SON OF THE BRIDE OF THE NON-MONSTROUS DEMIHERO

My most recent review on NATURALISTIC (ETC), was for the 1944 film THE CLIMAX. In the course of the review, I noted that it was structurally the opposite of the film that inspired it: the 1943 PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. The earlier film followed the dominant pattern of the American horror film, focusing on "the twisted nature of the monster, mad scientist, etc," as he menaced various victims, who are usually demiheroes as I defined the category here.

Demiheroes, even on the occasions where they triumph against their opponents, don't really choose to stand or fall, because they are governed, just like their monstrous counterparts, by a different form of will than one sees in the heroes and their villainous counterparts.

I later refined the name for this "form of will" as the "existential will." It is that force that urges demiheroes to exert themselves in the name of pure survival, in a manner parallel to their negative counterparts-in-existential-will, "the monsters." This is in contrast to the ways in which "heroes" and "villains" work, given that their function is to exert themselves in the name of the "idealizing will," be it for good or evil.

In horror-films that are centered-- as most are-- upon the figure of the monster, the monster's victims-- almost always demiheroes-- are usually not given much depth. But THE CLIMAX is interesting for inverting the pattern, though there isn't much of an increase in character-depth. That is, the real star is not top-billed Boris Karloff as the malefic Doctor Hohner, but singer Susanna Foster's character Angela, of whom I wrote:

the "climax" of the movie is that [Angela] triumphs over [Hohner's] attempted repression even without ever knowing what he did to her.

Now, as I said in the review, THE CLIMAX could do this easily because it wasn't really a horror film like PHANTOM, but an "uncanny murder-mystery."  And yet, this may have been a little glib. Certainly there are other mystery-films in which demiheroes become the stars of the show, as one can also see in Hithcock's THE LODGER, But though there are probably more demihero-centered mystery films than there are demihero-centered horror films, the majority of mysteries at any given time are more likely to center upon either serial heroes (Sherlock Holmes, Charlie Chan) or upon the source of the mystery, who like the star of the horror-film is often a monster (not sufficient to stand) or a villain (choosing to fall, as it were). As it happens, in this review of two unrelated films, I touched upon two such films, with 1993's SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER supplying an adequate example of "the murderer as a monster" and MURDER BY DEATH forming an excellent illustration of "the murderer as villain"-- a villain so formidable, by the way, that he confounds several hero-detectives, all of whom are spoofs of famous figures like Holmes and Chan.

It would be more accurate to say, not that works in the mystery-genre are characteristically dominated by demihero-personas, but that they're simply much more open to all four persona-types. The purpose of the horror genre is to fill the audience with what I have called "antipathetic affects," and for that purpose, the "monster" is better than any other persona, though I've noted in various essays that the dominantly positive personas of the hero and the demihero have their negative manifestations. Though Angela of THE CLIMAX reaches heroic heights in overcoming Hohner's influence-- though not in the service of a greater ideal, as would be the case with a genuine hero-- some demiheroes exist to be defeated. In the 1964 suspense-film DEAD RINGER Bette Davis' character registers as a demihero because she propounds the existential will in a negative fashion but lacks the more profound traits of "monstrosity" found even in the crappier monsters, like the featured "axe murderer" of the Mike Myers film mentioned above.

One of the few subtypes of horror film that allows for greater latitude in the use of personas is the comedy-horror film. Though in PUMPING THE PRIMACY I was addressing a different subject-- that of the NUM theory rather than the subject of personas-- I mentioned that it was possible for the demihero star of a comedy-horror film to be the main focus of the narrative, rather than whatever spooky phenomena he encountered. I cited Bob Hope's 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY. However, this pattern was not meant to be determinative either, for in the same essay I also mentioned another comedy-horror film-- 1941's THE SMILING GHOST-- in which the plot followed the same pattern as the "serious" horror flick, making the titular monster the narrative focus.

Of parallel interest is the way in which the narrative focus changes in Universal's "monster-mash" films of the 1940s. There's not much question in my mind that in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN,  HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and HOUSE OF DRACULA, the monsters are the stars of each film. Yet, when Universal chose to put paid to the continuing sagas of their "starring monsters," the story chosen put the emphasis upon the comedians. Arguably this was because Abbott and Costello carried more clout for the audiences. Similarly, Bob Hope is arguably the star of the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY, even if the monster known as "the Cat" may be the main focus of the original 1927 silent film, of which the 1939 flick is a remake.

TRAILS OF SUSPENSE: ADDENDA

I got curious about one of the authorities cited by Charles Derry in THE SUSPENSE THRILLER, one Basil Hogarth, because what Hogarth wrote about thrillers sounded to my ears more like a description of pure pulp-adventure than the somewhat more realistic strain of suspense Derry was analyzing. Only once in TST does Derry quote Hogarth's 1936 book WRITING THRILLERS FOR PROFIT, and it's surprising that Derry quotes him at all, given that Derry gets more substantial help from authors like Highsmith and Rand. Here's an abridged sample from the one Hogarth quote Derry uses:

It is necessary to put the heroine and hero in great danger at regular intervals, just snatching them from the jaws of horrid death in the nick of time. Climax must be piled on climax, and the whole thing must move swiftly... Force and threats play an important part in the plot... The more violent the action the better. Large man-eating apes, poisonous snakes, murderous negroes and bloodthirsty Chinese, surly Mexicans and plotting anarchists may run riot.

On first impression it sounds more like Hogarth was trying to get his readers to write less like Patricia Highsmith and more like Robert E. Howard! Not that there's anything wrong with that (contrary to elitist opinion), but if nothing else Hogarth's comments help show just how confounded the territory was, from the early 20th century on through today, between adventure and suspense.

An amusing factoid came up when I attempted to figure out what credits Hogarth had to his name, since Derry seemed to think that Hogarth was a professional thriller-writer. I found nothing, but thanks to a poster named "Doctor Kiss" on THE CLASSIC HORROR FILM BOARD, it turns out that Hogarth wasn't a professional in the sense Derry believed:

"Basil Hogarth was a 'literary tutor' who offered courses in writing from his office on Bloomsbury Street in London. He published substantially on classical music in British popular magazines during the 1920s and 1930s, in addition to bringing out several more of these 'how to' guides through a variety of publishers during the same period: MUSIC AS A PROFESSION (1925), HOW TO WRITE PLAYS: A GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL PLAYWRITING (1933), THE TECHNIQUE OF NOVEL WRITING: A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR NEW AUTHORS (1934), PERFECT MEMORY BY PSYCHOLOGICAL METHODS: A PRACTICAL GUIDE (1935), SELF-MASTERY THROUGH PSYCHO-ANALYSIS: A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR LAYMEN (1936). Several of these titles were reprinted multiple times during the 1930s and 1940s.

If Hogarth's reported date of birth is accurate - 1908, according to the British Library and the Library of Congress - then he got started on writing these guides while still in his teens (?!). His other work of note is as editor of the book-length collection of essays and transcripts THE TRIAL OF ROBERT WOOD (1936), about a celebrated British murder case. Advertisements for Hogarth's Bloomsbury Street office were still running in the press in the early 1950s.

There's no evidence that I can find of Hogarth having ever been an actual thriller-writer, and his 'how to' guides show no evidence that he had experienced any particular personal success in the fields which he wrote about."-- quoted with the permission of the writer.

One wonders what kinds of "thrillers" Hogarth grew up with, that he defined the genre in the above manner. A good candidate would probably be the BULLDOG DRUMMOND series of novels by one "Sapper," which are impressive on a number of levels, not least their mind-boggling xenophobia.

In any case, I imagine Hogarth's been pretty much forgotten by everyone but this one quote in Derry's book. But at least the excerpt from his book on thrillers provides an interesting snapshot as to how one early 20th-century Brit author viewed the genre.

TRAILS OF SUSPENSE

"The concept of a protagonist who is not in control thus seems virtually universal to the [suspense thriller] genre"-- Charles Derry, THE SUSPENSE THRILLER, p. 19.

In his 1988 analysis Charles Derry restricts his observations purely to the medium of films in sussing out the genre he terms "the suspense thriller." But though he doesn't analyze any thrillers from the prose medium, Derry does quote a number of prose-thriller writers in support of his observations, such as Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, and Boileau-Narcejac. In addition, Derry, influenced in part by the genre-theorist John Cawelti, provides a rigorous schema by which he attempts to separate out the essence of the "suspense thriller" from other genres with conceptual overlap, principally the detective/mystery genre and (to a much lesser extent) the horror genre. In doing this, Derry follows in the footsteps of both the thriller-writers and other academics, who seem to more or less agree that mystery and horror are the genres most often confounded with the suspense genre. This is basically accurate as far as it goes, but I think Derry and his fellow academics neglect another genre (also a "mythos" in my Fryean system), which would give some of their conceptualizations wider literary applicability. Obviously, I can't devote more than a broad outline as to how the genre/mythos I term "adventure" stacks up against that of "suspense," but Derry has given me some intriguing starting-points.

Early in the book Derry, careful to state that he wishes to deal only with the suspense-genre in its cinematic manifestations, advances a Caweltian definition based on the content of suspense-thriller films:

"Perhaps the suspense thriller can be perceived not so much as a group of films which thrill their audiences (although this may often be the case), but as a group of films whose content consists essentially of thrills."

Though Derry later devotes a chapter to his concept of the thrill, he never quite arrives at a way of distinguishing the unique thrill of the suspense-genre from those of other genres, such as horror and adventure. This may render certain aspects of his argument problematic, since in my essay THRILLER KILLING I observed that "even a glance at Wikipedia gives one of a cornucopia of subtypes-- action-thriller, horror-thriller, erotic thrillers-- that wander all over the genre-map." Indeed, if one were to define a thriller in the manner that one of his citations, Basil Hogarth, does-- as "any type of fiction... in which the sensational element preponderates," then almost every genre conceived in the last hundred years could be called a "thriller."

Plainly, a given sensation-- say, the threat of a entity that means harm to the viewpoint-character-- will be pretty much the same in any genre. What distinguishes the "thrills" of a suspense-story, a horror-story or an adventure-story must then be the way the narrative presents the thrill to the audience.

It's understandable that Derry doesn't attempt to say much about distinguishing the thrills of either horror or adventure from those of suspense. For one thing, Derry correctly sees the suspense-thriller as belonging to a greater category of "the crime-genre," and so he spends most of his energy distinguishing his chosen subject, suspense, from other categories of crime-tale, particularly the detective/mystery genre. I don't fault him for having done so, for the sake of his argument's clarity; I merely wish to expand the size of the lens Derry uses.

For instance, in Chapter 4, he posits a schema by which one can view crime-stories according to how much they emphasize the victim, the "detective," or the criminal. As long as one is only speaking of the crime genre, which almost always takes place in contemporary urban settings, this is appropriate. Stories that emphasize a "detective"-- and I will explain my added quotes shortly-- include such subgenres as the "classical detective," "the hard-boiled detective," and "the police procedural."

Derry's definition of the last of these, the "police procedural," is the main reason that I put quotes around his concept of the "detective." Derry defines this genre too broadly, saying that it is "composed of all those works which emphasize a professional policeman (or police detective's) adventures as a member of society's law-keeping forces." This is a problematic definition because although many policeman-heroes are technically "detectives" in terms of their official rank, such as Derry's first-mentioned example of DIRTY HARRY, many are not "detectives" in the narrative sense seen in either the classical detective tale (Sherlock Holmes) or the hard-boiled version of same (Philip Marlowe). Dirty Harry's labors to determine what villain to blow away constitute "detection" about as much as do a medieval knight's labors to find out the location of a dragon for the killing.

Moreover, my concept is that the police procedural is usually a good deal more realistic in tone than either DIRTY HARRY or various other examples Derry cites. And sure enough, a minute's search on Google brings me to a more precise definition than Derry's, from current crime-writer Jim Doherty:

A police procedural is nothing more than a piece of crime fiction (in any medium) in which the main, or at least a major interest, is the authentic depiction (or at least the APPEARANCE of the authentic depiction) of the profession of law enforcement.

Toward the end of the chapter in which Derry sets forth his victim/criminal/"detective" schema, Derry does recognize a thematic difference between the genre he seeks to define, "the suspense thriller," and those genres that critics insist on calling thrillers but which aren't relevant to Derry's concept of suspense. Derry seeks to define these other thrillers as expeditiously as he can:

"These genres on the left of the triangle [schema] should not be called thrillers, but if critics insist on occasionally doing so, they should be aware that these genres are more 'process thrillers' than 'suspense thrillers.'"

He further notes that the "leftie" thrillers tend to "present some distinct moral ethic... as a consistent value from beginning to end, whereas the suspense thrillers tend to examine and investigate an existing morality or individual commitment to a new code, arriving at some final position by the end." He doesn't address "process thrillers" again for the greater part of the book, except for a couple of pages in Chapter 9, where he notes the appearance in the early 1970s of "a new kind of thriller... exploring violent, almost fascist sensibilities." Among the films cited in this grouping are DEATH WISH (which is compared to DIRTY HARRY), RED DAWN, and RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II.

Putting aside the value judgment in Derry's "fascism" canard, it seems obvious to me that many if not all of the works Derry struggles to disentangle from his suspense thrillers (again, thanks to the mislabellings by other critics) are best seen through the generic lens of the adventure-mythos. In this mythos, as Northrop Frye pointed out, protagonists do not usually alter their basic moral stances as much as do some (though not all) suspense-heroes, and the reason ties back to Derry's pronouncement in the first quote referenced above: narratively it's just as important for the adventure-hero to essentially remain in control as it is for the suspense-hero to lose some degree of control.

That said, there are of course any number of exceptions. One may argue that on one level the first adventure of Dirty Harry ends with a certain loss of control in that after killing the villain he flings away the badge that represents his ties to law enforcement. Conversely, the suspense-hero of 1977's BLACK SUNDAY-- a film Derry surveys in his "political thrillers" section-- does undergo more doubts than Dirty Harry during the course of the story, but at film's end he "mans up" and decisively kills the villain, as Derry himself points out.

Exceptions often don't either prove or disprove the rule, however. I've noted in earlier essays that I deem the suspense-genre to be most strongly affiliated to the mythos of drama. In this characterization I follow Frye's remarks on the type of protagonist dominantly seen in tragedy:

He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject both to social criticism and to the order of nature.

This clearly contrasts with Frye's remarks on the concept of the hero seen in the romance/adventure mythos:

...the typical hero of romance, whose actions are marvellous but who is himself identified as a human being. The hero of romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended...

In a future essay I hope to go into greater detail as to how the *mythoi* of adventure and drama are at once "natural enemies" and "rival siblings." For now, I'll end by saying that although Derry's SUSPENSE THRILLER's focus prevents it from framing the suspense genre within the totality of possible genres, Derry's analysis of the genre itself remains both formidable in its scope and inspiring as to the author's ability to suss out common themes in a variety of disparate-seeming stories.

THRILLER KILLING

"I think the biggest thing that separates horror and thriller is the supernatural. If a movie has supernatural stuff in it, to me it's automatically horror. Even though there are horror movies that are reality-based and not supernatural. So it's tough."-- B-Sol, from this 3-25-10 post on THE VAULT OF HORROR.

The problem of the generic colloquialism "thriller" is indeed a tough one. As an actual name for a genre "thriller" is pretty much useless, for even a glance at Wikipedia gives one of a cornucopia of subtypes-- action-thriller, horror-thriller, erotic thrillers-- that wander all over the genre-map. However, the debate between B-Sol and Merilyn Merlot isn't concerned with any subtypes that aren't directly related to horror. B-Sol's suggestion of a divide between natural/supernatural is an attempt to find a dividing line between the pure horror film and what Wiki would probably have termed the "horror-thriller," as per some of the examples discussed, like JAWS and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

Parenthetically let me suggest a different term in place of the scattershot colloquialism "thriller." I used said term in this essay earlier:

In some ways, THE HAPPENING shares elements of both horror and suspense films. The idea of city-dwellers thrown into a mammoth catastrophe evokes the suspense-oriented narrative of the disaster film, with a side-dish of terrorist-fantasy flavoring. However, the theory about the source of the malady is presented in so oblique a way that it partakes less of the well-defined threats of a suspense-film and becomes more of a *mysterium*

The "suspense" genre, I said in a related post, was oriented not on seeking to scare the audience, but to "startle and disorient." In my own conception the pure horror film doesn't necessarily need the element of the supernatural, but it does need the element of the *mysterium,* which is my shortened form for the two Latin phrases invoked by Rudolf Otto is his classic IDEA OF THE HOLY, where he explains the numinous experience in terms of the *mysterium tremendum,* the overwhelming mystery that compels fear and trembling in the viewer, and the *mysterium fascinans,* which compels the viewer to be attracted to the fascinating mystery.

Like B-Sol, I find many non-supernatural films have enough of a "mysterioso" aspect to them that they remain conceptually within the bounds of the pure horror film. Hitchcock's PSYCHO is one example. Nothing supernatural occurs in the story, but the disintegration of Norman Bates' mind seems to be a transformation of normality as profound as if he had been possessed by a demon or the like.

However, while the horror film needs the *mysterium* in some form, the suspense film-- which is what I'd hazard is really what most people mean when they say "thriller"-- does not in general dwell on any overwhelming mysteries, as I would say is the case with both PSYCHO and the film I originally discussed in the above citation, THE HAPPENING. The Shyamalan film does have a *mysterium* at its core that aligns it with the pure horror film, but 1971's ANDROMEDA STRAIN is still a textbook example as to how to craft a suspense film that does have metaphenomenal (though not supernatural) underpinnings.

For that matter, the SILENCE OF THE LAMBS film also seems to have more in common with the suspense genre than that of horror. Hannibal Lecter is certainly mad, but it's questionable as to whether his madness is as grotesque and transformational as that of Norman Bates. Both characters inhabit essentially realistic worlds, but Hannibal's madness has far less mystery to it.

More on these matters later, probably.


ADDENDUM, 2-26-14: Just a note to myself that currently I do regard SILENCE as having its own "mysterium," albeit not one as overt as that of PSYCHO, and that therefore SILENCE does effect a "transformation of normality."