Architectural Horrors

We walked once to a Himalayan restaurant in Los Angeles, and, crossing the street to get there, a car almost hit us. The car stopped in time, but I grabbed your arm anyway to move you, or us both, out of the way. Later that night, I discovered bruises on your arm; you said they didn’t hurt. The car stopped in time; there are bruises on your arm.

In horror movies, I have noticed a trend: the monster is given less and less screen time. So much less that the monster is barely there. In The Conjuring (2013), we see the face of the demonic presence that has been terrorizing the Perron family for about twenty seconds, near the end, though we have been awaiting its appearance the entire film. I don’t remember what it looks like, except that it might have had purplish skin and a vague look of death.

In It Follows (2014), monstrosity is experienced as a sexually transmitted disease, and only those who have been infected can see the monster. “It” follows, but what “It” is doesn’t really matter. When we do see the monster, it is just an undead, Romero-esque zombie. Far more terrifying is the idea of the monster, not the monster itself but the expectation of its arrival, the thing we are always looking and waiting for in the film’s wide-angle views.

In Hereditary (2018), it seems that monstrosity is so dispersed, so parsed out, that it doesn’t matter who or what we label “the monster.” It simply is, like a disease located in DNA; not asked for, not justifiable, just there, awaiting its full tumescence.

I have never seen the T.V. mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s It (1990), nor the 2017 film remake, but I do know what the monster looks like, what “It” is, or might be. I have seen all, or most all, of the classic 1970s and ‘80s slashers, and I know, and can describe in detail, what their monsters look like. Freddy Krueger: burnt face, black fedora, red and black striped sweater, one steel claw-hand, forged in a basement furnace; Michael Myers: blank white face, stiff, animal-like brown hair, dark blue or black jumpsuit, chef’s knife; Jason Voorhees: hockey mask, brownish-green coat, machete; Leatherface: leather-face, made from the skins of his victims, butcher’s apron, chainsaw.

In these films, when the slasher had reached its formulized apex, it was necessary to literalize the monster in the film’s mise-en-scène, to literally put the monster in the scene. As such, the monster had to be recognizable, memorable, distinct. And once it was successfully created, the monster repeated itself, with only minor contextual changes, in further iterations of the franchise. The monster is fixed both spatially and temporally: Freddy in nightmares, Michael on Halloween, Jason on Friday the 13th, Leatherface in rural Texas. We knew what, and when, to expect.

The slasher films were most famously theorized for their interest in bodies. The moniker “body genres” that Linda Williams uses to describe these films suggests their intended purpose: viewers are encouraged to mimic what they see on screen, to a certain extent, with their own bodies. Bodies also needed to be put into the frame, physically crafted, distorted, and maimed. In Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), the bodies of the exorbitantly rich mutate before our eyes; they become literally filthy, stinking, and rich. And this is not a trick of the camera. Japanese artist Screaming Mad George designed the rubbery costumes, just as he designed them for his own film, The Guyver (1991), a childhood favorite of mine in which Mark Hamill transforms into a disgusting giant insect. Of course, the camera worked to aid the credibility of the incredible in these films, as it did famously in Jaws (1975), but the fact remains that someone, many people, had to design a monster, build it, and put it before the camera. They had to make a bold claim: this is monstrosity, and this is what it looks like.

In architectural horror films, like The Conjuring, It Follows, and Hereditary, the monster is always secondary, if not tertiary. In these films, editing, lighting, cinematography, and sound convince us that there is something in the shadows, but this something is rarely shown to us in full. This is not the genre of bodies, but the genre of ghosts. If ever there were a “kingdom of shadows,” as Maxim Gorky called cinema in its earliest days, this is it, reappearing as a cinema in which spectrality is both subject and style.

Perhaps this happened earlier, but it might be better to start with one of architectural horror’s prime examples: The Blair Witch Project (1999). Maybe this is where and when filmmakers began to realize that the camera was more frightening than anything that could be placed before its lens. Maybe here they realized that the time of the monster was over. That the narrative of Blair Witch concerns itself with finding a monster could not be more ironic. The monster is never found, just the camera.

Maybe Luigi Pirandello already knew this when he likened the camera to a devouring spider. It's not surprising that in many of these architectural horrors, the camera is diegetic. In Paranormal Activity (2009), the couple is so paranoid about finding the ghost that is haunting them that they arrange cameras throughout their house. Viewed objectively, the film is extraordinarily banal. We watch the couple sleep, jostle around. If we didn’t know it was a horror film we might think it was an homage to Warhol. Where is the monster? When will it arrive? What will it look like? We ask these questions, and the film only barely gives answers. Forget the old routine: the murder of a minor character to get the ball rolling, the inevitable arrival of the monster, a stream of increasingly spectacular killings, and, finally, a solution, and the death of the monster. And meet the new one: waiting. The old formula can only be embraced in parody or nostalgia. Wes Craven knew this by 1995 with Scream. Anxiety, and what it can propel you to imagine, is always more frightening. 

But when we remove the monster, we remove the capacity of the film to show, to demonstrate. Without the monster, we have only the architecture: the labyrinth after Theseus.

To be clear, I am not interested in making a claim about which of these forms is better: the body genre or the architectural. What interests me is the space in-between them, the difference itself. Horror is always both real and not real, there and not there, on the body and in the shadows. We manufacture it ourselves as much as we feel its visceral reality. But if we believe that horror movies have any connection to real-life (and if they truly didn't they probably wouldn't be horrifying), then they must have something to tell us about both what and how we fear.

We've learned, I think, to sympathize with the monster. We know that without the Minotaur, there is no Theseus. Monstrosity is relative and banal. A bold claim indeed, but often too simple. That's how we started looking in the duct-work, at circulations, networks, and architectures. The dissolution of the monster: “The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole” (Foucault). 

That the car didn't hit us doesn't and does matter. Anticipatory bruising might just be another explanation for the compulsion towards mastery, but had we been struck, it obviously would have been much worse. A vague look of death is still deadly. 

I am concerned, nonetheless, with what to do with monstrosity-in-waiting, even if this is an older concern than is realized (though, what isn't?).