Don't Go into the Cellar!: An Interview on Horror with Noël Carroll

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the latest
installment of Being Human from the
University of Pittsburgh.
This series is devoted to exploring
the humanities, their connections to
other disciplines, and their value
in the public world.
I'm Dan Kubis, associate director of
the Humanities Center at Pitt.
My guest today is Noël Carroll,
professor of Philosophy at the
Graduate Center, City University
of New York. Carroll is one of the
country's leading philosophers of
art and has written widely on film,
literature, the visual arts, and
aesthetics.
But since he was in Pittsburgh
during our city's celebration of the
50th anniversary of George Romero's
Night of the Living Dead, we decided
to focus our conversation on horror
and Carroll's groundbreaking book,
The Philosophy of Horror, or
Paradoxes of the Heart.
When Carroll published this book in
1990, horror criticism was
not a well-established field.
Noël has claimed that he wrote it in
part to convince his parents that
all the time he's been watching
horror films wasn't a waste of time.
Through the years, though, Carroll's
book has become an important
resource, both for its contributions
to film criticism and because of the
richness of the definition of horror
it proposes.
Horror, as he defines it, includes
works of art that feature a monster
who inspires both fear and disgust
in other characters.
Many critics have objected to this
definition's reliance on audience
reactions, and many others have
disputed the boundaries it stakes
out.
It's clear, though, that the book
has made an enduring contribution to
film and horror studies
and that it continues to inspire
productive debate.
It's also clear from the book's
humor and energy that Carroll
wrote it about a subject he loved.
So I began by asking him about that
love and about what motivated him to
write The Philosophy of Horror.
Thanks for coming in, Noël Carroll,
first of all.
I want to begin by asking you about
your work in horror
criticism. I want to ask you about
The Philosophy of Horror.
You published that book in 1990.
We just kind of like talked about
this a little bit.
In an interview that you gave a few
years ago, you mentioned that you
wrote the book out of love and that
you had a lot of fun writing it.
So I wonder if you can just talk a
little bit about that, about the
process of writing the book and what
motivated you to do it and that
kind of thing.
Well, the book--
it's true that once I started
writing it, I loved writing it.
But the way it came about
was a little bit
more accidental.
I was an untenured faculty professor
at Wesleyan and
should have been very conscious
about what I was writing in order
to get tenure.
And for that reason, I never
would have written a book called The
Philosophy of Horror because it
would have gone to reviewers at
academic presses, and the reviewers
would all write in
their reviews there is no such thing
as the philosophy of horror.
So I never would have written
it.
But what actually came about
was Rutledge had a
series of
very short books on
British authors.
And I proposed that I would
write the one on John
Wyndham, who wrote
a lot of horror novels.
Some of them were adapted into
two films, the
most famous being maybe Village
of the Damned.
Probably that was the most famous.
Anyway, I said I would be happy to
write that book.
And I approached the
New York editor of Rutledge.
He said, "You can't
write that book because that's a
British Routledge series, and
they only want Brits writing about
Brits." And then he said,
"But I would take a philosophy
of horror from
you." There had been
a seminar on it at the
Museum of the Moving Image
in Astoria. And he had seen that
Stanley Cavell was there and some
other people. So he said, "Well, I
saw your title at that
symposium, the philosophy of
horror." He said, "If you want to write
a book on that, I
would do it." And of course,
since he was willing to offer me a
contract and I didn't
have to worry about reviewers saying
there is no such thing,
I said, "Sure, I'll
write it." And that's actually how
it had came about.
I never, ever,
at that point in my career,
would have thought of it as possible
had an editor not offered
it to me.
And then in terms of saying
I loved it, I loved writing
it, but that isn't
what got
me to start writing it.
That's really interesting.
But then you-- but you did have--
you have been a huge fan of the
genre all your life.
You talked about how
you went to efforts to get to
see shows on TV
and to get new books and things like
that when you were a kid, so when
you were offered the opportunity,
you were ready.
Well, as I like to say,
I was the kid in Catholic school
who liked the page
of the Baltimore catechism,
where the people were burning in
hell, and the demons were dancing
around the flames.
And ever since then,
I've been
drawn to the genre.
I know you still
are. You still watch a lot of
horror films that come out.
And I want to ask you about
something that I read
over the summer in The New York
Times.
They were writing about
what they said was a new kind of
horror movie, and they called it
grown-up horror.
Right? And I'm thinking of films
like Get Out and The Babadook
and Hereditary and other
movies like that.
The kind of the distinction
they were drawing there was that
there weren't monsters, and there
weren't zombies, and there weren't
whatever else.
Instead, the horror came from
things like
grief or family members dying, or
things that happen in our real
lives, or something like that.
I just wonder what your thought on
that distinction that The New York
Times was just drawing?
Well, I don't find it very
convincing.
As
film historians know, the universal
horror films from the thirties:
Dracula, Frankenstein,
The Mummy, and the Invisible Man.
Those were films for the
whole family.
They were considered to be serious
films.
When I was growing up, certainly,
there were films like Rosemary's
Baby and The Exorcist that were
considered-- and
they came from literary properties
that were also considered to be
quite serious.
So the idea that we suddenly
got adult films, I think, is
mistaken.
Well, also, I think it's sort of
wrong to take that triplet that
you just mentioned and
say there's no monsters in them.
After
all, the
grandfather and the grandmother in
Get Out are
monstrous figures, the product
of
an experiment
that I think we would think of as an
inhuman experiment.
There certainly is a monster, the
guard, at the end of Hereditary.
I mean, of the three, the only
one that really captures
is
Babadook.
And then the other kind of films
that would be in
that category, like It follows.
There are many monsters in that and
everything that does
the It following.
Quiet Place actually has
aliens in it.
So
I don't think actually that
distinction works either.
Historically, it's not the
first kind of horror films
that were considered mainstream,
and it doesn't actually work
completely well for that particular
group. Now, that group of
films, I
would concede, are certainly
more sophisticated
than an episode
on TV of The Walking Dead.
They're more complicated in
terms of their narratives.
Some of their social
inflection is more complicated.
So I wouldn't deny
that. But for
almost any period you could
look at
the history of the horror
genre, there have been - I
don't know what you would want to
call - the
more ambitious and
the less ambitious.
I guess I would want to say.
I mean, Melmoth the Wanderer was
very ambitious.
But at the same time,
that novel was written
in the early 19th century.
There was a series called Varney
the Vampire.
And Varney the Vampire
was just a
shocker serial.
I wonder, just as a follow-up to
that, where does the idea
that horror films
are for kids-- right?
The whole category of grown-up
genre being the kind of category
that this writer used to talk
about these new films.
Where does that come from?
Is it just a matter of only
paying attention to the least
sophisticated of
horror films at any given time or--
I don't know?
What are your thoughts on that?
Well, if you look at the
cycle of
horror films,
the Universal's thirty
cycle is an early cycle, which
are those films that I just
mentioned: Frankenstein, Dracula,
Invisible Man.
Then at the end of the thirties
and the early forties, Universal
revives those
films, including
things like Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein. And those films
are simpler and less
ambitious than the earlier
ones.
But at the very same time,
Val Lewton is making films like the
Cat People that are
actually fairly
sophisticated.
So you do have
a series of films
that are being made for
a younger audience,
but at
the same time, they're
a set of more
sophisticated films.
So as I said, I think
for any period you can mention
they'll be low-ambition
and high-ambition
films so that, in the fifties,
when the science fiction cycle
begins, you're going to have,
on the one hand, a film like
Forbidden Planet, which is an
adaptation of Shakespeare's The
Tempest
and a fairly
high, even literary, quality.
And then you're going to have
very low-ambition films like,
you know, Robot Monster or,
I don't know, Plan Nine from Outer
Space.
So
there are going to
be
different
markets being appealed to.
Now, I think maybe the reason that
a reviewer of a certain
age may
try to make this distinction is
because when
they were growing up,
the horror films they saw
were on the low ambition
range,
slasher films, or
worse.
That's what they saw.
And then now they're suddenly seeing
these other films, and they look
far more sophisticated.
I think, when you hear a distinction
like that, it's less historically
accurate and more a function of
the biography of the person who's
making the distinction.
When he or she was an adolescent,
went to see films
that were,
as you said, maybe,
Friday the 13th, 24, or
Nightmare on Elm Street,
41.
So, I want to ask you another thing
that comes from The Philosophy of
Horror, your book.
One of the things
that you talk about in that book -
one of the arguments you make - is
that the characters
in the film suggest
how audience members will react
to the monsters in them.
Right? And that is the fear and
disgust are the two kind of
essential ingredients, let's say, to
have in a horror film.
I thought too, about-- so
thinking about that kind of
connection between characters in the
film and in audience, another
kind of connection that I
see in horror films
is kind of how the
audience wants to participate
in trying to make suggestions about
how characters should get away from
the monsters. I mean, this is a
classic thing about like watching
horror films and yelling like,
"Don't go into the shed.
Like, that's a terrible idea.
They're definitely going to get you
there." That kind of thing.
I wonder
if you can just say a little bit
about that, that kind of
participatory
aspect of horror films?
Is that something that stands out
about them more so than other kinds
of film?
Well, the first thing about that
kind of interaction, I
think, is that it's
pretty class specific.
That is to say,
in certain
neighborhoods, the
lookout responds,
"Don't go there."
I remember seeing the first
Halloween at the
Times Square movie theater,
and the audience
was very much, "Get out of there."
Or in other
movies, "Don't go down-- don't
go up to the attic or don't go
down in the cellar or don't go down
the alley." And
the audiences that were
more likely to do that
were in
cinemas that
were-- well,
what would I say?
The audience
acted much more like it was at home
watching television than
audiences that had
gotten BAs in film studies
who felt...shh, be
quiet. That
kind of audience.
So I do think
that it makes a
big difference to how
interactive the audiences are.
You actually find the audiences
to be less interactive
nowadays.
That may, in part, be
a result of the
surround sound systems,
which really actually
make it difficult for even the
audiences
voice to be heard.
I mean, we're all actually told when
we go to the movies now, too,
like be quiet throughout the movie.
Turn off your cell phone. And
actually, I find, to a surprising
degree, that works, at least
in the movie theaters that I go to
in Manhattan, people do turn off
their cell phones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's no-- and just to kind of
like follow-up on that.
You don't see it as being something
that identifies
horror films more than other genres.
That is the audience
wanting to participate in
a way. You see
it more as a class issue.
Yeah. Although now that I
hear you rephrase the question
and press me on it, it
is true that in
Mission Impossible,
you don't hear people saying,
"Don't jump out the window, Tom."
So that is
that there may be something that's a
bit more specific
to horror films.
Of course, part of the interactivity
involves screaming and
recoiling, and
that certainly
happens.
I don't know. I'm going to use this
word.
I guess I should use the word normal
rather than natural.
It feels more natural, I
think, for audiences to
scream at a horror
film than it does
to scream at
a James Bond film,
a thriller rather than a
horror thriller.
Or even I was thinking about
romantic comedies. It was much
harder for me to imagine a kind of
like the same sort of
whatever it is, cheering or
any anything that would happen at
certain moments in that kind of a
film the same way that-- and it's
just at least in my experience.
I think, actually, I have heard
people in romantic comedies
when it's usually the
woman.
I think I have heard audiences go,
"No!" When she
feels attracted to that
Lothario.
Anybody went, "No, stop!"
And of course, comedies also
get very
robust responses.
Not so much, "Look out." But there
is a very strong response.
There are also physical responses to
things like boxing films.
Watch people-- I mean,
they don't say "duck" to Rocky.
But actually, watch people
in their seats. They squirm in their
seats. It's as if they're
feeling the impulse to block
punches.
Right.
Well, one of the things-- we're in
Pittsburgh here, and one of the
things we're celebrating this year
is the 50th anniversary of Night of
the Living Dead.
So I wonder if I could ask you about
that movie in particular
and this kind of like--
this conversation we're having about
kind of audience participation.
When I watched that movie, I watched
it again recently for the first time
in a while, and I had just forgotten
how much of that movie is a
discussion between the characters
about what to do inside the
house. Like, should we go in the
basement? Should we not go?
That kind of thing.
And it's such a big part of that.
Can you talk about that
part of that-- how big of a role
that plays in that movie?
Well, I think it's very interesting
that there is
a theme
that's developed in parallel
fashion between
how the danger outside
is human, but the danger inside
is also human so
that the conflict between
the protagonist.
And Harry is
maybe even more dangerous
than the zombies.
And, of course, there's also a
zombie in the house, the little
girl, and then there
are the zombies outside.
I think
the theme that Romero really
introduced, and you see it
recapitulated in things like The
Walking Dead, is that
the enemy is us.
Humans are the greatest danger
to other humans.
They're on
the outside there, the
zombies, who are going to eat
you. And on the inside,
there are always these power
struggles.
Who's going to be in charge?
In The Walking Dead, there's
a conflict.
Is Rick going to be in
charge, or is Nagin going to be
in charge?
And at the end of the eighth
season, the question is,
can Rick still be
our leader after--
actually, he didn't kill
Nagin. So there's a brewing
a conspiracy within.
I think it's kind of interesting.
For most of human history,
we've been the prey.
And this is a theme of horror films,
vampires, werewolves.
You name it. They're
out to eat us.
In zombie films, we
are both the predator and the prey.
And I think it's interesting
in that respect that-- Night
of Living Dead came out in 1968.
One of the times in my memory
that the country was
almost more
divided into hostile
camps than any other
time in our history because of
things like Vietnam, which, of
course, the film alludes
to.
And now again, in
this decade, it seems like
the zombie is America's
monster. And look
at the hostile partisanship that
rules now.
Our enemies are us.
Yeah. Well,
this actually is-- maybe that
creates a kind of a good connection
for my next question because I kind
of wanted to ask you about your
work with horror in the context
of your work on
the philosophy of art and aesthetic
theory more broadly. When
you have talked about kind of
trying, not
necessarily sum up but, say,
characterize your work in
not many words.
You've talked about being interested
in trying to break down boundaries
between art and other aspects
of human life, politics and history,
and things like that.
I wonder if this-- can
you talk a little bit about how you
see the philosophy of horror
in your work as a whole?
Do you see when you look back at The
Philosophy of Horror, is that, what
you would say, one of the things you
were trying to do in that book?
Well,
in aesthetics by, say,
the mid-century,
which is the
slice of history I was born into,
there were
certain ideas about how
the arousal of emotion
was not the aim
of
art properly so-called.
So a very famous
theoretician named
Collingwood
wrote a book called Principles of
Art that was fairly
influential in which he said
that the
so-called works of art that
try to arouse emotions
they're like crafts.
They're
really not art properly
so-called.
Why? Well, because
there are a certain kind of
strategies that
you can employ to
bring about the desired
emotional response.
So in Aristotle's Poetics,
he explains what kind of characters
you need and what kinds of plots
in order to elicit pity and fear.
So for Collingwood, he thought,
well, that's really more like
a craft.
Art isn't about eliciting
specific emotions.
It's about actually
trying to capture
emotions in the process
of making the work.
Emotional states that are maybe
unclear when the artist starts.
She
works with her words or her musical
notes to try and capture
the feelings she has.
And the feeling she captures is not
something like horror
or pity.
It's usually a kind of emotional
state or feeling that we don't even
have a name for.
And that's the proper aim of art.
And it was specifically
that kind of view
of art, that
art proper isn't involved
in the arousal emotion
that the horror
book was
written against.
I thought that
there is the sort of art that
Collingwood championed,
but there is also art
that is meant to arouse
certain emotional states.
And it's
really that
Collingwood preferred
a certain kind of modernist art
and generalized from that
about how all art should
be.
His theory of art was really
a recommendation of what art
should be.
And I thought that I wanted
to reassert
the importance of considering
art that actually was designed
to provoke arousal.
Like most
religious art, which
is, at least
in the
Catholic tradition, is
designed to arouse
reverence and love of Jesus
Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Yeah. Can you say-- one of the
things-- and this is kind of getting
into a specific question
in film studies,
which is not, I'll admit, my
background, but I know that
you are associated within film
studies with a cognitive approach to
analyzing film.
I wonder if you can say a little bit
about that for someone
outside of film studies to
what that means.
What does that say about your work?
Well.
When I entered film studies
as a young professor,
it was increasingly dominated
by psychoanalytic approaches.
And in fact,
I think people thought that
psychoanalysis was
really the privileged
method for
examining
horror films, primarily
on the grounds that-- well,
psychoanalysis, for example,
analyzed things like nightmares.
And weren't
horror films just like nightmares?
Now, I had a number of
objections to that approach,
but one of them was that I found
psychoanalytic analysis
of horror
and other emotions
to be very threadbare, and
repetitive, and monotonous.
And I thought, well, the reason for
it is because
psychoanalysis doesn't have
a great
theory of emotions in
the sense that
they offer analysis
of specific emotions.
Psychoanalysis tends
to assume the emotional
vocabulary that we use in
everyday life and then has
a theory of why we
have those emotions.
But it doesn't have,
let's say, a special account
of what-- a special
account of what anger is
or a special account of
what indignation
is.
In other words, it might
give you a theory of why, or
at least an explanation of why,
certain people feel rage
but not an analysis of rage.
And I thought we needed something
of that particular caliber
to talk about
how and why and which
emotions were being
aroused in our works.
Yeah, it's really interesting.
This isn't really a-- just a
follow-up kind of comment. It's
really interesting here you
mention that it seemed threadbare
because it seems like, in this case,
it's kind of like
the theoretic or the systematic
nature of the psychoanalytic
approach that's making it feel thin
to you. Is that right?
Well, yes, the analysis
always seemed to be the same.
Right. Right.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
And especially at the time that
I was involved in film studies,
every film was about activating
the Lacanian mirror phase.
I mean, that was home
plate for the theory.
Slide into home plate.
There's a mirror phase right
at home plate.
This is where-- I mean, I can tell
you in literary studies,
this is some of the-- after
poststructuralism came and people
were writing a lot, and then people
began to criticize it, that was
actually-- I mean, it's a very
similar criticism of
post-structuralist literary
critics too.
They read my book.
Well,
let me ask you about another
art critic. Well, one thing you've
done in your career, along with
writing about horror film,
visual art, so many different
things, you've also written about
other art critics and art
criticism.
And Arthur Danto is someone who
you've written a lot about and
someone who's important to you.
Yes, very.
You've talked about him being
important for his focus on the
singularity of a work of art.
And I wonder if you can talk about
that. What does that mean for him?
Why is it important?
Well, Danto
writes criticism from a
philosophical perspective.
He has an idea of
what it takes to be a work of art.
Now, there may be some problems with
this philosophy, but
nevertheless, it does give him
what you could call his marching
orders.
And his view of art
is that something is a work of art
if it has a content,
if it's about something.
That's the first condition.
And the second condition is
that
it has a form that
articulates or embodies
that content.
So you could think of it in terms of
artworks have meanings like
themes and theses or
expressive qualities.
That
is what the
art critic needs to interpret.
And then, those themes
or meanings
are given body or
embodied in the work.
So the way that you go about
criticizing in Danto
style is you
identify the meaning of the work or
the theme of the work,
and then you look at and try
to explain to your audience
how that artistic choices the
artist has made
in the work actually
articulate or
fail to articulate
that meaning in terms
of the forms, the
arrangements, the choices, in terms
of the manipulation of the medium
that the artist has deployed
to present his
or her work.
Yeah.
I want to ask you about history
and where it comes into that kind of
critical practice.
Because I think
someone could listen to that
and think that
it doesn't allow you to do
historical analysis because
you're just paying attention to this
one work and thinking about the
theme and thinking about-- it's like
more of a formal analysis.
But I know that one of the things
that you've talked about also in
terms of what makes a good critic is
actually knowing and being able to
kind of identify what's happening
here with relation to other works
and historical works and things like
that. So how do you put those things
together?
Well, the way that someone like
Danto would put it together-- I
would do it slightly differently.
But the way Danto would put it
together would be to say, and
this was connected to your earlier
question about singularities,
is that at different
times,
artists will have different things
to say.
Different problems will arise
in the culture that need to be
addressed.
Different issues in
art will have to be addressed
in terms of
the things that
the artist finds important.
So history will change.
The changes in history, art
history, but also social history
will mean that in response
to them, artists will have different
things to say.
And insofar as they have different
things to say, they'll have to find
different forms.
They'll have to make different
choices about how to use
the medium to articulate
these different meanings in
an appropriate or adequate way.
And that's where the singularity
comes in because
what may be an
issue that, say,
a novelist in the 1950s
needs to address and
observe and
set forth an idea about
will be very different than the
kind of ideas that
might strike an
author today.
So that there'll be so many
of these novels from the fifties.
They'll each approach it in
different ways.
But in America, they'll
be very much
concerned with the
disappointment of white,
middle-class world life.
And we'll get Updike's
novels.
But today, actually,
much more concern
is going to be
devoted to
the problems of
women,
people of color, and different
ethnicities and different gender
choices.
And those will
call for
different differences in the kind of
structures of the novels that
they'll make. So different times
will
raise different issues
to be addressed, which
then, of course, will
force the
artists to find
different forms to
embody those thoughts.
Yeah.
So just to follow up on that.
So it's kind of in the--
it would be in the identification
of the theme.
To begin with that, one
needs to pay attention to history.
Well, for Danto, yes.
I wouldn't actually
put the emphasis on themes.
Some works have themes,
but not all do.
I would rather talk about purposes
which I
think are better
or more comprehensive.
It's a more comprehensive concept
to use than
meanings, but
the purposes grow out of historical
circumstances.
But that doesn't entail
that the critic
just looks at
the work and knows what the purpose
is without looking at
the various
choices the artist has made to
articulate those purposes.
Very often, you don't know what the
purpose is until you begin to
engage with and ask questions
about why did the artist do
this? Why did she do that?
And then you try and make sense
about what she might be getting at.
So it's not as if the purpose
just jumps out at you, although the
purpose is historically
shaped.
It's rather
that you have to play
a game trying
to figure out what the
purpose is at the same time
you're trying to find out what the
structures are, and your
hypotheses try to
get to that point
where the hypothesis about the
purpose best fits the hypothesis
about the means.
Yeah. Well, Noël
Carroll, thank you so much for
taking the time to talk to us today.
And we've really enjoyed you being
here in Pittsburgh.
Well, as they say, no, thank
you.
That's it for this edition of Being
Human. This episode was produced by
Noah Livingston, Humanities Media
Fellow at the University of
Pittsburgh. Stay tuned next time
when my guest will actually be Kazuo
Hara, documentary filmmaker and
winner of the first biennial
University of Pittsburgh, Japan
Documentary Award.
Thanks for listening.

In collections

Being Human Podcast Recordings

Order Reproduction
Title
Don't Go into the Cellar!: An Interview on Horror with Noël Carroll
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh (depositor)
Carroll, Noël, 1947- (interviewee)
Kubis, Dan (interviewer)
Date
November 2, 2018
Identifier
20230127-beinghuman-0036
Description
An interview with Noël Carroll, distinguished professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The interview focuses mostly on Professor Carroll's work on horror, particularly his 1990 book "The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart." It was part of the 50th anniversary celebration of George Romero's film "Night of the Living Dead," which was filmed in Pittsburgh in 1968.
Extent
38 minutes
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh. Department of English
Type
sound recording-nonmusical
Genre
interviews
Subject
Horror in literature
Horror tales--History and criticism
Horror films--History and criticism
Source
Being Human
Language
eng
Collection
Being Human Podcast Recordings
Contributor
University of Pittsburgh
Rights Information
In Copyright. This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).. Rights Holder: University of Pittsburgh
http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Rights Holder
University of Pittsburgh

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Don't Go into the Cellar!: An Interview on Horror with Noël Carroll

In collections