Journal of Popular Film & Television (2001) - The Cold War Horror Film: Taboo and Transgression in The Bad Seed, The Fly, and Psycho
Details
- article: The Cold War Horror Film: Taboo and Transgression in The Bad Seed, The Fly, and Psycho
- author(s): Cyndy Hendershot
- journal: Journal of Popular Film & Television (2001)
- issue: volume 29, issue 1, pages 20-31
- DOI: 10.1080/01956050109601006
- journal ISSN: 0195-6051
- publisher: Heldref Publications
- keywords: "The Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock's Films" - by Lesley Brill, Alfred Hitchcock, American cinema, Anthony Perkins, Bad Seed (1956), Barbara Klinger, Chicago, Illinois, Christopher Sharrett, Cold War, Cyndy Hendershot, Feature films, Film (Productions), Film (USA), Film theory, François Truffaut, George Toles, Georges Bataille, Grace Kelly, Henry Jones, Herbert Marshall, History, Horror Films, Janet Leigh, John Gavin, Joseph Stefano, Kurt Neumann, Lesley Brill, Martin Balsam, Mervyn LeRoy, Motion pictures, New York City, New York, Patricia Hitchcock, Paula Marantz Cohen, Philosophy, Psycho (1960), Raymond Bellour, Robert Bloch, Robert J. Corber, Robin Wood, San Francisco, California, Science fiction & fantasy, Taboos, The Birds (1963), The Fly (1958), Tom Bauso, Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, Universal Studios, Vera Miles, Vincent Price, Warner Brothers, William Rothman
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Abstract
The horror film is a genre that operates within a framework of taboo and transgressions, and the Cold War period in American history was likewise an age of taboo and transgression wherein transgression itself became linked with communism in popular perceptions, hence becoming conjoined with the threat of apocalypse. By reading 1950s Cold War era horror through the theories of Georges Bataille, Hendershot articulates in his analysis the interplay of taboo and transgression in three films from the Cold War period: "The Bad Seed," "The Fly," and "Psycho."
An eight-year-old girl commits three cold-blooded murders. Through reckless experimentation a scientist fuses his body with a fly's. A young man keeps his mother's dead body in his house. The horror film is a genre that operates within a framework of taboo and transgression. Following its Gothic predecessors, it expresses the most serious of transgressions—murder, necrophilia, incest—highlighting the taboo that prohibits such activities.
The Cold War period in American history was an age of taboo and transgression. The transgressive individual became equated with the communist who threatened to destroy America from within and bring about the destruction of the planet through nuclear war. As Gordene Olga MacKenzie argues, the McCarthyist witch hunt for communists encompassed those “suspected of violating mainstream sex or gender roles” (42). Transgression itself, and specifically sexual transgression, became linked with communism in popular perceptions and hence became conjoined with the threat of apocalypse.