Horror As Fascism, Fascism As Entertainment

by Th. Metzger

Novelist and expose writer Th. Metzger has been described by one publisher as “one of the most disturbing creative minds of his generation – or probably any other.” He is the author of three horror novels: Big Gurl, Drowning in Fire, and Shock Totem, and has published two non-fiction narratives: Blood and Volts: Edison, Tesla, and the Electric Chair, and The Birth of Heroin. Forthcoming from Autonomedia is the novel Dr. Penetralia.

In this somewhat academic treatise, he observes that modern horror fiction grows from the same psychological roots as Fascism. Convincing? You decide.

"Why babble about brutality and be indignant about tortures? The masses want that. They need something that will give them the thrill of horror, something that . . .
"urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis and become like little children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites.”

"The people want wholesome dread. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive."

"Perhaps more than anything else, the horror story or the horror movie says it’s okay to join the mob, to destroy the outsider."

Four brief quotes -- two from the most successful writer of fiction in the last half of the twentieth century, one from Ernst Rohm, head of the Nazi Sturmableitung (predecessor of the SS), and one from Adolf Hitler. Though grouping them together might seem capricious or unfair, there is a deep connection between the authors.

Hitler tells us that the masses want what he calls the "thrill of horror." Stephen King tells us that the horror story makes us see things simplistically, makes us join the mob and destroy that which we don't understand. In other words, if the orthodox meanings of Fascism and horror (Fascism a unique political movement, horror a mere pop culture entertainment) are stripped away, we can see them both as springing from the same sources and serving the same ends.

Even at the purely stylistic level, the similarities between 'blood and guts' and 'blood and iron' are numerous and striking. Stanley Payne's FASCISM: COMPARISONS AND DEFINITIONS lays out the many characteristics that the two social phenomena share.

"A positive evaluation of violence, extreme stress on the masculine principle and dominance, exaltation of youth above age, authoritarian figures, and mass mobilization." And of course the use of certain symbols (cross, swastika, blood, sacrifice, lightning strokes, etc.) also is a link.

However, the connection between Fascism and horror is much deeper. Returning to King and Hitler, one sees that both these master manipulators understand that the impulse to fear and the impulse to submit are inextricably connected. Power and helplessness, order and chaos, attraction and repulsion; both Fascism and horror exploit these dualities. Both make strong appeals to the irrational, to the parts of us least affected by logic, reason, or facts. They fill a void left by modernization, by the increasing irrelevance of the individual. They prey on spiritual longings and instinctual fears.

In short, they are religions.

Describing the Nazi emphasis on mass meetings, visual symbols, marches and ceremonies, Payne explains: "The goal was to envelop the participant in a mystique and a community of ritual that appealed to the religious as well as the merely political."

Notice that he calls those who attend Nazi events "participants." Not passive viewers, but active consumers. The thrust of Fascist propaganda was to touch the viewer both emotionally and spiritually. Leni Riefenstahl's TRIUMPH OF THE WILL illustrates this perfectly, and was not coincidentally one of the first seamless mixtures of cinematic creativity and actual political events. Even the architecture of Nuremberg was changed to create the greatest cinematic impact. The visual composition of the Party Rally, the mass formations of fanatical believers, torchlight parades, and their savior --Hitler --descending in glory from the clouds, all contributed to the exploitation of the viewer's spiritual longings.

German and Italian Fascism succeeded in large part because they addressed the deeper religious longings of their populace. Mussolini, before Hitler, used the legends and symbols of his people to stir in them an almost-numinous sense of purpose and direction. The fasces itself (from which the word Fascism comes) was a Roman symbol of authority, representing the ruler's power to punish or execute criminals. Mussolini, like Hitler, knew that to reach his audience, he needed to root himself deeply in folklore, ancient hatreds and dreads, twisted versions of history and national identity. The bombastic epic film SCIPIO AFRICANUS was just one of his many attempts at connecting himself to a “mysticalized” Roman past.

The roots of horror as mass entertainment go back hundreds of years, but few disagree that it crystallized as a genre in the first flowering of the gothic novel. "Originally, 'gothic' was a thoroughly pejorative word, applied not only to whatever belonged in fact to rude 'medieval' times, i.e. any period before the sixteenth century, but also to any surviving mode of speech or behavior considered unworthy of enlightened modernity."

The term quickly came to mean any work devoted to darkness, the inexplicable, superstition and irrational violence. And the Catholic Church became a perfect fictional vehicle to exploit these urges. Using "the depraved monk, the suborned Inquisitor, the malicious abbess," as stock characters, the gothic imagination fed on the "ritual and glitter, the politics and pagentry of the Roman church."

European writers (Hoffmann, 'Monk' Lewis, Polidori, M. Shelley) as well as American, the gothic was a tool by which the writer evoked the sublime, an elevated state combining terror, vastness, religious awe, darkness and frightful beauty. In a world where religion had given way to rationalism, people’s hunger for mystery and meaning remained --unfed. When the church is seen as just one more corrupt institution -- its symbols bankrupt and its practitioners suspect -- then people will go elsewhere to have their emotional needs met. Poe, Hawthorne, and Charles Brockden Brown (the first American to make a living as a fiction writer), all exploited this desire for spiritual elevation in an otherwise 'modern,' soulless world.

Likewise, the horror film acts as a crypto-religious experience today. The similarities to a temple or church service are many: mass meetings of like-minded people, skillful use of muddily-defined symbols, darkness, appeals to unreason, emphasis on the supernatural, reenactments of purgative (outwardly-directed) violence, a preoccupation with the battle between good and evil, 'us' and them.

And deeper, both organized religion and horror cinema attempt to deal with the need humans have to protect themselves from chaos and incursions of the inexplicable. They both are devoted to explaining the complexities of evil in simplistic terms. As King points out, the horror story's primary intent is to encourage the participant to vicariously join the mob, to destroy ‘the other.’

. . . Horror too can be seen not so much as a concrete historical pattern but a metaphorical image of late twentieth century reality. It expresses, it exploits, it exorcises forbidden urges at the same time it promotes an arch-conservative view of the world.

Horror and Fascism blend and blur. Dr. Caligari can be seen both as a link in the long line of pop fiction madmen and as a prescient vision of Adolf Hitler. Lovecraft's 'pure Aryan' heroes find themselves as horrified by race-mixing as they do by cosmic, chthonic forces.

Two expressions of the same dreads and desires, their boundaries overlap. And as they continue to mutate and metastasize, the forms they take will also change. Seen clearly for what it is, horror fills the same void that Fascism so skillfully exploits. And stripped of its temporary political manifestations, Fascism too can be seen in its pure form: pop entertainment.