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?
