“A miracle must be seen at a distance if one is to believe it to be true, just as a cloud must be seen at a distance if one wants to believe it is a solid body.” - Lichtenberg
1. I saw a perfect little horror movie yesterday afternoon. I went with my son, who is an encyclopedia of horror films, to see Passenger at Gaumont in Les Halles shopping mall, which is about half a mile from where we live.
Passenger is little – only an hour and a half, in comparison to the now average hour and a half of movie and 45 minutes of stuffing that seems to be the new Hollywood norm – and it is perfect in that it has no message and no aspiration besides making you tense and scaring you. The jumpscares start in the little prologue to the movie, and then we get to the couple at the center of the movie as they move out of Brooklyn and take to the open road in a camper van. The van subculture serves, in this movie, the same function as the summer camp or the creepy old town. And thus we pass into the particulars, which are well summed up in the IMDB abstract:
“After a young couple witnesses a gruesome highway accident, they soon realize they did not leave the crash scene alone, as a demonic presence called the Passenger won't stop until it claims them both.”
2. I have now seen, or been forced to see by my son, innumerable horror movies. I’m an old and broken structure-monger, a fossicker of motifs, and these movies, in that respect, don’t hide their compositional elements – they flaunt them. In this movie, as in so many horror movies, no good deed goes unpunished. When the couple are in a van convention, an old woman advises the girlfriend/fiancée part of the couple to not drive at night and “never stop” – which means never stop to help people in accidents.
On the one hand, one could interpret this injunction – which is realized in different forms in so many American horror films – as a product of a hyper-individual culture in which the subject must survive by blinding itself to any sentiment of empathy or generosity.
But that part of the horror ethos I find less interesting than the way this ethos combines with the supernatural. What the couple discover is that St. Christopher medals have a way of weakening the Passenger.
3. The discourse on superstition extends through all the European enlightenments, all the way back to the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews of the Mediterranean cultures of the ancient period. Myself, I think the key text for the early moderns was Plutarch’s essay on superstition – and that in the 18th and 19th century this tradition was twisted, or reshaped, by the model of a world of contract – a total contract society, so to speak.
The Voltairian view was that religion and superstition were aspects of the same thing. Voltaire himself acknowledged awe – but his typical stylistic impulse was to mock at all that is awe-ful.
In Plutarch's essay, De superstitione, the move is not to slyly let superstition mean religion. The latin word is a translation of deisidaimonia, fear of demons. Plutarch doesn't disbelieve in demons. He was a member of the Delphic priesthood, and his moral essays are, not surprisingly, not only a model for the early modern genre of the essay but, as well, of its cousin, the sermon. The great Anglican preachers of the 16th and 17th century were utterly familiar with Plutarch. And one sees them lifting the themes of Plutarch’s essay.
In France, there was a different turn given to Plutarch. Amyot’s translation of Plutarch – which made his work plunderable by every French writer since the 16th century – prefaces the essay on superstition with the note: “This treatise is dangerous to read, and contains a false doctrine: for it is certain that superstition is less evil, and approaches nearer to the middle of true religion, than impiety and atheism.”
Amyot’s note should be hung in the hall of Great Horror movies, for it contains the doctrine that allows the horror movie to dicker with supposedly true religion.
Plutarch is concerned with what I would call the world of superstition. World is a key word, here: for the world is, for Plutarch, a divine thing – if not a created thing. And it is world views that separate, in Plutarch’s essay, religion from superstition. Atheism then plays the role of the null set, which is why the essay begins by supposing that null set:
“A man thinks that in the beginning the universe was created out of atoms and void. His assumption is false, but it causes no sore, no throbbing, no agitating pain.”
In contrast to this, Plutarch constructs the superstitious person. His argument here is nicely rounded in a paragraph:
“To come now to our subject: atheism, which is a sorry judgement that there is nothing blessed or incorruptible, seems, by disbelief in the Divinity, to lead finally to a kind of utter indifference, and the end which it achieves in not believing in the existence of gods is not to fear them. But, on the other hand, superstition, as the very name (dread of deities) indicates, is an emotional idea and an assumption productive of a fear which utterly humbles and crushes a man, for he thinks that there are gods, but that they are the cause of pain and injury. In fact, the atheist, apparently, is unmoved regarding the Divinity, whereas the superstitious man is moved as he ought not to be, and his mind is thus perverted. For in the one man ignorance engenders disbelief in the one who can help him, and on the other it bestows the added idea that He causes injury. Whence it follows that atheism is falsified reason, and superstition is an emotion engendered from false reason.”
The key word here, I think, is “blessed”, makarismos in the Greek. Throughout the essay, the atheist is treated as though he literally lacked a sense, and thus could not see the blessing in which he lives. But the superstitious man is in a similar position – he sees only the curse, he fears the demons more than he experiences the very sensual blessing of the world.
The bones of Plutarch’s essay can be seen, for instance, in Jeremy Taylor’s sermon, On Godly Fear from the 1660s, where superstition is recognized, in line with Plutarch, as a misplaced fear, and put among the pagan and Romish practices – a line of thought that of course has a new relevance given the discovery of New World nations and the attempt to proselytize the Gospel among them. Atheism is to one side, and idolatry is on the other, and they are joined by a certain cognitive kinship. Unlike the New Age Americans who take pagan idolatry to be the worship of nature, Taylor takes it to be a sign of an extreme fear of nature – of a removal from the blessed world into a world of mere survival.
“The Latins, according to their custom, imitating the Greeks in all their learned notices of things, had also the same conception of this, and by their word superstitio understood “the worship of demons,” or separate spirits; by which they meant, either their minores deos, or else their zoas apotheothentas, “their braver personages, whose souls were suppose to live after death;” the fault of this was the object of their religion; they gave a worship or a fear to whom it was not due: for whenever they worshipped the great God of heaven and earth, they never called that superstition in an evil sense, except the Adeoi, “they that believed there was no God at all.” Hence came the etymology of superstition: it was the worshipping or fearing the spirits of their dead heroes, “quos superstites credebant,” “whom they thought to be alive” after their apotheiosis, or deification, “quos superstantes credebant”, “standing in places and thrones above us;” and it alludes to that admirable description of old age, which Solomon made beyond all the rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans; “Also they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way;” intimating the weakness of old persons, who, if ever they have been religious, are apt to be abused into superstition; they are “afraid of that which is high;” that is, of spirits, and separate souls of those excellent beings, which dwell in the regions above us...” (Sermons, 1874:66)
4. Plutarch’s atheist was a theoretical creature. Taylor's was less so, but the preferred alternative to belief in 17th century England was a quiet retreat into deism. But the world of contract, envisioned by the Enlightenment thinkers and animating, now, a million models in economics, became a very real thing – a set of practices which guides our days and governors - is always shouting in our ears since we first learnt to babble. In the fold between the Blessed world and the Unblessed world of contract, horror movies resort to superstition by way of religious relics. It is an interesting genre in this way, a symptomatic genre, even. The role of superstition as religion is pretty much at the center of the popular horror film notion of the supernatural. The world is not blessed, nor is blessing a possible thing – not if you are to survive. But the relic, the “idol” in Taylor’s phraseology, plays a very important role.
In Passenger, we have a secular setting in which one member of our couple – the man, Tyler – brings with him a St. Christopher medal, which he hangs on the rear view driver’s mirror. His partner, Maddie, laughs, and Tyler says something joking about Maddie going to hell, before taking it off. But Maddie has him put it on again. The bit with the St. Christopher’s medal is, in an odd and surely unintended sense, a play on Plutarch’s contrast between atheism and superstition. When the couple stop to help a man who has crashed his car – thus operating as good Samaritans – the demon, Passenger, spots them. It is for this rather futile good act that they are then punished, throughout the movie. The maxim they learn from a wise woman at the van gathering (never stop!) is in opposition to any view of the world as blessed, as communal. Without that sense, in a world blasted free of blessing, the St. Christopher medal literally becomes a weapon. This is a motif that casts a long shadow in horror movies, back to the magical power of the cross in vampire movies and so on. The only thing the “demon” fears are sacred objects which are denuded of their aura as blessed objects in a world where only curses and counter-curses count.
5. Horror movies, and stories, ride at the margins of the bourgeois story; it is a sign of some movement in the underground, the under consciousness, when they become central. These are moments when the enlightenment replacement of the blessing is strained – when it thins, when all the comforts between the subject and terror take on a suddenly fragile and contingent appearance. If horror movies were only this, then they would not have such weight – but the horror movie cannot utterly keep out the blessed world. Even the wise woman responds to the couple to aid them (although, spoiler, she quickly is destroyed). Interestingly, the horror movie slasher in which only one survives seems to have become a bit out of date. There are helpers in some recent horror movies. Still, it is a hard thing to become a survivor in a cursed world, since it really puts in question the price and value of survival.
6. And yet, these considerations have to be put under the sign of entertainment. The cursed world, the world of survivors, we want to see it re-enacted again and again. It goes down like Coke and popcorn. This is the mystery of the perfect little horror movie.
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