pollution is a supplement to these effects, but does not by itself constitute a qualification for ogrehood. It is clear from this analysis that modern horror writers are less constrained in the use of literary devices than were their forbears. As Herron points out, the earlier writers were almost entirely confined to attempts to produce terror.37 This is no longer so, and it may be that part of the reason for the rise of modern horror fiction is simply that the practitioners have a greater range of weapons in their armoury. In turn, the greater freedom of these writers probably depends, at least in part, on large-scale movements in western culture. As Douglas points out, in small-scale societies, the various aspects of culture are bound together, reinforcing each other.38 In western societies this is no longer so, and the changes evident in modern popular literature reflect larger social and cultural movements.

Notes
1John Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery and Romance (Chicago: University o Chicago f Press, 1976) ZWilliam Clements, The Interstitial Orgre: the Structure of Horror in Expressive Culture, T h e South Atlantic Quarterly, 86 (Winter, 1987), pp. 34-43. 3David Punter, T h e Literature of Terror (New York: Longmans, 1979). 4Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 38-39. Xlements, p.38. Tlements, p. 39. Tlements, p. 39. Wlements, pp. 39-40. gClements, p. 40. 1OAntony Flew, Thinking about Thinking (London: Flamingo, 1975), pp. 4546. Robert Thouless, Straight and Crooked Thinking (London: Pan, 1974), pp.5254. ZMary Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 35. SIbid., pp. 73-93.

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Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 45-58. 5Basil Bernstein, A Socio-Linguistic Approach to Socialization, in Directions in Socio-Linguistics, ed. by J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). 16Douglas,Natural Symbols, pp. 45-47. Ibid. p. 47. *8Douglas,Purity and Danger, pp. 39-40. 1gMary Douglas, Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 247. 20Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, pp. 36-37. 2IEileen Barker, Let There Be Light: Scientific Creationism in the Twentieth Century, in Darwinism and Divinity, ed. by John Durant (Oxford B. Blackwell, 1985),pp, 181-204. 22Ken Ham, T h e Relevance o Creation (Brisbane: Creation Science Foundation f Ltd., 1983), p. 3. 23Stephen King, Danse Macabre (London: MacDonald Futura, 1981). ZIbid., p. 37. 25Don Herron, Horror Springs in the Fiction of Stephen King, in Fear Itself, ed. by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (New York: New American Library, 1985), pp. 75-99. 26Ibid., p. 77. 271bid., 89. p. 281bid., 89. p. z9Herron,p. 77 30Christopher Hitchens, American Notes, T h e Times Literary Supfdement, 2015 (February 10, 1984),p. 138. SlKing, p. 22. s*Herron, p. 77. SSS. Gorley Putt, Introduction, in T h e Turn o the Screw and Other Stories, f by Henry James (Harwondsworth: Penguin, 1975),p. 5. 34King, Danse Macabre, p. 116. STbid., p. 50 and p. 173. 96King, Danse Macabre, p. 74. s7Herron,p. 77. SSDouglas, Purity and Danger, p. 78. Martin Bridgstock is a Lecturer in Division of Science and Technology, Griffith University, Queensland,Australia. He has an interest in the relationships between societies and cultures, and has been heavily involved in the creation science controversy. He is co-editor o f Creationism-an Australian Perspective (3rd edition, 1987).