Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

236 Pages·2011·2.643 MB·English

by  George Ochoa

Deformed and Destructive Beings
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Deformed and
Destructive Beings
The Purpose of Horror Films
G O
EORGE CHOA
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARYOFCONGRESSCATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATIONDATA
Ochoa, George.
Deformed and destructive beings : the purpose of horror films /
George Ochoa.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7864-6307-7
softcover : 50# alkaline paper
¡. Horror films—History and criticism. 2. Monsters in
motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1995.9.H6O25 2011
791.43'6164—dc22 2010052836
British Library cataloguing data are available
© 2011George Ochoa. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
On the cover: Poster image from the ¡988 remake of The Blob
(TriStar/Photofest)
Manufactured in the United States of America
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
To Martha and Melinda
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
PART I. THE HORROR FILM ANALYZED
1. Purpose 5
2. Knowing 18
3. DDB Profile 28
4. Structure 38
5. Essential Elements 47
6. Ethics 61
7. Meaning and Significance 72
8. Evaluation of a Good Horror Film 83
9. Evaluation of a Bad Horror Film 96
PART II. THE HORROR FILM IN CONTEXT
10. Genres 107
11. History: Beginnings to the 1950s 117
12. History: 1960s to the Present 131
13. Reputation 143
14. Taxonomy 151
15. Techniques 168
16. Directors 181
17. Stars and DDBs 194
18. Other Directions 201
Notes 209
Bibliography 215
Index 219
vii
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Preface
This book introduces a new theory of the horror film: that the primary
purpose of the horror film is to make the audience know the monster. Prima
facie, monsters are so visible in horror films that this may seem obvious, and
yet it is commonly overlooked or neglected. For example, Noël Carroll, in The
Philosophy of Horror, writes that the locus of audience gratification from horror
is “not the monster as such but the whole narrative structure in which the
presentation of the monster is staged.”1But why should the locus of audience
gratification notbe the monster as such?
Avoidance of the monster as such occurs regularly in academic and pop-
ular efforts to understand the appeal of horror movies. Critic James B.
Twitchell, for example, locates the psychological attraction of horror in the
way that horror stories “carry the prescriptive codes of modern Western sexual
behavior”2—again, not the monster as such, but something else. Like academ-
ics, the public at large is often inclined to think that horror movies are centrally
about something other than the monster as such—most commonly, feeling
scared, as if it were obvious that feeling scared were intrinsically appealing.
No less a genre luminary than horror star Vincent Price once opined that the
appeal of horror movies “is based, perhaps subconsciously, on an inherent
need to be frightened.”3
I wrote this book because it has long seemed to me that the central appeal
of the horror film is nothing else than the monster as such. This was clear to
me as a boy watching the Universal Pictures monsters on television—the
Frankenstein monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man—assembling monster model
kits, and reading Famous Monsters of Filmland. What I was most interested in
was preciselythe monsters. This has remained clear to me since in all the years
of watching horror movies, despite many changes in the genre, from demonic
possession films to slashers to torture porn. But it has also become clear to me
why so many people find it difficult to grasp this point.
It is difficult because people today talk in the wrong vocabulary for the
task—the vocabulary of the modern world rather than that of St. Thomas
Aquinas, the medieval scholastic philosopher and theologian. Say what you
1