" We Are Legion": Primal Dreams and Screams in the Satanic Screen

The TV promo for a recent Satanic possession and exorcism film proclaimed that it is "so disturbing that you won't sleep for weeks." The ad poses an interesting question. Why do we pay money to be frightened by horror stories that make us lose sleep at night? It is a conundrum that has engaged generations of literary critics. A potential answer comes from the findings of a new generation of Darwinists who expand the master's findings to explain central elements of human behavior. These scholars meld biology, sociology and psychology to create the fields of study called sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Basing their findings on Darwin's theory of adaptation, natural selection and survival of the fittest, they not only offer a new definition of human nature but the basis for a hermeneutic in analyzing response to timeless narratives in the arts, including the question of why we enjoy vicarious fear inspired by the horror film in general and the Satanic film in particular.Attempts to explain the lure of the tale of terror have been around for almost as long as the genre of fiction has existed. In the 18th century, Edmond Burke called the pleasures of vicarious fear "sublime": "WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling."1 He offers a variety of examples of the sublime: mountains, storms at sea, ruins, and even various colors and smells, all conducive to creating unease. His theory on the pleasures of fear inspired generations of gothic novelists, beginning with Charlotte Smith and Anne Radcliffe in the 1790s.Modern behavioral studies offer the potential for critical theories that are both similar to and different from Burke's. Freud's writings on the tripartite psyche and the role of the unconscious mind have long inspired analysis of literature and film, beginning with Ernest Jones' 1910 essay "Hamlet and Oedipus." Carl Jung described what he called archetypes, primordial images imbedded in the human mind that influence our lives and create a response to art, literature and, of course, film. Maude Bodkins adapted Jung's work to literary criticism in her 1934 book Archetypal Patterns in Poetry.2 Freud's and Jung's writings have inspired schools of critical analysis, beginning with the premise of both Freudians and Jungians that the unconscious, be it the individual as in Freud's writings or the collective in Jung's, drives some human behavior and can therefore create a response to literature or film. Burke's description of the sublime bears similarities in his assertion that powerful emotions override reason, presumably triggering response in the unconscious through association. More recently, criticism has focused on culture as an influence in our response to literature and film. Cowan, for instance, describes films as "sociophobic artifacts, the artistic traces of a wide variety of fears that continue to haunt us." "Put differently," he writes, "our culture teaches us in a variety of ways what to fear [in the horror film], and through a variety of cultural products reflects and reinforces the fears we have been taught."3The adaptation of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as an approach to literary criticism has been slow to develop. Gottschall and Wilson discuss the general theory in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, but applications in specific critical studies are hard to find.4 Yet the principle seems clear. Edward O. Wilson, for instance, writes: "The arts are not solely shaped by errant genius out of historical circumstances and idiosyncratic personal experience. The roots of their inspiration date back in deep history to the genetic origins of the human brain, and are permanent."5 Burnham and Phelan sum up the central point of why understanding our evolution leads us to insights about literature and film: "Our brains have been designed to genetic evolution . …