The Books of My Life: Caligari's Children

 

I have never been and am not a fan of the horror or terror film. I have, of course, since I have been watching films since the 1960s, seem many of the "classics" of the horror or terror genre including Nosferatu, Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The Lodger, Frankenstein, Dracula, Cat People, Hound of the Baskervilles, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie, and the Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream cycles, both of which went all postmodern on the horror film. I have even liked some of them, the first Nightmare on Elm Street, for instance. I found its surrealism and snark about high school and everyday life enjoyable (the contradictions and disruptions some find in horror films). In the end, however, I have never been a devotee of the genre just as I am not a devotee of the cult of Star Wars.

So, why, you might ask, did I read a book on the horror or terror film genre, Caligari's Children: The Film as Tale of Terror by S.S. Prawer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)? The answer, of course, is that it was there on my bookshelf. A better answer might be the other one I would give: namely, that I am interested in mass popular culture and horror films have been and are popular.

I found a lot of the things in Prawer's book intellectually interesting. I agree with Prawer that the terror film has historical precedents in gothic literature, fairy tales, and biblical myths and biblical apocalypticism. It is nice to see someone paying attention to the role Judaism and Christianity have played in the history of Western culture. I agree with Prawer that film socialises, resocialises, and is a form of social control and that it allows viewers to live vicariously before they return to their "normal" socially controlled lives. I agree with Prawer that audiences are not always if at all passive. I appreciated Prawer's delineation of several stages in the history of the terror film. I appreciated Prawer's attention to mise-en-scene, something relatively easy to see in horror films like Nosferatu, Caligari, The Lodger, and Cat People. I appreciated Prawer's attempt to bring a moral and quality dimension to the terror film by counterpointing the mood and tone of classic horror films and the in-your-face quality of more contemporary terror films. Of course, notions of quality are present in all forms of film criticism simply in the choice of what films to study and focus on and they are ultimately in the socialised eyes of the beholder. I found Prawer's hybrid approach to the terror film, one which melds sociology, anthropology, history, theology, philosophy, psychology, psychoanalysis, genre studies, and narrative studies, interesting if very much a product of the post-auteurist bricolage age in which the book was published.

Has Prawer's book converted me to a devotion to the horror film genre? No. It did enlighten me about the genre and give me much to think about, however. And for those reasons alone I recommend it.