A horror experience involves an experience of both fear and revulsion; two emotions that are considered to be negative, yet manage to elicit – and revel in eliciting – a pleasurable experience for an art-horror audience. The nature of the pleasures generated by viewing horror films have been critically theorised about by psychologists, philosophers, and academics for decades. Michael Haneke’s 2004 realist horror film, ‘Funny Games’, decisively removes the ordinary pleasures found in art-horror and is as a result an intriguing case to use in investigating three significant competing theories: physiological, cognitivist and psychoanalytical. It shows that while truth resides in all theories, the psychoanalytical theory has the resources to most consistently explain why horror-fans gain pleasure from a realist art-horror experience.
Fear provokes the release of adrenaline. It comes with potent physical responses: an increased heart rate, blood flow, dilation of the air passage – the body’s primal way of preparing itself to effectively face a threatening situation. When this happens quickly, it is known as an adrenaline rush. It can become an addictive experience because the reaction triggers the release of endorphins, which are a class of opioid neurotransmitters that act as a natural analgesic (Thorén et al., 1990). While an actual horror experience would trigger a severe form of this reaction, the spectacle of art-horror has a level of unreality that allows for detachment preventing trauma, releasing only moderate levels of endorphins. The term ‘adrenaline-junkie’ was coined for thrill-seekers who purposefully seek out situations that can trigger this rush. To them, extreme situations are merely a prop that catalyses the physiological response they pursue. However, this explanation – while sound – seems too reductive. It does not address the revulsion involved in horror, nor the underlying level of understanding that is required for something to become horrific.
Horror involves fear and revulsion; fear of something deeply repulsive or disturbing. In order for an audience to find something disturbing they must first understand something about it that elicits discomfort. Cognitivists argue that horror-fans do not find any pleasure in the horror itself: a horror experience is always negative; but it is the narrative pleasures of horror films that retain its audience. Noël Carroll, an American philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of film, has an account of this explanation that describes the horror in a horror film as a ‘price’ that the audience has to pay to experience a very specific type of narrative.
“… [T]he pleasure derived from the horror fiction and the source of our interest in it resides, first and foremost, in the processes of discovery, proof, and confirmation that horror fictions often employ … [T]he disgust that [viewers] evince might be seen as part of the price to be paid for the pleasure of their disclosure … thus, disgust, so to say, is itself more or less mandated by the kind of curiosity that the horror narrative puts in place.” (Carroll, 1990)
In this account Carroll refers specifically to supernatural horror films – a realist horror film relies not on “discovery, proof, and confirmation” to sustain narrative interest, but on its characters. The audience, when confronted with a seemingly impossible combination of the human and the monstrous, must be fascinated by the antagonists; and also have an investment in the protagonists, as a result of their charisma or relatability. The narrative itself, of course, needs to also have a level of ingenuity to retain engagement.
The cognitivist explanation, much like the physiological one, is a valid theory for the origins of art-horror pleasure, yet it falls short when applied to Haneke’s ‘Funny Games’. The antagonists are undeniably intriguing – an improbable hybrid duo of well-brought-up, polite, intelligent young men and sadistic tormentors. There is an interesting scene where one of the duo directly teases this concept of voyeuristic fascination, mocking the standard tropes that horror films use to elucidate a psychopath’s psychopathology.
PAUL: “His father's an alcoholic, his mother … truth is, he's fucking her.”
This is followed by:
PAUL: “None of what I said is true. He's not white trash, he's a spoiled little brat. Truth is, he's a drug addict.”
The explanations he offered were insincere, and the point was that their sadism is inexplicable. Haneke’s film is nothing if not self-aware, and he deliberately removes horror genre stereotypes to make a statement – but this ingenuity and reflexive intellectual engagement should, according to the cognitivist theory, make ‘Funny Games’ more enjoyable, rather than less. Cognitivists may argue that the discomfort of watching this particular film outweighs the narrative appeal, or that a viewer needs to grant themselves permission to pay it. However, neither of these defences adequately explain why that price would be higher in this mildly gory film, or why they’d have trouble granting themselves permission to pay it when their motive of cognitive interest is so innocent.
It is this notion of ‘permission’, however, that seems to have significance. Haneke himself explained his motives behind making a film so measured in its attempt to be unenjoyable:
“The killer communicates with the viewer … [making] him an accomplice … [A]t the end I’m reproaching him for this position … I wanted to show how you are always an accomplice of the killer if you watch this kind of film … that show[s] violence in an acceptable way. We don’t realise we are accomplices to this …” (Haneke, 1997)
Haneke seems to be placing violence and its representation as morally commensurable, which is problematic, but it reveals that his intent with the film was to find a way to make the viewer self-conscious about their voyeurism, and as a result prevent them from enjoying it. He was generally successful, so it is clear that the permission a viewer gives themselves to enjoy a film has impact on the pleasure they are able to gain. If that were not so, there would be no reason why refusing that permission would detract from art-horror enjoyment; the cognitivist and the physiological enjoyment of horror would be left unscathed. Thus, ‘Funny Games’ dismisses both arguments in this instance.
Psychoanalytical accounts of horror suggest that horror elicits a positive response due to the satisfaction of subconscious, repressed human desires and wishes being fulfilled. Intuitively this concept seems to lead one to a misunderstanding of its nature, seen in Anthony Tudor’s description of the case.
“[Underlying psychoanalytic accounts of art-horror] is the belief “that human beings are rotten at the core”, whether by nature or nurture, and that horror resonates with this feature of the human condition. The genre serves as a channel releasing the bestiality concealed within its users …” (Tudor, 1997)
This is a misinterpretation of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and his ‘return of the repressed’ argument. Its issue is that psychoanalytic theory “does not assume that humans are rotten to the core, nor does it nor does it need such a view to claim that horror appeals to repressed desires” (Cox & Levine, 2011). Repressed wishes are not necessarily indicative of one’s true masochistic or sadistic self – rather, the fact that they are repressed in the first place suggests otherwise. The psychoanalytic must first accept the existence of perverse desires and of underlying mechanisms of disavowal and rejection.
The nature of these desires and mechanisms are perhaps better described through an existentialist interpretation of the matter. A study conducted at Florida State University examined what they dubbed the ‘High Place Phenomenon’; the temptation, when standing at the edge of a cliff, to simply step off into oblivion (Hames et al., 2012). The investigation was prompted by concern that this temptation is the result of inhibited suicidal tendencies, but it revealed otherwise – there seemed to be no link to this common urge and the wish to actually kill oneself. As it turned out, the term ‘High Place Phenomenon’ is not particularly accurate. The French idiom ‘l’appel du vide’, translating to ‘the call of the void’ is closer to the truth – in France it is understood as the urge that one’s brain has to make the strongest possible decision it can make in any given situation. It can be applied to the temptation to reach out and touch a flame, or jerk a steering wheel into oncoming traffic. It is not an intrinsic desire to put one’s life in danger, but rather an inexplicable, inaccessible craving to be in a stimulating or dangerous situation, usually effortlessly outweighed by one’s instinct for self-preservation. In the same way, human desire to see perverse wishes being fulfilled is not proof of a fundamental bestiality – it is merely an inexplicable, inaccessible craving.
Art-horror is a substitutive fulfilment of these wishes, and makes it easy to enjoy the fictional representation of something horrifying because there is no burden to risk human life nor acknowledge the nature of what or why something is being enjoyed. That nature is disguised by its horrific imagery – the discomforted response makes the overarching pleasure gained more acceptable. In an environment where the audience does not consider themselves responsible for images because they are beset by them, they are able to feel satisfaction without guilt. Haneke’s film systematically forces the audience to acknowledge their complicity through both technical and artistic means, and it is this self-consciousness that prevents the film from being enjoyable.
While the main source of art-horror pleasure may come from this subconscious process of enigmatic satisfaction and psychoanalytic guilt loopholes, these interpretations also have the potential to help explain some of the attraction for extreme experiences within other theories. Both the physiological and cognitive responses to horror are also surrogate experiences; it is often too threatening or traumatic to physically be in a situation that might elicit an endorphin rush resultant of an intriguing, high-stakes story. It is possible that the benefits of these physical and mental responses play some role or lend to inaccessible appeal of danger. All theories identify a well-founded source of art-horror enjoyment, but it is the psychoanalytic theory and the existentialist interpretation that seem to hold more fundamental truth.
All of these explanations for pleasure derived from art-horror produce varying degrees of persuasive results. They attempt to dissect how emotions that are commonly considered to be negative can manage to elicit a positive response through film. While all theories identify a source of pleasure, the psychoanalytic theory combined with an existentialist interpretation of desires and wishes seems to play a more essential role. It holds its ground in the face of ‘Funny Games’, a Haneke film explicitly designed to confront the pleasurable experience gained from being horrified in the cinema.
S O U R C E S R E F E R E N C E D
Cara, E. (2016). Ever Had The Urge To Just Jump? You Might Have Experienced The 'High Place Phenomenon'. Medical Daily. Retrieved 2018, from https://www.medicaldaily.com/high-place-phenomeon-suicide-ideation-cognitive-dissonance-378029
Carroll, N. (1990). The Philosophy of Horr, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge.
Cox, D., & Levine, M. (2012). Thinking through film. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Hames, J., Ribeiro, J., Smith, A., & Joiner, T. (2012). An urge to jump affirms the urge to live: An empirical examination of the high place phenomenon. Journal Of Affective Disorders, 136(3), 1114-1120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2011.10.035
Haneke, M. (2005). Interview with Michael Haneke. Funny Games, DVD.
Haneke, M. (2007). Funny Games. Long Island: Celluloid Dreams, Tartan Films, Film4 Productions.
Mandic, M. (2016). ‘L’appel du vide’ – The call of the void | Pi Media. Pimediaonline.co.uk. Retrieved 2018, from http://pimediaonline.co.uk/science-tech/lappel-du-vide-the-call-of-the-void/
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Tudor, A. (1997). Why horror? The peculiar pleasures of a popular genre. Cultural Studies, 11(3), 443-463. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/095023897335691
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