Although he employs psychoanalysis himself on rare occasions in his analyses of and commentaries upon horror fiction, Stephen King doesn’t seem to be a fan of Freudian thought. Critics who approach criticism from this point of view, he says, tend to conceive of “the writer’s books” as “Rorschach inkblots that will eventually reveal the author’s anal, oral, or genital fixation” rather than illuminate the literature they allegedly interpret (“Horror Fiction” from Danse Macabre in Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing, 190).
This is not to suggest, however, that horror fiction is devoid of sex; as I have demonstrated in previous posts, the genre is replete with examples of erotic behavior, especially of the perverted and deviant sort. It’s just that the sex is not sex for sex’s sake; it is not gratuitous, nor is it an expression of unconscious impulses. Often, when it occurs, it is presented within a context of social, or even sociological, significance.
According to Anne Rivers Siddons herself, the author of The House Next Door, she was careful to create a menace with which her sophisticated, upwardly mobile, middle-class suburbanite characters (and readers) could identify as relevant to their lives:
A traditional ghoulie would be laughed out of the neighborhood. So what would break and crumble defenses and penetrate suburban armors? It would have to be different in each case. Each person has his own built-in horror button. Let’s have a house that can isolate and push it, and then you’ve really got a case of the suburban willies (quoted in “Horror Fiction,” 98).“The whole point of the book, of course, is not so much the house and its peculiar, terrible power,” she continues, “but what effect it has on the neighborhood, and on the relationships between neighbors and friends, and between families, when they are forced to confront and believe the unbelievable”:
This has always been the power of the supernatural to me. . . That it blasts and breaks relationships between people and other people and between people and their world, and, in a way, between people and the very essences of themselves. . . . For belief is everything; belief is all. Without belief, there is no terror” (quoted in “Horror Fiction,” 898-99).King offers an example of Siddons’ implementation of her theory. During a party hosted by the haunted house’s first residents, Walter and Pie Harralson, guests come running to the bedroom in which the hosts have left their coats when they hear Pie screaming. King describes the scene, before offering his commentary concerning it:
Near the end of their housewarming party, Pie begins to scream. The guests rush to see what has happened to her. They find [her husband] Buddy Harralson and [his mentor at their law firm] Lucas Abbott embracing, naked, in the bedroom. . . . Pie’s Daddy has found them first, and he is in the process of expiring of a stroke on the floor while his Punkin Pie screams on. . . and on.. . . and on” (102).King sees this scene as exemplifying Siddons’ use of the conventions of “the new American gothic to examine. . . . social codes and social pressures” (“Horror Fiction,” 168):
The essence of the horror in this scene. . . lies in the fact that social codes have not merely been breached; they have been exploded in our shocked faces. . . . It is a case of everything going just about as totally wrong as things can go; lives and careers are ruined irrevocably in the passage of seconds (“Horror Fiction,” 102).King’s insights concerning horror are, as usual, spot-on, as is his further contention that this genre of literature has the dual purposes of exploring “taboo lands” before confirming readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo” (“Horror Fiction, 107).
At times, horror fiction crosses paths with erotic fiction; indeed, sometimes, the two merge, producing hybrid monsters that are half-sex and lust, half fear and revulsion. Even when they remain more or less distinct, however, the two genres have a lot in common--at times, at least. King suggests as much when he differentiates classic Gothic from new American Gothic horror fiction. “Once upon a time,” he observes, “the Bad Place was seen by critics as symbolic of the womb--a primarily sexual symbol which perhaps allowed the gothic to become a safe way of talking about sexual fears,” but, with the advent of “the new American gothic,” which depends more upon the use of a microcosmic setting and a narcissistic protagonist, “the Bad Place” now more often represents “interest in the self and fear of the self” (“Horror Fiction,” 106-107).
Although erotic fiction differs from horror fiction in that the former plays upon readers’ ideas, emotions, fantasies, and experiences concerning lust and sex and the latter relies upon readers’ ideas, emotions, fantasies, and experiences concerning fear and revulsion, they share the same purposes, at times, at least, as the dual purposes identified by King. After exploring social taboos concerning lust and sex, erotic fiction may or may not then confirm its readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo,” for after observing or participating for the first time in a sexual act of a usually deviant or perverted nature, a protagonist can either reject the sexual experience into which he or she has been initiated (a decision which reinforces the status quo concerning what is normal, permissible, right, or appropriate sexually); accept the sexual experience (a decision which rejects the status quo’s censure of such sexual behavior); or remain, for the time being, at least, undecided and confused concerning whether to accept or reject the sexual experience (a decision which suspends acceptance or rejection of the status quo’s censure of such sexual behavior). Unlike horror fiction, erotic fiction can, but need not, confirm readers’ “own good feelings about the status quo” and its censure of unusual sexual behavior.
Another similarity between horror fiction and erotic fiction is the concern of each of these genres with power. For King, horror is a subdivision of fantastic literature, and fantasy, in turn, is comprised of “tales of magic,” which are, in turn, “stories of power”: “One word nearly defines the other. Power is magic; power is potency. The opposite of potency is impotence” (“Horror Fiction,” 184). Often, the concern with, and for, power takes a sexual form, especially for men: “I think that most men, even today, tend to identify the magic most strongly with sexual potency. A woman may not want to but she can; a man may want to and find that he cannot” (“Horror Fiction,” 186).
Drugs such as Cialis and Viagra, penile implants, and other products of technology may be enlisted as “magical” means by which to empower sexually impotent men and to level the playing field, as it were, between women who “may not want to but. . . can” and men who “may want to and. . . cannot.” In extreme examples of erotic--or pornographic--films, mechanical devices, or sex machines are shown as leveling the playing field, as it were, between women’s innately greater sexual capacity and men’s more limited sexual stamina, replacing flesh-and-blood male organs (and men themselves) with tireless contraptions of steel, rubber, and plastic that operate, fluidly and forever--or, at least, until the gasoline that powers them runs out. Never has even the most virile alien, beast-thing, or monster in horror fiction had such tireless staying power as these mechanical contrivances!
Another way in which horror fiction and erotic fiction parallel one another is that both invite audiences, whether readers or moviegoers, to become voyeurs. Audiences are invited to observe, or even to participate, vicariously, through identifying themselves with the stories’ protagonists, in all manner of sexual behaviors, many of them deviant or perverted.
It is important to understand that the reader or the viewer is invited, not forced, to observe and to participate in these sexual acts, for he or she (more commonly, he) is free to refuse the invitation altogether by not reading or watching the story at all; is free to stop reading or watching at any moment that he no longer wishes to accept the invitation; and is free to read or watch the story all the way through--several times over, if he likes. In any case, the reader or the moviegoer, if he does accept the invitation, does so on his own volition; therefore, he is complicit in the seduction, perversion, deviance, abuse, violation, and any other sexual behavior, even that which is immoral or even criminal, that is described on the page or depicted on the film that he, voluntarily, reads or watches.
For readers, viewers, and critics who accept the Freudian view of fiction, horror fiction is more or less an extravaganza of unconscious sexual drives centered upon anal, oral, and genital fixations, Oedipal conflicts, castration complexes, penis envy, and so forth, whereas readers, moviegoers, and critics who interpret horror fiction from a theological Judeo-Christian worldview understand such literature to assess and address human beings’ relationships to and interrelationships with one another, with nature, and with the Creator of both humanity and the universe.
This distinction between these two approaches to literary analysis and criticism points to yet another parallel between horror fiction and erotic fiction. There is a reason that, in horror fiction, as in erotic fiction, the sex that is described or depicted tends to be deviant and perverted.
King asserts that the fiction of fear--and, it might be added, of lust--is a disbelief in, or a rejection of, God--the same God, it should be remembered, who bade Adam and Eve “to be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” and not to experiment with their sexual organs and orifices just to have sex for sex’s sake:
All of these [horrible and absurd] things are mentally acceptable if we accept the idea that God abdicated for a long vacation, or has perchance really expired. They are mentally acceptable, but our emotions, our spirits, and most of all our passion for order--these powerful elements of our human makeup--all rebel. If we suggest that there was no reason for the deaths of six million Jews in the camps during World War II, no reason for poets bludgeoned, old women raped, children turned into soap, that it just happened and nobody was really responsible--things just got a little out of control here, ha-ha, so sorry--then the mind begins to totter (“Horror Fiction,” 144-145).Perhaps King is right, but, as far as lust and sex are concerned, it appears that many men and women are happy to accept horrible and absurd behavior. Almost anything between two consenting adults is considered permissible by many and desirable by some. In erotic fiction, it is rare that an initiate rejects unusual sex in favor of accepting the status quo’s censure of it.
Much more often, it seems, the protagonist is apt to follow the example of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist of Brokeback Mountain or of EugĂ©nie of The Philosophy in the Bedroom, who accept their perverted sexual experiences, rejecting the status quo’s censure of the deviant sex into which they have been initiated, or the example of the indecisive Jimmy Fergus of The Crying Game, who is reluctant to accept or reject either the deviant sexual experience into which he’s been initiated or the status quo’s censure of it.
If this is true, and most erotic fiction shows acceptance--or, indeed, approval--of the perversions that are part and parcel of the genre, erotic fiction’s rakes and reprobates are atheists or apostates for whom, in the absence of God, nothing is too sordid or depraved and everything sexual is sexy. Whether, if there is a God, despite their unbelief or faithlessness, they are damned is another question; however, since the monsters in horror fiction are often prompt in slaying those who act in a lewd and lascivious manner, the welfare of the promiscuous sinners of erotic fiction appears none too certain!
Note: "Sex and Horror, Part 8" will present a gallery of images from a number of movies depicting sex and horror and some final thoughts concerning this topic.