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NICOLA NIXON Making Monsters, or Serializing Killers For all that it had the veneer of currency, with its special effects and dalliance with the quasi-scientific "paranormal" and "parapsychological ," Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist seemed, in 1982, to be merely a residual demon-possession film, a latecomer to the already rather shopworn seventies occult movie. Lagging behind The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), The Sentinel (1977), The Amityville Horror (1979), and The Shining (1980), Poltergeist nevertheless had all the ingredients: a nice family, a haunted house, a possessed child, and, most important, the ever-menacing danger ofunholy spirits and the "Beast" lurking just beyond the reality of the bucolic suburbia of Cuesta Verde. And yet Poltergeist also presented something else, something other than a drafty window or bricked-in basement as the liminal space between the demonic and domestic world: it posited a television set as the interstice and conduit between specular reality and what gets portentously referred to throughout the film as the "other side." Experiencing the most profound effects of this liminal space is a little female viewer, Carol Anne Freeling, who is sucked into the interstice through her apparently one-sided interaction with "TV people." That the "TV people" are merely pleasant illusions , produced to occlude the horror of the Beast from Carol Anne, is made clear by the time Hooper shifts the cinematic emphasis from the white noise and snow-filled holding pattern of the perpetually on television to the bedrooms upstairs, in which the scene of Carol Anne's metaphoric rebirth into American 21 7 218 THE GOTHIC POSTMODERN suburbia is enacted. As with The Amityville Horror, the Beast is eventually thwarted, and the now-reunited Freeling family abandon their home, drive to a Holiday Inn, and, as a parting shot, proceed to stick the hotel television set out in the hallpresumably to stave off any further unwitting submission to its dangerous enticement.! If Poltergeist was effectively among the last gasps of the popular seventies genre of occult or Satanic-possession films, its early eighties take on that genre equally registered, as did David Cronenberg's Videodrome (also of 1982), the emergence of what would become one of the more gnawed-over and politically fraught debates in eighties and nineties America: the problematic relationship between fictional illusion, or "TV people," and its youthful .Atp.erican consumers. And if, in terms of those debates at any rate, the Satanic Beast was dropped out of the triangulated relation ofreal viewer, fictional screen, and otherworldly gothic demon, this lacuna suggests as much about a shift away from the popular seventies articulation ofhorror as it does about a realignment of the locus of monstrosity. What seems to disappear in the removal ofthe Beast is horror's representation within arcane religious tropes and a thematics of the "other side." Now, to a point, the situating of the monstrous and its horror within the parameters of religious extremes made perfect sense in the seventies, when the supposed prevalence of strange "brainwashing" cults and their charismatic leaders prompted alarmist anticult propaganda. With the trials of Charles Manson and the Manson "family" in 1970, with Mansonite Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme's failed shooting of President Gerald Ford and her trial in 1975, with the Jonestown massacre in 1978, and with the repeated hysterical efforts to have Reverend Sun Myung Moon deported and his Unification Church disbanded in the late seventies, it is scarcely surprising that the decade's horror films should at least tangentially reflect real fears ofan emergent evangelical menace. Given their focus on the mysterious "possession" of middle-class American family members, who speak with the voice and words of the symbolically recognizable but always elided, faceless, otherworldly Beast of the apocalypse, films like 3.145.119.199] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 07:05 GMT) MAKING MONSTERS, OR SERIALIZING KILLERS 219 The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror accentuate the helplessness ofvulnerable youth in the face ofa far greater occult power. In the post-Watergate early eighties, however, when television had proven itself useful for the simultaneous propagation of comforting fictions and exposure of the shocking truth behind them, when Cronenberg's Father O'Blivion had heralded the emergence ofthe more benign but equally avaricious televangelist ]immy Baker, the construct of horror and its representation had changed. By the time Reverend Moon had been dispatched to a Connecticut prison on a vaguely trumped-up charge oftax evasion in 1984, the cinema's metaphysical gothic Beast, whose presence was merely suggested representationally with gusts...

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