The Eyes of Horror

I love horror films, as many people do. Personally I enjoy watching them in order to experience the fear of the situation shown on screen without actually having to experience the events. When watching something like The Descent (Marshall, 2005) my body is reacting to the fear of some creature of the caves coming after me but I’m sitting on my sofa at home and I’m not really in danger… I guess you could call it being a safe adrenaline junkie.

However, one thing that The Descent has in common with almost any other film of the horror genre is that it focuses on vision, or better yet, the lack thereof. Most every horror film plays around with the eyes or vision in someway, but you may be wondering why? and I’m going to tell you.

First off, I won’t kid you, I don’t like the origins of psychoanalysis. I’ve had my quarrels with Freud in the past because personally I don’t see him as a very scientific man. However, I cannot deny that some of his theories (but mostly the theories of his successors) do hold up against modern psychological theories.

Luckily, we are talking about one of his successors; Jacques Lacan. He was the one who said that we learn early on in life (before proper development) where on our bodies we received pleasure. He decided to call the areas “pleasure sites” (I promise, this does all tie into horror films). The pleasure sites included things such as the mouth, the ears, and, you guessed it, the eyes.

Now, the enjoyment of looking is usually called “the scopophilic drive” and lots of psychoanalysts agree that this drive is probably the reason why we love going to the cinema, because we are allowed to stare. Parents always tell you not to stare when you’re younger and, according to Lacan, the reason is because you learn about controlling your pleasure sites until you have repressed them.

So! after that crash course in Lacanian psychoanalysis, we are finally back to the eyes! Now we all know that we get pleasure from seeing, it stands to reason that you would get unpleasure from not seeing.

Take my earlier example of The Descent, the whole film revolves around the fact that the girls cant see what they are doing in the darkness of the caves, and then when they are finally allowed to see around them, they, and by extension you as the audience, get jumpscared by this mostly blind monster of the caves. Even this goes back to Lacan as you are being punished for looking at things, same when your parents would tell you in a hushed tone to “stop staring at that man” and you knew you were in trouble.

Another film that comes to mind is Don’t Breathe (Alvares, 2016) which leans heavily into the theme of restricted vision. Not only is the main antagonist blind but the entire setting is made to feel like the main character, and again the audience, is blind in this situation as no lights are used for almost all of the film (all the scary bits anyway).

There is, however, yet another side to this as eyes are very often mutilated in horror films. I remember when I first watched Hostel (Roth, 2005) and endured the scene where a man takes a blowtorch to a woman’s eye, and when she is rescued it gets cut off and this horrible liquid came dribbling out of her eye socket… bet that grossed you out. But this mutilation is the most obvious of scare tactics because sight is one of our most valued senses, especially when it comes to evaluating danger. So watching someone lose their eye, or get killed through them, like the first jumpscare in The Void (Gillespie, Kostanski, 2016) is incredibly unnerving.

I feel like my main conclusion out of all of this, is that many critics and movie goers, trash modern horror for being “too cliche” with their jumpscares, but the point is it still works because of that unconscious psychology. So bash them all you like! They will still make you scream!