#aviva briefel

[goreprofonde]

Hereditary centers on the affective state of “cruel optimism,” which in Lauren Berlant’s words “exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” Berlant defines cruel optimism as the affective condition that emerges from and perpetuates the precarity that has prevailed in the West since World War II and sustains neoliberal fantasies of a better life. The “cruelty” of this structure emerges when “the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming.” This false sense of mastery within profound submission and precarity is at the heart of the occult plot of Aster’s film. Indeed, the posthumous note Ellen leaves for Annie is a document of cruel optimism par excellence: “Try not to despair your losses. You will see in the end that they were worth it. Our sacrifice will pale next to the rewards.” The note fails to mention that these rewards, which necessitate the revival of Paimon, one of the kings of Hell, will involve the brutal death of every member of Annie’s immediate family, including herself. Because the demon requires a male host but had accidentally settled in Annie’s daughter, Charlie, he must relocate to her son, Peter.

To make this happen, Charlie is decapitated in a car crash; Annie’s ineffectual husband, Steve, spontaneously combusts; Annie decapitates herself using piano wire; and Peter dies by jumping out of a window so that his body can be inhabited by Charlie/Paimon. According to the grandmother’s logic, the magnitude of these losses is negligible in light of the rewards they will bring. As one of the worshippers explains at the end of the film, the cult will gain “knowledge of all secret things...honor, wealth, and good familiars.” Indeed, the final close-up of Peter as Paimon conveys a combination of horror and glory, comparable to the eerie smiles on the faces of the protagonists in the last moments of The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) and Midsommar. The lighthearted song played over the end credits to Hereditary, Judy Collins’s rendition of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” at once clashes with the horrors we have just seen while confirming the cruel optimism that has motivated the characters’ actions: “Something’s lost, but something’s gained / In living every day.” The lyrics uncannily echo Ellen’s injunction to Annie that she should not regret her “losses,” as she “will see in the end that they were worth it.”

- Aviva Briefel, The Terror of Very Small Worlds: Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror.

[goreprofonde]

The film uses a visual language of size and scale to convey the cost-effectiveness of Paimon returning to offer his followers the “good life.” Annie and her family are a small price to pay for these demonic rewards. The opening of the narrative signals their relative insignificance when a slow zoom into a miniature house resting on a craft table seamlessly morphs into the interior of a real house, with Steve waking up his son for Ellen’s funeral. As Zinoman comments, “The implication is clear: These people are minor players in a drama they have little control over.” This view is reinforced by a high school student who describes characters in a Sophoclean tragedy as “pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine.”

- Aviva Briefel, The Terror of Very Small Worlds: Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror.

[goreprofonde]

This miniaturization of horror contrasts with the overwhelming loss, grief, and fear that pervade the rest of the narrative. It is difficult to buy Ellen’s claim that sacrificing her family is a small price to pay for Paimon’s rewards, given how much death and suffering we witness throughout the film. This anguish is evident both in Grand Guignol scenes of decapitation and bodily decay and in the overwhelming feelings, reminiscent of family melodrama, emoted especially by Annie. These range from her primal scream of grief when, offscreen, she discovers Charlie’s decapitated body in Peter’s car to her angry dinnertime accusation to her son of both killing his sister and withholding his feelings following her death: “I wish I could shield you from the knowledge that you did what you did—but your sister is dead! She’s gone forever! . . . But you can’t take responsibility for anything, so now I can’t accept. And I can’t forgive. Because nobody admits anything they’ve done!” Annie’s accusation of wastefulness is well suited to a film that brings together horror and melodrama, two of the genres that Linda Williams associates with physical excess in offering the “spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion.” Melodrama in particular plays with the scaling of emotion, as it typically represents giant feelings expressed in private, domestic spaces: the house, the bedroom, the bathroom.

- Aviva Briefel, The Terror of Very Small Worlds: Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror.

[horror-seminar-2021]

Week 9: Properties of Horror

Wood analyzes American horror films of the 1970s. He characterizes the horror monsters with surplus repression, unique to each culture, that gets projected onto the Other to disown. In the Western culture, sexual energy, bisexuality, and sexuality in women and children were repressed by society. Wood notes that these surplus repressions hinder the development of humanity as a whole. The Other can be any person that is different from one, including just another individual. Wood identifies the Western culture as a "monogamous heterosexual bourgeois patriarchal capitalist" society, and anyone who does not fit in this extensively detailed description can be deemed the Other (197). The Other in the Western culture includes women, children, the proletariat, other cultures, ethnic groups within the culture, alternative ideologies, and sexualities deviating from the norm. The otherness must undergo assimilation or face extermination because the dominant culture cannot destroy it, thus repressing and hating it. Wood writes that this otherness is well reflected in the formation of the monsters in the American horror films.

He then examines the American horror films in the late 1960s-70s. The horror films are popular in America but seen as low-culture, often ignored by the majority of the critics. They also explore societal taboos and what has been repressed within the safety of fictional entertainment. Wood notes this as "our collective nightmare," also remarking on the surrealistic aspects of horror films (203). The 70s horror films focus on the dominant social norm being threatened by the monster who embodies the repressed and the otherness the normality seeks to renounce. While the monster is pictured as evil and a threat, Wood points out that some monsters evoke pathos, leaving the audience in ambivalence. He argues that the audience inherently wants to destroy the normality that oppresses (and represses) them, thus extending their sympathy to the monster. Furthermore, Wood addresses the Freudian thesis that "what is repressed must always strive to return" since the repressed return to haunt the normality–often white middle-class suburbian family–in forms of monsters (205). Throughout the decades, the horror of monsters has moved from foreign, distant, and exotic lands to nuclear family homes in the suburbs. Not only has the nuclear family become the source and the site of horror, but the horror films in the 70s and 80s have grounded themselves upon the sentiment of condemning the oppressive norms and the excess that demonstrates the inevitable consequences of repression.

Wood also views the reactionary wing of the horror films in comparison to the "apocalyptic" horror films. The apocalyptic horror films gaze into the despair and negativity but recognize the impossibility of the dominant ideology, which can be seen as progressive. The reactionary wing horror films would designate the monster as just evil with a completely non-human appearance. The viewers rarely show sympathy to the monster thanks to the presence of a positive force on screen, often related to Christianity. The Exorcist (1973), for example, shows the demon possessing a young girl as the evil incarnate and the priests attempting to exorcise the girl. With the historical events in the 1960s, the horror films in the following decades reflect the ideological disintegration and potential of revolution, only to "seal it over again" with a restoration of normality at the end of the film.

Briefel and Ngai argue that only certain people enjoy the privilege of being haunted and accessing the emotional property of fear. Because suburbia became the home ground of slasher films in the 80s, the victim pool would be restricted to middle-class households who can afford a house in the white suburb at that time. The extensive housing displacement over the Raegan and Bush administration has created anxiety regarding displaced individuals dispersing outside the inner-city area. The homogenous group of white middle-class families feared invasion and diversity in their neighborhoods, wanting to "maintain itself as a cohesive, autonomous group" (73). The remnants of the housing crisis can be seen in Candyman (1992) set in the Carbrini-Green housing project in Chicago. The disparity between Helen's condo Lincoln Village and Cabrini-Green extends beyond the appearance of two buildings. The inhabitants and "reputations" of two housing facilities embody racial undertones and stereotypes regarding urban areas and black people who are the predominant population of Cabrini-Green. While the residents of Cabrini-Green experience the terror of Candyman, Helen's fear and haunting become the film's central plot, reaffirming Briefel and Ngai's argument that anxiety as the emotional property is a sign of empowerment.