Abstract

I examine the Western strain of the horror genre as a particular visual medium which gives us insight into a fundamental equivocation in our cultural ontology. Rather than horror being largely about fear of other human beings, or imaginary or metaphorical creatures, I posit that much of the animating force of the genre comes rather from terror at the prospect of agency being felt to be in the wrong place, that is, among other-than-humans. This agency, however, is considered a normal part of everyday life for people throughout the world. I ask, what does this shadow animism, as I call it, have to teach us about our culture and the ways it might shift to be more open to agency beyond the human?

Until my mid-twenties it’s very possible I had never seen a horror film. I’ve always very much enjoyed sitting down to immerse myself in a movie, but I had always avoided horror. The notion of subjecting myself to being scared just for the fun of it had very little to appeal for me. Maybe on some level I remembered childhood fears of glimpsing the certainly less-than-horror X-Files series or Spielberg’s A.I., and the chill that it instilled in a young heart. However, horror is my partner’s favourite genre, and her love for it convinced me to give it a chance. Much to her chagrin, I couldn’t resist applying my anthropologist’s obsessive eye to the movies we increasingly watched.Perhaps you don’t think we need more fear in our lives, find the genre too formulaic, or just can find no appeal in subjecting yourself to jump scares and gruesome scenes of bodily dismemberment. This is a perfectly respectable position, one which I myself long held. In spite of this, maybe I can convince you that there is something anthropologically interesting going on in the genre, which might pique your interest enough to give it a try.Horror has long been a staple of the written word, with H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe most famous among its authors. As interest in the genre increases, there is a growing set of quite terrifying horror videogames on the market as well. However, the primary way this genre is taken in remains through film. Even though you might sometimes be watching it through your fingers, it remains a fundamentally visual medium. Though the genre is being touted as going through a renaissance of sorts, receiving the larger budgets and flashier techniques of more mainstream Hollywood in projects such as the Conjuring series or in Jordan Peele’s recent films Get Out and Us, it is still often thought of as a schlocky lower form of art that relies on a relatively small, and formulaic, set of techniques to achieve its goals of satisfying the thrill seeking of its audience. While this may often be the case, I would like to take the genre seriously here, not necessarily as an art form itself (this I leave to others), but as an expression of a fundamental equivocation at the heart of contemporary Western society’s ontological leanings.

A Visual Anthropology of Horror

Anthropologists David Sutton and Peter Wogan argue in their book Hollywood Blockbusters: The Anthropology of Popular Movies that the efforts Western cultures expend in the production, consumption, and discussion of films are tantamount to the mythological worlds of other cultures. They state that “movies can be usefully thought of as cultural myths: that movies explore (or exploit) key cultural contradictions and that their appeal lies in their ability to present these cultural contradictions for repeated consideration” (2020:16). The textual analysis of film thus provides a keen insight into key cultural categories.Horror fiction, however told, is well understood to supply a particular window into the lives of a people, and the cultural categories (and contradictions) that matter to them. As David Graeber handily summarizes:“anthropologists have come to understand, over the years, that every society is haunted by slightly different nightmares, and these differences are significant. Horror stories...always turn out to reflect some aspect of the tellers' own social lives, some terrifying potential, in the way they are accustomed to interact with each other, that they do not wish to acknowledge or confront, but also cannot help but talk about.” (2014:149)It can therefore be said that there is a form of ethnohistory written into the stories that people use to scare themselves. These stories, and the monsters and beings that populate them, develop in concert with, and in expression of, a culture’s fears and anxieties as they grapple with larger socio-historical forces over time. The sociological analysis of the manner in which particular developments in the West are reflected in horror fiction, from the Great Depression to contemporary Capitalism, and the examination of what they say about our own culture, has been heavily studied by many others (see for example Asma 2009).A common way of analysing the genre interprets its focus as displaying, in essence, the rejection of ‘othered’ cultural forms, sexualities, ethnicities, animal bodies, spiritual superstitions, broken taboos, and so on. Although this is an insightful way of analyzing horror fiction, it overlooks a more fundamental othering, which I argue specifically characterizes the Western expression of horror. The genre is predominantly – though certainly not entirely – preoccupied with the issue of, to echo Mary Douglas, animation in the wrong places. 

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Horror as Ontology

The worlds of horror fiction are populated by a whole host of non-human others, whether they are Christian demons as displayed in the Conjuring film series, ‘pagan’ deities as in the folk horror classic The Wickerman, Indigenous spirits as in the film Wendigo, or other creatures of obvious agency expressing their displeasure in the world of matter. Beings of a variety of kinds predate upon the human characters, and ‘otherworldly’ beings without their own bodies often interact with or possess humans, or even inanimate objects: with doors moving of their own accord, objects falling off of counters, crosses revolving, or furniture attacking the characters. The representations of these beings are often drawn from our own folk history or religious imagination and that of others around the globe, some of which have been drawn from the ethnographic record itself. However, they are often reinterpreted through our own worldview as if they were merely fictional, or at the very least possibly metaphorical and symbolic, as in the 2014 film The Babadook, in which the monster seems to symbolize the grief and trauma the characters shared over the loss of their husband/father. 

Anthropologist Yasmine Musharbash (Musharbash & Henning Presterudstuen 2014) reminds us however that the very notion that these other-than-human agents might be fictional is a rather new one. It is precisely the fact that the experience of animacy beyond the human is, as the ethnographic record well attests, the common everyday experience of peoples throughout the world, that demonstrates that the genre is animated not just by the prospect of ‘other’ human beings, but in a deeper sense, by a horror at the worlds that they live within, which are sometimes filled to the brim with animated beings of all kinds. Horror films are thus haunted by beings that have been exiled from a contemporary Western cosmology, which is largely materialist and anthropocentric in orientation. The experience of agential power in the natural world beyond the human is defined by this ontology as necessarily miraculous, and therefore otherworldly, whereas it is the everyday experience of animistic peoples the world over. Indeed, many anthropologists themselves, from the early days of Evans-Pritchard, who reported seeing, however briefly, “witchcraft on its path” (1976:11 [1937]), to more recently Edith Turner, who details how she experienced the “reality of spirits” (1993), have written of their inexplicable (to their own cultural upbringing) ‘supernatural’ experiences in the field. In light of this, not only is horror then a certain kind of ethnocentric rehearsal, but it is a kind of xenophobia at an ontological level as well. What has been underexplored, and this is particularly what I think the anthropological toolkit is well-placed to investigate, is taking seriously the possibility of genuine fear of the existence of beings, and social relations, in excess of our Modernist ontology.

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Fictional Framing and Metaphysical Play

The act of participating in these fictional worlds might be thought of as a kind of complicated form of metaphysical play. The framing of the horror movie as a piece of fiction allows the watcher to safely engage with it according to its internal rules, which are predicated on the fact that it makes no realist claims: it doesn’t argue that spirits are real, but rather engages in a form of make-believe. This is the artifice that allows for its function, and the humouring of it, as a genre. Horror is all well and good so long as it stays securely within the fabrication of the medium, though connections to ‘real’ events are often exploited to intensify the fear. There is a thrill in finding yourself checking the corners of your room before you drift off to sleep, but any deeper indulgence is thought of with the cool disdain of a (at least aspirationally) rationalist culture. What is rehearsed over and again in horror fiction is the dynamic of Western rationalism grappling with its incomplete extinguishment of ‘otherness’. This imperfect repression allows us to continue to fear this illicit animism leaking out of the screen into the world, continuing to provide the animating energy that fuels the fear that is the ultimate goal of the films. The crucial point to make though, is that horror doesn’t display a disbelief of this agency, it does not deny it, but expresses rather a tacit, bounded acknowledgement, and almost ritual rejection of it. It wouldn’t be scary after all if we weren’t even a little suspicious that this kind of thing might be real!My argument is that as a general cultural attribute ‘we’ in the West are terrified to acknowledge the very ontological (and therefore social) reality of animistic peoples the world over. Beneath all its myriad elaborations, fundamentally what is on display in Western horror fiction is the spectre of animism haunting our rationalist world. It is for this reason that I term this tendency, with horror as an especially poignant exemplar, shadow animism.Watching horror movies can therefore be thought of as a way of both managing and controlling our horror at the prospect of other-than-human animacy. Although the agency that is out of place – whether it be spiritual beings or monsters – erupts into the world of the film, pressing its existence on the characters, the film more often than not concludes with the banishment (if not extinguishment) of it through magical practices, rituals, or pure violence. The ontological boundaries are hardened, normalcy is reasserted, both for the characters and the viewer. That is, at least for now. In a sense then, we can see horror fiction as a way in which we engage in a ritual of the re-inscription of our own metaphysical framework, its preclusion of its ‘others’, and reassure ourselves as to the solidity of our worldview. Anthropology Beyond Our HorrorAlthough ‘taking things seriously’ is a complicated affair as Astuti reminds us (2017), with people holding contrary and conflicting views in differing situations, what would it mean to accept the possibility that we are actually scared of something that we are suspicious does indeed exist? Examining the resources the West is able to use to scare itself within a metaphysical register allows us insight into a fundamental equivocation in our culture, and the possibilities this holds out for viewing the world, and its many beings (as many throughout the world already do) beyond the bounds of our own form of rationality.What horror provides, potentially, is perhaps what Descola has termed an animist ‘bubble’ in a largely naturalistic culture. Maybe, just maybe, we can be scared beyond our assumptions and our fears and accept that the world is teaming with other-than-human animacy. Recognizing this fact might not extinguish our fear, but it can at the very least allow us to begin to develop relational competence with other-than-humans in which we do not see them as predators alone. So, next time you decide to turn off the lights and subject yourself to some horrors, don’t blame me if you find yourself checking the corners of your room more often, or wake up from scary dreams. Perhaps you’re just in the shadow of animism.