In my writing on horror so far, I have, probably unavoidably, left a succession of terms and concepts by the wayside. When I first wrote something on the subject, it was almost absentmindedly, in response to a particular discussion and an attempt to link that discussion to something broader. As these things tend to happen, this brief attempt to interject into a particular topic started to morph into something else the more I started reading specifically towards it. The turning point, perhaps, was my reading into psychoanalysis, both as it related explicitly to horror [Kristeva] and more generally [Lacan]. Questions began to arise about what exactly I was addressing when I spoke about horror; was this, in other words, a pseudo-literary excursion into genre, or something more subtle and philosophical in its aims. What is exactly the significance of horror here, what is it I think it can help me explain?
Some time ago I posted a query on twitter concerning the link between horror and sex. The link itself doesn’t come out of nowhere of course, with sex and horror sharing a kind of ambivalent imaginary space in a variety of ways for some time. Georges Bataille stakes much of his writing both pornographic and philosophical on this co-existence, and for psychoanalysis, to reckon with sexuality is to reckon with something shrouded in fantasy for a reason; to confront ones desire directly is to be repulsed by it. So there is a movement between the two; if we wanted to be slightly provocative, we could say a dialectic of sex and horror. But what does this tell us about either, and what, if anything, does it tell us about what binds the two together?
Sexy Vampires? Yes Please
When Twilight, the young adult series of supernatural romance novels, became popular, the figure of Edward Cullen, a vampire, but one explicitly written with sex appeal in mind, garnered much derision. The claim was that he couldn’t be a “true” vampire; where was the cape? Where were the prominent fangs? What a lot of this derision conveniently ignored was that the figure of the vampire itself has been tied up sexuality and eroticism practically from the moment it entered the popular imagination. While it’s difficult perhaps to see much sexually appealing about the monstrous being Bram Stoker described in Dracula, as soon as the tale begun to be spun into stage-plays and films, the titular count became a distinctly sexually charged being, and the more “the vampire” became a diffuse, popular archetype to be found across a broad range of horror and supernatural fiction, the more it also merges with the domain of sexual fantasy. By the time you reach Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Dracula, it’s impossible to ignore the flamboyant eroticism oozing out of the screen.
In fact we can draw an example more recent than either Coppola’s grand historical erotica or Robert Pattinson’s glistening torso, in the decidedly online reaction to trailers for the survival horror video game Resident Evil Village. The catalyst was perhaps the very first reveal of a particular antagonist within the game, being a nine foot vampire woman called Lady Dimitrescu. Rather than fear, online communities immediately dove headlong into the realm of sexual fantasy, expressing a desire for this ostensibly intimidating and definitely murderous entity. Even if some of this was expressed in an ironic way, it seemed that Dimitrescu had become the focal point of a tidal wave of online desire. People who expressed their wish for a tall lady to step on them, who made endless humorous comments while playing on the desirable nature of being pursued by this alluring undead aristocrat.
So vampires are popular subjects of sexual fantasy, and this both precedes and continues far beyond the popularity of Twilight. What is happening here? Surely, we might reasonably assume, nobody involved in these fantasies actually wants to be pursued by a nine foot tall vampire and have the blood drained from their body. Likewise, there is an aspect of mind control and coercion commonly involved, making the consent of such scenarios questionable at best. Due to this, we might be tempted to cast a moral eye over these desires, and condemn them as a dangerous influence, or even politically regressive and anti-feminist. While I understand this impulse, it’s something I want to manifestly avoid. Not only is there little of interest to say about something we have already cast into the flames, there is a point missed somewhere along the line about what exactly fantasy is, what it does and how it relates to sex as such. Instead, we might be better served by viewing it somewhere “beyond good and evil”. Taking a Lacanian tack on defining fantasy, we may find that it’s no surprise at all that we find eroticism in things that we would never entertain in reality.
Narrative Jouissance
The question to ask here is perhaps expressed most succinctly as; what is enjoyable about the fantasy? Fantasy, in the Lacanian sense, is a narrative space, an imaginary drama of desire. The thing I want to focus on here however, is what precisely makes the fantasy enjoyable to us. Perhaps the primary insight of Lacan here is the counter-intuitive realization that what we enjoy about fantasy is that which prevents it being realized, the obstacle to reality. To Lacan, to realise the desires expressed via fantasy, to “complete” them, is to find ourselves suddenly repulsed by them. In other words, if a fantasy ceases to be a fantasy, it ceases to be enjoyable. The somewhat ambiguous French term for enjoyment, Jouissance, as its employed by Lacan comes in useful here. There is a contradictory enjoyment to fantasy. We enjoy fantasizing about vampires not because we actually wish to be brainwashed and turned into a member of the undead, but in particular because these things remain at the level of fantasy itself; in a sense, they open the channels of desire.
Here we find Fantasy rather than being some kind of mimetic reflection of social life or sexual politics suddenly considered in its own light. Rather than looking at these expressions of narrative jouissance simply as a symptom of social pathology, or even just sexual frustration, they become interesting in and of themselves. This shift seems to be from Fantasy as suggestive of a problem to be solved to fantasy as suggestive of a condition, the condition of Desire.
Eros and Thanatos
But this, as Lacan himself points out, can easily simply become a complete detachment of Fantasy from anything else. Simply ogling the realm of fantasy, sitting back and saying “life is but a dream” executes the irony of falling back into a re-iteration of boundaries between fantasy and reality. Rather than fantasy being a driver of reality as we experience it, Fantasy then simply becomes a complete detachment from everyday concerns, tripping and plummeting even further into a kind of pure idealism in which concept and ideas alone fuel the world around us. What the psychoanalytic approach simply entails is not that we live purely inside our own heads, but that the supposed “inner world” of the subject is in fact a complex interplay with the “outside” world of the other. So while the sexual fantasy of vampirism does not entail a legitimate wish to be preyed upon, we have to push further and ask what it does entail.
The figure of the vampire taking on the qualities of sexual desire, again, strikes us as contradictory due to the danger implicit in the narratives it traditionally emerged from. The vampire is a threat, and clearly signaled as such; an undead monster who drains humans of blood is not an obvious candidate for sexual desire, surely? This assumption, in itself, may very well be a large helping of what we could call “copium”, or to make it more plain, the fantasy of the vampire might be telling us something about sexuality that we don’t want to know.
This is an area where the work of Georges Bataille seems instrumental. Indeed, his Eroticism, as a work, hinges on the intertwining of sex and death, one contained within the other, the moment of exuberance and life paired inextricably with the moment of destruction and abjection. We seek to affirm ourselves through merging, replicating, dissolving. The connections here are many, and we find the same metaphor of cellular reproduction reiterated in this text and Lacan’s Seminars on Feminine Sexuality, where we find its lineage traced back to Freud’s juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos. Eros, to Freud, is a fusion that makes one from two. Then Eroticism, for Bataille, becomes “assenting to life up the point of death”. This mirrors almost directly Freud’s introduction of the death drive, the tension between it and the pleasure principle, and hence the strange, uncanny joy of jouissance. Desire is a horror to us precisely because it takes us back to ourselves, implies simultaneously a kind of creation and a return to dust.
The contradictory movement of eroticism contained both in Bataille and Freud [thinking here in particular of Beyond the Pleasure Principle] might go some way towards explaining the vicissitudes of sexual desire contained in our pull towards the vampire. That images of threat, horror, even violence, become meshed together with diffuse fantasies of sexual desire is a regular, yet regularly disavowed phenomenon which appears on some level to re-enforce sexuality as a condition, one which is tied together with those aspects of the everyday which we require, affirm, but disavow. In the vampire’s seduction then, we find written a repressed shadow of what follows us and confronts us, but that we would rather not, or perhaps could not, confront directly.
Melancholic Heterosexuality
Fantasy then, confronts us with what we disavow of our own sexuality; this is, namely, that our sexuality is in itself fueled by fantasy. This is Lacan’s famous dictum “there is no sexual relation”, meaning in sum that desire, or rather the satisfaction of desire, is impossible, and so remains at the level of fantasy and sublimation. The controversy for us, when it comes to our thinking about sexuality, is that this detaches it from the necessity of the biological sex act itself, and means that sexuality itself is fantasy, and only becomes real through its unreality, so to speak. Fantasy is, rather than the common understanding of a supplemental escape, of fundamental importance to the everyday, and our relation to it often defines our relations with others.
What of the vampire then, where does this leave him, smouldering in his keep or twinkling with the light of a thousand diamonds? There are reasons I gravitated towards the vampire particularly. Firstly, what is interesting about vampirism as sexual fantasy is that it is one often heterogenous in origin. What was curious about the resident evil example is the sheer amount of different sexualities that seemed to emerge in the figure of the tall vampire woman. The desires expressed openly here ranged far beyond the fantasies of heterosexual “normalcy”, and those who expressed them likewise. This suggest then that not only does the sexual desire of vampirism reveal something about fantasy, but about the specific nature of fantasy, that it undermines what Judith Butler calls “melancholic heterosexuality”.
Melancholic Heterosexuality is the name Butler gives to the insistence that sex is defined by its biological components, simply by the penis and the vagina, in other words. It tends towards the justification of hegemonic notions of heterosexuality and rejections of Queer sexuality on the basis of nature. Nature here is a distinct brand of realism in which a straightforward affirmation of “empirical” reality stands in for an affirmation of values. In other words, melancholic heterosexuality is the progression from the “is” of sexual intercourse to the “ought” of heterosexual love. If, then, there is really no sexual relation, and the desire of love is underpinned not simply by the interaction of genitalia but by the narrative space those genitalia act within, then this considerably weakens the foundations of this kind of naturalistic hand-wringing so integral to normative heterosexual desires. It in fact appears to expose the supposed nature of heterosexuality to which it must always return as itself no more than a space of fantasy. It is sexuality unmoored from the expectations attached to biological reproduction, something which presents a quandary for those who would reject queer desire on the grounds of some imagined ontological primacy.
The Distribution of Fantasy
Another reason for my interest in the vampire, the primary one perhaps, is its status as an archetype of popular culture. Rather than a specific character, it seems reasonable to see the vampire more as a combination of features combined and recombined in different formations. We know what is meant by “vampire”, but the specifics might change dramatically from fictional world to fictional world. Vampires range from grotesque corpses to sophisticated, well groomed aristocrats with an entire castle of servants, they might be rearranged with bat like features, the sexual allure might be directly alluded to, minimalised or erased, even though it’s interesting to note that in much vampire fiction a transformation takes place between the two. The vampire, in other words, is a kind of mythological figure of horror and fascination, and so exists in a kind of diffuse way, replicated endlessly in endless variations.
This resembles nothing less than fiction as something which can be pulled apart and reassembled. What this says about fantasy is that there may also be a pull in recombining elements of these figures and narratives, and perhaps therein the space of fantasy also becomes a space of distributed experimentation with desire. Psychoanalysis might, with good reason, call many of these attributes partial objects, to which we attach a desire, but what becomes curious is the ways in which they are combined and the manner in which they shift. This then re-enforces the notion of fantasy not simply as a daydream or personal fixation, but as something distributed across a broad plane, throughout the everyday. Here we reach the point at which fantasy becomes the narrative forms of popular culture. What is the structure of Marvel, or the Disney Industrial complex itself, if not a particular set of fantasies mobilised en masse via serialised cultural production.
The question posed here through the vampire however, one that is perhaps pertinent to the culture industry monoliths of our time, is what desire emerges from these diffuse and reassembled structures of consumption. What kinds of escape do they offer? Inasmuch as there is a distribution of partial objects, fetishes, sexual fantasies throughout the popular sphere of everyday life, what kind of relationship with our own desire emerges?