John Menick

The horror film has a direct line to our political unconscious. Unlike good-intentioned, well-made democratic political films like Z or The Battle of Algiers, horror films play, not to our public rationality, but our private fears. Political films in a capitalistic democracy are based on rational argumentation, but the horror film is fueled by terror, a kind of cinematic authoritarianism. Put differently, a democratic political film diagrams how things happen, who did what when and with what consequences, a horror film is an explosion of that diagram, it is a film without consequences, without reason. This probably explains why so many horror films, specifically in the zombie genre, are based on the breakdown of democratic political structures. In this way, horror is not about the loss of democracy, of private property, of the autonomous self — it stages and embodies that very loss.

Recently, Eli Roth’s Hostel 2 sent film critics into convulsions like no horror film has done in some time. Most interestingly, almost all critics who gave a poor review to the film have also questioned the sanity of its director. The claims are breathtaking. Roth has been called “toxic,” a “saboteur,” and, weirdly, a “pussy.” That last macho charge comes from Nathan Lee at the Village Voice, probably the most outraged and outrageous review of the group. “Anyone can string a naked woman up by the ankles and slit her throat,” Lee claims. Or really, Mr. Lee? Please explain. Perhaps it should be assumed Lee means this in cinematic terms, but his unconscious ambiguity says more about the effects of the film than Lee is willing to admit. Although reviews like Lee’s and Laura Kern‘s in the Times seem outraged at Roth’s terrifying violence, if you read them closely they are really claiming the film was not terrifying enough. In Lee’s misogynistic lingo: the violence was “neutered.” It’s as if, in order to put Roth and his sexist authoritarian tortures in their places, reviewers wish to show Roth not only how to be a better horror director, but how to be a better torturer.

This confusion between director, audience, character, and actor has been staged before, first by Pasolini’s Salò, and later in Haneke’s Funny Games. I’ve written about the first film elsewhere, but it should probably be mentioned that what separates Roth’s intentions from Pasolini’s is that the Italian director wished to make a film that was inconsumable, something that would purposefully fail at the box office. Pasolini’s film was about the horror of capitalism, and he made it by staging another of capitalism’s horrors: not the erosion of democracy, which may be capitalism’s secret fantasy, but the immolation of the marketplace itself.

Pasolini’s anti-market ethos went well beyond the easy infamy of the horror director. His position was based on political commitment, something that Roth obviously lacks, despite some statements on Fox News concerning US state violence. Reviewers were apparently aware of the need for infamy in marketing mainstream horror, and worried aloud that the bad reviews might help Roth at the box office. It didn’t work. The Times recently reported that horror films are in a slump, even those on which reviewers heaped praise. Whether the box office reflects much of anything is arguable, but one has to smile when Virginia Tech is mentioned as a possible reason for such a slump. Here is another more ludicrous, but much more interesting possibility: on June 8, the day Hostel 2 opened, the news broke that proof had been produced that Romanian and Polish prisons had been used as torture chambers for the CIA. Perhaps it wasn’t that people thought Hostel‘s Eastern European torture chambers were “neutered,” but, better yet, they found them redundant.