Declan Ackroyd
In his seminal study of the English people and their attitudes toward execution V. A. C. Gatrell notes that, even before the abolition of public executions in 1868, ‘the polite’ of Victorian society had begun to distance themselves from the spectacle, resulting ‘in a deepening embarrassment about any unseemly display’ that these acts entailed.[1] Having shifted the violence of the state away from public view it took until 1968, another hundred and one years, for execution to become completely banned in the UK. (1969 in Northern Ireland). In our modern era the consumption of public violence is now widely considered taboo, but it still appears in parts of our society in differing forms, from the sport that we watch to the cinema that we consume. This essay will explore the latter.
The state-mandated violence, which historically came in the form of public executions, torture, and post-death mutilation of the corpse, was sequestered from the public, but that drive to witness, something A. V. Seaton terms ‘thanatourism’[2] – the human drive to explore death, and death related subject matter, including the visiting of memorials to death sites, museums centred around violence and persecution, and a litany of things in a similar vein – still exists, now in the form of the films that we consume from behind the blue haze of our screens. This digital consumption of violence, something I will refer to as ‘Neo-Draconian,’ is the successor to the historical print making (etchings, woodcuts, engravings) widely reproduced and used to commodify the breaking of the convict’s body.
Many iconic slasher franchises – Friday the 13th, Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre – have killers that wear masks; however, what I intend to unpack here is the very opposite, a theme that occurs in some areas of extreme horror – the perpetrators hiding not behind physical coverings but instead behind a metaphysical absence from the camera’s view, therefore remaining absent from the audience entirely.
August Underground (2001)
The ending to Fred Vogel’s 2001 found footage horror August Underground – widely regarded as one of the most extreme, visceral, and transgressive movies of all time – climaxes in a shower of blood, in which one of the two killers graphically murders a prostitute with a claw hammer. Even to the more seasoned among us, the violence demonstrated in this particular film is incredibly difficult to sit with. What I’m interested in examining in the context of the Neo-Draconian, however, is the audible glee that is espoused by the unseen cameraman. The film itself centres around two serial killers, one (played by Vogel) who is recorded by another who remains anonymous, as they spend the following seventy minutes torturing, sexually assaulting, and murdering multiple people seemingly at random.
Throughout the film’s seventy-minute run time, Vogel’s character reacts and performs to the camera, and therefore the audience, with a grin on his face. The complicity that this communication with the viewer creates echoes the attitudes of bystanders at the physical gallows in historical depictions.
Detail from ‘The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn‘ (left); still from August Underground (right)
In William Hogarth’s ‘The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn’ (1747), for instance, we can see the face from August Underground two hundred and fifty years before. Whilst Vogel is daubed in the blood of his victims, his partner remains anonymous maniacally laughing off screen, his anonymity (achieved through his absence from the camera’s view) acting as a metaphorical executioner’s hood. Vogel, on the other hand, represents the common man staring back at us through the executioner’s anonymous camera.
William Hogarth’s ‘The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn’ (1747)
The violence that we associate with these acts is viscerally shown on screen, the anonymous cameraman and the shaky nausea-inducing camera work becoming the executioner’s hood, offering the perpetrator cleansed anonymity, muddying the clear divisions between audience and killer (in cinema), or audience and executioner (historically).
Hogarth visually captures the festive almost jovial atmosphere through the exaggerated expressions of the Tyburn mob. Vogel reimagines this spectacle for the digital era with the addition of an auditory onslaught: the laughter of the cameraman becomes the primary signifier of the celebration that surrounds the body’s breaking. Both exist to communicate the audience’s participation with the violence that is taking place, the latter simply a more contemporary variation on this theme. Instead of flocking to witness state-mandated executions, the violence exists in a domestic setting, further making the human link more relatable, and therefore amplifying the need for the anonymity of the ‘hood.’
The ultraviolence we see on the digital screen, in other words, fills the void left behind by the sequestration of the state violence that the public historically flocked to.[3] Whilst Vogel uses the aesthetics of found footage, with its shaky camera work, and its metaphysical masking of the perpetrator, our next example does quite the opposite: the executioner removes their hood and frames the violence through the language of art house cinema.
Martyrs (2008)
Jacques Callot, ‘Burning at the Stake,’ from the series ‘Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre’ (The Miseries of War) (1633)
In Martyrs (2008) Pascal Laugier uses a Hitchcockian switch midway through the film. What begins as a fairly standard revenge film morphs into a transgressive analysis of the human body’s capacity to withstand pain, opening up metaphysical and historical analysis. Laugier invites the audience to view what we assume is a typical revenge film – granted a very violent one – only to structurally pivot and ask us to look deep inside ourselves and ask whether we ourselves could withstand these punishments.
The metaphysical examination of withstanding pain comes in the form of multiple torture sequences that the film’s female protagonist is subjected to. These vignettes directly echo etchings and wood carvings from history such as Jacques Callot’s ‘The Miseries of War’ (1633), with its graphic imagery, or ‘The Disasters of War’ series (1810-1820) by Francisco Goya. The violence that we see on screen echoes the violence that is already contained within these images, each of them communicating our shared violent history. The transference between the etched or painted image into the digital video is again no accident: it is a form of modernising the past; both formats – the historical reference images and the cinematic interpretations of violence – exist as imaginings and/or re-imaginings of the levels of violence that humans are capable of inflicting on one another, the transfer from the etching to the digital video is just the a newer iteration of how these gory vignettes are reflected back at us.
Plate 39 from Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’ (1810), ‘An heroic feat! With dead men!’ (Grande hazaña! Con muertos!) (left); still from Martyrs (2008) (right)
Laugier’s camera and Goya’s etching needle both act as a proxy for the audience, allowing us to take on the point of view of the executioner, thus turning the passive viewer into the active participant, becoming both perpetrator and consumer of violence.
Conclusion
‘Yet their effective participation in this counterfeit being has to be perceived as real.’ – Guy Debord – Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 107
The anonymity of the lens allows for a split between the person holding the camera and the self that is witnessing the horror. We as cinema goers watching these acts rendered on film (or, in the examples given, on digital video) are one and the same with the crowd gathered around the gallows; we have all come to satisfy this side of a personality. The cinema screen (or the phone screen) sequesters us from observation, it allows us to observe without being observed in the act of doing so. It is our own personal ‘hood’ that protects our reputation while we indulge our thanatopic drive.
While Vogel uses transgressive communication methods and the anonymity of the killer in August Underground, and Laugier uses historical iconography to probe metaphysical pain in Martys, other corners of Neo-Draconian cinema – from Hostel’s monetised meat markets to Saw’s mechanised witch trials – reveal how capital and state power continue to stake their claim on the criminal corpse.
This essay is a precursor to my wider writings on Torture Porn and Extreme Horror cinema. It is an extracted and adapted section which I intend to submit to an academic journal.
Notes
[1] Gatrell, V. A. C. (1994). The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 16.
[2] Seaton, A. V. (2017). ‘Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism’, in Timothy, D. J. (ed.) The Heritage Tourist Experience. London: Routledge, pp. 371—81.
[3] ‘James Cook.’ https://www.storyofleicester.info/a-place-to-live/james-cook/.
References:
Callot, J. (1633).’ Les Grandes Misères de la Guerre‘ [Etching]. Princeton University Art Museum.
Debord, G. (1967). The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by K. Knabb. London: Rebel Press.
Gatrell, V. A. C. (1994). The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goya, F. (1810–1820). ‘Los Desastres de la Guerra‘ (Plate 39: ‘Grande hazaña! Con muertos!’). [Etching]. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Hogarth, W. (1747). ‘The Idle ‘Prentice Executed at Tyburn‘ [Engraving]. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
August Underground. (2001). Dir. Fred Vogel. [Film]. Toe Tag Pictures.
Martyrs. (2008). Dir. Pascal Laugier. [Film]. Canal+.
Seaton, A. V. (2017). ‘Guided by the Dark: From Thanatopsis to Thanatourism,’ in Timothy, D. J. (ed.) The Heritage Tourist Experience. London: Routledge, pp. 371–81.
Declan Ackroyd is an artist, educator and independent researcher working in the north west of England. His writing examines a range of subjects from transgressive cinema to the contemporary art gallery, and historical state violence to the violence of spatial politics. He has written for the Journal of Visual Culture’s online magazine.
