Daylight Horror

Two images are embedded in my childhood memory of horror, and they are both from the film The Golden Child. One is the image of blood coming to the surface of a bowl of porridge, which has always stayed with me for its grotesque combination of textures. The other is a scene, which last no longer than 30 seconds, in which a demon from hell pursues the protagonist from the depth of a cave into the blazing light of a Californian highway, the demon’s flapping wings swirling high above the brown car. Thankfully, my attachment to these two images is not the side-effect of some insidious 1980’s nostalgia, all scattered remnants of which are now consigned to the flames. Instead, what fascinates me about these scenes is the visual sight of horror within the banality of natural light. There is indeed something truly horrific about a dark entity—fictional or otherwise—that is caught in the cloudy rays of a Wednesday afternoon. When the demon ascends from the subterranean world of the caves, then we seem to be confronted with an accident in reality. It is as though a force of the unconscious has unlocked the invisible screen linking the night with the day.

This synthesis of the otherworldly and the banal was reignited last night, when watching Pascal Laugier’s truly disturbing but somehow captivating Martyrs. Amongst the library of recent French horror, this is surely yields the most artistic merit. There a coldness to this film that is matched only by frostiest region of repetitive, droning black metal. True, Frontier(s), Haute Tension, À l'intérieur were all unflinching in their brutality. But in all of these films, the standard horror gestures are simply augmented through the prism of gender reversal. Which however culturally interesting, often amounts to nothing more than a device. Incidentally, I have not seen Antichrist yet (I seldom go to the cinema due to an intolerance to other people making noise), but I sense that Martyrs will likely be a thematic counterpart. Alongside the visual and spatial aspect of Martyrs—which I’ll touch upon in a second—there is an overt presence of Bataille in this film.

A summary of the plot can be found here (although if you plan on watching the film, then you’d be advised not to follow the link). The theme of martyrdom refers to the idea of bearing witness to the transcendental. Indeed, the basic theme of the film is the relation between suffering, eroticism, and testimony. The “disturbing” aspect of the film is less the visceral gore, but the lurching sadness at the heart of the film for a “lost continuity.” The presence of Bataille in this exploration is evident in several ways. Notably, in the transitional stage of the film, where Anna discovers the underground chamber, a wall of horror reveals itself. Various photographs of dying people with their eyes seemingly transfixed in ecstasy become the focus. One of these images is the famous “ling chi” photograph, which Bataille was purportedly obsessed with and would later feature in his Tears of Eros (cf. this probing analysis by Darren Jorgensen of the role the ling chi plays within Bataille’s thinking).

This scene is a portentous warning for the character. As the film’s core unfolds, it becomes clear that the “justification” for this glorification of suffering is an existential craving for a vision that sees beyond life. The onus on vision is central, as one of the central motifs of the film is the role of the eye in its expressive response to suffering and redemption. As one of the characters says when she sees this redemption embodied: “I’ve never seen an expression like that. She’s liberated. Completely liberated….She doesn’t see what’s happening around her. [But] she is still alive.” At this point, the character has been skinned alive save for her face.

Implicit in this thesis is the idea that sustained, systematic torture and suffering degrade the empirical ego, thus putting the lived body in contact with the transcendental realm beyond appearances. The link between Schopenhauer’s asceticism and Bataille’s eroticism is weirdly aligned here, inasmuch as both seek the reclamation of a lost continuity through the modification of the body. Only, Schopenhauer seeks redemption via dissolution whereas Bataille pursues a trajectory of excess. And the ambiguity of the word “dissolution” here is what binds them both, as Bataille says: “Dissolution—this expression corresponds with the dissolute life, the familiar phrase linked with erotic activity” (p. 17). The ecstasy of the film is thus very much orientated toward a Gnosticism, in which the self departs the flawed shell of the body, in the process sacrificing individuation for cosmic wisdom. “Here,” writes Bataille, “life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite” (p. 91). The Catholicism in Bataille’s thinking is crystallised in the final scenes of the film. The first, we find the Mademoiselle responsible for the project bearing to witness to the martyrdom of Anna: “Did you see it? The other world?” And then in a final scene, the victory of Anna’s martyrdom is announced to a gathering of like-minded people, dressed in expense suits and driving vintage cars: “Her ecstatic state lasted for 2 hours and 15 minutes. It was not a near death experience. What she experienced was an authentic martyrdom.” The civility of this meeting and of the clinical, cold feeling of the film more broadly reinforces Bataille’s point that: “We have to imagine a sacrifice as something beyond nausea” (p. 92).

This post-nausea violence returns me to the use of light in the film. Truly, this is a visually striking film. Like the seminal scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where we first see Leatherhead lurching from the darkness of a doorway into the light of the hallway before then Dionysiacally rampaging in the searing sun at the end of the film. Especially notable to Chainsaw Massacre is the literally haunting confrontation with the trucker at the very end of the film. At this point, the female victim has escaped and is on the threshold of escape. In order to stop her, Leatherface must pursue her beyond the house. Journeying through farmland, the scene reaches its apothesois on a neaby road. A truck, "Black Maria," emerges in the distance, running over one of the killers before stopping to assist the girl. Meanwhile, Leatherface has caught up and the three of them are frozen in this surreal meeting at the side of the truck. The scene no longer becomes about otherwordly horror, but the sublimity of placing disparate objects beside one another in the self-conscious glare of daylight.

Martyrs is an exemplary treatment of this liminal realm between domesticated light and the “dark entity of the house” (to quote Bachelard) which resists and refuses that domestication. The film persistently explores the genuinely nightmarish realm, in which the objects of our dreams long repressed to the basement return to haunt our waking life. The outbreak of violence in the film amplifies this violence by disjoining the domestic drama of breakfast with the murder of the family. Throughout this and other scenes, natural light is used in such a way to cast a banal, realist hue upon things. The result of this is the sense that the viewer has accidently stumbled behind the scenes of a nightmare being rehearsed. Yet the rehearsal proves to be a reality, and however much banality suffuses with reality, “the unconscious,” as Bachelard says, “cannot be civilised.”