Horror

(This is an edited and expanded version of a paper I wrote some years ago while in grad school, hence the fealty to MLA citation conventions.)

The aesthetic of the cult film is easy to identify but difficult to define, as is often the case with modes of expression that are at once prevalent and diverse. Salient characteristics include dubious artistic intent with correspondingly dubious artistic merits, an appeal to prurient or base interests in the viewer, minimal budgets and flimsy production values, as well as exotic, bizarre, or unconventional themes and storylines. Critics who argue for the validity of the cult aesthetic in film tend to make much of the latter qualities. Certainly, few would argue against the proposal that the primary appeal of the cult film is its implicitly oppositional, if not counter-cultural, stance in relation to what may be called “mainstream” and “elite” values of beauty, aesthetics, and formal verisimilitude. The grotesque features of cult cinema are seldom a consequence of mere failure on the part of the filmmakers. It is doubtful that anyone would propose that an inept but mainstream Hollywood blockbuster like Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever counts as a cult film as that term is usually understood, since the proper cult film is what is generally produced, consumed, interpreted, and embraced on the cultural periphery, and makes little effort to appeal to mainstream standards of classical cinematic aesthetics despite a frequent tendency to ape the more superficial qualities of mainstream movie successes. Beginning with this understanding, the plethora of cinematic oddities directed or produced by Roger Corman would seem to have a legitimate claim to being the foremost canon of representative cult cinema. The Corman oeuvre is a quintessential body of films that are amenable to a kind of token-to-type analysis owing to recognizable recurring formal attributes, and close critical examination is an efficient means to get a conceptual handle on the idea of the “cult film,” even though Corman’s work hardly exhausts the idea of the cult film as a cultural phenomenon.

The critic’s understanding of the cult film becomes somewhat troubled when s/he attempts to pursue an assessment of a work that goes beyond its implicitly- sometimes explicitly- oppositional stance. As the critic Greg Taylor maintains, “In truth, cultism was never equipped to handle the complexities of aesthetic analysis, because it originally pitched itself as an alternative to this very sort of traditional discernment” (261). The contrarian nature of the cult aesthetic and its accompanying enthusiast sub-culture inevitably produced a set of critical standards that privileged a personal, often nostalgic, and certainly idiosyncratic set of affective relations between the viewer/consumer/fan and certain cult works. The more “institutionalized” standards of criticism often used for the assessment of mainstream or elite works of art were contrary to what the cult film stood for. As a consequence, “standards tend… to remain vague, obscured behind the oppositional gesture itself… Thus, attempts to delineate the strengths of cult objects in detail have been so rare simply because they are difficult to sustain given the sparseness… of the underlying criteria” (Taylor 262). This brings critical judgments directly into the realm of the highly subjective, a result that should probably be unsurprising since the sensibility embraced by the cult aficionado is supposed to be limited to the auspices of a, well, “cult.” “Cultism is so inextricably bound up with issues of self-definition as to make the critique of any particular cultist gesture tantamount to personal attack” (Taylor 262).

I feel, however, that it is worth the effort to develop a mode of criticism that can in some sense accommodate the cult aesthetic, for both the reason that cult films have intrinsic artistic merits that should be explored, but also because they reveal certain strange and idiosyncratic qualities of the cultures that produce them. The cult aesthetic is worth understanding because the tensions and contradictions in the culture at large are worth understanding. A mode of criticism and a set of critical standards that can be helpfully employed to make cult films speak their peculiar truths and place them in a larger context or body of work (even a “canon” if we are feeling generous) is both attainable and desirable, and can probably be best achieved by engaging with critical models that are pre-occupied with cultural problems not traditionally associated with aesthetics, such as narrative (not necessarily ‘literary’) and medical studies. The critical engagement with the cult film should honor its oppositional stance first. Because cult cinema frequently deals with the extremes of human behavior, and individual films are often saturated with lurid sex and gory violence, and generally embrace a giddily outrageous mode of representation that fetishizes depictions of human suffering (this is especially conspicuous in the horror genre), I feel critical studies of trauma, injury and/or illness should be brought to bear on considerations of specific cult films. Illness narratives, with their emphasis on physical suffering and bodily dissolution and the resources human beings call upon to cope with them, can be seen to be ubiquitous in cult films, provided receptive audiences are willing to adjust their stock perceptions on those matters. This may not be immediately obvious due to the eccentric nature of the artistic sensibility, where the vulnerability of the human body is not honored in such a way that does justice to the tragedy of the human condition or the human desire for a transcendence of limitations, but where the human body is often subjected to wildly bizarre and exotic modes of transformation and trauma. My task here will be to demonstrate that the illness narrative is operating, albeit on an often near-subliminal level, in many cult films. The critical text I will be utilizing will be Arthur Frank’s landmark study The Wounded Storyteller, a work that analyzes how the sick and wounded make sense of their condition through the act of storytelling, and how the construction of a narrative of and through the compromised body enables the process of healing. The insight I find most useful for my purposes relates to the centrality of the body in constructing the formal qualities of narratives of illness. Frank’s project is unabashedly moral, as he believes listening to stories of illness helps develop the capacity for empathy and thus broadens the moral strength of the community. The film I will be assessing is the 1981 Roger Corman-produced science fiction/horror outing Galaxy of Terror (directed by Bruce D. Clark and co-written by Clark and Marc Siegler). It is a clear homage to the Ridley Scott film Alien, and the basic premise involves an interstellar civilization of the far-future where the crew of a spaceship is sent to a distant and mysterious planet called Morganthus to rescue another ship that crash-landed there. Upon arrival, they become stranded themselves due to an unseen force that compromises their ship’s instruments, and they find the crew of the ship that preceded them all brutally killed. A mysterious alien structure nearby may hold the key to understanding how and why it happened, and as the characters investigate, they are killed off one-by-one by grotesque monsters that are all physical manifestations of their worst and deepest fears. Each death functions as a mini-narrative of bodily corruption and dissolution, wherein the attacking monster serves as a metaphor for the character’s fear, and each character’s fear is in turn related back to their understanding of their body and its vulnerabilities. The narrative type developed and proffered by Frank that most closely resembles this trajectory is the Chaos Narrative, and I will endeavor to show how it and related ideas are operating in Galaxy of Terror. I will then explain how the medium of cinema is uniquely equipped to handle this type of storytelling, and then I will relate these ideas back to the problem of the critical assessment of the cult aesthetic.

Arthur Frank’s baseline understanding of the illness narrative (from which he constructs his larger theoretical-analytical schema) is fairly intuitive. “The mystery of illness stories is their expression of the body: in the silences between words, the tissues speak” (Preface). To understand illness narratives, one needs to accept the centrality of the body and the imprecision of language to articulate its needs. This is one area where the medium of cinema is uniquely equipped to tell such stories; although language is (usually) utilized as a formal element in the form of dialogue, and although there is a “film grammar” that some critics have argued is roughly analogous to conventional grammar, the visual nature of the film medium enables viewers to appreciate the “silences” of which Frank speaks in the form of images. Galaxy of Terror does not specifically depict people suffering from illness, but rather it shows scenarios in which bodily fears[i] run amok and destroy the people possessed by them. The trajectory of bodily trauma that characterizes the deaths scenes in Galaxy bears a strong relation to the illness narrative because it shares in its recognition of the body’s mutability, vulnerability, and ephemerality. At the very beginning of The Wounded Storyteller, Frank describes and quotes a woman suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome: “she ‘needed… to think differently and construct new perceptions of my relationship to the world.’ Serious illness is a loss of the ‘destination and map’ that had previously guided the ill person’s life: ill people have to learn ‘to think differently’” (1). The basic structure of an illness narrative involves a person falling ill and coming to recognize a need to fundamentally re-structure his/her subjectivity, a nebulous entity that bears a much stronger and disturbingly dependent relation to the physical body than previously thought. This adjustment is achieved, or not achieved, through the aegis of narrative, or story-telling. The self is closely bound to the concept of narrative, and learning new patterns of thought is inextricably entwined with telling new stories. The characters in Galaxy of Terror essentially face the same dilemma whenever they are confronted by one of their own, personal Monsters from the Id: they need to learn to think differently, or perish in body and mind. Much like the person suffering from a severe or terminal illness, their subjectivity is closely bound to the body and their sense of its strengths and weaknesses, and when the mysterious alien force on Morganthus triggers their fears of physical vulnerability, very strange and very brutal body-narratives play out, but not in the medium of words. Instead, these stories play out in the potently excessive cinematic manner of embodied metaphors, an approach that adds a sense of immediacy to a storytelling mode that often struggles when confined to words. “The ill body is certainly not mute- it speaks eloquently in pains and symptoms- but it is inarticulate. We must speak for the body, and such speech is quickly frustrated: speech presents itself as being about the body rather than of it” (Frank 2). The visual immediacy of the monstrous, embodied metaphors present in Galaxy of Terror changes the nature of the “speaking.” The stories they relate are grasped emotionally and lack clarity or conventional linear development. But stories they are. A noticeable difference between the illness narrative described by Frank and the events of Corman’s film is the position of the onset of “illness” on the timeline of a specific character arc. In Galaxy of Terror, psychological anxieties become bodily traumas, a reversal of the standard illness narrative where a bodily trauma or change instigates psychological anxiety which is then engaged and hopefully alleviated by the act of storytelling. This is because the fear of trauma, illness, and the loss of bodily integrity is always present in the film, and indeed, this fear is always present, though not necessarily consciously, in human beings everywhere at all times. The fear that applies to all the characters of the film is the dread that they would be unable to manage bodily disruptions. Their wounds lead them inexorably into chaos, where the very possibility of a corrective narrative- that is, a coherent sense of self- is permanently frustrated. For the crew of the Morganthus, the psychological is closely bound to the physical body. “The mind does not rest above the body but is diffused throughout it” (Frank 2).

The dynamic of every death scene in Galaxy of Terror is the word being made flesh, or ideas being joined to objects and emerging as embodied metaphors. “The speech that the body begets always imposes itself upon the body” (Frank 28). Why do certain bodies beget certain kinds of speech, and produce different metaphors? Frank answers this question by proposing four different body types, which are basically different methods of dealing with perennial bodily problems. They include the disciplined body, the mirroring body, the dominating body, and the communicative body. I believe that all four approaches to dealing with body problems- which are primarily understood by Frank to be problems of action (29) – beget different kinds of anxieties, and are represented by the characters in Galaxy of Terror to various degrees. Frank is careful to point out: “Ideal types are puppets: theoretical constructions designed to describe some empirical tendency” (29). As an action-oriented science fiction B-movie, Galaxy of Terror does not have much room for complex characterization, and the characters on display can be easily reduced to a set of tendencies, bodily and otherwise. “People define themselves in terms of their body’s varying capacity for control” (29). Each character in the film attempts to assert bodily control in a different way that I will insist roughly corresponds to the body types outlined by Frank, and this generates different sets of body-related fears that in turn beget different monstrous metaphors that then proceed to assault and maim. By now, some examples should be in order.

The Mirroring Body is most conspicuous in the character of Ranger (played by Robert Englund), whose hallucination involves being attacked by a malevolent doppelganger of himself. In addition to the obvious “mirroring” taking place in this confrontation, there are many features of the Mirroring Body narrative present in Ranger’s characterization. Frank defines the mirroring body in terms of consumption, “attempts to recreate the body in the images of other bodies: more stylish and healthier bodies. The primary sense is visual: the body sees an image, idealizes it, and seeks to become the image of that image” (43). The device employed by the plot of Galaxy of Terror to make the hallucinations of the characters seem relevant is to reveal a character’s fear through dialogue before isolating them in some corner of the alien game cube and subjecting them to their grisly fate. Before Ranger experiences his hallucination, he has a confrontation with Cabren (the level-headed space veteran and protagonist) which reveals his naked envy of everything Cabren is capable of that he is not. His idealization of Cabren’s abilities is part and parcel of his central fear as a mirroring body- the fear of disfigurement, understood broadly as the sudden inability to effectively perform as an ideal image (Frank 44). The evil doppelganger he confronts is his morally disfigured self, an entity he is capable of defeating when he finds out that it doesn’t bleed when he cuts it. Lacking bodily vulnerabilities, the monster suddenly ceases to be credible as a bodily fear, and Ranger is capable of banishing it from his mind. The doppelganger’s lack of bodily vulnerabilities also reveals the essential nature of the manifested fear it represents; it is all image with no tangible substance to sustain it, and Ranger’s attempts to confront it (and on some level “consume” it) only serve to harm Ranger. It is the recognition of the doppelganger’s ersatz corporeality that allows Ranger to reconfigure the logic of The Mirroring Body metanarrative that haunts him and defeat his monster- a literal mirror image of himself.

Less fortunate is Dameia (played by Taaffe O’Connell), the ship’s technical officer and character I would argue is representative of the Communicative Body. Frank positions the Communicative Body as being accepting of contingency and wholly associated with itself as a complete body-self unit (48). This produces a sense of other-relatedness, or a dyadic approach to other bodies. “The communicative body realizes the ethical ideal of existing for the other… Communication is less a matter of content than of alignment: when bodies sense themselves in alignment with others, words make sense in the context of that alignment” (Frank 49). Dameia is easily the most empathetic crewmember, and she extends comfort and sympathy to numerous other characters throughout the film. When she is first introduced, she assists Ranger in securing a safe position on the ship during the reckless take-off procedure initiated by the unhinged captain. It can be argued that the communicative body is in opposition to the Dominating Body (to be described next) in that it privileges communication over force. Its principle fear, then, is contact without alignment, or having to experience the violent imposition of another body. Before Dameia has her monstrous encounter, she gets into a confrontation with the belligerent team leader Baelon, and Baelon insults her with a well-placed bit of slut-shaming that reveals that Dameia has a reputation for an ambivalent and confused attitude toward sexuality. It is revealed a little later that she is also significantly frightened of worms, non-human creatures the culture at large regards with disgust and ambivalence, and which are invariably coded as distant from the human. Dameia’s fatal vision consists of the film’s most memorably grotesque and disturbing sequence; a giant maggot attacks Dameia and rapes her to death, an encounter with a dominating body that comes wrapped in the image of a confirmed phobia. The alien otherness of this attacking body speaks to the abject terror of non-alignment which sustains the communicative body.

As mentioned previously, the Dominating Body is represented by the character Baelon, the bellicose Rescue Team Leader who is always over-eager to indulge his temper and detects threats in every corner of the ship and insults in every gesture from his crewmates. Dominating bodies define themselves in force and refuse to accept contingency of any kind. It is also troublingly dyadic, responding to its dread of contingency by attempting to assert control over other bodies. “When the body is dissociated from itself but linked with others, the body’s will turns against the other rather than toward itself” (Frank 47). This makes the nature of its fear fairly easy to deduce: it dreads, much like the communicative body, a body that can and will effectively dominate it, but unlike the communicative body that dreads an exchange without alignment (rape instead of intimacy) the dominating body simply fears losing a fight with another dominating body. This is precisely what happens to Baelon, who envisions an immense, reptilian monster which charges him and which he cannot fight off no matter how much firepower he hurls at it. Eventually, the monster overwhelms and disembowels him.

The body type that is ultimately lionized and made heroic in Galaxy of Terror is the Disciplined Body, represented by the protagonist Cabren who survives the film to the end to confront the person secretly responsible for stranding the crew on Morganthus (Ranger, the mirroring body, also survives but sustains an injury that prevents him from being an effective final combatant; he remains at a distance from the climactic battle.). At the beginning of the film, it is shown that the character organizing the rescue mission to Morganthus is the head of the intergalactic empire in which all of the characters live, a mysterious figure called the Master whose features are obscured by a glowing red haze that surrounds his head. Near the climax of the film, it is revealed that the ship’s cook Kore is in fact the Master in disguise and that he steered both the previous crashed ship and the current one onto Morganthus in order to test the mettle of the crew and select a successor. It turns out that the mysterious alien structure in which most of the action takes place was constructed by a long-extinct race in order to train its young to manage fear. In humans, it has the capacity to confer great power on anybody who “wins” the game and makes it into the central chamber (In a case of murky plotting, the exact nature of this “power” is never described in any detail, but it apparently enables the Master to govern a vast intergalactic empire.). The Disciplined Body is ideally suited to survive such a game, as it is self-defined in actions of self-regimentation. “Its most important action problems are those of control… to reassert predictability through therapeutic regimens… to compensate for contingencies it cannot accept” (Frank 41). The methods it employs are strictly monadic, that is, solitary and orientated toward self-support and self-discipline. Cabren is the very model of the disciplined body, as he is the only character who retains a cool head throughout the proceedings, trying to temper conflicts and retain control as crisis after crisis occurs and the dead bodies keep piling up. Significantly, he is the only character who does not experience a fear-themed hallucination of any kind until he angrily confronts Kore near the film’s end, and then Kore needs to communicate the visions directly instead of allowing them to be largely self-induced as with the other characters. Crucially, in this climactic confrontation, Cabren combats the embodied fears of all his murdered crewmates, gaining an understanding of their body-based anxieties in the process. It is strongly implied, however, that this does nothing for Cabren’s feeling of empathy, as he needs to remain emotionally aloof in order to effectively “conquer” his own fear and the embodied fears of the others. Cabren pursues a disciplined regimen of body-control, making him a ritualist ideally suited to perform the ceremonial transfer of power from an old Master to a new one. He emerges victorious over Kore and becomes the Master himself. This course of development is radically different from the ideal of the Wounded Storyteller propounded by Frank. Frank’s project encourages the sharing of illness narratives to promote a feeling of empathy. In Galaxy of Terror Cabren’s apprehension of the illness narratives of the other crewmembers does not enable empathy, but emotional discipline, a necessary pre-requisite for the political authority that he is entrusted with at the film’s end. The sharing of stories enables the conquest of other bodies, an outcome not anticipated in any of Frank’s writings but explored, albeit in a crude, cult-ish manner, in an obscure Roger Corman Science Fiction B-picture.

As I already discussed, each grisly death in Galaxy of Terror is a mini-illness narrative, and with the exception of the cases of the story’s two survivors, each mini-illness narrative bears a striking resemblance to the theory of the Chaos Narrative, one of three types of illness narrative developed by Frank. Its features and characteristics are myriad and complex, but the aspect that should be considered central is well-summarized as follows- “Chaos is the opposite of restitution: its plot imagines life never getting better. Stories are chaotic in their absence of narrative order. Events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence or discernible causality” (97). Each and every kill scene in Galaxy of Terror follows this hopeless and non-linear trajectory to some extent. Monsters appear and disappear seemingly at random, violence occurs in total isolation when characters are completely separated from their fellows (the alien force governing the planet has the seemingly supernatural ability to separate the characters at will), and matter is destroyed and re-constituted and then destroyed again without any regard for the laws of causality or logic. Crucially, these visions largely play out without words (The only sounds are the grotesque groans, growls, and slurps of the monsters and the victims’ screaming.). “Words suggest [the wound’s] rawness, but that wound is so much of the body, its insults, agonies, and losses, that words necessarily fail” (Frank 98). This allows for the image to take over. I’ve already discussed how the monsters in Corman’s film are essentially embodied metaphors, and therefore can be understood as visualized representations of a linguistic concept. The monsters cannot be “told” by the sufferer, only experienced with a frightening immediacy. The reflection and sense of linear temporality necessary for storytelling is absent, and the abstractions often present in stories are instead viscerally lived in the moment. The absence of a capacity to reflect is crucial: “For a person to gain such a reflective grasp of her own life, distance is a prerequisite. In telling the events of one’s life, events are mediated by the telling. But in the lived chaos there is no mediation, only immediacy. The body is imprisoned in the frustrated needs of the moment” (Frank 98). It is impossible to really convey the chaos narrative through the medium of the written word, but the immediacy of the moving image, especially the metaphorical moving image, may be able to give a viewer an impression of lived chaos. The solitary, gruesome deaths the characters of Galaxy of Terror experience are all about being imprisoned in the solitary, frustrated needs of the body for an indiscernible amount of time that can only terminate in death, and the dissolution of narrative and its accompanying sense of a coherent self. There is an anti-narrative quality to all of the deaths in the film. Causality is suspended but narrative conventions are still present in a distorted form, most saliently the staples of conflict and metaphor, both tied to the needs of the vulnerable body.

In order to effectively conquer a chaos narrative, one must reconstruct it, and to reconstruct it, one must have the privilege of distance, psychological if not literal. This is the imperative of every character in Galaxy of Terror, and what it really means when the Master says they must “learn to control their fears.” They need to cultivate psychological distance by re-conceptualizing their bodies’ needs. Only two characters manage to do this by the film’s end, and they achieve it through embracing the standards of the disciplined body. This is significantly different from Frank’s understanding of the effective ways to banish chaos, which place a stronger emphasis on embracing the standards of the communicative body (104).

I hope that I have by now demonstrated that many of Arthur Frank’s insights are easily applicable to the storytelling conventions present in the film Galaxy of Terror. I will now add to my earlier speculations on why the medium of film is uniquely well-suited to deal with some of these issues related to ill and suffering bodies and the many ways they tell stories about themselves and other bodies, as well as tease out some of the broader philosophical and cultural implications of the cinematic approach to these matters. The philosopher Noel Carroll located one of the most powerful aspects of cinema in the affective power of the moving image- “…certain motion pictures can… afford us self-knowledge, by awakening feelings in us we never knew we had and enabling us to examine them… the link between the moving image and our affective life is one of its major draws” (148). Since Frank is concerned with the welfare of the moral community and feels that the sharing of stories of illness is conducive to its development, any medium that has the power to activate the affective life should be regarded as useful to that purpose. The feature unique to cinema is the moving image, a tool that has both the narrative draw of the written or spoken story and the sensual immediacy of the visual. Cinema allows us to visualize the ill or suffering body and how it dwells in real time better than any other medium one can imagine. Indeed, it is the capacity to imagine that makes storytelling so useful to the development of moral sense. “…our capacity to respond to fictions emotionally is rooted in the capacity… of the emotion system to be aroused not only by that which we believe, but also by that which we imagine. Motion pictures are sense—bearing vehicles that mandate viewers to imagine the states of affairs and events that they depict audiovisually” (Carroll 154). This is closely tied with Arthur Frank’s idealized vision of the wounded storyteller and what s/he can do for the imagination of the whole human community- “The community [can] elaborate [the wounded storyteller’s] story, both within itself and beyond. In this elaboration, the community recognizes what it has in common, and it grows. Witness, here as elsewhere, grows…” (Frank 184).

A film like Galaxy of Terror demonstrates the functionality of the ideas of thinkers like Frank and Carroll without any of the idealizations or optimism. The mechanism of the human and bodily behaviors described by Frank is depicted but not in a manner that allows for much empathy or dignity. The cult aesthetic allows the viewer the pleasure of recognition, but its total eschewal of sentimentality and tragedy inhibits a humanistic understanding of the truths portrayed in the film. For some, this may be the cult aesthetic’s biggest failing. I suggest that it is its most unique quality and major strength. It is folly to idealize the human subject for the very simple reason that s/he is a body and immune to such transcendent representations. As the critic Jeffrey Sconce remarked in his discussion of sleaze in the cinema, “Often, sleaziness implies a circuit of inappropriate exchange involving suspect authorial intentions and/or displaced perversities in the audience” (4). Galaxy of Terror, a film that features a scene where a woman is raped by a giant maggot in graphic detail, is clearly sleazy. The strength and possibly problematic quality of such works is that they allow viewers to view the insights of people like Frank independent of their ethical concerns. The cult aesthetic is essentially amoral, and draws attention to the disturbing fact that the human is not only a body, but an animal.

Works Cited

Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Malden, MA: Blackwell

Publishing, 2008. Print.

Frank, Arthur. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1995. Kindle.

Sconce, Jeffrey ed. Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and

Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Print.

Sconce, Jeffrey. “Introduction.” Sconce 1-15.

Taylor, Greg. “Pure Quidditas or Geek Chic? Cultism as Discernment.” Sconce

259-272.

[i] which at least in the universe of the film seem to be the only fears that people can have, although a specific fear’s relation to “the body” may not be immediately obvious