By Robert Bauer
The other day I heard excruciating shrieks coming from my daughter’s bedroom. As a concerned parent, I went to investigate imagining some sort of torment that the oldest was perpetrating against the younger two. As I burst through the door and demanded what was going on, I was met with, “Aw Dad, you ruined our game.” I asked what sort of game it was that they were playing that would require such unholy shrieking. “We’re playing Horror Movie,” was the gleeful response. The game consisted in one of them lying in bed pretending to sleep while the other two hid in the closet and under the bed respectively. Suddenly the two would jump out as monsters and the girl lying in the bed would leap up shrieking. This was followed by rampant giggles. This experience left me with a number of questions. The first was: How did my daughters, not one over 8 and none of whom have ever seen a horror movie, know what a horror movie consisted in enough to create such an accurate representation? Then, is there a primal aspect of horror that even uninitiated children understand and can create? As I thought of the particular narrative and even cinematic nature of their game I thought: Is there an aspect of horror that is pervasive throughout genre, style, or history that can have an influence on even the very young? I thought then of Aristotle and Poetics and his description of tragedy. The ultimate goal of tragedy is catharsis brought about by means of pity and terror. If terror is a fundamental part of tragedy, which is a founding representational form, how then can that concept be utilized in other symbolic forms? What is it about horror that can reach across genres, styles, and forms?
Through the course of this paper, I will look at Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in Poetics and compare it to the defining characteristics of Horror. I will also discuss the primal nature of fear and then identify different criteria for judging universal horrific tropes, codes, and modes based on that discussion. I will then take a contemporary media artifact outside of the horror genre (No Country for Old Men[2007]) and analyze it according to that established criteria. I will establish then that No Country for Old Men is exemplary of the idea that there exists a primal aspect to horror; not just in our ancestral bones, but as dreadful tentacles reaching into many genres. I will then suggest other films and media for further discussion and research.
The Primal Origin of Terror
Fear is a fundamental aspect of humanity. It is part of the survival instinct. H.P. Lovecraft says in his essay Supernatural and the Unknown in Literature, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear”.
Lovecraft also notes
that this fear is instinctual and that psychologists support this claim, and with the preponderance of psychological, sociological, and anthropological literature on the subject, is it safe to conclude that fear is a primal and universal emotion in the human race. Fear can come from the real or the imaginary as our minds are so adept at applying meaning to events. It is the meaning, the belief that creates that fear. The fear in fiction is created in a different way than in reality. It is what is differentiated as experienced and depicted. The fear we feel in a fictional context is related to perceived believability of the events or a connection to what has been experienced as real. In Steven Schneider’s work Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors he says, “What we must believe in spite of our ‘better’ [...] judgement is that the objects or events being depicted really could exist or happen.”
One is afraid of what they see or hear depicted, precisely because it is related to something that the spectator has seen, heard, and believed.
This has been used historically in artistic discourse for millennia. In Aristotle’s foundational text, Poetics, he discusses the primary purpose of tragedy. He says, “Tragedy [...] accomplish[es] by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions.”
These two emotions, pity and terror, are the components of what I will term Primal Catharsis. Amongst the Greeks, as far as is known, the purpose of theatre was to produce catharsis. This catharsis was the feeling of an emotion intensely as a means for purging that emotion by way of the mediated experience of theatre. This Primal Catharsis has endured through the centuries and remains in force today. Artists, taking Aristotle’s work as prescriptive rather than descriptive, used it as a primer for writing effective dramatic works. Romans borrowed heavily from the Greeks and infused Aristotle’s observations with their theatre. Shakespeare studied Roman Tragedy, imitating the tragic tropes instilling that Primal Catharsis into the likes of Macbeth and Othello. The French Neo-classicists were even more dogmatic about Aristotle establishing their Academie Francaise to enforce his ‘principles’. On and on the Poetics endured, carrying with it the purposeful Primal Catharsis, through romanticism, melodrama, realism, and into film in the modern era. While all modes of visual and literary representation do not claim Aristotle directly, they are indeed influenced by his verifiably constitutional work.
Modern cinematic forms still use pity and terror as a fundamental cathartic tool. The emotions have not changed, though the form and medium have. Modern films have developed many ways and means to access that Primal Catharsis, and they continue to develop new ways to do so. Through a careful study of the many genres of cinema one can identify the ways in which that genre accesses and utilize that pity and terror.
Fear is associated commonly with the Horror genre. As such it is not a far cry to claim that Horror is the champion of Primal Catharsis. By analyzing Horror one can discover a series of codes or elements that it uses to produce Primal Catharsis. Then by extension, those codes can be correlated with other genres, showing that indeed the means of achieving that pity and terror are used independent of genre. This highlights the universality of those codes and Primal Catharsis. Doing so, adds legitimacy to Horror as a genre, as it is so often dismissed as a lower form of entertainment.
The Horror Code: Accessing Primal Catharsis
One of the means for understanding genre is by looking at the breadth of a group of films and identifying commonalities that crop up in individual articulations. Then one can create a defining code of that genre that will help in identifying other films as part of that genre. Though this is an exclusionary approach, it can be helpful in understanding themes and messages within a particular cinematic grouping. Film theorist Edward Buscomb discusses a particular approach to genre that focuses on inner and outer form.
The outer form consists in the setting, form, tools of the trade, recurring physical objects and the inner form consists in the themes, ideologies, messages, contradictions.
Though he ignores cinematic elements such as lighting, editing, angle etc. it is easy to see how those elements can be included in the outer form. He argues that by looking at the outer form of a film, one can understand what the inner form is. For example, since Westerns show horses and wide open spaces, the themes relate to the colonization of the wild untamed land.
Much has been written about horror as a genre in which has been discussed the inner and outer form. I will not be breaking new ground in identifying the inner and outer form of horror, rather I will look at three ideas that become fundamental in creating the Primal Fear in horror and how then they can apply in non-horror genres. As they are identified, I will discuss the inner (Narrative/thematic) and outer (Visual/aural) form of these ideas and how they relate to fear and ultimately Primal Catharsis.
The Unknown
H.P. Lovecraft states, “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
He argues that this fear descends from primitive times in which humanity had little understanding of the world. He says:
The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.
Humans understand very little of what makes the world work. Unable to deal with the concept of not knowing or understanding an event, they create an outside motivator for the event. Hence stream stories of the supernatural. This creation of a motivation for the event gives one a sense of control. When one has no control it reminds one of the event over which no man has any control: death. Death is unique in its threat as it is a direct affront to the survival instinct and it is in and of itself and unknown. Humans resist death as a threat to instinct and cognition, we want to live and we want to know.
This fear of the unknown has worked its way into literature and thereby cinema. While the unknown is not literally represented always as death, the idea haunts always as a specter of death. Cinema has developed ways to represent the unknown to recall this ancient fear by narrative and visual means, which hearkens to Schrader’s inner and outer form.
There are three narrative means of representing the unknown. All three are effected by an absence or dearth of information. The first is an absence of backstory. Not knowing where something comes from gives a lack of context. This make framing the actions of character difficult. There is no explanation of what led them to this and so the character is simply a threat with no motivation. This is apparent in Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets. The villain is a young man, married, living with his parents. There seems to exist unspoken tension between the young man and his parents and even his young wife. This tension is never explained. When he begins his killing spree, he gives no explanation. Even the note left on the table, doesn’t tell why he began killing everyone. This is particularly unsettling because this monster of a man seems so much like the real men that exist all around and they are men for whom we have no backstory, no context. This hearkens back to what Schneider says about the need for it to connect to real life. This sense of the unknown is coupled with the death of so many people in the film, drawing attention to our own great unknown: death.
The second narrative means of representing the unknown is in the absence of resolution. When the film leaves the ending unresolved it reminds us of our own unresolved ending. There is no knowledge of what is beyond death. While religion allows for faith in something more, there is no proof that one can have without experiencing it one’s self. In film, the ending being left unresolved or unfinished is terribly unsettling to audiences. In Bogdanovich’s film, there is no explanation (as there, is unfortunately, in Hitchcock’s Psycho). The boy is hauled away and we are left with the image of his car sitting alone in the drive-in parking lot. We are not told who survived and who died in the shootings. Case in point, Byron’s secretary, a fairly significant character in the film, was shot, but her fate is left untold. Even the final line of dialogue delivered by Bobby Thompson reveals no information regarding motivations or consequences, it is simply a statement of fact. “I hardly ever missed, did I?”
Similarly, Hitchcock uses the absence of resolution in his The Birds. The family gets into the car and drives off slowly through the birds and then the film ends. There is no information given as to what their fate was, or what happens to the world. We are left wondering and unsettled. Equally, we don’t know what happens after our lights go out. We want that knowledge, but there is none to give. That emptiness is a stolid reminder of the demise we all will face, but we do not know when, how, or what comes after.
The third narrative device that represents the unknown is the absence of speech. One way to know and feel comfortable with a character is to know what they think. A primary means of understanding that is through what the character says. Once again Bogdanovich’s film demonstrates this principle. The character though he does speak, is reticent regarding his thoughts. He lies. He exchanges pleasantries. He chats. But what he thinks is not revealed. His silence, throughout much of the film is threatening because we do not know what he is thinking. Other examples, of which they are myriad, are the laconic slashers Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Neither are heard to speak in their films. Contrast this to the villain Darth Vader, who speaks much, revealing his thoughts and motivations throughout the trilogy. He is never as threatening as Michael Myers or any number of shambling zombies though his capacity to mete out death is equal if not superior. His speech makes him safer, by protecting us from the unknown. Silence, while indicating our lack of knowledge also, represents the silence of death. Death speaks not, and so we do not know why we die. The dual layering in death of the threat to our instinct and our knowledge continues.
Though these narrative cues are significant, it is important to note the formal elements horror that support this concept of the unknown. Well documented is the use of low key lighting in horror cinematography. Horror as a genre owes much to the german expressionist filmmakers who fled to the United States and into Hollywood in the 1930’s. This chiaro-scuro lighting became the modus operandi of horror from that time forth. The emotional effect of extensive use of shadow is unsettling. The shadow conceals or hides information and provides an uncanny sensation. Freud gives one definition of heimlich (which when paired with the prefix ‘un’ is the origin of ‘uncanny’) as: “Concealed; kept from sight”
The variegated light and shadow conceals and reveals simultaneously, passing constantly between known and unknown, heimlich and un-heimlich. This is clearly seen in F. W. Murneau’s Nosferatu. Count Orlock’s castle is a shadowy tomb. The pivotal moment as the young man sees the door of his room open of its own accord and reveal Nosferatu down the hall is riddled with shadow. The light and dark of the scene passes the characters between what is known and what is unknown, what is revealed and concealed. This leaves the audience without a sense of clarity, calling to mind the darkness that comes after death. Hence, so many horror films occur at night, providing a naturally dark environment to call to mind the unknown.
Horror films are often fond of using obscured cinematography. The most common usage being the placing of the camera in a position that occludes rather than reveals information. While this approach was ostensibly devised to maintain films within the Hayes Code stipulations, it has developed into a remarkably effective means of playing on audiences fear of the unknown. This is often used to make monsters more threatening, by not giving the audience a clear look at the beast, their imaginations fill that space with the most horrific. Additionally, these monsters can represent death, which is none to clear, and our glimpse of it is limited by perspective. In Stephen Spielburg’s Jaws the shark is not revealed for much of the film. The camera captures only the limited perspective of the characters in the piece: a dorsal fin. The audience is limited, therefore, to know that the harbinger of death has a fin. That limited vision of the creature is a limited vision of our death.
This same idea is often portrayed by limiting our view of violent acts. By placing the violence out of frame, the audience can only guess as to what happens, once again removing any control over the situation, and thereby reminding us of the imminence of our demise. In the B-film The Leopard Man, a young hispanic girl is seen running from the big cat. She reaches her home and pounds on the door. The mother struggles to open the door as she hears the terrified screams mixed with the violent roars of the cat. The audience is treated to no sight of the bloodshed excepting the symmetrical pooling of blood under the door. This plays to the fear of the unknown, especially that a loved one may meet their doom out of our sight, that they will pass on without us being with him or her. In another stunning example, James Whale’s Frankenstein, Victor and his mentor are seated in the laboratory discussing what should be done about the monster, who is locked below. They hear screams and realize that Fritz, Victor’s assistant, is in danger. They rush down to the cell of the creature and find Fritz hanging dead by the monster’s hand. The violence occurring off screen leaves us uncertain as to the moments of his death. His final moments are unknown and we are left with only the consequences.
Related to this practice is the editing out of the payoff, meaning that the climactic moment (usually of violence) is cut and takes us to another scene elsewhere. While this practice has become passé of late, it is still an effective way of horrifying audiences with the unknown. In Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme uses this effectively in the scene when Hannibal Lecter is to be transported. He stands still for a moment beguiling both the audience and the Officer into false security, then he leaps at the officer with teeth bared. Before seeing the teeth sink in, the camera cuts. Once again the unknown forces us to fill in that gap with the horror of death.
The Uncanny
The absence of knowledge is an element of the horror genre and has been utilized to great effect historically. That being said it is far from the only element that can be accessed to bring about that Primal Catharsis, that pity and terror. It is difficult to have any sort of meaningful discussion of horror without acknowledging the influence of Freud’s discourse on the uncanny. Within his text he discusses the term Heimlich, which is homely or familiar.
Freud also said that the uncanny is that which “Arouses dread and horror...certain things which lie within the class of what is frightening.”
Therefore that which is un-heimlich is unfamiliar, leading to the common definition of uncanny as being that which is familiar made unfamiliar. Much serious scholarship has been done in order to apply this understanding of the uncanny to horror including Stephen Scheider in his work Monsters as (Uncanny) Metaphors: Freud, Lakoff, and the Representations of Monstrosity in Cinematic Horror. In his article he discusses the uncanny nature of monsters in horror texts. Monsters have been established as a necessary part of horror. Noel Carrol argues that monsters in a world that does not accept monsters is a primary qualifier of horror.
As such the analysis of the monster as a metaphor for the uncanny becomes Shneider’s main premise.
Monsters are, according to Schneider, a metaphor for those infantile beliefs that are repressed or surmounted. He summarizes literature as saying “repressed infantile wishes [are] the sole source of uncanny feelings.”
Though he is somewhat incredulous in this, it allows for an analysis of how different monsters represent surmounted beliefs leading to that uncanny feeling.
The first are the reincarnated monsters. These are zombies, ghosts, vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, Jason Voorhees, etc.
The infantile belief that they represent is that the dead can return to life. Freud says “apparent death and the return of the dead have been represented as most uncanny themes.”
This is uncanny precisely because our knowledge of death and its terminality creates an uncanny valley between the reality of the living and the return to life. They are dead but not dead, familiar but not. We should have laid aside this belief long ago, but in the horror film it comes back to life and forces us to face it. In George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead we encounter this reincarnated monster. The people of the film recoil at the horrid reality of the living dead, and we as an audience recoil, but the physiological response is far less powerful than the psychological unrest that comes from facing a surmounted belief. They are dead, but they are alive and moving, but not alive, dead. That uncanny feeling, that revealing of what was once hidden or repressed is fundamental to the effect of horror.
The second kind of monster is the psychic monster. Schneider defines these as the monsters that are omnipotent, representing the repressed belief that other beings can be omnipotent, that they can know our thoughts.
Examples of these monsters are Carrie, Freddy Kruger, Scanners, and to an extent vampires. This belief in omnipotence can be presented as telekinetic or telepathic. Carrie is an obvious example of telekinesis. Dredged in pig blood and humiliated by her peers at prom, Carrie lets loose her ability to move objects with her mind. Whether she is breaking down a basketball hoop to crush her kind-hearted teacher (indicating that no one is safe), or deflecting the car driven to kill her, she is demonstrating that the ‘reality’ of the surmounted belief that people can indeed control the outer world with their minds. This uncovers that which was concealed, resulting in the sensation of the uncanny.
The final kind of monster is the dyadic monster. This is surmounted belief in a double. Schneider identifies two subcategories of doubles, or dyadic monsters. The first is the Physical Double being a doppelgänger (The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers) or replicant (Terminator, The Stepford Wives). The second is the Psychic Double consiting in Schizos (Norman Bates), Shape-shifters (Vampires, Were-wolves), Projections (Frankenstein’s Monster), and Serial Killers (Hannibal Lechter).
These doubles are related to the idea that as infants we do not understand the difference between us and the one in the mirror. We overcome that belief but as we see doubles in film we are struck by that surmounted belief again and feel the uncanny. When seeing Norman Bates, he is the boy next door. He is personable but he has a different consciousness.
He is also his mother. So the uncertainty about who he is and who he isn’t is the source of uncanniness. When he comes down the stairs and we see him dressed as his mother and acting as his mother but he is not, that represents the doubling of the psyche. Or as a physical double, are the twins in Kubrick’s The Shining. The mere image of the two girls, dressed in identical gray dresses is unsettling, because it brings back that surmounted belief in the double.
The interesting thing about these surmounted beliefs and the uncanny is that all the while that we are seeing them on the screen, we know that they are not real. We experience what Carroll describes as Thought engagement. We know that Dracula (Shape-shifter Psychic Double) is not real, we have surmounted that belief, but the thought of him existing, “the prospect that there could be such a being” is where the horror is.
So there is this play between the reality, the surmounted belief, and the thought that the surmounted belief could be real, and that play is where the uncanny lies.
Existential Dread
Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the horror film is the concept of two irreconcilable forces with which the characters and all people must come to terms. There is a dialectical tension between these two forces and there is no hope of overcoming the two. This space of tension is where horror lives. The first force is the knowledge that nothing endures. Whatever exists will come to an end. The life of each person will play its course and eventually expire. That end is a source of fear, and while I have spent a considerable portion of this paper discussing the unknown and how death is the great unknown, this idea of death itself as an undesirable is a great fear. Fate will have her own. We are helpless in her face.
The other force is the idea that this life is unbearable. There is pain and suffering in this life. There are destructive diseases (Cancer, AIDS, Heart Disease, Diabetes, Stroke). There is poverty and starvation. There is oppression via racism, misogyny, the idealogical state apparatus. There is violence and war. There is the unmitigated knowledge that nothing we do changes anything. This suffering leads to desires for annihilation, but we fear death.
These two forces leave all people in the devestating position of choosing between two undesirable options. This is the Roman Tragic Choice. In Greek drama our pity for the characters came about by knowing that their choices were designed by fate, but the Romans did them one better by forcing characters into a choice between to impossible things. Medea must choose between living with the knowledge of Jason marrying someone else or vengeance by way of murdering their children and thereby, his posterity. While this dichotomy is contrived, Medea truly believes that they are her only two options. Shakespeare distilled this quandary into six words: “To be, or not to be”
Hamlet desires annihilation; death because he cannot go on living with things as they are (his father dead, mother married to his uncle who murdered his father) but he fears death “the undiscovered country.”
Perhaps tragic choice was best described by Bill Watterson as “The Torment of Existence weighed against the Horror of Non-Being”
This existential dread is often personified in the monster. This villain is an unstoppable force, which one cannot truly escape and to which one will ultimately succumb. George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead demonstrates this concept beautifully. There exist three worlds in this film: the world of the dead, the world of the poor, and the world of the rich. The poor cannot get out of their position. This is indicated by the conversation between Cholo and Kaufman. Despite Cholo’s hard work in the service of Kaufman, he will not be allowed entrance into the world of the rich. Nor do the poor want to become zombies, which is to face death. They do not want to remain poor and suffer the indignities of the impoverished (prostitution, drugs, illness, and ultimately ignominious death) nor do they want annihilation. When our hero defeats the zombies after their feasting on the rich, he is left with his life, but the threat of the zombies remains. They have no hope. Even if they defeat the zombie for the day, they will eventually succumb. They will die someday and become a zombie. They don’t want to die, they don’t want to live. They cannot escape the torment of their existence nor the specter of death. Either way the choice is made for them. If they live then they must endure the horror of life, if they die, then death has won. This existential dread is the death of real choice, the choice is made for them either way.
Primal Catharsis and the Gaze
The Unknown, the Uncanny, and this Existential Dread all lead to Primal Catharsis. One of the powers of films is its ability to draw upon two modes of viewing the text simultaneously. The audience has a dual capacity. Laura Mulvey discusses the male gaze in her text Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which, while intended to discuss the creation of the male-subject/female-object binary
, can be easily adapted to discuss this concept of Primal Catharsis. It can be understood thusly: the audience can gaze at the scene in a scopophilic pleasure, like unto a fetish. The events on screen are to-be-looked at. The spectator maintains a separation between themselves and the individuals on the screen. The other mode is a narcissistic gaze, where the spectator identifies with the protagonist (like the infant in the mirror seeing the reflection as their very self). In Mulvey’s work, these two gazes are for the visual pleasure of the man in looking at the woman, however in this horror context it takes on a new meaning.
The first view (audience as audience) is associated with the pity aspect of the Primal Catharsis. We see the characters suffer as an other from ourselves and can relate in the best case through empathy, or as Aristotle puts it, pity. We feel sorry for the characters as they suffer through the unknown, as they experience uncanny interactions with monsters, and as they discover the Roman Tragic Choice leading to existential dread. We recognize that those feelings are common with feelings perhaps we have experienced in the past and we are sorry for them. We pity Victor Frankenstein. We pity Mina Harker. However, this pity is only half of the equation.
The narcissistic gaze allows access to the full potency of Primal Catharsis. As we view a film, we place ourselves in the position of the protagonist. We are not only spectators from afar, but we become the Subject of the film, the person whose view is being portrayed. This puts us in danger of the Unknown, the Uncanny, and the Existential Dread as we are now the character in the film, having placed ourselves in their position as subject. Their Dread becomes our dread, their Unknown ours, and their uncanny shivers, ours. This is how, then, we access the terror aspect of Primal Catharsis. We do not only feel sorry for the character, we feel their fear, their terror. In that sense, the only way Primal Catharsis can be achieved is due to the existence of this phenomena of the dual scopophilic spectatorship. Only because the audience can gaze as both an audience and a subject can they feel both pity and fear. As Janet Murray states, “a good story [or in this case film]...giv[es] us something safely outside ourselves and upon which we project our feelings.”
Outside ourselves is for Pity, the projection is for Terror. This is the Primal Catharsis.
No Country for Old Men and Primal Catharsis
Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 film received many accolades and was no stranger to controversy. Aside from discussions about its particularly violent content or vicious arguments over whether Chigurh was in the hotel room when Bell investigates
, there has been discussion over the genre of the film as horror. There are several threads on discussion boards regarding the pinning down of the film to that genre, but there is little agreement.
Much of the marketing of the film was simply as another Coen Brother’s thriller, and the omnipotent Guide Wikipedia concurs.
It is not my intent to prove that this film is a definitive horror film (as trying to pin the genre of any Coen Brothers film is a fool’s errand), rather the film makes excellent use of the previously defined horror element of the unknown, the uncanny, and existential dread to access the Primal Catharsis. I will demonstrate several examples of how the film accesses these elements by way of its visual and narrative elements and then suggest other films that may benefit from a similar analysis.
The Unknown
The film uses various means of emphasizing the unknown for the sake of primal catharsis. In terms of Narrative codes there are the three afore mentioned means utilized in the film: absence of dialogue, absence of backstory, absence of resolution. The absence of dialogue is highlighted in general and character specific ways. In general, there is not much dialogue in the film. Many scenes have no dialogue at all, as the characters are not in a position to speak. In many others they speak, but reveal very little regarding thoughts or feelings. The overall effect of this is a sense of mystery regarding the film. As audience, we realize early on that this film is not going to say much. That general sense of the unknown connects to our fear, leaving us ill at ease.
In a more specific character sense, the making laconic of Anton Chiguhr emphasizes the unknown nature of his character, making him more of a threat. The first scene where we are introduced to him, he speaks nary a word. He is escorted into a police station and seated in a chair. As the officer speaks into a telephone, he is seen in the background stepping over his handcuffs. Without a word, he moves behind the officer and strangles him with the cuffs, ultimately rupturing his jugular. He remains virtually silent throughout the scene, speaking no words. The fact that this is arguably the most violent death in the film connects that silence with morbidity. As death itself is the great unknown and lack of speech makes thoughts unknown, we connect the two unknowns together and feel terror; primal catharsis.
The absence of backstory also contributes to the terror of the unknown. Any knowledge we have of the characters is picked up in bits and pieces of dialogue, of which there is very little. This provides a general sense of absence of knowledge throughout the film. Most importantly, there is no backstory regarding Anton himself. As the villain of the film, so little is said about who he is that he becomes almost mythical or phantasmic (which will be discussed later). The most we know of him comes from bits of dialogue spoken by Carson Wells, another bounty hunter. He asserts a few things, like that he met him once and that he is a man of principles, though it is never explained what those principles are.
But that is all. This absence of origin, motivation, relationships, etc. becomes a gulf of darkness that colors the character as a threat. That unknown quality of his origins connects him with the unknown of death and thereby appeals to the primal cathartic terror.
The absence of resolution or closure is equally if not more-so effective. At the end of the film, Chigurh confronts Carla Jean. After arguing about the validity of his claim on her life he leaves the results up to a coin. She refuses to call it and then there is an absence. We only see Chigurh leave the house, check his boots, and drive away. Without the resolution of the scene; the result of the coin, his response to her adamant refusal, we are left in limbo. This unknown resolution lends credence to the death comparison. What Chigurh brings is unknown and that means death. We fear that unknown because we cannot see our own end. No one is witness to their own death, so that part of the narration in the film is removed and we are reminded of that unknown moment. Even if we see it coming, as Carla Jean does, we don’t see it happen.
Visually the film also connects to the unknown. This is achieved in the film through dark lighting, obscured camera work, and editing out the pay-off. The lighting in particular is remarkable as multiple times the characters pass through darkness as they face impending doom or as the doom comes to them. The most remarkable example of this is as Chigurh walks silently down the sidewalk toward what he believes is Llewllyn’s room in the motel. The overhead lights are interspersed leaving spaces of black and light. The camera tracks back, framing Chigurh from the mid-chest up as he passes through those light and dark spaces. This has the effect of never giving us a good clear look on his face making it difficult to read his feelings about what is to happen. This connects with our uncertainty about death. We cannot know what death brings, how it fees, so death comes partially revealed, yet partially obscured. We cannot see, so we do not know. Thus we are afraid.
Obscuring or limiting the view is often achieved in this film by eschewing the ‘god-cam’ for the perspective of a single character. When Llewllyn meets his doom we are in the car with Bell. We only see what he sees, which is the escaping Mexicans screaming out of the parking lot. He runs in and finds Llewllyn dead on the floor of his room. His death is left out of our view. This absence of vision reminds us of what we cannot know. In a smaller instance, Chigurh kills one of the Mexicans in the motel shower. He asks him a question to which he responds “No me Mate.”
Chigurh closes the curtain, points the gun inside, fires. We see the blood spatter on the inside of the curtain and hear the slumping body, but do not see the death. Similar to the hispanic girl’s death in The Leopard Man we see results of death, but the death itself is obscured from our view. It remains as unknown as death is. We know some, but not enough.
Editing out the payoff is another means of this accessing of the unknown. This bears a resemblance to the absence of resolution in the narrative sense. In a confrontation on the side of the road, Chigurh pretends to need a jump from a passing resident. The man asks him where he’s headed and Chigurh is evasive, though not fearfully. He asks the man if he can get the chickens out of the back of his truck. The man looks back bewildered by the odd question. The film cuts to a shot of Chigurh washing out the back of the pickup with no sign of the original owner or the chickens. This cutting out of the pay-off of the scene, the moment when Chigurh kills the man and takes the truck, is a sign of the unknown and connects the unknown with death and, thereby, Primal Catharsis.
The Uncanny
The unknown is not the only horror element that No Country for Old Men utilizes to access the Primal catharsis. The film uses Anton Chigurh as the Uncanny Monster, a metaphor for surmounted beliefs that connect with Stephen Schneider’s assertions in his essay as well as Freud’s discussion generally. If the uncanny is to make the familiar unfamiliar as Freud says, then there are aspects of the representation of Chigurh that are verily uncanny. Chigurh in appearance is clearly a man, yet there are aspects of his appearance that make him seem strange or unusual; unfamiliar. For example, his face reveals little emotion. The eyebrows rarely move and his eyes seem almost dead in his sockets. His smile is uncanny. It is not a smile of genuine emotion, but a smile of artifice. It bears the appearance of reality, without being real. His movements are slow and almost lyrical. He floats from place to place, never moving faster than slow gambol. This appears unnatural especially in those moments when any normal person would be agitated or hysterical. His arms do not swing when he walks, they rather hang dead at his side. In appearance and movement he moves more like a ghost than a man. His voice sounds like a man, yet is unusual in its cadence, accent, and dynamic. Always low and quiet, like a whisper or a threat, he speaks not as would be expected for a normal man to talk. These characteristics work together to take that which is normal and usual (familiar) and make it unfamiliar. He is uncanny. Like a real man, but enough unlike one to make us feel alienated, strange, and afraid. This helps us to feel the terror that Aristotle requires for Primal Catharsis.
Chigurh is a monster and a metaphor. Though he lacks the excesses associated with the common portrayal of the movie monster, he fits in with the kinds of monsters that Schneider describes as part of the uncanny metaphor. The best monsters he argues are not limited to being metaphors for one surmounted belief. Rather, “Many of horror cinema’s most enduring monsters turn out to be mixed metaphors [...] insofar as their presence reconfirms more than one surmounted belief.”
As it turns out, Anton Chigurh has tokens, as Schneider calls them, of monsters in the three surmounted beliefs, making him a particularly apt monster and thereby connecting us back to Primal Catharsis.
Chigurh is a reincarnated monster. This represents the surmounted belief that dead can come back to life. Though not portrayed as literally dead and having risen, he does have much in common with the dead coming back and walking among us. In one scene, after having been shot by Llewellyn, Chigurh is seen shambling down the sidewalk, with blood running down his leg. His movement is similar to the zombie, the walking dead, and this type of movement is repeated as he walks away from the camera at the end of the film after the car crash. That crash seems to have killed the other driver as he lie motionless in the front seat, yet Chigurh has risen from the ‘dead’ and climbs out of the wreckage, bloodied and broken. A relation to the disembodied return of the spirit, another permutation of the reincarnated monster, is referenced when Ed Tom Bell says, “I think he’s pretty much a ghost.”
The behavior and conditions of Chigurh are ethereal enough for him to make that assertion. Thereby, he equates him with the surmounted belief of the reincarnated monster.
Chigurh is also the Psychic Monster. This is the surmounted belief that another can know one’s thoughts or manipulate reality with the mind. Chigurh, by remarkable means, is able to always find his quarry. This is never explained, only warned against. Carson Wells declares to Llewllyn that “He will find you.”
There is no escaping a person who knows what you will do next. When Llewllyn escapes Chigurh on the streets of Del Rio to Mexico and ends up in a Mexican Hospital, Chigurh knows he is there. He simply states, “You are in the Hospital across the river.”
This appears to us that Chigurh knows the protagonist’s every move, almost even before he does. He knows what hotel he Llewellyn ended up in in El Paso. He knows to look in the air duct for the bag of money. He seems to know more than any person ought to. This connects him to the Psychic monster, an uncanny beast.
Anton Chighurh is a Dyadic Monster. This means he represents the surmounted belief in a double. Schneider specifies a subset of dyadic monster called a ‘psycho’
. Psychos are mental doubles and Chigurh best represents the type called ‘serial killer’
They are like us in mind and body, but act in ways alien to us. This is most clear in that he operates under a system of rules that is foreign to commonly accepted practice, yet clearly and rationally defined. We know this based on his behavior. He kills, but not everyone, yet their seems to be no real difference between the humanity of the two. These serial killer doubles are frightening because they are us and they are not. The only separation is action. That is what makes them uncanny. A monster who looks and seems in every way like a man and is rational like one, but behaves like a monster is perhaps the most frightening of all. That gives us deep access to that terror that is necessary for Primal Catharsis.
Existential Dread
Perhaps the most effective means of access to Primal Catharsis in this film is its approach to the existential dread. The film presents a choice to Llewellyn Moss and it is by the voice of Chigurh himself. When they speak on the phone, Chigurh tells him that he can return the money to him and die or keep the money and his wife will die. This is the Roman Tragic Choice. To leave a choice between two undesirable option reminds the audience of the existential quandary of living an unbearable life or annihilation, the thought of which is also unbearable. Llewllyn attempts to choose a third option by arranging to give the money to Carla Jean and then hunt and kill Chigurh. Like so many Greek tragic heroes before him, his attempt to cheat fate is met with deathly consequences. In this case, both he and Carla Jean are killed. There is no third choice between living in this wretched life and death.
Throughout the film there are other hints to this truth. Whether in the gas station with the clerk who must call the coin (and wins, but for what?) or the drug runners who died of “Natural causes[...] natural to their profession.”
as Ed Tom so sardonically puts it, there is no escaping the bitter reality. Anton Chigurh is unstoppable. He is death, he is fate. When Carla Jean meets him she does not run, because inherently she knows that there is no outrunning death, it will come. She is given a choice, by means of the coin. She says “It all don’t make no sense.”
She is thereby recognizing the absurdity of the tragic choice. When face with the two undesirables, she choses to not decide, but death comes anyway. Death is inescapable. The choice is inescapable. When choosing life or death, there is no third option.
These three elements of horror work to bring us to Primal Catharsis because we as an audience play within our dual role. We gaze at the characters on screen and feel sorry for them. When the poor sap who stops to help Chigurh, we feel for him as he is air-gunned in the head. He is not us, but we pity him for his death came unsuspectedly. On the other hand, when Llewllyn sits on his bed with the sawed-off shotgun aimed at the door watching the shadow of Chigurh’s feet beneath it, we feel terror. Through the narcissistic gaze, we place ourselves in his position, for we see his view, and we are afraid of the unknown, of what is behind that door. Be it an uncanny feeling upon seeing Chigurh pad his way down a hall or the fear of the unknown in dark of a river bank or the dread of knowing that not even Carla Jean makes it, we pity them at a distance and we feel terror putting ourselves in their place. It may not be that No Country for Old Men is a horror film, but it definitely uses these three aspects of horror to achieve Primal Catharsis.
Conclusions
It is clear that fear and terror are innate aspects of human experience and it should come as no surprise that horrific stylings have pervaded literature from ancient times. The codified means of producing pity and terror in audiences by Aristotle have endured and failed in many ways, but the fundamental piece that remains is that pity and terror are primal when it comes to the cathartic experience. Horror has utilized many means of accessing that feeling, few of which I have discussed in this paper. The unknown and its hearkening to the great unknown still appears in much of horror. The uncanny and the dark sense of the imperfection of life continues to thrill. Our tragic choice of continuing to run or accept our fate weighs heavily in much of horror from Michael Myers to Chucky. While other enduring horror elements can be identified and studied, I have found these three to be particularly effective in analyzing the way in which horror and non-horror films access that Primal Catharsis. While much argument exists regarding the Genre of No Country for Old Men it is irrelevant when viewed with the goal of connecting the film to that which endures: pity and terror. It would be useful to look at other films with these three elements to see the pervasiveness of this concept Primal Catharsis. I suggest films that already have been recognized as being thrilling or terrifying such as 2001:a Space Odyssey, The Manchurian Candidate, or even Network and Blackhawk Down. I believe that a similar study of such films will support the assertions of this paper. Such studies will reveal that there is a common thread in films that strike for the gut. Primal Catharsis is just that, Primal, visceral, and I dare to offer: universal.
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