Cullen Wade
“Swimming isn’t a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning.”
—George Carlin, Playin’ with Your Head
Springboard
If, as it’s speculated, our prehistoric ancestors learned swimming to escape predators1, I doubt many of the millions of Americans who use swimming pools every year are consciously practicing how to avoid being ripped apart by beasts. But as hundreds of horror films suggest—including the 100 or so I dissect in my forthcoming book S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema—part of us remembers. Unlike wild-water swimming, the artificial pool is supposed to be safe, a water experience mediated by concrete and chemicals. But even the tamest water is inhospitable to surface-dwellers, and the horror movie swimming pool often functions as what theorist Barbara Creed calls a “border.” Creed, who builds on Julia Kristeva’s abject and Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order, writes that “the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film […] to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.” She points out the importance of “a border between what Kristeva refers to as ‘the clean and proper body’ and the abject body.”2
