A few nights ago, I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s one of those canonical horror films that’s been on my list for ages but never appealed to me enough to sit through. It’s weird – since the self-aware horror of the ’90s, the genre’s tropes have been burned into the cultural consciousness, parodied and exhausted until they’re so far removed from the original material now as to exist in their own sphere. This is true of any genre tropes, but I’ve found for horror in particular it’s difficult to watch those original films from the ’70s and ’80s back and take them particularly seriously. Or, to rephrase it, to experience the sheer terror that stopped the likes of my parents’ generation from sleeping afterwards. They’d simply never seen anything like it – there were the dusty old horror films of the ’20s and ’30s, Hammer stuff from the ’50s, but nothing that spoke to the particular post-Vietnam milieu that saw the rise of consumer capitalism and the dawn of colour t.v. Within the twenty years from around 1968-1988, horror films rose, burned, and burned out, but it was the greatest period the genre has ever seen. So much of what’s been incorporated into our notions of horror is directly indebted to that period. Craven, Carpenter, Kubrick, De Palma, Romero, Hooper – the heavyweights of the genre to this day defined the 1980s as the decade of horror. I’ve digressed, and I didn’t start this as a genre discussion, but the scene is set. Nightmare on Elm Street fell flat for me; it bordered on camp, I couldn’t take Freddy Kreuger (one of the most iconic horror villains ever) seriously, and I really did not care about the characters or storyline. I know how influential it was blah blah but fucking hell it was a drag. It didn’t help that the night previous I’d watched Scream which basically sent up every decision made in films like Elm Street. The whole thing felt ridiculous, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. So my mind was wandering, thinking about other films from the same period that I’d seen: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, The Exorcist. Horror’s having a ‘moment’ currently, and I started to think about contemporary films and if they shared much with their predecessors. Something was lingering, sticking out at points and cropping up again when Elm Street felt like getting lively: sex. Sex is absolutely everywhere in horror: threatening, building, mingling with fear, destroying those that indulge. It’s something acknowledged in Scream when the American Teen Horror Diehards are watching Halloween at Stu’s house and Randy’s laying out the ‘rules’ of the genre: “There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance: 1. You can never have sex. The minute you get a little nookie–you’re as good as gone. Sex always equals death.” And in horror, sex has always equalled death, in one form or another. The ’80s films are crammed with horny teenagers, damned by their lust. Older films have some kind of rape/domination threat from a monster. Is it all such a far cry from Dracula, necking young women?
The Nightmare – Henry Fuseli 
Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers – Henry Fuseli
It’s worth taking a brief look at the genre’s literary roots and its genesis. The Romantic movement (app.1770 – mid-19th century) saw the birth of a new set of ideas that reacted to the dawning ‘modern world’. This was the genesis of our world now: industrialisation, urbanisation, secularisation and consumerism. Society was growing rational, scientific, and technological, as breakthroughs were made in science in the previous era, The Enlightenment. Romantics, however, found more noble pursuits in beauty, love, wisdom and the unknown: the grey, untameable areas that could not be confined by rationality. Francisco Goya, one of the period’s seminal artists, depicted in his work ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’ a quintessential Romantic interest: the limit of the exalted faculty known as Reason and the power of the irrational over the human mind. The Romantic has sympathy for madness and the unexplained, and near contempt for the final powers of science and logic. This openness to that which is unknown and the belief that civilisation is the poison indicated a desire to return to something more primal. Thus came the rise of the Gothic, alternately called ‘Dark Romanticism’. Romanticism’s interest in the unknowable necessarily created the field for art and philosophy exploring humanity’s dark underbelly. One of the most famous paintings of this time is Fuseli’s ‘The Nightmare’ (1781): a woman thrown back, ostensibly asleep and utterly vulnerable to the demon/incubus on her chest. Fuseli’s painting has been variously interpreted, some commentators suggesting the piece shows the contents of the woman’s unconscious. But I’ve chosen ‘The Nightmare’ because of its overt sexuality, which scandalised its audience on first exhibition. It’s dripping with sex – the woman could either be asleep, dead, or in the throes of desire. Satisfied, dominated or some combination of the two. Her white, virginal clothing makes the painting’s darkness all the more striking. All this is to say that sex has been there right from the beginning, in various guises. It’s the place where reason and logic have no place, the liminal space beyond quotidian worries and the banalities of life. Freud, for one, would say sex is the closest we get to a manifestation of the unconscious. So of course, horror is obsessed with sex – it’s everything that’s fundamentally us and not-us, everything that’s either repressed or hidden for most of us, most of the time, it’s the arena wherein we act out our darkest desires. And in sex, we can be our most vulnerable or most powerful or both at once. These visceral extremes of our physical potential as humans ties closer to our potential darkness than one may think. Why else would sex and violence so often come hand-in-hand if they do not occupy, at some fundamental level, the same sphere? They both exist past the same point, beyond which the rules of usual, rational life are often foregone. So much horror, textual and visual, buzzes with sexual potential because it also buzzes with nightmarish potential. The order of usual life has been suspended.
So, it’s lingering in the background of most (if not all) horror texts, to varying degrees of success. Think of a really shitty horror film and the likelihood is that it’ll have some uncalled-for (women’s) nudity or a sex scene that is mostly a non-sequitur. But it can be done right too, ramping up the terror. Reagan in The Exorcist with that crucifix!! Jack Torrance in The Shining with the woman in Room 237!! The sex ritual at the climax of Midsommar is what the entire film leads towards. It’s usually more nuanced and subtle in literature, but Jonathan Harker’s run-in with the three vampire women in Dracula, Angela Carter’s entire ‘Bloody Chamber’ collection, and the constant threat of sex in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto are each standouts.
It’d be wrong to ignore Catholicism’s role in all of this. All of that suppressed sexuality, vows of celibacy, hot priests (Andrew Scott). A lot of Gothic imagery and content is distinctly anti-Catholic, from its very inception. Hoeveler writes that ‘[b]y the mid-eighteenth century, the long siege of fighting and dying over religious beliefs was, in fact, believed to be safely in the past as an elite class and an enlightened bourgeoisie embraced the brave new world of rationalism.’[1] This class of people, she notes, believed that religion was largely primitive, superstitious and irrational – perfect grounds for the Gothic story. Considering the historical context, she writes, ‘[g]iven the chaos that ensued during the reigns of Mary and Elizabeth, and the Stuart and Cromwell periods that followed, it is fair to say that fear of religious extremism characterized a good deal of the British public. Rather than recognizing that both sides shared responsibility equally for the mayhem that had occurred, the majority of the population, now Protestant, scapegoated Catholics for the history of civil and political unrest following Henry’s reign.’[2] Catholicism’s theocracy symbolised tyranny, the past haunting the present, despotism and posed a threat to the new world. The Gothic’s tropes and themes are deeply anti-Catholic, demoting Catholicism’s most respected figures (the nun, the monk, the priest) to lecherous villains and sexual perverts, and ‘the texts themselves served the blatantly ideological function of secularizing and reformulating the major tenets and representations of Christianity.’[3] Hendrix notes that more contemporary readers ‘were particularly fascinated by the priestly vow of celibacy. Surely, they reasoned, a total denial of sex must mask total sexual perversion. In the Name of the Father, by John Zodrow, wallows in the sweet spot where fascination blurred into fetishization.’ Sex, then, in many of these early texts and many that came afterwards, is a tool used to undermine (if not outright shame and undo) the respected truths of Catholics doctrine. Its wildness and sin are at odds with Catholicism’s piety, hierarchy and order; it breeds in the Gothic.
Unless it’s blatantly exploitative and pornographic, then, sex in horror often has something to say beyond the text. Jumping forward again a few hundred years, the inclusion of sex in many horror paperbacks and films from the ’60s to the ’90s was firmly grounded in sociopolitical change. Hendrix highlights ‘[t]he sexual revolution of the ’60s encouraged a new frankness about sex, and movies like 1972’s Deep Throat made the depiction of raw sex no big deal,’ before raising Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire seriesas a specific case study: ‘Anne Rice didn’t change how she wrote about vampires between 1976 and 1988; something bigger was going on in society. In Dracula, Renfield proclaimed, “The blood is the life!” By the time Rice published Lestat, the equation was blood = death. Rarely has a disease engendered such fear and loathing as HIV. The term AIDS was first used in 1982, and by 1985 hundreds of parents would pull their children out of school based on rumors that an infected student might attend. Politicians proclaimed that children could “catch” the infection from a sneeze or a water fountain. Families abandoned the corpses of their dead sons in hospitals. The illness posited a future where human contact would be rare, bodily fluids poisonous. Into the midst of this panic swooped Rice’s vampires, sexy and shimmering. Swapping blood was all the high they craved, and they humanized the notion of the other. Everything our parents were telling us was wrong: these vampires were scary but seductive, dangerous but delightful. Becoming one of them was described as receiving their “Dark Gift,” and the transfusion made them not only permanently stoned, but, as Lestat said, “more fully what we are.” You would become more fully yourself. And your real self was fabulous.’
The slasher film is a sub-genre of horror that manages to blend psychopathic killer, sex-obsessed teenagers, gruesome violence and virginal girls. Many cite the Hitchcock classic Psycho as the first example of the truly perverted slasher, and when it’s done well a slasher can live up to Hitchcock’s legacy. It’s a category into which A Nightmare on Elm Street falls, Texas Chainsaw, Friday the 13th. I bring it up because I think it links some of the best examples in contemporary horror with those of the ‘classic age’. Some of my favourite entries into the genre in recent years – It Follows, Raw, Jennifer’s Body, The Neon Demon (as well as long-form t.v. like ‘Bates Motel’ and what ‘Riverdale’ was trying in its first season…) – borrow from the slasher’s tropes, sex and clichés, but rework them to offer some social commentary. 2014’s It Follows sees a demon infinitely passed between people through sex. The only way one gets the demon to stop hunting them down, walking towards them to kill them, is to have sex and pass the burden to a partner. Raw and The Neon Demon both see cannibalistic, fame- and/or power-hungry young people having violent sex in a race to the top. Jennifer’s Body, my favourite on this list and, up until recently, a grossly underappreciated film, sees Megan Fox weaponise her sexuality as a boy-eating cannibal. Jennifer was offered as a virgin sacrifice in a Satanistic ritual, but (in an inversion of the virginal/final girl trope of the slasher) because she wasn’t actually a virgin, she became permanently possessed and more powerful than any of the Satanists. Jennifer’s best friend (Amanda Seyfried) learns that Jennifer is a succubus, the female alternative to the incubus that sits atop the woman’s body in Fuseli’s The Nightmare. I’ll avoid any spoilers, but it’s ultimately a feminist story galvanised by sexual assault that sees women embody sexual power and Otherness rather than squander in shame.
If A Nightmare on Elm Street offered me one thing, it was the rabbit hole down which sex and horror meet. Though many exploitation films and incredibly poor horrors use sex as a cheap ploy, it seems like the tide is turning (again) after films like Jennifer’s Body showed how powerful sex can be as a vehicle for sociopolitical commentary. That sex endures in the genre more than 250 years after its genesis speaks obviously to our basest and most perverse desires, but also to our perennial interest in that which goes on behind closed doors – who we are when no one’s watching, and what this ultimately says about the modern condition at large.
[1] Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘Anti-Catholicism and the Gothic Imaginary: The Historical and Literary Contexts’, in Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 3. Ed. Brett C. McInelly. Brooklyn: AMS Press, 2012: 1-3 (p.1).
[2] Hoeveler, p.16.
[3] Hoeveler, p.20.
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