JOIN USHow kindness turns to horror
he coronavirus pandemic has evoked horror around the world and the feeling now associated with it is the fear of contamination. The same fear is the primary emotion associated with a popular genre in literature and cinema, the genre of horror. It can manifest itself in various ways and, as an instance, ‘The Exorcist’ (1973) and the Dracula films are about the contamination of the Christian world by pagan evil from outside, which is why Christian ritual is effective against the evil.
‘The Fly’ (1986) is a horror film in which a scientist teleports himself accidentally with a fly and his genes are spliced with those of the fly, making him gradually turn into a giant fly-shaped mutant. Disease and infection are, naturally, subjects for the horror genre and even Dracula is associated with bubonic plague. I will just look at a short story by Edgar Allan Poe called ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and a film by David Cronenberg (who also made The Fly) called ‘Rabid’ (1977), about an epidemic among human beings, whereby people develop thirst for human blood, become zombies and transmit the disease.
In ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, a pestilence is raging in an unnamed kingdom of the Old World and there is no cure for it. Its effects are ghastly and people die within hours of contacting it, bleeding from their pores. But prince Prospero is optimistic that he can keep himself and his companions safe and retreats with them to one of his fortified areas where they partake of all the luxuries and entertainments they are provided with.
In due course, the prince decides to celebrate their survival with a masked ball held in seven rooms, each in a different color, its tapestries and panes matching its hue, except the black room where the panes are scarlet. The guests are enjoying themselves until the ebony clock in the black room strikes twelve and they notice a new entrant made up to look like the corpse of a victim of the Red Death. The Prince is infuriated at the intruder and pursues him through the rooms until the gaunt figure turns around and confronts him. A moment later the Prince is himself dead from the plague and, when his companions summon the courage to apprehend him, they find him entirely formless; he is the embodiment of the disease they have tried to keep out.
There are two issues of pertinence in the story and while one has to do with the impossibility of subverting the ends of nature, the other has to do with the megalomania of the aristocracy, which believes that it stands at a different level from those it is lording over, and entirely immune to their suffering.
One of the reasons the coronavirus pandemic is causing so much panic today is because, where most epidemics begin with the poor classes that bear their impact, this began with the globally mobile class that also spread it. When domestic employees are forbidden to enter apartment blocks, therefore, it is they who are being protected from their employers and not vice-versa, as one might imagine it.
Cronenberg’s ‘Rabid’ is a different kind of film in which a young woman suffers an accident and the plastic surgeon uses a radical technique by which the grafted skin is treated to morphogenetically develop into tissue on its own; but contrary to expectations that she will recover, she grows a phallus-like stinger under her arm and infects people.
These others then become carriers and, eventually, become so numerous and lethal to the public at large that shoot-at-sight orders are issued to the national guard to terminate them.
The film is looking at another side of contagious sickness that provokes a response that is not humanist. The argument here is not that humanist tendencies should prevail but that there is a limit to it that is reached when one is personally threatened or society endangered.
The responses to infected celebrities partying after returning from Western destinations have even suggested imprisonment. The responses to everyday suffering are caring but they change when a crisis situation emerges. Cinema, while dealing with illness, is humanist (The Sky is Pink) but when the issue is a contagious disease, the outlook transforms.
The carrier of the disease could then become a personal threat to oneself and this engenders the category of the horror film. It appears that the day is not distant when the sententious Western media runs out of its life-affirming rhetoric, and there is already a tinge of horror in the public statements made over the coronavirus pandemic.
(The writer is a well-known film critic.)