Kirk J. Schneider’s Horror and the Holy, Wisdom Teachings of the Monster Tale (1993) is an insightful and accessible book about psychological processes underlying the nature of horror. He starts with an interesting premise: that horror entertainments—his focus is primarily on the cinema—can be classified along a continuum, from “hyperconstriction” to “hyperexpansion”.
Both
are deviations from the norm, and as
their magnitude increases, our discomfort is amplified until it becomes horror,
“…the world of the nightmare and the grotesque.” However, an encounter with such extremes can
be therapeutic if it leads to greater self-awareness and integration. Schneider implies that horror entertainments,
whether literature or film, are similar to the wisdom literature of various
religions. Studying them can facilitate “wholeness”
or even “holiness”.
While
not identical to my own suspicions, Schneider’s are certainly close in
spirit. In my view, horror
entertainment, nightmare and religion exist in close symbiotic relationship
with each other, a triumvirate forming a unity derived from a single substance,
despite the superficial differences among their members—not unlike that other,
more exalted Trinity you may have heard about.
The
characteristics of the hyperconstricted mode include confinement,
claustrophobia, diminishing life force, descent, retreat, and isolation. Hyperconstriction directs one toward the
grave—or toward the womb. Taken to an
extreme, it leads toward the experience of obliteration. Schneider offers the film Dracula (1931) as an example of
hyperconstriction, citing Harker’s incarceration in the vampire’s castle, Lucy’s
seduction by the evil count, and Mina’s struggle against being overwhelmed by
Dracula’s powers, among other vampire motifs.
In Schneider’s view, Van Helsing, the “professor” who rescues the other
characters, is the most psychologically healthy. He alone is able to integrate his awareness
of the horror of Dracula with knowledge and reason, and so develop a plan to
combat the evil.
The
other end of the continuum is hyperexpansion, characterized by themes of
extension, proliferation, enlargement, dispersal, acceleration and
explosiveness—“…the nightmare of mania, the end-state of ruthlessness and
disarray.” Schneider feels that Frankenstein (1931) best exemplifies
this mode of unfolding chaos. (It is
interesting that the monster and its creator’s name have been confused almost
from the beginning.) The hubris and
megalomania of Dr. Frankenstein, the horribly ironic consequences of his
experiment, and the ensuing chaos his creature brings about in the country side
are hallmarks of the hyperexpansive mode.
These psychological
tendencies occur in the individual to varying degrees, as well as in society,
culture, and in art. In the individual
human being, extremes of one or the other modes lead to mental illness. In societies, extreme forms of hyperconstriction
or hyperexpansion result in tyranny on the one hand or chaos on the other. In art, when these tendencies proceed
unchecked and unceasingly in either direction, they produce tragedy and horror.
This is
not exactly a new idea, though Schneider has made clever and original use of
it. Friedrich Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy (1872) attempted to
show how Greek culture, mythology and literature could be aligned along a
continuum with Apollo at one end and Dionysus at the other—the two gods serving
as personifications of order, restraint and intellect on one side, and passion,
creativity and chaos on the other. E.R.
Dodds, in his classic study The Greeks and the Irrational (1951)
explores similar notions in the context of classical Greek literature and
mythology. Both extremes are needed, but
the tension between them is never resolved, and this conflict can be seen as a
source of cultural creativity and development.
Schneider
arrives at a sensible solution to these extremes, a “middle way”, that he calls
“wonderment”:
For
the purposes of this study, wonderment combines the idea of inquiry (“to wonder
about”) with enchantment (“to wonder at”).
He goes
on to propose a way forward, at least psychologically, toward relative peace of mind:
Perhaps
each of us, thanks to the recognition of wonderment, will be able to nurture
the marvelous in the maddening and maddening in the marvelous, to achieve
fuller lives…to become passionate people who master our passions.
Schneider
applies his categories of hyperconstriction and hyperexpansion to other examples
of classic horror. He considers The Phantom of the Opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Invisible Man, and The Incredible Shrinking Man to be
examples of the “hyperconstrictive”; Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Birds,
and Forbidden Planet are classified
as “hyperexpansive”. However, Vertigo and Alien defy easy categorization, containing elements of both modes—they
are deemed examples of “bi-polar horror.”
Amusingly,
Schneider takes various famous monsters and shows how, with a bit more balance
and reflection, (read, treatment)
each might have succeeded in a particular field by applying their unique
talents or habits. At the time he
published Horror and the Holy, Schneider
was a psychologist at the “Center for Existential Therapy” in San Francisco,
and so approaches Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with a very
clinical perspective, as if they might have been actual patients.
Thus
the Phantom of the Opera might have applied his obsessive-compulsive nature to
the composition of great music or architecture, Mr. Hyde might have channeled
his reckless aggression into a successful political or acting career, and “Dracula…could
have become a celebrated psychologist.” It is the most entertaining part of
this thoughtful book.
Schneider
concludes his book by applying his insights to several case studies involving
individuals suffering from schizophrenia, bi-polar syndrome, and depression,
and then more broadly to problems in the fields of psychology, science, and
religion.
Schneider’s
approach seems relevant to an analysis of H.P. Lovecraft’s work. Some examples that may be labelled
hyperconstrictive—his primary mode—include Imprisoned
with the Pharaohs (1924) In the Vault
(1925), The Temple (1925), The Colour Out of Space (1927) and The Thing on the Doorstep, (1937), among
others. All of these emphasize darkness,
depth, submersion, confinement and burial.
Lovecraft’s characters almost always descend,
through stairwells, tunnels, caves and watery depths to find some soul shattering
knowledge about the nature of reality.
(See also Looking
Up and Looking Down (Mostly Down)).
On the other
hand, when Lovecraft’s characters and monsters ascend, as in the much anthologized The Outsider (1926), all hell breaks loose in a nightmare of
unbridled freedom and terror—that is, when something invoked or discovered
escapes its confines. Some examples of
his stories in the hyperexpansive mode would include Herbert West—Reanimator (1922), The
Call of Cthulhu (1928) The Dunwich
Horror (1929), and the The Dream
Quest of Unknown Kadath (1943). It
would be interesting to examine a timeline of Lovecraft’s work to see whether
oscillations between the hyperconstrictive and hyperexpansive modes coincide
with events in his troubled life.
Over
the past year—in fact, since a year ago today—The R’lyeh Tribune has examined different aspects of horror theory
in an effort to obtain a deeper understanding of the genre, its origins and
significance. Interested readers may
want to peruse these earlier posts:
(two
part series)
(three
part series)
********************
Fans of
the “psychic detective” subgenre may want to check out John Linwood Grant’s new
blog, at http://greydogtales.com. The tradition of the psychic detective begins
somewhere around the time of William Hope Hodgson’s John Cornacki (circa the
1910s and 20s)—if not before—and is continuous with much later versions of this
popular type of character—think of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, for
example. Grant also discusses horror
literature in general at his site.
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