Horror and its layers

"Tod Browning lay in his grave eating malted milk balls," goes the opening sentence of a gripping chapter in David J Skal's book The Monster Show. What is happening here isn't as otherworldly as that bald sentence makes it sound. The year was 1901 and young Browning - employed with a travelling carnival - was playing the part of the Hypnotic Living Corpse; the trick involved being "buried" in full view of spectators and then spending up to 48 hours underground, in a wooden coffin with a hidden ventilation system and nourishment. 

Among the lessons from this anecdote, one is that the public's fascination with morbidity can always be relied on to sell tickets; another is that individual experiences of this sort have had a far-reaching effect on popular culture. Tod the Living Corpse would in time become a film director and helm two of the most influential horror movies ever made, the 1931 version of Dracula starring Bela Lugosi and the viscerally disturbing Freaks (1932) with its cast of actual deformed carnival performers. Browning told an interviewer once that all the time he spent six feet under was "conducive to thought". Perhaps he passed his lonely subterranean hours thinking of a future where he might terrify large groups of people without having to himself undergo such discomfort. And perhaps it was natural for him to find his calling in cinema, where a director can be a puppet-master, pulling the strings from behind a curtain, watching his audience squirm. 

Horror as a genre is not for all tastes, but it's bemusing that so many people regard it as something frivolous and disreputable despite the fact that fear is one of the profoundest and most fundamental of human emotions. Skal's book, with its many fascinating stories, is a study of a century of horror in American culture - mainly in film, but also in other media such as photography and pulp literature. It is about horror as a reflection of social currents or states of mind; a mirror - or an antidote - to a zeitgeist. As the author points out, it is no coincidence that one of America's worst years of the century, the Depression-afflicted 1931, was also the best ever for monster movies. 

The talking points in this book include things that have often surfaced in popular-film studies: for instance, the Godzilla monster as an incarnation of nuclear-age paranoia (the creature is a byproduct of radioactive waste, and it is, of course, Japanese in origin). But there are others I hadn't thought closely about, despite having been a long-time fan of horror films. Contemplating the effect of World War I on horror in art, Skal notes that "modern warfare had introduced new and previously unimaginable approaches to destroying or brutally reordering the human body" - and this found echoes in the Surrealist artists' preoccupation with disfigurement, as well as in films like the 1922 Nosferatu, with its pestilential, plague-like images. Equally engrossing is the chapter about the effects of the drug Thalidomide, which was prescribed to pregnant women in the 1960s but resulted in thousands of birth defects. This found resonance in books and films about monstrous children, among them Village of the Damned, Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist. 

Reading this book made me think about layers within our own horror movies. The recent Ek Thi Daayan, for instance, can be read as the story of a man who, since his childhood, has had a long-suppressed fear of women; now, as he sets about trying to consolidate a romantic relationship, the fear resurfaces and he seems to be beset by witches. Similarly, the atmospheric 13B - in which a man realises that events in his house are mimicking a TV drama plot- can be seen as a comment on how media affects our self-perception. 

But what of earlier, more apparently simple-minded horror films? In Raj Kumar Kohli's Jaani Dushman, a hirsute, long-fanged beast terrorises a village, killing young girls on their wedding day. Given this theme, and a final scene where three macho heroes confront the monster in a den, the film could well be about a conservative society's fear that its young women might be seduced, their honour "compromised", before they have been married and safely co-opted into the system. The somewhat confused narrative structure leaves a question dangling though: was the werewolf a controlling patriarch with a surplus of chest hair? Or was he a saviour, trying to yank a regressive society out of the dark ages? Go on, discuss.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer