Household Horror

Marc Olivier

Description

Take a tour of the house where a microwave killed a gremlin, a typewriter made Jack a dull boy, a sewing machine fashioned Carrie's prom dress, and houseplants might kill you while you sleep. In Household Horror: Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects, Marc Olivier highlights the wonder, fear, and terrifying dimension of objects in horror cinema. Inspired by object-oriented ontology and the nonhuman turn in philosophy, Olivier places objects in film on par with humans, arguing, for example, that a sleeper sofa is as much the star of Sisters as Margot Kidder, that The Exorcist is about a possessed bed, and that Rosemary's Baby is a conflict between herbal shakes and prenatal vitamins. Household Horror reinvigorates horror film criticism by investigating the unfathomable being of objects as seemingly benign as remotes, radiators, refrigerators, and dining tables. Olivier questions what Hitchcock's Psycho tells us about shower curtains. What can we learn from Freddie Krueger's greatest accomplice, the mattress? Room by room, Olivier considers the dark side of fourteen household objects to demonstrate how the objects in these films manifest their own power and connect with specific cultural fears and concerns.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: Kitchen/Dining Room
1. Refrigerator
2. Microwave
3. Telephone
4. Dining Table

Part II: Living Room
5. (Sleeper) Sofa
6. Remote
7. Sewing Machine
8. Houseplant

Part III: Bedroom
9. Bed
10. Typewriter
11. Armoire

Part IV: Bathroom
12. Radiator
13. Pills
14. Shower Curtain
Conclusion
Filmography
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Película fotográfica
• Folclore
• Wardrobe
• Sewing machine
• Literary criticism
• Environment
• Social sciences
• Pseudoscience
• Performing arts
• History of film
• Cinema
• Acid rain
• Surveillance
• Couch
• Latex
• Film
• Folklore

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253046581
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

HOUSEHOLD HORROR
THE YEAR S WORK: STUDIES IN FAN CULTURE AND CULTURAL THEORY
Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, Editors
HOUSEHOLD HORROR
Cinematic Fear and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects
Marc Olivier
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Marc Olivier
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-04655-0 (hdbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04656-7 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-0-253-04659-8 (web PDF)
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Part I Kitchen/Dining Room
1 Refrigerator
2 Microwave
3 Telephone
4 Dining Table
Part II Living Room
5 (Sleeper) Sofa
6 Remote
7 Sewing Machine
8 Houseplant
Part III Bedroom
9 Bed
10 Typewriter
11 Armoire
Part IV Bathroom
12 Radiator
13 Pills
14 Shower Curtain
Conclusion . . .

Filmography
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T O M ICHELLE , M AX , L UCAS, AND E VA, FOR KEEPING me from turning into Jack Torrance. To my parents, Miriam and Bob Winegar, for actual thoughts and prayers. To dog Jack, for clearing my mind during ponderous midnight walks in his final year. To movie group friends Craig Mangum, Nicholus Chugg, Rob McFarland, Ed Cutler, and Corry Cropper, who brainstormed films and objects with me as this offbeat project teetered at the precipice. To my colleague-consultants, especially Sara Phenix, Bob Hudson, Daryl Lee, Scott Miller, Van Gessel, Jack Stoneman, and again, Corry Cropper. Thanks to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies for providing a fruitful venue to present research in progress. Thanks to the generous Ludwig-Weber-Siebach Professorship and the Humanities Fellowship awarded by the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University. To Richard Daniels and the Stanley Kubrick Archive for letting me read All work and no play . . . thousands of times over. Special thanks to Indiana University Press; to the peer reviewers of the manuscript, who provided helpful comments; to the series editors, Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffee; to Leigh McLennon for copyediting; and to Janice E. Frisch, who convinced me immediately that this was the perfect series for my book. And to Brooke Gladstone, whose voice I imagine as a litmus test for readability.

HOUSEHOLD HORROR
INTRODUCTION
C OMPLETE THE SENTENCE: IN THE GREAT GREEN ROOM / There was a telephone / And a red balloon / And a picture of- Chances are, if you were a child, parent, or babysitter any time after 1947, you recognize that inventory of domestic objects. Margaret Wise Brown s Goodnight Moon is the quintessential object-oriented book. Like many books for young children, Goodnight Moon is unburdened by the constraints of character development and plot. It s more of a chant, really-a ritualized bedtime peace treaty with objects that will soon go dark and haunt the room with their unrecognizable shapes. Goodnight Moon names a series of objects in a room and then says good night to each of them. Household Horror is the insomniac s answer to Goodnight Moon ; it is a story about straining to see objects in the dark. In Household Horror , there is a telephone call coming from inside the house, a sewing machine working on Carrie s prom dress, a typewriter that makes Jack a dull boy, a possessed bed, a refrigerator best left unopened, and other household objects that refuse to sleep no matter how many times you tell them good night.
This is an object-centered book, but it is not strictly speaking a book about object-oriented ontology (OOO) or other strains of philosophy that acknowledge the being of things. I am nevertheless deeply influenced by the nonhuman turn of the twenty-first century. I consider Ian Bogost the patron saint of this book, given that my idea to look at objects in horror films emerged from a discussion of Bogost s Alien Phenomenology with students in my theory class. Most of the students simply could not conceive of a world in which objects are endowed with their own being as much as any human-a flat ontology in OOO speak. My guess is that it had been a while since any of them had read Goodnight Moon . Let me echo Bogost in The Nonhuman Turn to explain my feelings about what OOO accomplishes: So much of object-oriented ontology is, to me, a reclamation of a sense of wonder often lost in childhood. 1 To wonder, I will add a reclamation of awe, or wonder mixed with fear. Horror recovers the wonder and fear of objects in a way that approaches the sincerity of a child frightened by the shapes of objects in the dark. My object-focused view of horror decenters the human in a similar manner to OOO and speculative realism. Nevertheless, I have no desire to write about how Kant got it wrong (a critique of correlationism being the first station of the OOO cross at which one must genuflect, followed by methodic attention to philosophers whose last names begin with the letter H ). Instead, I start from a position of belief in the dehierarchizing principles of object-centered thought, and then I see how the objects in scary movies take on new dimensions when seen through 3-O lenses. I agree with the object-oriented crowd that cautious anthropomorphism is a useful weapon in the fight against anthropocentrism. 2 Therefore, I try to place objects on equal par with humans by arguing in all sincerity that a sleeper sofa is as much the star of Brian De Palma s Sisters (1973) as Margot Kidder ( chap. 5 , [Sleeper] Sofa ), that The Exorcist (1973) is about a possessed bed ( chap. 9 , Bed ), and that Rosemary s Baby (1968) is a conflict between herbal shakes and prenatal vitamins ( chap. 13 , Pills ).
Household Horror includes canonical works, cult classics, mainstream franchises, and films not generally associated with the genre. Many of the films are Western productions (especially, US or UK), but chapter 4 ( Dining Table ) focuses on an object in Japanese cultures, and chapter 11 ( Armoire ) looks at a Western object in a South Korean film. Horror fans stand to be alternately thrilled and aggravated by my inclusions and omissions. What! Two films by De Palma and nothing by Cronenberg? Auteur worshippers will find some of the standards such as Hitchcock ( chap. 14 , Shower Curtain, naturally), Lynch ( chap. 12 , Radiator ), and Kubrick ( chap. 10 , Typewriter ) and deeper cuts such as Zulawski ( chap. 1 , Refrigerator ). Chronologically, the approach varies. Chapter 8 ( Houseplant ) is a double bill of features from two different genres that opened only a week apart-the sci-fi horror remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and the feel-good documentary The Secret Life of Plants (1978). Chapters 3 ( Telephone ), 7 ( Sewing Machine ), and 13 ( Pills ) take on works from at least three decades each to explore changes in specific object-human and object-object interactions over time. In brief, traditional strategies of coherence such as chronology, country, director, and subgenre are present to some degree in this book, but these categories are secondary to the manner in which the works permit access to an otherwise overlooked household object.
Household Horror is organized by room (sections) and by object (chapters). As a reader, you are free to roam about the house (or more accurately, the one-bedroom apartment) in any order you choose. Each chapter can stand alone. I do not aim to present a point-by-point argument that progresses from one chapter to the next in order to arrive at one grand theory of The Object. Accordingly, there are many conclusions but no traditional Conclusion. My purpose is to explore the presence of objects in cinema regardless of the status of those objects as symbols or as characters -a critic s favorite anthropomorphic compliment to bestow on objects that demand attention (e.g., The house is almost a character in that film ). I treat objects as beings that surpass the roles given to them as props or decor. Objects do more than prop up humans. If I succeed, then what OOO philosopher Graham Harman says of essayist Clement Greenberg s prose should also be true of this book, that it retrieves relevant objects from the shadows of indifference, and makes them the target of our awareness in a plausible way. 3 In short, I wish to spark curiosity more than to author an exhaustive treatise. As OOO philosopher Timothy Morton writes, No solo ever exhausts the trumpet-there is that feeling that there is always more of the object than we think. 4 An object, according to Morton, is like Doctor Who s TARDIS: bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. 5 My project has more in common with cubism s multiplication of viewpoints or with the Renaissance rhetoric of abundance ( copia ) than with classicist ideals.
I encourage readers to use this book as a point of departure for object-centered readings of other media texts. Consider gaps as invitations. The Houseplant chapter, for example, does not include The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), counter to the expectations of every person to whom I spoke while writing it. Nor do cult