In this
thoroughly engrossing cultural study, Wasteland:
The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror W. Scott Poole, a history
professor at the College of Charleston, persuasively argues that the birth of
horror as a genre is rooted in the unprecedented destruction and carnage of
WWI. Filmmakers and artists, many of them veterans, he proposes, saw in horror
imagery a way to critique war, and thereby “transformed fantasy into a
simulacrum of reality.” Poole locates glimpses of the war’s horrors in work
produced during and soon after it—not only explicit references, as in the
trench warfare art of Otto Dix and the war dead rising at the end of Abel
Gance’s film J’Accuse, but in more subliminal images: the technologized tools of
killing in Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony”; the somnambulist who
unthinkingly obeys an authoritarian master in the film The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari; images of body dismemberment in Freud’s essay The Uncanny.
PublishersWeekly , July 2, 2018.
What exactly
constitutes horror? Being spooked by the dark, and by the dead who might return
in it, may have haunted the earliest human consciousness. Ceremonial burial
predates all written history; the act apparently represented an effort to
placate the corpse so it would not make an unwelcome return. The roots of
religion itself may be in this impulse, with gifts to the dead constituting the
first ritual.
In fact, much
of what we think of as “natural human life” may stem from the terror of death
and of the dead. Even sexual desire, and our constantly changing conceptions of
gender roles that accompany it, may have much to do with the terror of the
dead. The urge to reproduce, once inextricably linked to sex, may have a
connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating death by creating an enduring
legacy. You can test the primal strength of this cultural idea by noting how no
one questions the rationality of reproduction, even in a world of rapidly
dwindling resources. Meanwhile, people who choose not to have children often
receive both religious and secular disdain as selfish, the breakers of an
unspoken social contract, or simply odd.
Does the fear
of death that drives us mean that horror has always been our dark companion, a
universal human experience in which cave paintings and movie screens are simply
different media for the same spooky message? Not exactly. The idea of death and
ruin as entertainment, even something one could build a lifestyle around,
appears first in the 18th century in novels like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of
Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Commentators called this
taste Gothic because the interest in ruins and castles called to mind the
Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages.
Our
contemporary term “goth,” used to describe everything from a style of music to
black fingernail polish, of course comes from those 18th-century goths. The
wealthy of that century could fully indulge this new fascination, turning
estates into faux medieval manors and forcing their servants, on top of all
their other indignities, to appear at parties dressed in robes that made them
look like what Clive Bloom describes as “ghoulish monks.” It’s hard to call
this precisely a popular taste, as the novels of suspense that inspired these
ideas were damned or banned in some places and very few people had a suitable
estate, or enough money or servants, for playing haunted house.
“Horror” in
today’s sense had yet to be born. The word existed, but it had an appropriately
weird history. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “horror” first
appeared in the 14th century as a synonym for “rough” or “rugged.” Over
centuries, the term started to carry the connotation of something so “rough,”
in the sense of “sordid and vulgar,” that it caused a physical shudder.
Once Gothic
romanticism appeared in the late 18th century, the word “horror” showed up in
poetry and prose in something close to the modern sense. English Romantic poet
Robert Southey’s praise of “Dark horror” in 1791 echoed his interest in eerie
works in Germany. Even here, the word suggests something a bit sordid rather
than spookiness for fun. In a 1798 treatise entitled “On Objects of Terror,”
English essayist Nathan Drake used “horror” interchangeably with “disgust” and
advised artists only to “approach the horrid” rather than actually enter its
darkened halls. In Drake’s view, “horror” meant physical revulsion, not a good
scare. Even into the 1800s, the meaning of the word always suggested the body
in a state of intense distress. A medical manual from 1822 used the word in
this way: “The first attack [of sickness] commences with a horror.”
“The war has
left its imprint in our souls [with] all these visions of horror it has
conjured up around us,” wrote French author Pierre de Mazenod in 1922,
describing the Great War. His word, horreur, appears in various forms in an
incredible number of accounts of the war, written by English, German, Austrian,
French, Russian, and American veterans. The years following the Great War
became the first time in human history the word “horror” and its cognates
appeared on such a massive scale. Images of catastrophe abounded. The Viennese
writer Stefan Zweig, one of the stars in the firmament of central Europe’s
decadent and demonic café culture before 1914, wrote of how “bridges are broken
between today and tomorrow and the day before yesterday” in the conflict’s
wake. Time was out of joint. When not describing the war as horror, the imagery
of all we would come to associate with the word appeared. One French pilot
passing over the ruined city of Verdun described the landscape as a haunted
waste and a creature of nightmare, “the humid skin of a monstrous toad.”
One of the
ideas Freud entertained concerned how the war changed the subjects that fiction
might explore. “It is evident that the war is bound to sweep away [the]
conventional treatment of death,” he wrote in 1915. While his own sons and many
of his students fought at the front, he declared, “Death will no longer be
denied; we are forced to believe in it. People really die; and no longer one by
one. But many, often tens of thousands, in a single day.” Freud hoped, and he
expressed it only as a hope, that the return of “primitive” passions, a kind of
“bedazzlement” with death, would end when peace returned. He would be mightily
disappointed.
One unlikely
voice, who indeed had luckily avoided service in the Austro-Hungarian army,
helped explain this new, festering reality. Walter Benjamin loved hashish and
women too much to get around to writing a proper history; instead, he wrote
essays of such beauty and depth that we are still puzzling and wondering over
them almost 80 years after his death. He did, during the period that this book
covers, fitfully scribble at essays, fiction, personal reflections, and a
sprawling unfinished work he called simply “The Arcades Project.”
In 1936, four
years before his untimely death, Benjamin wrote an essay he called “The
Storyteller,” in which, amid his meditation on the nature of memory, he said
this about the Great War:
“Was it not noticeable that at the end of
the war men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer
in communicable experience? What 10 years later was poured out in the flood of
war books was anything but the experience that pours from mouth to mouth.”
Benjamin of
course knew about, and often criticized, the vast literature that the war
produced, especially those works that talked of the “sublimity” of conflict,
praised the “beauty” of unremitting violence, and often shaded over into
fascism’s dreams of mythic warriors. He wrote the words above about the armless
veteran one saw at the café, the cousin who had been at Ypres or Gallipoli and
sat silent at family gatherings, sometimes staring off into the middle
distance. He wrote of the men who wore masks meant to hide their terrible
facial wounds, disfigurements sometimes made even more eerie by the first,
halting efforts at combat plastic surgery.
Of these
men’s experience of war, Benjamin continued:
“A generation that had gone to school on a
horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in the countryside in which
nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a field
of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human
body.”
We must write
of such things, Benjamin counseled, “with as much bitterness as possible.” For
many in his generation, bitterness even proved too weak a concoction.
I hope the
air feels thick with static, the smell of an alchemy gone awry, a precursor to
what Benjamin once described as a “single catastrophe” that tore history apart
like a massive explosion, “piling wreckage upon wreckage.” Because not only did
single acts of horror happen, they produced a world of horror that we still
live in, both in our imaginations and in our daily lives. The artists, writers,
and directors who experienced the Great War, most of them directly, never
stopped having the same nightmare, over and again, a nightmare they told the
world. Meanwhile, like a spell gone wrong, the Great War conjured up a new
world, a sort of alternate reality distinct from what most people before 1914
expected their lives to be. It was a dark dimension where horror films,
stories, and art became a Baedeker’s guide to the new normal rather than
entertaining diversions. Monsters had come out of the abyss.
I have tried
to write of these things with as much bitterness as possible.
From : Wasteland: The Great War and The Origins Of
Modern Horror. By W. Scott Poole.
LitHub , October 31, 2018
More information on the book. Counterpoint Press
In World War
I, or what's referred to as the Great War, 16 million people were killed and
over 20 million injured. It was destruction on a global scale the likes of
which the world had never seen. In fact, despite the numbers, we’ll never know
the full story of the war’s devastation. The casualties were catastrophic, and
civilians became targets not only in Europe but in sub-Saharan Africa and the
Middle East. The Allied blockade caused an unknown number of deaths in Germany
and it continued even after the armistice and into the peace negotiations,
causing widespread starvation. The true casualty rates may actually be over 40
million. But the numbers do not tell the whole story.
A whole
conceptual world died. Certain ideas about the nature of the human being, and
optimism about the human future became impossible in a world of poison gas,
machine guns, and a shells that could tear a human being in half. It’s hard for
us to conceive today how apocalyptic the war seemed. The closest modern
comparison would be if a series of “dirty” bombs exploded all over the capitals
of the world tomorrow, or a nuclear exchange killed tens of millions. By 1918,
the world of 1914 was unrecognizable. It was a shattered image as the
"Great War" ingrained itself onto the world's psyche and changed
things forever.
In a new
book, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror, out October 16
on Counterpoint Press, historian W. Scott Poole looks at how the horror genre
slowly evolved and took shape after World War I. Major films, with themes still
recognizable to horror fans today, like J ’accuse (1919), The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari (1920), and Nosferatu (1922) all appeared within a few years after the
end of the conflict. Almost all were produced, directed, and written by
veterans who had seen some of the worst of the fighting. VICE talked to Poole
to find out why the birth of the horror genre was rooted in the destruction of
the Great War, how the definition of the word horror evolved over the years,
the debt the White Walkers from Game of Thrones owe the conflict, and the
images of the fighting that still linger today.
VICE: Why are
you convinced the birth of the modern horror genre was rooted in the
destruction of the Great War?
W. Scott
Poole:
The macabre had existed long before the Great
War, in epics, gothic novels, the work of Shelley and Stoker and Baudelaire.
But new themes that we connect with horror—dismemberment, mutilation, the dead
that return for revenge, the sense that not only a house might be haunted, but
that the whole world could become a charnel house—this appeared for the first
time and found a far larger audience. What I have seen in the writings of
veterans, including those who became some of the first horror auteurs, is a
desire to compulsively relive the trauma over and over again. Horror is a
language of trauma.
V : Why do
you think people haven’t considered the wartime context for horror’s emergence
before?
WSP :
I can’t claim
to be the first to have noticed it. The idea has appeared before, both in
fiction and non-fiction. David Skal writes in his popular, now classic book,
The Monster Show, of how the beginnings of 20th-century horror are found in a
world that dealt not only with a mountain of corpses, but millions of often
horribly disfigured veterans. Christopher Bram’s novel, which became the
Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters, tells the story of James Whale,
the director of the 1931 Frankenstein, his final years haunted by his memory of
the trenches and of his monsters. My book is new in that it’s the first
comprehensive look at this era that shows the links between history and horror.
V : How did
the Great War ingrain itself on people’s psyche?
WSP :
Death would
never be understood in the same way. This is perhaps the most important way
that horror became part, not only of mass culture, but of how we see the world.
The 19th century had sentimentalized death in many ways, especially in burial
and mourning practices. This became impossible after the Great War, and both
soldiers and civilians were buried in mass graves, unidentified and
unidentifiable. We see in horror films like Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) or The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) the idea of the body as an automata, a kind of
death doll, an empty husk. This is terrifying. It’s a sign of how deeply the
world had changed that such stories could, when they made their way to the
United States, become the hugely popular monster movies of Universal Studios.
It is, I say in the book, as if death had a fandom.
V : Describe
what the Great War’s no man’s land was like and how the trenchworks factored
into to modern horror imagery?
WSP :
No man’s
land, a kind of field of corpses, represents a new sort of haunted house, an
embodiment of the most morbid aspects of horror film and what I’d even call
horror as a worldview—a way of thinking about the war. Even in sub-genres of
horror like the off-road slasher film—the cult classic The Hills Have Eyes
would be an example—we see this imagery. The new season of American Horror
Story, “Apocalypse,” uses this imagery, combining it with the terror of the
figure in the gas mask, an inhuman image that we see used over and over again
in horror.
V : How did
artists like Otto Dix influence the emerging genre?
WSP :
Otto Dix
fought through four years of the Great War and, like so many, came away a
confirmed pacifist. He saw art as, in his words, an “exorcism.” It would shock
and offer “horror to the moralist.” He, and other veteran/artists like Max
Ernst, portrayed images of death, the grotesque, and the morbid. I think
readers will be surprised at how much interchange occurred between what we
think of as “pop culture,” such as film, and the so-called “high culture” of
art. It was a time when, as another veteran artist André Breton described, art
must present the nightmares of the world to the widest possible audience. This
is why, for example, young surrealist painters loved the film Nosferatu, even
dressing like the characters and shouting out their favorite lines at repeated
viewings.
V : Describe
how the definition of the word horror has evolved over the years?
WSP :
The word
horror was not used in our sense before the Great War. The term appeared in the
poetry of the Decadents and Romantics but often to describe physical repulsion,
in fact, it was also used before the Great War as a medical term for a loss of
control of the body. It’s significant to me that the ghost story or the “weird
tale” after the Great War becomes a horror story, very literally a story of
bodies in agony, reflecting the Dante-esque realities of modern war.
V : How did
World War I influence filmmakers like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Albin Grau, Tod
Browning, and James Whale?
WSP :
For all of
them, the war left a sense of mental and emotional fragmentation that their
films replicated. Lang came back deeply scarred by the war, waving his service
revolver around in very public fights with his wife. We see some of this rage
and sense of dislocation in his films of crime, serial murder, and, famously,
in Metropolis, a futuristic society that has at its heart a beast, a monster
that swallows human beings whole. Murnau and Grau both lost comrades in some of
the most ferocious fighting on the Western and Eastern fronts, and Grau
believed in their making of Nosferatu that he had, in his words, shown the
world “the war…the cosmic vampire that has sucked the blood of millions.”
Whale
created, after his experience in the trenches both World War I films and the
two great Frankenstein films—Frankenstein in 1931 and Bride of Frankenstein in
1935. Today, Frankenstein’s Monster may seem a friendly square head, used to
sell everything from cereal to hamburgers. We do well to remember that he is
something more terrible than the return of a corpse in Whale’s vision. He’s a
field of corpses, a graveyard of bodies stitched together and moving. He’s the
nightmare of the last hundred years.
V : What debt do the White Walkers in Game of
Thrones owe to the Great War?
WSP :
The White
Walkers are another example—there are many others in mass culture from the
films of the late Romero to the fiction of Max Brooks—of our obsession with an
army of the dead. Filmmaker Abel Gance first sought to capture this image in a
1919 film made in the final months of the war in which an undead army of
veterans rises and returns home, to the horror of their loved ones. Gance used
actual veterans of the fighting in Verdun as extras to play the undead army,
many of them bandaged, some amputees, others with horrific facial injuries.
This idea, the corpses of the last hundred years of conflict ignited by the
Great War, obviously haunts us even in our most popular entertainments. If it
is escapist, it doesn’t work, it’s a kind of failed leap out of history.
V : What are
some images from the Great War that still linger today?
WSP :
Walter
Benjamin, a kind of wandering essayist whose work I follow through the book,
talks about “wreckage piling upon wreckage” as an image of modern history since
1918. The Great War began this catastrophe. The “peace” created, for example,
the very idea of “the Middle East” as Britain and France carved up the now dead
Ottoman Empire into colonies. Britain essentially, for example, decided that
the nation of Iraq would exist, cobbling it together out of peoples who had
little in common.
America and
Japan became great powers because of the war, and their competition for the
Pacific set them on a collision course that became part of World War II.
Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine the Arab-Isreali conflict, the Cold War, or
modern terrorism without the world that the alleged peace of 1918 made. In
fact, the virulent fascist ideologies of the 20s and 30s, the concept that a
people could find transcendence by “making their nation great again,” is
entirely a monster born out of the trenches, ideas hatched in the damaged minds
of Corporal Mussolini and Corporal Hitler, that shadow us still. We are living
in the haunted house, the inescapable haunted house, of no man’s land.
Nearly Every
Horror Movie You Love Is Actually About World War I. By Seth Ferranti.
Vice , |
October 16
2018
Cris Alvarez talks with W. Scott Poole about his book that examines the effect World War One had on horror movies. The Art and Design of Sci-Fi and Fantasy, Mystery andHorror, October 29, 2018
Also of interest :
From July 31 2017 until January 7, 2018 the exhibition World War I and the Visual Arts
was shown at The Met Fifth Avenue, New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art
Art as
Influence and Response: A First Look at World War I and the Visual Arts. By
Jennifer Farrell. Metropolitan Museum of Art
, October 16, 2017
The
International Modernisms of World War I.
By Natalie Haddad. Hyperallergic
, December 9, 2017. (review)
The most
compelling reason to see World War I and the Visual Arts is Otto Dix’s
spectacular, harrowing series of etchings, The War (Der Krieg, 1924). The
exhibition includes all 50 prints that comprised the published portfolio, a
rarity in itself, as well as a 51st print censored by Dix’s publisher, “Soldier
and Nun (the Rape).” Installed in three
rows on one wall, the etchings cycle through battlefields and barracks of the
Western Front. (The wall text does not include the titles of individual prints,
which provide dates, places, and some context.) Dix, who served in a Saxon
machine gun unit on the Western and Eastern Fronts, incorporates small details
and art historical references in the images, some of which can only be
discerned at close range.
Amid the
ghostly moonlight and shadows surrounding a cross and disembodied leg in
“Soldiers’ Grave Between the Lines,” the opening print, rats crawl in and out
of holes in the earth; the blackened and bloated hands and faces of casualties
in “Gas Victims (Templeux-La-Fosse, August 1916)” show the effects of chlorine
gas on the body; in the final print, “Dead Men before the Position near
Tahure,” dog tags identify a decomposing corpse as a Corporal Müller from
Cologne.
The War
exponentially enhances and complicates World War I and the Visual Arts. Dix
contributed more to the visual representation of war than any other artist in
the 20th century, but his contributions — most of all The War — are as
paradoxical as the war. Although his work is most often aligned with pacifism,
it can be and has been seen as a glorification of warfare, yet it belongs to
neither pole. Dix’s war is bizarre and nightmarish and traumatic, but it is not
simple. He saw in his experience the human drama and his greatest achievement,
which the Met gives us in full, is to confront it.
From June 5 –September
24, 2018 Tate Britain showed Aftermath,
art in the wake of World War One.
About the
fate of Otto Dix’s work The Trench – described by a leading American curator in
1931 as ‘perhaps the most famous picture in post-war Europe … a masterpiece of
unspeakable horror’. Tate Britain
Aftermath:
Art in the Wake of World War One, Tate Britain review - all in the mind. By Katherine Waters. The Arts Desk , June 5,
2018
This hits
full force in Dix’s Nocturnal Encounter with a Lunatic, 1924. Behind the
grinning skeletal figure welters a devastated landscape. Roof beams splay
skyward as spatchcocked carcass ribs and the pale star of a dead man drapes
over a deeply scored ground. Nothing is alive but the madman, and even that is
doubtful, for his eyes are empty beads of light and this is his deadened mind’s
landscape. This landscape is inflicted on Dix, who relays it and inflicts it on
us. Decades on, people no longer carry this war inside them, but for the
madman, this was no fleeting vision: this blasted landscape was the reality in
which he lived. The horror is that war happened again, so soon.
Aftermath:
Art in the wake of World War One – review. By Alistair Cartwright. Counterfire, September 18, 2018
Two works
could stand as bookends to this justifiably historical exhibition. The first is
an etching by Otto Dix. It shows three card players at a table. One player
holds the cards in his teeth, another with his toes. A pipe is plugged into the
place where one player’s ear should be. The wooden peg-legs which rest under
the table do not, on a second glance, all belong to the table. The curving
ironwork of the table momentarily distracts us from the armature supporting the
broken body of the player on the left. Dix turns an archetypical scene of
modernity in its heady days of Parisian cafe culture (think Cézanne’s card
players from 1894/5, or Toulouse-Lautrec’s treatment of the same theme) into a
nightmare fusion of the mechanical and the organic.
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