THE HOUSE FULL OF HORRORS

A ‘mock trailer’ for The Swamp/La ciénaga (2001) is available on YouTube. It is a film school assignment, where some scenes from the film are manipulated, carefully curated, and reconfigured, mixed with disturbing promotional phrases and upsetting music. This fictional trailer is announced with the title La ciénaga del terror (‘Horror Swamp’) and prepares us for a movie which could very well have been the real one. Taking situations to the extreme, coercing them, forcing them to confess, the trailer makes evident what the film merely suggests. Or, rather, it displays explicitly that which the images of The Swamp do not show, but which never ceases to intrigue them, because they fear it. What one does not want to see is always what one is afraid of seeing because one would not stand seeing it.

The horror genre is defined by the type of emotion it tries to elicit, and from which it takes its name. That which causes fright is a situation considered by the characters (and, thus, by the viewers) ‘as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order’: what horrifies − according to Noël Carroll − is that which threatens and causes repulsion because it is indescribable, unconceivable and inadmissible. That relation is not straightforward, because the fear of seeing often is the fear of not knowing how to see. Naming is always reassuring: language describes, shapes, contains, and thus dominates or at least creates a certain feeling of control. When the unknown acquires an outline, a distance is created as well. Sight replaces touch. Most of all: that which we can see, precisely because we see it, should not be able to touch us. Like a painter who takes a step back to appreciate the landscape captured in the canvas, the real changes its scale and becomes more encompassable when it falls under a gaze.

To see is to compare. Jorge Luis Borges would say that something entirely new would be invisible. Indeed, things become decipherable (understandable) when we can see them against a known reference. That is why, behind our fear of seeing, there are doubts about our ability to see, that is, of controlling the thing through/in our gaze.