Dr Matthias Hurst
College of Liberal Arts [ECLA], Berlin
Subjectivity Unleashed: Haute Tension (France 2003; dir. Alexandre Aja)
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There is a long tradition of the topic of subjectivity and its implications concerning reality and perception in the European horror cinema since Robert Wiene’s classic film Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari (1920) that unleashed the power of subjective imagination in a tale of murder and madness, creating its unique expressionistic visuals. The dark corners and deep abysses of the human (un-)consciousness proved to be the most frightening landscape in horror fiction, and its exploration is still a challenge for film directors and spectators alike.
With Haute Tension (2003) by French director Alexandre Aja the topic of subjectivity and psychological disturbance reaches a new, metafictional level, both reflecting the European horror tradition and commenting on the modern American horror film. The story about two young women, a family in the French countryside and a mad serial killer starts as an average genre film with structural elements and motifs of slasher and backwood horror (Halloween, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) and follows the traditional confrontation between the protagonists and the Other, who is, of course, only a symbolical representation of a repressed part of the main character’s psyche or cultural background. But while the American horror film usually keeps the distinction between protagonist and antagonist and hides the narrative device of psychological projection (in an either Freudian or Jungian sense), Haute Tension makes this standard interpretation in its final part obvious, risking to become totally absurd by this revelation: The story twist, uncovering the importance of the heroine’s subjectivity for the experience and the visualization of horror, subverts the logic and the whole structure of the film. It culminates in a parody of the American horror cinema, exploding with gross violence and imploding with narrative logic and thus literally deconstructing the horror genre – a metafictional account of modern horror, its relation to human perception and representation in our media culture and its origin in the notion of subjectivity unleashed.
