Framing the Void: Trauma, Historical Erasure and the Excesses of Horror

Abstract/nFraming the Void: Trauma, Historical Erasure and the Excesses of Horror/nby/nKatherine Elizabeth Guerra/nDoctor of Philosophy in Film and Media/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Kristen Whissel, Chair/nThe first chapter of this dissertation focuses on how film can picture the unrepresentable, the marginalized, or historically neglected of cultural and collective traumatic rupture, using the films Inglourious Basterds (2009 Tarantino), El Espinazo del Diablo (The Devil’s Backbone 2001 Del Toro), and El Labirinto del Fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006 Del Toro) as case studies. I analyze how both Labirinto and Basterds represent violent historical events through fantastical narratives and modes of visual excess. Both spectacularize absences that structure any effort to represent the traumatic event (the unspeakable or that which remains unspoken) to make visible the elisions (official and institutional) and gaps that punctuate the historical record. I show how these films mobilize historical inaccuracies and the fantastic in service of articulating reimagined and un(der)represented experience. Chapter two sustains my focus on absences by analyzing recent developments in the horror film regarding the increasingly ephemeral (and increasingly irrelevant) “monster.” In the 2010s, the monster has been emptied of meaning; the genre’s lethal slasher/creature instead stands as a placeholder around which meaning is made. I contend that as terror, trauma, travel, time, and the nation-state have become more dispersive and diffuse concepts, the monster itself has become increasingly arbitrary. In films such as It Follows and The Cabin in the Woods, the monster is too much and not enough. They are “ephemeral monsters” that function as generic markers on a path that leads to the unmarked site of failed collective memory and language. Where the first half of my dissertation constructs a broader theory of picturing the unspeakable and producing memory, the second half of my dissertation focuses on narrower case studies which demonstrate how horror films of the twenty-first century may still engage with preexisting classical archetypes and tropes while leveraging the specularity of the monster and bodily violence to create and mark the voids around which meaning must be made. Chapter three analyzes the relatively new figure of the resistant (millennial) mother. I contend that in contemporary or “millennial” horror films, anxiety and disgust arise not from horror of the consuming, overly possessive mother that populated twentieth-century horror films, but from the elusive and reluctant “resistant” mother who refuses to mother and is inappropriately “complete” apart from her child. Here, the mother’s ephemerality transforms her into a dispersive figure of horror. I then turn to New Black Horror films such as Get Out and Candyman (2021), that have begun to test the limitations of the form. That is, New Black Horror films are increasingly excessive, self-referential, and violent in ways that destabilize and undermine the institutions they represent onscreen. Grounding my analyses in Afropessimism, I argue that formal excess, circumscribed omniscience, and increasing bodily violence in New Black horror create a staging ground for the production of Black subjectivity through the destruction of the institutions that ordinarily impose and shore up a system of looks organized around White supremacy.

Advisor: Whissel, Kristen