Fulci’s Waste Land: Cinema, Horror and the Dreams of Modernism

by Michael Grant

From the beginning of the 19th century, with the onset of Romanticism, art began to make the matter of its own status central to what constituted it, and by so doing incorporated the problematic and ambiguous into its very essence.  Horror cinema is also a product of the Romantic movement.  And it too confronts us with the question of its status: films were, and regularly still are, found to be offensive and trivial. 

Lacking the redemptive powers of art, they are thought especially worthy of censorship.  It is not to be denied that extreme violence, sexual degradation and grotesque forms of death are legion in the films of Argento, Cronenberg, Craven, Hooper, Fulci, Deodato, and many others, and yet I would argue that this is precisely the point: its confronting us with death presented in especially offensive and unacceptable ways, and its provoking of scandal and outrage, are what constitute the real significance of the horror film in our culture, and what of authentic value attaches to it attaches to these very images of death and dying. 

 The significance of this mode of representing death is not explicable in the reductive categories of psychoanalysis: its significance is inseparable from its specific expression in specific works, as I hope to show in the case of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (1981).

Michael Grant is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.  Publications include studies of contemporary poets, essays on philosophy and on the horror film, a monograph on Dead Ringers (1998) and a collection entitled The Modern Fantastic: The Cinema of David Cronenberg (1999).  He has also edited The Raymond Tallis Reader (2000).

  epff@psychoanalysis.org.uk