Realist Horror in "The Following"

After reading Freeland, I decided to post about a different movie. The movie I originally chose to watch was The Possession – and there wasn’t too much to discuss in terms of realist horror that I could find. (If you identified some, please add them in your comments). Instead, I think there would be much more material to work with from the recent television series The Following. Yes, this is a TV show and although it is considered a drama thriller, I think there is much at work here in terms of horror elements that Freeland alludes to. 

Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) is an FBI agent who is asked to help investigate and solve a series of murders by an ex-college professor turned serial killer, who has a crazed obsession with Edgar Allan Poe. From prison, Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) continues his “intellectual” work of murdering for the sake of art. At the scenes of each of the murders, there can be found literary evidence of Poe’s works, left by Carroll’s network of other killers. Although the show is only into its third or fourth episode, we can deduce that Hardy must play along and get one step ahead of Carroll in his literary game, filled with puzzles, blood, knives, and cut out eye-balls.

There is much to be said about this show in regards to Freeland’s arguments against the classical approach to horror. Freeland uses Henry to describe how a horror movie may create “terror and unease” without following the classical rules of having an “identification figure” or a plot that depicts any “righting of wrongs” (261). In The Following Carroll is locked up behind bars, monitored by guards 24/7. Yet the audience’s unease is constant due to the fact that Carroll’s depraved mind is conjuring scenarios that are both “promising and withholding” of the “spectacle of violence.” We know there are going to be more murders – that’s why things keep happening even though Carroll is locked up (also it’s a television show…). The point is, like in most good horror films, that half the terror is the event leading up to the spectacle of violence – its that sense of anticipation that makes for such intense sequences.

The show itself is a great representation of realist horror. A depraved college professor who knows the works of Poe so well that he aims to continue Poe’s artistic expression through his own acts of monstrous violence.

The classical approach, as Freeland says, relies on the assumption that “we can draw a distinction between artistic imitations and reality” (264). I see The Following, like realist horror for Freeland, to be “a particularly postmodern phenomenon.” The motives of Carroll blend artistic imitations with actual acts of murder to create horror. It is deduced by the FBI agents in the beginning that Carroll believes Poe’s art can only be perfected in death. Therefore, the poems represent “artistic imitation[s]” and Carroll’s murders represent a gruesome “reality.” The connection between theses two elements is what makes the show a wonderful representation of realist horror.

One could also argue that the show (and indeed realist horror) plays upon elements of the uncanny – something very real and artistic (like a poem), together with elements of bloody murder – to create horror. (Or maybe it is the other way around: the familiar element is the serial killing and the unfamiliar is the fact that poetry is the motivation for murder?) As Freeland says, “realist horror evokes real, albeit paradoxical, reactions: at the same time it is both emotionally flattening (familiar, formulaic, and predictable in showcasing violence), and disturbing (immediate, real, gruesome, random).” I think her analysis here very much applies to The Following. We have here a very predictable element of horror: a serial killer is plotting his next murder. The random and perhaps unfamiliar element is the when, where, how of the act of violence.

But perhaps my analysis of the show is a stretch. Carroll is a pretty depraved dude (his victims are all female and he cuts out their eyes), but does the show properly combine artistic imitations and reality to successfully create realist horror? What about the uncanny? Is there anything else at work here?