Shock Xpress - Necrophilia in the Movies

"The last taboo! There's a phrase to be seen on the cover of many a paperback, and it usually turns out to refer to cannibalism. I wonder. There seems to be a general feeling that, in extreme circumstances, eating people may be excusable. Suppose, though, that the survivors of that notorious Andean air crash, rather than eating their dead fellows, had - well, you know...

In the endless list of strange sexual activities, all of which are enjoyed by someone, somewhere, necrophilia must rank pretty highly on the taboo scale. Furthermore, it may be the most extreme perversion to have been portrayed in generally available film."

In a fascinating article in the third Shock Xpress book ("A Coffin Named Desire"), Colin Davis delves into the depiction of necrophilia in the movies. This is the first post in a series of posts featuring films discussed in Davis's article.



Terror! Il castello delle donne maledette (Dick Randall, 1974)




Flesh For Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey and Antonio Margheriti, 1973)

Current 93 - Dögun (1988)

take the torch to daddy's house
take the flame to daddy's house
take the fires to daddy's house
take the torch to daddy's house
blood of my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust

take the flames to daddy's house
take the fires to daddy's house
build the pyres higher and higher
bring the flame to daddy's house
build the pyre, build the pyre
blood of my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust

take the flames to daddy's house
take the torch to daddy's house
take the flames to daddy's house
build the pyres higher and higher
build the pyres higher and higher
build the pyres higher and higher

take the fire to daddy's house
take the flames to daddy's house
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood of my blood, dust to my dust

take the flames to daddy's house
take the fires to daddy's house
build the pyres higher and higher
blood to my blood, dust to my dust
blood to my blood, dust to my dust

Aarseth Watching Video pt. 2 - The Apathy of Euronymous

From this interview with Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth from June 1992:

"Is the life you are living OK for you? If you could change something what would it be?

Yeah, it’s quite OK. I’d just like to have extremely much money. Then DSP would be a big company, we would all have the POWER in this part of the music business, and I would live in luxury with a harem and watch the children in Africa starve to death on video.

(...)

If you could change something in the world, what would it be then?

I would get all things back to what they were during the cold war, then I would mix it with the barbarianism of the Viking ages and middle ages. I would make people more religious and fanatic. And I would have taken over the Black/Death metal movement from the beginning and seen to it that only evil bands could have existed. And I would have lots of money while others were starving. I would NOT do anything with starving children in Africa, if you’re thinking about that. They can die."

The formation of Mayhem in 1984 coincided with the terrible famine which occurred in Ethiopia in 1984-1985. It seems likely that Aarseth's pitiless remarks were inspired by this humanitarian disaster. In Ethiopia, drought, agricultural mismanagement, corruption and violent tyranny had conspired to cause a drastic fall in the production of food and cash crops. Close to 8 million people became famine victims during the drought of 1984, and over 1 million died.

Ethiopia had been a Marxist-Leninist state since the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974. During the famine, it was ruled by the military government of Mengistu Haile Mariam. This regime had killed an estimated 500.000 people in the so-called Red Terror. Mengistu was one of the Communist dictators along the lines of Pol Pot, Nicolai Ceaucescu and Enver Hoxha: implacable despots of the kind for whom Aarseth expressed so much admiration (read more in these posts 1, 2, 3 and in this post).

The famine generated intense media activity in the West. Bob Geldof and Midge Ure founded the supergroup Band Aid to produce the "Do They Know It's Christmas?" charity single, and went on to organize the July 1985 concert Live Aid, which raised $100m for humanitarian aid.

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Aarseth's remarks are heartless. Seen from an analytical point of view, they stand in marked contrast to his reception of snuff films, as examined in this post. In the interview which formed the basis for that post, Aarseth described how, consuming 'snuff films', he identified with the victims, vicariously experiencing their suffering: "That is the best way to watch such a movie to try to FEEL the actual pain of the victims. It becomes much more gruesome then, and that's great. One must be alone in the darkness and suffer with the victims." In the interview quoted above, however, we find no trace of identification with the famine victims. On the contrary, Aarseth seems to create the greatest distance possible between himself and the hungry children.

In the interview quoted above, Aarseth proposes to watch videos of starving African children not in solitude but in the company of the sensual young women that inhabit harems, naked odalisques whose sole purpose is pleasing the autocrat to whom they have given themselves (for a moment, I imagined an aging Aarseth as a corpse-painted Black Metal Berlusconi). One can be sure that the consumption of these videos would be accompanied by laughter, talking and so on - which in the other interview was deemed undesirable because it would distance the viewer from the gruesomeness of the snuff film. Likewise, the luxury in which Aarseth desires to live would distance him from the poverty-stricken, powerless Ethiopians.

There is no trace left of the sympathetic identification with the victims which was so prominent in the previous interview. Like a Sadean debauchee, Aarseth strives only to enjoy the privileges of inequality, transforming the heartrending sight of starving children into a purely egotistical pleasure. The lack of compassion and solidarity is complete.

Aarseth's thinking seems to parallel that of the Marquis de Sade, as analyzed by Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot saw Sade as an emotionally apathetic man:

"Apathy is the spirit of negation as applied to a man who has chosen to be sovereign. It is in some way the cause or the principle of energy. Sade appears to argue more or less as follows: the individual today represents a certain amount of force: most of the time he disperses his strength for the benefit of those ghosts called other people, God or the ideal; by this expenditure he wrongly exhausts and wastes his potentialities, but what is worse, he is basing his conduct on weakness, for if he expends himself for others it is because he believes he needs their support. This is a fatal lapse. He weakens himself by vain expenditure of energy and he expends his energy because he believes he is weak. The strong man knows that he is alone and accepts that condition; he repudiates the whole inheritance of seventeen centuries of cowardice that would make him turn to others. Pity, gratitude and love are all feelings he destroys, and in destroying them he recuperates all the force he would have spent on those debilitating impulses and, more important, he derives the beginning of a real energy from his work of destruction."

Does it go too far to call Mayhem an anti-Band Aid?

Shock Xpress - Massimo Pupillo (pt. 2)

In an article in the third Shock Xpress book, movie journalist Lucas Balbo interviews director Massimo Pupillo. These are some movies mentioned in the article.


Il Boia Scarlatto (Massimo Pupillo, 1965)




Bill Il Taciturno (Massimo Pupillo, 1967)

Aarseth Watching Video pt. 1 - Euronymous, Saint of the Pit

"La sainte de l’abîme est plus sainte à mes yeux!"

Gérard de Nerval, Artémis


From this interview with Øystein "Euronymous" Aarseth (conducted probably shortly after Per Yngve Ohlin's suicide on April 8th, 1991):

"And now over to something more humouristic...yes... snuff-movies. Who had been the perfect actor for a snuff-movie, and why the hell aren't they legalized? Don't you think that every video-store should have its own section with snuff-movies?

EURO: Actually I think it's great that movies like that are forbidden. If they were legal and easily accessible, all the small trend children would be watching them, and then it would not be something extreme anymore. It's just the same what happened to death metal it became something everyone could buy in every store, something normal and accessible for everyone. All the mystic and evil atmosphere is GONE. I do not think snuff-movies are funny, I think they are DARK. I've seen people laugh at them, but that's probably because they will not be themselves. That is the best way to watch such a movie to try to FEEL the actual pain of the victims. It becomes much more gruesome then, and that's great. One must be alone in the darkness and suffer with the victims. If you watch it with other people, they will often talk, laugh and so on, and then you get more distanced from it. It's not supposed to be funny (death to fun), it's much better when it's depressive."

In the early nineties, the Norwegian state practiced a severe system of censorship. Horror films were either heavily cut or banned outright. Even relatively innocuous British horror films such as British horror films such as House of Whipcord and Twins of Evil were forbidden.

In all probability, Aarseth was bluffing when he claimed he had seen snuff movies. Snuff movies, films which depict the actual killing of a human being, are nothing more than an urban legend. In the (thoroughly researched) 1994 book "Killing For Culture. An Illustrated History of Death Film from Mondo to Snuff" film journalists David Kerekes and David Slater concluded that no such films have existed anywhere, at any time. Probably, Aarseth made the common error of mistaking notorious gore films such as Man Behind The Sun, Cannibal Holocaust and Guinea Pig 2: Flowers of Flesh and Blood for actual snuff movies; another possibility is that Aarseth categorized films from the Faces of Death series as snuff films.

Kerekes and Slater made some useful observations with regards to the social function of the myth of the snuff movie:

"Snuff is the ultimate debase, a monster that must exist because it cannot be proven not to exist. As such it is exploited by campaigners fighting 'Satanism', pornography and 'video nasties'. For bureaucrats seeking publicity and missionaries seeking funds, it is a tool - the demonized apotheosis that necessitates their crusade. It is what the public must fear and what these bodies will serve to protect the public from (and in recognizing it, will themselves remain untouched and immune). For the 'transgressives', on the other hand, it is the next inevitable step down the slippery slope - like all marijuana smokers will become crack addicts; like all beer drinkers will turn to hard spirits; like all porn viewers will resort to sex crime."

The myth of the snuff film, constructed by ".. bureaucrats seeking publicity and missionaries seeking funds..." was appropriated and used by Aarseth. This imaginary terror, this demented obsession of modern-day inquisitors, inspired Aarseth to wrest the demonic power of the snuff movie from his contemporary media landscape to cast that image back at Norwegian society. By publicly, ostentatiously claiming to consume snuff movies, Aarseth desired to become Norwegian society's "...ultimate debase...".

"Actually I think it's great that movies like that are forbidden." Aarseth's words illustrate the observation that transgression is a 'dual operation', an interplay between interdiction and transgression. Neither transgression nor interdiction can take place or have meaning without the other. Transgression does not deny the interdiction: on the contrary, it reaffirms the interdiction. For Aarseth, if snuff movies wouldn't be forbidden, if they would be legal and easily accessible, they would be meaningless. Aarseth needed his bureaucrats, missionaries and inquisitors. Aarseth was not only an artist who desperately desired to ruin that staid Christian society of which he was a part; he also was an artist who longed for a society that would deny his right to exist.

Where (inquisitorial?) criticism and theory regard the consumer of horror films to be in a sadistic-voyeuristic collusion with the camera, Aarseth "...suffer[ed] with the victims", as if he attempted to open up the boundary of the silver screen to feel "...the actual pain of the victims." Rather than assaultive, Aarseth's gaze is receptive, introjective, opening up to the pain of the victims. Carol Clover's classic 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws. Gender in the Modern Horror Film suggests that Aarseth's reception of snuff films is structured similarly to the reception of horror films:

"The evidence suggests that the first and central aim of horror cinema is to play to masochistic fears and desires in its audiences - fears and desires that are repeatedly figured as 'feminine.' It may play on other fears and desires too, but dealing out pain is its defining characteristic; sadism, by definition, plays at best a supporting role. To the extent that a movie succeeds in 'hurting' its viewers in this way, it is horror; to the extent that it does not try, it is not horror but something else."

Even if Clover is wrong to simply identify the consumption of horror films with sadomasochistic practices, she is right in the sense that both masochism and the consumption of horror films foreground an intimate sensation of corporeal suffering. With Karmen MacKendrick, both masochism and the consumption of horror films can be described as a 'counterpleasure', which are "...pleasures which queer our notion of pleasure, consisting in or coming through pain, frustration, refusal. (...) They are pleasures that refuse the sturdy subjective center, defying one's own survival, promising the death not of the body but, for an impossible moment, of the subject..." (sourced here).

Aarseth's approach to the consumption of snuff movies was solitary and contemplative: "One must be alone in the darkness and suffer with the victims. If you watch it with other people, they will often talk, laugh and so on, and then you get more distanced from it." Rather than consuming these films in a gregarious manner, Aarseth experienced the agony of the victims in solitude. For Aarseth, the consumption of these films must take place outside the banalities of ordinary life, cut off from the normal communication of emotions.

In the citation above, Aarseth expressly linked his ideal way of consuming these film to the experience of a "mystic and evil atmosphere": i.e. to mysticism and the left-handed sacred. This is particularly interesting in connection to the consumption of horror films as a counterpleasure which threatens the death of the subject. It would seem that the experience of corporeal suffering through the contemplative consumption of horror films is not only close to eroticism, but also to (left-handed) sanctity. Bataille: "The Saint is not after efficiency. He is prompted by desire and desire alone and in this resembles the erotic man." (sourced here).

In the white light of the desert, Christian hermit Saints identied ecstatically with a tortured and crucified Christ. In the pit-like darkness of his room, illuminated only by the somber blue light of the cathode tube, an enraptured Aarseth identified with the tortured and murdered victims of snuff films.

Shock Xpress - Massimo Pupillo (pt. 1)

"In Terror Creatures, when I needed a jumping heart, I prepared the effect myself without the aid of any specialist. First I bought a pig's heart and a Japanese toy for a dollar. It was a little doll with a rubber ball hand-pump connected to it. When you squeezed the rubber ball, the doll jumped. I inserted this mechanism into the pig heart and it worked perfectly. Thump, thump, thump. The heart would beat perfectly as soon as you squeezed the pump."

In an article in the third Shock Xpress book, movie journalist Lucas Balbo interviews director Massimo Pupillo. These are some movies mentioned in the article.


L'Amore Primitivo (Luigi Scattini, 1964)




5 Tombe Per Un Medium (Massimo Pupillo, 1965)

Black Youth

Given the current controversy in the blogosphere over Sonic Youth, I was intrigued by this excellent Decibel Magazine interview with SY's Thurston Moore in which he extensively discusses his predilection for Black Metal:

"I remember Sonic Youth playing in Scandinavia at the end of the ’80s and early ’90s and all the kids there were getting into local metal stuff. I remember them walking us around to record stores and they all had long hair and leather jackets and they were all kind of morose. I remember going to this one store in Oslo where all they were playing was Deicide. [Laughs] Deicide was coming to town and they were really excited about it—more excited than they were to see Sonic Youth. And then there was all this local stuff, like the first Mayhem recordings. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time because it just seemed like sub-Venom. So I didn’t really start listening to black metal until maybe the last ten years or something. I was into certain things, like the first Burzum record. I remember buying that in Scandinavia after I’d read about it somewhere. That record was cool because it was so unusual. It had this very displaced kind of quality to it. It was more avant-garde compared to most metal—it was almost alien. But I wasn’t really following it too much."

Does Moore's 'confession' confirm SY's supposed avant-conservatism? Does this prove their alleged role as a "hypervisible simulation of an alternative within the mainstream" (sourced here)? Or, to put it in Black Metal terms: are SY really posers? Or is it part of their fandom, carried over from punk, "a demolition of the fourth wall of the stage of performance which is designed to have a liberatory, anti-hierarchical effect, putting the band down among the audience." (sourced here).

Personally, I stopped following SY after their 2000 album NYC Ghosts and Flowers. Nonetheless, I saw them live a few times after that; I enjoyed their shows immensely.

Saenredam's Nothingness

"Hanging in the Dutch museums are works by a minor master who may be as deserving of literary renown as Vermeer. Saenredam paints neither faces nor objects, but chiefly vacant church interiors, reduced to the beige and innocuous unction of butterscotch ice cream. These churches, where there is nothing to be seen but expanses of wood and whitewashed plaster, are irremediably unpeopled, and this negation goes much further than the destruction of idols. Never has nothingness been so confident. Saenredam's sugary, stubborn surfaces calmly reject the Italian overpopulation of statues, as well as the horror vacui professed by other Dutch painters. Saenredam is a painter of the absurd; he has achieved a privative state of the subject, more insidious than the dislocations of our contemporaries. To paint so lovingly these meaningless surfaces, and to paint nothing else - that is already a "modern" aesthetic of silence."

Roland Barthes, "The World As Object" (sourced here).