Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and CultureHarmony Wu, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 56-68

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Halfway through The Blair Witch Project(Meyrick and Sanchez 1999), in which astudent film crew finds itself lost and pursuedin a haunted woods, Mike admits to kickingtheir only map into the creek, declaring it“useless.” From this point, Mike, Josh andHeather must follow the track of an unseen,occult map, which leads inevitably to thecenter of a terrifying maze. Their fear andsuffering are intensified by the persistence oftheir own map of experience (academic,middle-class, urban) which they still try tocarry around in their heads, just as they hangon to the heavy camera equipment whichweighs them down. I want to take thatmoment of kicking the map away as a meansto re-theorize the horror film from theperspectives of Gilles Deleuze. The map ofpsychoanalysis, which has been leading us forso long in our interpretations of the horrorgenre, will be pocketed, and I will see how farwe can travel without it. The Blair Witch Projectis a good starting place for this move.

Psychoanalytic film theory offers valuable,but limited, insights into the horror genre,treating the plot, characters or viewer as ana-lytical case-studies, seeking to uncover the“repressed” deep structures of early trauma.This is neither adequate to account for the af-fective registers of horror nor the aestheticexperiences offered by The Blair Witch Project.Theories of horror could develop fruitfullyalong what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattaricall “lines of flight,” which they describe as “afibre strung across borderlines constitutes aline of flight or of deterritorialization.”1 In myattempt to conceptualize new topographies ofhorror, I wish to follow the “borderline” de-marcating, on the one hand, psychoanalysisand, on the other, an “intensive voyage” intothe horror film experience as mobilized byThe Blair Witch Project.2

Setting the Scene: Limits ofCinepsychoanalysisFrom a psychoanalytic point of view, the plea-sures of cinema are embedded within the

ANNA POWELL

Kicking the Map AwayThe Blair Witch Project, Deleuze and the Aesthetics of Horror

The failure of the gaze: non-representational contact withforces of darkness (The Blair Witch Project, 1999)(Photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

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ever-elusive dynamic of desire and lack; inpsychoanalytic horror theory, desire anddread operate as the duality machine of Erosand Thanatos, the tandem of ambivalence.The application of psychoanalysis to horrorinvolves the mapping of a pre-determined setof mythic narratives (particularly colludingwith the Oedipal) onto the film’s narrativepatterns. Where Freudian and Lacanian filmtheory has characterized fantasy as thespectator’s “mise-en scène of desire,”3 in horror,desire meets dread in primal fantasies of cas-tration and back-to-the womb scenariosduring which repressed material returns. Par-ticularly in its Gothic forms, horror replaysprimal scenes and traps the present in the in-evitable return of the more potent past ofinfantile fantasies. The application of this kindof psychoanalytically informed analysisyields predictable, and ultimately unsatisfy-ing, insights; all texts are reproductions of thesame limited set of infantile fantasies. Psycho-analytic film theory looks to content, not style,as it seeks the replaying of primal scenes andarchetypal scenarios.

Another facet of psychoanalysis’s strait-jacketing of a more immersed exploration ofthe experience of horror is its ahistorical na-ture and its disregard for the corporealelement. The film spectator, according to psy-choanalysis, maintains a distance from thescreen as a fantasy spectacle, and the deepstructures of the viewer’s psyche become thefocus rather than “the materialist aesthetic ofsensation, where body and mind are imbri-cated.”4 The danger of psychoanalyticalabstraction and its division of body and mind,lies in its disregard of the phenomenal andexperiential dynamics of film watching. Thespectator’s fascinated engagement with theimages themselves, and their potent affect,tends to be ignored or treated as mystificationby structuralist psychoanalysis. Since the pub-lication of Laura Mulvey’s generative essay(which might be termed the primal scene ofpsychoanalytic film theory), other critics andtheorists have sought to nuance Mulvey’srather rigid model. Still, the chief focus of suchwork by Kaja Silverman, Tania Modleski and

Carol Clover has been on representationsrather than affectivity.

Psychoanalysis’s application to horror,specifically, has been marked by thesemore generalized limitations of ahistoricityand affective denial. Barbara Creed, inThe Monstrous-Feminine, has applied JuliaKristeva’s psychoanalytical theory of ab-jection to horror film, fitting Kristeva’sconcept of the abject (the “in-between […]which disturbs identity, system, order”5)to the supposed “feminine” aspects of thehorror film monster. In this paradigm,abjection relies on the dichotomy of self andother—a dichotomy which, in Creed’s theory,emerges as an irreducible opposition, despiteKristeva’s original suggestive exploration ofthe fluid and gendered nature of abjections.While the interaction of psychoanalysis andhorror has produced such provocative appli-cations such as Creed’s, the basic paradigm ofcinepsychoanalysis emphasizes the deepstructure of the unconscious, the primacy ofthe egoic subject and the need to maintain andstrengthen ego boundaries. Plot events andrepresentations are consistently foregroundedat the expense of sensory affect. Approachesto the horror film need to be supplemented,though not necessarily displaced, by adetailed exploration of aesthetics and theextreme levels of affective engagement experi-enced by the spectator.

Ways Out: Deleuze and Guattari;Schizoanalysis and HorrorThe philosophical and aesthetic conceptsof Deleuze and Guattari offer some solutionsto the problematic gaps left by cine-psychoanalysis.6 They suggestively explorethe corporeal “machinic” connections of spec-tator and text as they meld together in amolecular assemblage. Seeking to rethink thedeep structures of psychoanalysis, theysuggest instead the processual immanence of“schizoanalysis,” a central concept in Anti-Oedipus, which blames Freud’s Oedipus Com-plex and Lacan’s concept of Lack ascontributing to the repressions of the existingsocial system. They advocate the deployment

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of schizoanalysis to assist “the constant destruc-tive task of disintegrating the normal ego.”7

Seeking liberation from the oscillation be-tween desire and lack, they posit the “schizo”(not to be confused with the clinical concept ofschizophrenia as intellectual and affective dis-integration) as an autoproductive desiringmachine. Schizoanalysis is materialist, con-cerned with tracing the flux of matter in itsconcrete assemblages and lines of flight. Itseeks to reach the pre-Oedipalized anduncastrated “orphan unconscious” which isbeyond all law.8 Deleuze and Guattari aim to“overturn the theatre of representation intothe order of desiring-production: this is thewhole task of schizoanalysis.”9

Deleuze also explores the fluid temporalmachinery of film, which elides past andfuture in a present instant, which passes evenwhile it is being manifest. Deleuze andGuattari offer an experiential emphasis absentfrom most psychoanalytic readings and re-gard film viewing as a process of transitionand becoming. The application of these in-sights to film analysis offers the opportunityto extend current theory by providing a usefulnew set of tools to explore the experience ofour engagement in horror film.

Schizoanalysis affords a way to re-read hor-ror film by considering aspects other thanthe fixed surface forms of representation,enabling a focus on the material immanenceof The Blair Witch Project’s world, its insistentincursions into the spectator’s consciousness,and the characters’ refusal to meld with it.Schizoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’stheoretical outlooks are particularly suitablefor application to horror, a genre of formal ex-cess and stylistic extremes—over-saturatedcolors, special effects, disorientating cameramovements and distorted sound—whichundermine cognition and bombard the senso-rium. In turn, Deleuzian applications havethe potential to enhance our awarenessof the operations of the horror machinein popular cinema.

Steven Shaviro (1993) and Barbara Kennedy(2000) have offered suggestive groundwork forthe development of Deleuzian applications to

film such as the one I am making to horror.They also identify the significant theoreticalfissures between a Deleuzian perspective andpost-Mulvey cinepsychoanalysis, attending tohow theories of desire and pleasure dependon the separation of body and mind (theLacanian subject divided against itself; theFreudian ego a contested site between id andsuperego). Shaviro, working from a Deleuzianschema that centers embodied responses,reminds us that the image is not in fact a“lacking” and empty illusion (as Lacanianswould have it), but is potent with affect.10

Cinematic images operate in the realm of“primordial forms of raw sensation: affect,excitation, stimulation and repression, plea-sure and pain, shock and habit,”11 to which thespectator responds to images with visceralimmediacy rather than gazing at them froma subjective distance.

Pleasure for Deleuze and Guattari is mate-rially based, immanent within sensation itself.Desire is thus not the product of lack ornegativity, but is itself productive and auto-matic. The autoerotics of desire attain theirconsummation in “the nuptial celebration ofa new alliance, a new birth, a radiant ecstasy,as though the eroticism of the machineliberated other unlimited forces.”12 Suchautomatism is experienced via intensivestates: “haecceities”—a “thing in itself,” adynamic event of becoming—and notsubjectivities.13 These states afford an intensefeeling of transition without the climacticclosures sought by psychoanalysis.

Via their technique of “schizoanalysis,”which I will be deploying as a concept rel-evant to the event of The Blair Witch Project,Deleuze and Guattari seek to evoke “a schizo-phrenic experience of intensive qualities intheir pure state, to the point that is almostunbearable—a celibate misery and gloryexperienced to the fullest, like a cry sus-pended between life and death, an intensefeeling of transition, states of pure, nakedintensity stripped of all shape and form.”14

By means of this, the “beyond” of the pleasureprinciple is not the death instinct, butsensation itself in dynamic flux, a perceptual

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immanence which opens up a new perspec-tive on our affective experience of horror,a genre which foregrounds aesthetic excess,shifting emphasis away from unearthing anunderlying dual structuration and toward anexploration of manifest cinematography.Cinepsychoanalysis’s myopic focus on thescopic regime as organized by Oedipalized,split, gendered subjectivity and motored bysadistic and masochistic operations, ignoresthe ways in which film energizes and mobi-lizes as it works in molecular assemblage withother bodies of matter. Deleuze and Guattarioffer a way to account for these bodies ofmatter, which include technological, socialand biological bodies, and the spectator ’sown materiality as a receptive and respon-sive organism. They suggest that there are“proximities between molecules in composi-tion, relations of movement and rest, speedand slowness between emitted particles.”15

Melded by these processes, affect is bothpsychical and material at once, in a “coagula-tion” of the regimes of humanism andscience.16 Schizoanalysis allows us to explore“the machinic arrangements grasped in thecontext of their molecular dispersion.”17

By this materialist cartography, psychic interi-ority is replaced by an immanence in whichdesire is process and energy: ideas aredynamic events or “lines of flight” which cantake us into “a fibrous web of directions,much like a map or a tuber.”18 Their term “rhi-zome” (or lateral, multi-forked root system) isused to suggest the nomadic movement ofthought by the intensities of a processualrather than a deep-structured “self.”

Schizoanalytic horror film theory, then,would approach the image in itself, alien tostructures of signification, and mobilized byits affect on the incorporated spectator. Al-though the camera is set up, angled andmoved by human agency, its ultimately tech-nological apparatus passively records theobject before it. This passivity enables it tocapture what Georges Bataille calls the “rawphenomena”19 of immanent matter: the moviecamera’s technological automatism penetratesand melds with the flux of the material world,

removing perceptual experience from theidealizing tendency of humanist paradigms.Cinepsychoanalysis’s refusal of corporealactuality is resolved in schizoanalysis, wherethe affect of film may be explored as an eventwhich acts upon the viewer. Material capturein space and time thus replaces, or supple-ments, issues of representation. The embodied“look” is also a sensation, which conjoinswith other sensory areas such as tactilityvia the operations of synaesthesia. Withschizoanalysis, it is possible to view the bodynot as separate from the mind, but as a per-ceptual continuum of mind/brain/body.All cinema (not only avant-garde texts whichforeground their own construction) may beread materially via the flux of sensation whichis film viewing. Denying depth and psychicinteriority, Deleuze and Guattari insist uponthe immanence of art as “a being in sensationand nothing else: it exists in itself.”20

Cinema frees perception from the norms ofhuman agency and cognition and renderedprimordial by its automatism. Film is “mon-strously prosthetic” and composed of “theunconscious epiphenomena of sensory expe-rience” and thus, it:

…crosses the threshold of a new kind ofperception, one that is below or above thehuman. This new perception is multiple andanarchic, nonintentional and asubjective; it isno longer subordinated to the requirements ofrepresentation and idealisation, recognition anddesignation. It is affirmed before the interventionof concepts, and without the limitations of thefixed human eye.21

The directness of film springs from thestimulation of the optic nerve, agitating thesenses and bypassing the cognitive and reflec-tive faculties. Cinema is an assault upon thesenses in a kind of “non-representational contact,dangerously mimetic and corrosive, thrustingus into the mysterious life of the body.”22

Deleuzian film analyses are not intended tosupplant psychoanalysis with an alternativeorthodoxy. They seek to challenge, but also tosupplement, valuable existing approaches,such as the insights of feminist work on thehorror film, by transversal readings located

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in the interstices between the two. The ap-propriateness of applying Deleuze andGuattari’s aesthetics to horror is exemplifiedby the “case” of The Blair Witch Project,an inordinately frightening, sensationalistfilm, even if its form and structure divergefrom more familiar patterns of horror cinema.The film powerfully illustrates the machinicconnection of text and viewer, with thecinematography itself offering a variant formof violence and excess. Notorious for its“sickening” visual style, the video camerazooms in and out randomly; images shakeand shudder, irritating the optic nerve andcausing physiological disturbances in thebody of the spectator. Although the footageis supposedly shot in the immanence of“real time,” the temporal linearity is confusedby spatial, conversational and behavioralrepetitions. The Blair Witch Project bothexhibits the limitations of more familiar appli-cations of psychoanalytic theory andillustrates the use value of a Deleuzian approach to the horror genre.

The Blair Witch Project: A DeleuzianExplorationFilm students Mike, Josh and Heather had setout to film a documentary account of their in-vestigations into the Burkittsville Blair WitchLegend. They got lost in the woods and mys-teriously vanished. The Blair Witch Project’sconceit is that it is supposedly made from thelost students’ unedited “rushes,” discoveredby a search party who failed to find any othertrace of the student filmmakers. The BlairWitch Project is a picaresque, occult horror filmwith a non-linear narrative, unsophisticated“amateur” cinematography and a mysteriousopen ending. The horror is conveyed chieflythrough character reaction rather than graphicrevelation. Presented as a “documentary,” ithas a special relationship to the “real,” givento us “unedited,” set in real time, lacking thesmooth construction of classic realist films.

Cinematic movement; sensory affectThe cinematography, mise-en-scène and dia-logue of The Blair Witch Project self-reflexively

comment on the technology and process offilmmaking. A 16mm camera, video andsound equipment are part of the “baggage”the characters carry with them and lovinglyprotect. All of the events experienced byHeather, Josh and Mike are recorded, seen andheard through lenses and microphones; theplot, the characters’ motivations and finally,the existence of the film itself, is dependentupon this technology. The inexperience of thecrew and the raw state of their rushes is alsothe viewer ’s experience of the film as anevent. Camera shake, blurred focus, lack ofcomposition and extreme close-ups have a di-rect affect on our mechanisms of perceptionbefore reaching more advanced stages of cog-nitive processing. Our mind/brain/bodycomposite is melded with the technology ofcinema in Deleuze’s “machinic assemblage”of material movement, force and intensity.

In The Blair Witch Project the conventions ofclassic realist film are undermined by thecrew’s inexperience and the lack of editing.The Renaissance perspectives and balancedcompositions of classic cinema are replacedhere by the documentary style of ciné verité ordirect cinema, the aims of which, according toDeleuze are “not to achieve a real as it wouldexist independently of the image, but toachieve a before and an after as they coexistwith the image, as they are inseparable fromthe image.”23 This sense of temporal simulta-neity is intensified by our viewing “real”events directly as they are seen through theviewfinder, rather than being shaped in post-production into the illusion of an autonomousfictional world with its own time-scheme.Our impression of live shooting is intensifiedby the lack of selectiveness: the film crew setsup initial shots, then experiments with closeror wider views and alternative shots,all of which are kept, rather than subjectedto editorial decision.

Camera movements dominate our percep-tion of the film and display the materiality ofthe camera, showing its technological limita-tions in conjunction with the human operator.The camera runs on unselectively, so we havelengthy images of a clump of trees or

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someone’s back as they walk away. Heather,Josh and Mike refuse to stop recording eitherimage or sound, even in the most stressfulsituations, in part to protect themselves fromthe surrounding horror by, in Josh’s terms,“filtering” reality through technological me-diation, rather than directly seeing/hearingwhat might actually be “out there.” All thisgives the impression of “wild” shooting andseeks to validate the “truth” of the record. In-stead of recording a reality that completely“co-exists with the image” like Deleuze’s di-rect cinema ideal, these techniques achieveonly a partial verisimilitude.

The source of horror actually conceals itselffrom the characters via their own technologi-cal dependency, an effect amplified in the finalscene inside the house. Here, the disorientat-ing camera movements that are so much apart of the Blair Witch experience (imagesjump and jolt as the three struggle through thewoods and run for their lives) intensify, em-bodying the horror via technologicalapparatus. When Mike runs downstairs, thevideo camera records a dizzying spiral, culmi-nating in a shock effect when he drops thecamera, which autofocuses into an extremeclose-up of the gravel on the floor. WhenHeather also drops her camera, her black-and-white film sticks and jitters into the final shotof the film. We do not see the source of theirhorror or witness their presumed deaths, butthe affect produced by these swirling andjerky movements throughout the film assertsan ever-increasing agitation of the spectator’soptic nerves, resulting in some viewers’ expe-rience of motion sickness, even to the point ofvomiting, while watching the film. Psycho-analysis does not offer us any insights here,but a Deleuzian perspective suggests that theintimate, molecular meld between spectatorand screen has taken place.

Deleuzian time and spaceAlthough we are told that the crew are only inthe woods for a week, the experience seemsmuch longer. There are many signs of timepassing: autumn comes on quickly, leaf-fallincreases, and the faces of Heather, Josh and

Mike change from fresh-faced relaxation tohaggard, gray tension lined with frowns.When Mike threw the map away and theirspatial co-ordinates disintegrated, they alsolost track of time.

Following Nietzsche and Bergson—notFreud—Deleuze proposes a model of time asflux and process (whereas psychoanalysissuggests the unconscious as a timeless zone,where past and present exist in simultaneity).For Deleuze, cinema has a unique capacity formaking visible the relationships and workingsof time; in cinema, it is possible that the move-ment-image can be superseded by thetime-image such that “time ceases to be de-rived from the movement, it appears in itselfand gives rise to false movements.”24 Thebody becomes “the developer of time, itshows time through its tirednesses andwaitings…characters who have lost theirmemories in modern cinema literally sinkback into the past…to make visible what isconcealed even from recollection.”25 Deleuze’sinsights resonate with The Blair Witch Project’sdisturbing loss of temporal co-ordinates. Theunfamiliar environment of the Burkittsvillewoods and the loss of their map underminecharacters’ memory functions. They areforced to focus on an unfamiliar present,while at the same time losing their sense offuture—a blurring of temporal boundariesthat leads to an apparent replaying of pasthorror in a re-animation of the malign forceconcealed in the woods.

The past has a particular status in thehorror genre, often asserting itself on thepresent, like a ghost which lingers and repeatsits own present which is not allowed tobecome past. Such insistence of pasts subvertsa linear map of time. The ruined house at theend of The Blair Witch Project is a hauntedspace where the final events remain ambigu-ous, but it is clear we are to understand thatin some form, past events are replayed,and the film crew gets caught up in the tem-poral loop, forced to re-enact victim parts inchild murders perpetrated by a psychopathforty years earlier.

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According to Deleuze, destiny can forcecharacters out of their personal pasts to“affirm a pure power of time which overflowsall memory, an already-past which exceeds allrecollections.”26 This sense of being lostin time results from a process in which atten-tive recognition fails:

When we cannot remember, sensory-motorextension remains suspended, and the actualimage, the present optical perception, does notlink up with either a motor image or a recollec-tion-image which would re-establish contact. Itrather enters into relation with genuinely virtualelements, feelings of déjà vu […] dream images[…] fantasies […] it is not the recollection-imageor attentive recognition which gives us theproper equivalent of the optical-sound image, itis rather the disturbances of memory and thefailures of recognition.27

The film crew’s need to recognize land-marks, which may lead them out of thewoods, leads to excessive efforts of attention,attempts to force memory. But they fail to no-tice they are retracing their steps, not movingforward in the direction they seek. Weary anddisheartened, their failure to find their wayout leads them to the possibly “virtual ele-ments” of the house where a past which is nottheir own is replayed, forcing their participa-tion in its temporal looping.

Josh, Heather and Mike, obsessed with re-cording and playing back “filtered” reality, arelost and alienated from their present environ-ment by the superficial alternative map of“everydayness” by which they still seekto live. Characters such as these, Deleuzesuggests, are

…caught in certain pure optical and soundsituations, find they are condemned wanderingabout or going off on a trip. These are pure seers,who no longer exist except in the interval of themoment, and do not even have the consolation ofthe sublime, which would connect them to matteror would gain control of the spirit for them. Theyare rather given over to something intolerablewhich is simply their everydayness itself.28

The sensory-motor schema of modern cin-ema is “shattered from the inside,”29 bycharacters lost and trapped in uncharted ter-

rain like the Burkittsville woods where per-ceptions and actions are disjointed and spacesare left empty or uncoordinated. Time reflectsspatial disorientation.

To an obsessive degree The Blair WitchProject disregards temporal ellipsis (in which“uninteresting” sections are cut) in favor ofreal-time shooting, thus rejecting classicalcinema’s rigorous ordering of time and spaceto the precise demands of structured narra-tive. The chief editing logic of the film is notnormatively motivated but emerges from adialogue between two media—film andvideo. Heather’s black-and-white 16mm cel-luloid alternates with Josh’s color videotape,producing two versions of “reality” whichpresent distinct visions of characters andevents, undermining the consensual diegesispreferred in classic cinema. Melded inmachinic assemblage with their equipment,Heather, Mike and Josh experience the frag-mentation of the real as they strive torepresent it. The different media editedtogether function as prosthetic extensions ofthe different operators’ points of view,reproducing that disjunction and dislodgingany spectator position of mastery from afixed center which regulates perceptionof space and time.

Sound in horrorHorror films are noted for their unnervingsounds which agitate the spectator’s auralnerves, both in effects, ranging range fromhuman screams to synthesized electronic notes,and in extra-diegetic music. Studying the

Little boys lost: Mike admits to kicking the map into the creek(The Blair Witch Project, 1999)(Photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

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“startle effect” in horror film, Robert Bairdnotes the “linkage to affect” which bypassesour conscious reason as we view.30 He arguesthat our immediate perceptual systems makeno distinction between real and amplifiedsound, asserting that films partly affect us bymanipulating our sensory environments, “con-structing energy fields we take, before reason,to be extensions of the physical world.”31

Shaviro’s Deleuzian reading also focuses on the“physical shock effect” of speech events andother noises, arguing that “far from reducingsound to the condition of language, cinematends to ‘deterritorialize’ and disarticulatelinguistic utterance, to pull it in the direction ofnonsignifying sound.”32 Shaviro asserts thatthe deoriginating and deterritorializing force ofthe cinematic apparatus leads directly to thevisceral immediacy of cinematic experienceof both sound and tactility.

In The Blair Witch Project, most of the soundis directly diegetic, with no incidental music.Wild sound predominates; as characters talkand argue, their speech is often indistinct,adding to the sense of realism. When “super-natural” noises do occur, like the criesof children outside the tent, that they arerecorded by the sound equipment reaffirmsour sense of their objective reality. It is uncer-tain whether the bleating moans of Josh wehear are real or hallucinatory, but some of themost distressing sounds come directly fromcharacters we do see, such as the sobbing,choking gasps when Heather hyperventilatesafter opening the bundle of sticks that containviscera wrapped in Josh’s shirt fabric.

It is difficult to reduce the qualities ofsound, their tone and timbre, to signification.Words themselves are not always amenable tomeaningful discursive interpretation, and thisis particularly true with much of Blair Witch’songoing chatter. For Kaja Silverman, writingfrom a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective,speech produces absence, not presence, be-cause it is the currency of the Symbolic order:“the discoursing voice is the agent of symboliccastration.”33 Deleuze and Guattari refute thestructuralist division of words into langue andparole and characterize spoken language as a

“continuous, immanent process of varia-tion”34 which moves across the sociolinguisticfield, undercutting the hierarchized distinc-tions of structural law and empirical instance.

Subject and objectOne of the ways fixed cognitive structures areundermined in The Blair Witch Project isthrough the use of blurred and out-of-focusshots. Indeed, the first words of the film are ofa man’s voice telling Heather, “You look alittle blurry. Let me zoom out okay?” It is ini-tially impossible to recognize the first shot asanything familiar, until focus is re-established.As the story progresses, Heather is revealed asindeed “blurry” on the inside, despite herfrantic attempts to keep external reality in fo-cus and under control. The undermining ofperspective and focus that comes with theinexperienced use of filming technology oper-ates in tandem with the erosion of thesubjective coherence and ego-boundaries ofthe characters. It also affects the spectator’scognitive operations and sense of control overthe subject matter as our optic nerves andauditory membranes struggle to processconfusing data. Like Heather, Josh and Mike,the spectator ’s own coherence is under-mined as we slide into what Deleuze woulddescribe as a “molecular assemblage” with thebody of the film.

The blur of subject into object intensifies asthe crew wander deeper into the maze of thewoods, and the viewer’s sensory participationthrough affective contagion intensifies. Whenthe crew find the children’s graveyard of rockpiles, our eye experiences ominous alternationbetween sharp focus and blurred focus asHeather counts the piles, moving along theseven of them with her camera/eye. As timepasses, an increasing number of shots of thetrees and the undergrowth are recorded.Rather than offering more information aboutthe environment or identifying its details, themore we look, the more opaque it becomes.The landscape takes on an unnerving life of itsown, when piles of stones appear outside thetent, coiled like grey organic growths whichblend into the leaves and soil around them.

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This process of transmutation of humaninto non-human and back again intensifieswhen the crew discover a group of anthropo-morphic stick figures hanging from the treesin a glade. From an occult perspective, theyare dolls used to mobilize the black magic op-erations of a hex and an ominous warning.For psychoanalysis, they figure an uncanny,schizoid doubling. A Deleuzian reading ofthe figures, however, considers the dynamicsof “becoming:”

…all becomings are molecular: the animal,flower, or stone one becomes are molecularcollectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects,objects, or forms that we know from the outsideand recognise from experience, through science,or by habit.35

If the crew insists on “knowing from theoutside” only and reject molecular opennessto the woods, they will not survive. The tree/human meld of the figures are fearful to them,and they refuse their suggestion of a hybridassemblage of human and tree. The students’retention of intransigent, cerebral human-nessin an unhuman environment leads to theireventual domination and destruction by theforces of the wood. The old house they findwas in the process of becoming-wood throughits slow ruination; it does, however still retainhorrible marks of having “become-human”—and it is in here, not outside in the woods, thatthe finale is enacted. The audience, in our mo-lecular assemblage with the screen,“becomes” more effectively than the charac-ters. Unbound by the practical dilemmas andimmediate discomforts suffered by Mike, Joshand Heather, we are freer to enjoy the sensoryallure of the autumnal woods and their mys-terious presences. The concept of molecularityfacilitates the exploration of such engagement.

Remnants of psychoanalysis: resistingsadism and masochismSteven Shaviro’s foray into a Deleuzian-in-formed film theory provides a well-neededstarting point from which to move beyond apsychoanalytically dominated account of ourfascinated engagement with cinema and other

moving media. However, there is a disjunc-tion between Shaviro’s critique, which despiteits efforts to wrestle free is still rooted in psy-choanalysis, and Deleuze’s approach. In anattempt to undermine the dominant, Mulvey-influenced concept of the active mastery of thegaze, Shaviro deploys the figure of masoch-ism to account for spectatorial fascination,aligning cinematic pleasure with the viewer’sobjectification and abjection. The imagery ofmasochism also informs his evocation of the“blinding ecstasy”36 of Bataillean expenditurefilm makes possible for the spectator.

His perspective here is a binary reversal ofMulvey’s alignment of the male gaze at theobjectified screen female with sadistic voyeur-ism, perpetuating the totalizing binariesof psychoanalysis and the eternal pairing ofunequal power relations, consensual or other-wise. Like sadism, masochism requires adegree of distinction between subject andobject, in this case the “violent” cinematic im-age and the “passive” spectator. For Deleuzeand Guattari, the “artificial lands”37 of perver-sions such as masochism are the home of“perverted machines”38 which remain tooabstract, representative and large to enable theimmanence of schizoanalysis. My Deleuzianintervention avoids such divisive replicationof distance between spectator and screen,focusing instead on the complex and fluidassemblage which is the film viewing process.

If the viewer/screen relation is molecular,then the spectator becomes an active partici-pant in the experience, congruent with thefilm as event. A machinic assemblage removesthe subject/object interface as the same mate-rial composes and the same force flowsthrough congruent elements, inviting a cel-ebration of the dynamic, experiential congressof spectator and screen image. In horror film,however, it is difficult not to experiencedispleasure and revulsion at certain moments.It seems almost impossible to remove a senseof subjective violation when “I” want to lookaway from the horror of the image and, inpsychoanalytic parlance, rebuild my ego-de-fenses and refuse the invasive violation of selfby other. For me, such a moment is Heather’s

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confessional and its extreme close-up of heragonized face, which has become the iconicimage of the film in popular imagination. Ifind the exaggerated depiction of psychologi-cal and emotional torture here excessive anddifficult to watch (figure 1). At such moments,I also draw back from my molecular delight torecall the “molar” and social gender imbal-ance, and again become uneasily aware of theproliferation of images of suffering and terri-fied women in horror film.

It is difficult not to find some aspects ofShaviro’s masochistic interpretation helpfulhere. He describes being “powerless not tosee” in Dario Argento’s films, when

the unstable screen image holds my distractedattention captive; I do not have the ability tolook away […] as I watch, I have no presenceof mind […] my responses are not internallymotivated and are not spontaneous; they areforced upon me from beyond. Scopophilia isthen the opposite of mastery: it is a forced,ecstatic abjection before the image.39

Deleuzian theory does afford a space forthis kind of hybrid response; the concept ofthe interstitial reading allows molecular andmolar frames to co-exist. There does appearto be a special relation of passivity atmoments in horror spectatorship, where thepsychoanalytic concept of masochism offersa useful exploratory tool which can operatein consilience with Deleuze in a transversalline of flight. This interdisciplinary approachcould be relevant to a consideration of thenature of the horror of The Blair Witch Project.If masochism is the dominant perversionhere, the audience shares the fearful yet plea-surable passivity and helplessness of Mike,Heather and Josh as their debasement is per-formed before us. This masochistic empathyis perhaps increased if we are aware of thecircumstances in which the film wasshot and the actual discomfort and anxietyexperienced by the actors (whose real namesare used) in the cause of “authenticity.”40

The still active fan culture which sprung up onwebsites in response to the film itself and its

Figure 1. Pure naked intensity: Heather records her own fragmentation on video (The Blair Witch Project, 1999)(Photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.)

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promotional hype could be further evidenceof participatory empathy—or the continuingassemblage of spectator and artefact inmasochistic complicity.41

As well as affording a theory of masochism,psychoanalysis would locate the film’s horroras the replaying of a primal fantasy of regres-sion and return to the womb. The “hauntedhouse” is a symbol of the mother’s body ren-dered uncanny by Oedipal taboo. Thedamaging of the ego defenses by the return ofthe repressed could possibly lead to malfunc-tioning object cathexis and schizoid delusions.

A Deleuzian perspective on The Blair WitchProject offers both a reading of the stylisticspecificity of the film and opens up a newapproach to the horror genre. It locates horrorin our own sensory affect, in our jarred andconfused optic and aural nerves and ourhaptic projections of other sensations engen-dered by cinematography and sound. We alsorespond imaginatively by sympatheticmimicry of the characters’ sufferings. A con-sideration of “becoming” could locate thehorror in the inability of the crew to adapt andopen up to their new environment, or wel-come its otherness. For the characters, thetree-people, emblems of the body/woodmeld, are frightening rather than exhilaratingmarkers. A psychoanalytic reading ofthe fantasy here might suggest that theuncanny objects encountered in the woods areparanoid delusions or the full blown halluci-nations of (shared) psychosis, a readingsupported by the fact that the crew nevermanages to capture the monster on film, andthe ending remains open. Mental disintegra-tion, not death, could be their final condition.

Deleuzian and psychoanalytic perspectiveson the film are not necessarily antithetical.They may be fruitfully used in tandem, tointeract and supplement the other’s short-comings. Psychoanalysis offers considerableinsights into the possible origins of horror inits model of the primal taboo, its violation andattendant psychic disintegration. Deleuzianconcepts extend this position by enabling usto explore the direct materiality of fear andthe aesthetics of horror.

Conclusions: Deleuze and HorrorFilmHorror overtly displays an intensive andinsistent materiality, with an avowed sen-sationalist goal of physically affecting theaudience, involving, as noted by LindaWilliams, an “almost involuntary mimicryof the emotion or sensation of the body onthe screen.”42 Shaviro further notes how thegenre focuses on agitated bodies and alsoagitate the body of the spectator in a “shock-ingly direct way.”43 Horror short-circuitsfantasy mechanisms and disembodiedimaginings and “excitedly seek[s] to incisethose imaginings in [my] very flesh.”44

For him, Deleuzian explorations of film,which trace our surrender to the fascinationof images are preferable to those paradigmslike cinepsychoanalysis and structuralismwith their “psychoanalytic reserve andhermeneutic suspicion” which seeks touncover deep structures and fix meanings.45

The Deleuzian focus on the embodied spec-tator seeks to capture the fluctuations ofattraction and repulsion as we directly experi-ence them on our nerve-endings.

There are, however, some further gaps inthis neo-aesthetic of immanence. Its lack ofsuitability for broad ideological and culturalanalyses belies its claim to “materialism” bydeliberately stripping the concept of its “mo-lar” Marxist dimensions. Bio-aesthetics couldbe viewed as a regressive move back to recap-ture the immediacy of unfiltered perceptionlost in adulthood. It could be seeking a returnto a golden age, not to the blissful dyad withthe mother but to the pristine, undifferenti-ated vision of infancy. It claims a “scientific”perspective in its analysis of molecular phe-nomena, but disregards the empirical“hardwiring” of the human perceptual systemtowards increasing differentiation and cogni-tion, a process which occurs prior to, but helpsto form, structured conceptual ideation.

To help us explore the horror film experi-ence, it seems necessary to retain someelements of modernist discourse as well as de-veloping our understanding of the physicalprocesses of affective cognition. Fear, terror and

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s

desire have dynamic specificity, which mightwell go out of focus if we look too closely at themolecules which compose them. A neo-aes-thetics of horror film is long overdue, andDeleuze’s approach offers a concrete and

Anna Powell is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the English Department at Manchester MetropolitanUniversity. She has published on Kathyn Bigelow, Kenneth Anger and Poppy Z. Brite. This year, her bookon Gothic is forthcoming (Mellen), and she is currently writing a book on Deleuzian aesthetics and hor-ror film for Edinburgh University Press.

NOTES1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London:

Athlone, 1980) 249.2 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H.R.

Lane (London: Athlone, 1984) 319.3 James Donald, ed., Fantasy and the Cinema (London: BFI, 1989) 1.4 Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

15.5 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1982) 4.6 Jungian depth psychology, concerned with unveiling the occult significance of symbols, does not take our

exploration of the affective aesthetics of horror film any further. It would interpret the woods as the CollectiveUnconscious where numinous archetypes, such as the anima (the ambivalent female figure) are unsuccessfullyencountered. This leads to the failure of the differentiation process, caused by the crew’s inability to deal with anaspect of their “shadow” side. The therapeutic fantasy function of the film would be problematic, however, due toits lack of visible archetypes. A Jungian perspective might be helpful when applied to emblematic components ofmise-en-scène, but offers little on cinematography.

7 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 342.8 Ibid., 81-82.9 Ibid., 271.10 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 17.11 Ibid., 27.12 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 18.13 A haecceity—a “thing in itself”—is not a fixed structure like the concept of subjectivity (an autonomous, fixed

essence inherent in the individual), rather, a haecceity is a dynamic event of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari write,“You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non-subjectified affects” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 262).

14 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 18.15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 275.16 I borrow the word from Kennedy (47).17 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 323.18 Kennedy, 69.19 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, Allan Stoekl, ed. (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1985) 16.20 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. G. Burchill and H. Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1991)

164.21 Shaviro, 31.22 Ibid., 258.23 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta. (London: Athlone, 1989) 38.24 Ibid., xi. These and the following comments Deleuze makes in relation to Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad

(1961).25 Ibid., xi-xii.26 Ibid., 48.27 Ibid., 54.28 Ibid., 41.

medium-specific way in to extend our aware-ness of the genre’s aesthetic. I advocate theneed to make transversal connections acrossexisting approaches; it is time to pocket themap, but not to kick it into the creek just yet.

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29 Ibid., 40.30 Robert Baird, “The Startle Effect,” Film Quarterly 53:5 (Spring 2000) 20.31 Ibid., 22.32 Shaviro, 34.33 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) 43.34 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 103.35 Ibid., 275.36 Shaviro, 45.37 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 318.38 Ibid., 32239 Shaviro, 49.40 The actors were not let in on the antics of the filmmakers, who set out to literally and really scare them, rather than

rely on the actors’ performances of fright.41 On January 30, 2002, there were 119,000 websites connected to the film on the Google search-engine.42 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (5th

edition) Leo Braudy and Marshal Cohen, eds. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 704.43 Shaviro, 55.44 Ibid., 101.45 Ibid., 65.