Closing the Case: For Now, At Least

It’s only fitting that I finished the first complete draft of my dissertation the same week as this blog celebrates its second anniversary. The “end” (ha,  I have months of revision between now and the defense, which should be late May/early June) came at noon on the dot (at least it wasn’t midnight, folks) on Tuesday, January 17. And bizarrely enough, for a dissertation that was written completely out of order (Chapter 2 was first, then 1, then 4, then 3), the last words were actually the last words, the conclusion to Chapter 4. Waiting on comments from my adviser at the moment, which is nice because it lets me step away from the writing/revision process for a few weeks (during which time I owe Diabolique an article on gothic horror and soap operas). At the same time, I am about to get very cozy with the Chicago Manual of Style while I finally get my citations and bibliographical materials under control. Good news is, I appear to be on track to defend and graduate at the end of spring. So happy two year anniversary, “Horror Begins at Home” blog. I am in an infinitely better place now than I was when I started this thing. Horror might begin at home, but it doesn’t have to.

Meanwhile, I am spending my weekend in the snow and the mountains for some much needed R&R. And no, I am not taking my psychic five-year old son nor am I taking my alcoholic, failed writer husband. And I hope there are no frozen Nazi zombies up there (see Dead Snow).

The last little bit of the final chapter:

As a conclusion, it seems entirely appropriate to ask: are these families actually being helped by paranormal reality and the ghost hunters whose counsel they seek? The answer would seem to be, for the most part, yes. Episodes end with tearful and grateful clients, usually mothers, effusively thanking the respective investigative teams for their assistance, even when activity continues to occur after the ghost hunters depart.

Their individual gratitude stems not from the successful “busting” of the ghosts in their home, but from the validation provided through the attention and empathy provided by the investigators, as well as the mental health counseling referrals, improved relationships with family members, and an increased sense of safety and well-being in their home. Something might remain, but the family is now equipped to manage the phenomena and reduce conflict and stress among themselves. Through participating in paranormal reality television, haunted families are able to see themselves as members of a distinguished group, one whose members have experienced traumatic encounters, paranormal and otherwise, and have lived to tell the tale.

P.S. I keep worrying that I am going to open my chapters and see that all they are is this:

Reversing the Dread of Difference: The Real Ghostbusters of Paranormal Reality TV

Working very hard to revise my fourth dissertation chapter (the first three are in the can, so to speak). Drastically overhauled the existing chapter this morning (believe me, it needed it) and here is an excerpt from the new introduction:

It is in the ghost hunter’s interventions into the heteronormative family that paranormal reality television most visibly engages with difference, found in the intersectionality of gender, race, and sexuality, among others. With ghost hunters primarily gendered as male, a range of masculinities are visible across the subgenre, ranging from the traditional masculinity of Ghost Hunters and Ghost Adventures and the less conventional, more empathic masculinity found in a program such as Paranormal State. Traditional masculinity is undermined through ineffectual aggression towards the spirits and displays of abject fear by male ghost hunters, followed by overcompensation typified by anger and the continued taunting of the ghosts. At the same time, while female ghost hunters are shown as largely subordinate to their male counterparts, they also emerge as principle figures in the emotional function of these programs and fostering empowerment from fear.

Racial difference is at last made visible among ghost hunters, but it remains contradictory even as it is advanced as benevolent, with the racial “Other” being a distinct minority among the majority of ghost hunters, implicitly raced as white. Represented in programs such as A Haunting and Paranormal State as shamans and otherwise mystical figures, persons of color occupy minimal space in the narrative and remain excluded, their knowledge and practices frequently appropriated by white ghost hunters and family members. Queerness is another contradictory display of difference: restoring the family rather than threatening it through previous associations between queerness, monstrosity, and horror, queer ghost hunters present and embody alternatives for families who feel they have nowhere else to turn.

Given this function and drawing upon various and interrelated forms of difference, the ghost hunter serves as an unofficial family therapist, providing empowerment to the haunted, those achieving catharsis through sharing their accounts of the paranormal and learning how to negotiate that which oppresses them. These interventions suggest how difference informs interactions between ghost hunters and the families who seek them out, with the ghost hunter marking intersections between forms of difference, the paranormal, and the heteronormative family. “Otherness” is frequently invoked as a means of combating the malevolent spirit world and addressing family trauma. Indeed, this is the one space in paranormal reality television where difference, rather than being used as a scapegoat,  is allowed to be made visible, restoring the heteronormative family and advancing viable alternatives.

"Back off, man, I'm a scientist."

By Brolin’s Beard: Possessed Patriarchs and the Native American Burial Ground

Revising and rewriting my little heart out to get a draft of my dissertation to my adviser by Wednesday. Today, I’m working on fleshing out my second chapter, which deals with the paranormal horror film of the 1970s and 1980s. Just finished a passage on horror movies of that era (primarily The Amityville Horror) and their dependence on the “Native American burial ground.” Read on if you wish, because I have to keep working. #writebitchwrite

Of all the films under analysis in this chapter, The Amityville Horror is the most overt in advancing racial difference as a distancing mechanism and a marker of horror and danger in relation to the heteronormative family. Richard Dyer has noted that “horror as a genre does seem, despite some interesting exceptions, to be a white genre in the West.”[i] As a predominantly “white” genre, then, the horror film has shown, since the time of its inception, a strong tendency to locate its horror in the racialized Other (as described by Robin Wood in his foundational work on the family in 1970s horror cinema) depicted as intruding into the (white) family’s private sanctuary of home and hearth.

Note to "possessed" bearded patriarchs everywhere: accountability. Take some. Stop blaming it on the Native American burial ground! Or, say your mothers. Or ex-wives. Or your children.

A film such as The Amityville Horror and, to a lesser degree, The Shining, also registers what Bernice M. Murphy refers to as “the gnawing awareness that America as a nation has been built on stolen ground resurfaces with renewed ferocity in many of the haunting found in the Suburban Gothic.”[ii] This continues as an important trope in paranormal reality, where a number of the depicted haunting are suggested to have a “Native American angle” despite only the flimsiest evidence, in the absence of other motivating factors, to support such an attribution.

Again, the psychoanalytic process of projection is particularly strong here, allowing trauma in the family to be blamed on the scapegoat of not only the paranormal but racial difference, as well (a process dating back to early American captivity narratives). Abusive patriarchy is therefore absolved of any culpability in their terrorizing of their families, with such behavior chalked up to possession by the agents of historical trauma in the form of Native Americans and their dispossession of ancestral lands.

Richard Dyer observes “that the whiteness of white men resides in the tragic quality of their giving way to darkness and the heroism of their channellng or resisting it.”[iii] The Amityville Horror, and other horror films relying on the “Native American element” present in the trope of the desecrated burial ground,[iv] feature racial difference not as the specter of national injustices from history but as active and racialized threats to family and patriarchy that must be resisted, with the white patriarch’s restoration posited as one of the most crucial points of the narrative and his family’s survival.

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[i] Dyer, 210

[ii] Murphy, 104

[iii] Dyer, 28

[iv] Pet Sematary (Mary Lambert, 1989), adapted from Stephen King’s 1983 novel, also demonstrates a concerted investment in the Native American burial ground as a site of horror for the family, and although it is not about a haunting per se, the film does engage extensively with family trauma (particularly in terms of loss and mourning) and the annihilation of the Creed family as the result of their interactions with the Micmac burial ground located in the woods behind their rural Maine home.

Horror Hall of Fame, Part 1

When people hear “Horror Hall of Fame” (as one does, you know, every day, right?), they tend to think of the killers, critters, entities, etc. that cause so much mayhem and hilarity. However, my thoughts run to the people who make these films so enjoyable. Of course, there are the obvious ones: you’ve got your Doctor Loomis types, your Chief Brodys, your pantheon of Final Girls. Yet I believe there are some unsung heroes out there, and their time has come round at last. So what if they almost never make it to the end credits?

"Fuck off, Wade."

Kathleen Kinmont as Kelly Meeker in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Meyers (1988)

Now, as a Women’s and Gender Studies instructor, I feel compelled to put this in as gentle and non-judgmental a manner as I can, but hey: Kelly is the evil slut of this movie. She’s kind of the town whore and as tends to happen in these movies with their messed-up gender politics, she pays for it (impaled with a shotgun, I’ll leave the symbolism to you). True, she does try to steal the unibrowed Brady (Sasha Jenson) away from our nominal ingenue Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell, who I also love), but really, one gets the sense that Brady is only using Kelly to get back at Rachel for having to babysit that night. Kelly’s grown on me over the years: she’s sassy and sex-positive, and I say that’s not a bad way to be. And really, she gets her comeuppance when Rachel dumps coffee on her in the kitchen. The reason Kelly is one of my horror heroes, however, is that she answers the door to trick-or-treaters wearing only a t-shirt that reads “Cops Do it By the Book” (it should be mentioned that her father is the sheriff of Haddonfield in this and the next movie). What a magnificent slut. I applaud her.

"You talkin' 'bout some damn shark's mutha?"

Louis Gossett Jr. as Calvin Bouchard in Jaws 3-D (1983)

This dude. After featuring Murray Hamilton as the evil old white man in charge in the first two Jaws movies, I am guessing the makers of Jaws 3-D were trying to go all Affirmative Action in terms of corrupt bureaucracy in the third entry, which features the awesome Gossett as entrepreneur Calvin Bouchard who apparently built the Sea World marine park where the film takes place. Although quite charming to his public, he is also prone to taking foolish chances (resulting in the death of the captive baby great white and thus riling up his considerably larger mother) and tends to put PR and profit ahead of his employees’ lives. He exists primarily as an antagonist, although in the end we see that he is not so bad and he actually survives the film (although it could be made a little clearer). Why do I love him so much? Because of the lines he gets. Consider:

“You’re talkin’ about some damn shark’s mother?”

“Listen, nephew. There’s a $2-1/2 million turbine that’s not gonna go up in smoke because of some damn fish! Shut the pumps down!”

“Get me some lights down there! I can’t see shit down there! And get me some medical attention here, quick!”

“Because they cost too much to replace and they burn out, that’s WHY.”

I’m glad Gossett had a good year in the early 80s (winning an Oscar for An Officer and a Gentleman, although this brought it to a crashing halt), but I swear he seems to have wandered into the wrong movie, kind of like the comic relief stoners and the biker gang from Friday the 13th, Part 3 3-D. And I am sure they will end up on here sooner or later.

"WHAT'S HAPPENING??????"

Dominique Dunne as Dana Freeling in Poltergeist (1982)

Oh, Dana. Poor, poor Dana. She spends most of the movie staying with friends while her parents try to get her sister Carol Anne out of the TV. She finally gets to come home, everything seems fine, she goes out to get herself a hickey, and comes home to see her HOUSE BEING SUCKED INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION. I don’t blame her for standing in the street and screaming hysterically. Personally, I would have been dropping the f-bomb left and right, but that’s just me. Sometimes in life, all you can do is scream, “WHAT’S HAPPENING?”

Blame it on the granny.

Hallie Foote as Grandma Lois in Paranormal Activity 3 (2011)

Last one for tonight. Grandma Lois from Paranormal Activity 3: because you do not see her coming. And she will mess you up. Do not go to grandma’s house unless you want to get messed the hell up. She has powers and she has friends with similar interests and like I already said… she will mess you up. Shudder. Serious kudos to Hallie Foote for craftily underplaying that role. I hope they bring her back for the fourth movie.

Next time: Jud Crandall, the drunk mother from A Nightmare on Elm Street, and more.

“Some Weird Mindf%ck”: Pleasant Surprise re: Reception of Paranormal Reality

Word. I wrote the reception section today (the following is an excerpt from it, and it will also, fingers crossed, be my Console-ing Passions paper this summer) and the majority of the conclusion section, leaving only the paragraph-long transition to Chapter 4 to be written tomorrow. I said I would have the draft “finished” (with the exception of reworking/rewriting some earlier work) by the end of the Christmas break, and I meant it. Once I put this to bed, I can do other things, like have a syllabus and lesson plan ready for WGS 101 on Monday morning, revise a book review, write an article pitched to a magazine, and get a conference panel proposal out by the 10th. Oy vey…

Reception informed by family trauma ranges from relatively subtle (“anyone see any patterns emerging? Families in crisis? Traumatic events?”) to more sophisticated in viewer awareness, with one viewer of A Haunting posting: “I really think a lot of these people are susceptible at the moment these ‘hauntings’ happen, whether because of financial strain of moving into a new home, the emotional strain of a new family, or the absolute horror of being a 12-year-old.” PJ Watcher, acknowledging family trauma while also maintaining belief in the paranormal, writes: “surely some of these incidents are the result of dysfunctional households or mental problems go untreated, in some cases, drug or alcohol abuse must come into play. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that demonic and angelic beings exist but the show strains credulity sometimes.” Other viewers of paranormal reality are more direct in connecting its narratives to family trauma and specifically to domestic violence, as Wild Roses notes that “several of the haunting stories do seem like thinly disguised he-was-an-abuser-stalker-possessive-mentally-unstable mate rather than a haunting . . . except for the mother in an episode a while back, all the men seem really prone to being easily manipulated by spirits or demons.” Such a reading illustrates that viewers of paranormal reality do read these programs as accounts of family trauma. Louveciennes cites a specific episode of A Haunting:

“”Did anyone ever see the episode where the single mother had a daughter with some kind of mental handicap, and the daughter was always looking at nothing and giggling? The mother said she thought the daughter was seeing angels or something nice. Then she met this guy and they got serious really fast and he moved in with her a month later, and all of a sudden bad stuff started happening and they thought the daughter was possessed and yada yada yada. I always had this feeling that it was some weird mind-f*** the boyfriend was pulling on the family, for whatever reason.”

Snow Dog, referencing the “Demon Child” episode of A Haunting in which a young boy’s antagonistic and bizarre behavior is ultimately attributed to demonic possession, writes: “Everything that child went through pointed to abuse – the sudden change in behavior, the destruction of toys, harming more helpless members of the family (the cat), and urinating in the closet are all signs of either abuse or extreme mental disturbance.” These observations, posted publicly in online forums devoted to paranormal reality programming, demonstrate that the subgenre is indeed capable of being received by viewers as evoking trauma in the family even as it relates sensationalized accounts of the paranormal.

"Guess I remembered the safety that time, you bastard."

Giving up the Ghost: Receiving Paranormal Reality TV

An excerpt setting up the final section of this chapter, on reception. The whole kit and kaboodle should be done by Friday afternoon.

Paranormal reality television, a subgenre including such programs as Paranormal State and Ghost Hunters, presents a seemingly endless series of haunted family homes, depicting each family’s traumatic encounters with and attempts to expel occult forces from their home (through either their own efforts of the intervention of outside authorities, whether religious or “ghost hunters”), a process that often involves the excavation of past trauma in the family. To conclude this chapter,  I examine how these accounts are received by viewers, as metaphorical representations of oppressive domesticity or as campy horror stories? Examining online fan interaction and commentary, I suggest that, much as these programs themselves, paranormal reality’s reception by viewers proves complex and highly contradictory. Textual analysis can yield observations of paranormal reality television’s potential for articulating trauma and critiquing the nuclear family, yet it is only through interrogating discourses of audience and reception that suggestions can be made regarding the subgenre’s appeal and function in its cultural moment.

Dead technology. Oogedy boogedy.

Janet Staiger, in Media Reception Studies, notes: “Finding evidence for reception that has taken place in the past is difficult. Lack of evidence is usually the case; audiences watched movies and television programs but left no material traces of their thoughts or feelings.”[i] However, the reception of paranormal reality, having emerged relatively recently and in the age of the internet, can be studied through online fan commentary at websites such as Television without Pity along with a host of other official and unofficial sites devoted to individual programs.

Staiger also references the work of Henry Jenkins on categories of fan behavior, particularly “the constitution of ‘a particular interpretive community’,” of which she writes: “Fans usually have developed a network of colleagues, and these groups discuss, debate, and, for newcomers, teach perceptions of variation among the formulas, explanations for aspects of the text or performance, and predictions of future encounters with it.”[ii] While the “interpretive communities” formed online in response to paranormal reality television may be more loosely organized than those described by Staiger and Jenkins, they nevertheless provide a sense of how these programs are being received by viewers and how they interpret intertwining narratives of the paranormal and family trauma.

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[i] Janet Staiger, Media Reception Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 14.

[ii] Ibid., 99

“Blame it on the Micmac”: Formalism and Disavowal in Paranormal Reality

Here’s an excerpt from the last few days’ work on formal aspects of paranormal reality. Also, happy first day of 2012, the year I finish and defend this dissertation…

Both horror and melodrama are significantly reliant on music and sound effects to create an ominous atmosphere of foreboding and increasing tension: paranormal reality, not surprisingly then, underscores much of its action with eerie background music easily found in cinematic horror. Horror cinema is also known for its use of dim lighting or darkness, manipulating shadow and light to heighten the fear and suspense experienced by the viewer and also found in the aesthetic of Gothic television as elaborated by Helen Wheatley; indeed, paranormal reality programming takes place primarily at night, in darkness or with a minimum of light (candles, flashlights, etc.). Hand-held or otherwise subjective camerawork, including tracking shots, have become a familiar characteristic of Gothic television and paranormal reality, with investigative teams using multiple cameras as they attempt to gather evidence of a haunting.

For no reason, here's Jud Crandall. He wanted to wish you a happy new year.

A number of other formal characteristics associated with horror are on display in paranormal reality, where odd camera angles, including canted shots, create a sense of unease for the viewer along with the regular employment of filters, flash inserts, distorted images, superimpositions, quick zooms, and the manipulation of time through sped-up film and video along with slow-motion. While these can all be considered characteristics of Gothic television, a mode to which paranormal reality unquestionably belongs, they also function to suggest that the viewer is watching a horror film, emphatically granting agency to the paranormal and displacing the origin of trauma originating in the family.