Death in the Digital Age

One of the most famous horror tropes is the “surprise cliffhanger” ending. You’ve seen it before. The camera zooms in on the supposedly-dead body of the villain when suddenly the eyes of the monster spring open, the murderer’s fist breaks through the rubble or grave they were buried under, the fingers of what is supposed to be the corpse of the serial killer begin to twitch. It’s not quite a twist or a cliffhanger in the traditional sense, in that it doesn’t really affect the plot or character development in any way, but it does do just enough to shift the ending away from the nice traditional “happily ever after” side of things (if you have a lot of time to waste, I recommend looking at the TVtropes page about this, linked here).

While in actuality the purpose of these little twists is probably to ensure the sustainability of a film franchise, enabling studios to make more sequels and therefore more profits, but I think there is something to be said for the fact that a lot of times, horror doesn’t resolve. It goes on. Even A Head Full of Ghosts is not immune to this trope.  In the very last chapter, Tremblay gives us just enough to think that perhaps everything is not quite over. There’s the confusion about the fingerprints on the jar of poison, for example, or the way Merry’s breath hangs in the air in the last sentence, reminiscent of Marjorie’s possession “performance.”  The story is quite clearly wrapped up, yet there are still those loose threads, those little details that do just enough to keep your hair standing on end long after the book has ended.

My question is, what is the reason for this trope? Where does it come from? Maybe it’s for shock value, maybe its for future profits, but I think the answer is something simpler than that. Horror, by its own definition, can’t fully “end,” at least not in the way we normally expect stories to end. The whole point is to unsettle, to disturb, to shock. A simple resolved ending, much like real life, does none of those things. Horror is paradoxically the furthest and yet the closest genre to everyday life. On the one hand, we deal with things like ghosts, zombies, vampires, demons, and the like, creatures and beings far outside the world we feel control over. Yet at the same time, horror doesn’t just…end. It goes on. Just like life, sometimes it wraps up, sometimes it doesn’t. Either way you have to leave the theater, close the book, or turn off the tv.

Postmodernism has been at the center of discussion in two of my classes this semester, and its elusive nature begs the question of whether or not postmodernism encapsulates all other movements of history and of those to come. In the most basic sense, postmodernism means to question everything: to not accept grand statements just because they come from authorities, to decenter ourselves from the very truths around which we revolve. Maybe it’s my own naiveté, but living in a postmodern world has made me question whether or not any authority can, or should, be accepted from here on out.

In Recreational Terror, Pinedo says that postmodernism encapsulates “a profound loss of faith in master narratives,” and “the breakdown of moral clarities.” In a world in which things are less certain than ever, in which indeterminacy reigns, it seems unlikely that a bold, new narrative will be able to unite our trains of thought once again. The second law of thermodynamics states that things will only ever get more complicated, that entropy is always increasing. In other words, once a plate breaks, it is very unlikely that the laws of physics will make that plate fall back into place, and postmodernism seems to have broken the plate.

The image above was introduced to me the first time I heard of postmodernism way back in my days as a freshman in high school. The caption translates into “This is not a pipe,” and the knee-jerk reaction is to disagree. The artist’s point, however, is that this is not in fact a pipe, it is merely the image of one.  All in all, in a world that has taught us to not accept anything and that more or less has taught us that our own interpretation is valid as long as we have the evidence and logic to back it up. So, in a world in which master narratives are meant to be thrown out, how can a new one be established?

There’s a lot of gross scenes in A Head Full of Ghosts. Marjorie oozes green slime out of her mouth onto her spaghetti, urinates and defecates on the floor, bleeds on the bed, and practically bites a man’s arm off. Any number of these gory scenes, or ones like it, could have been connected to the death of Merry’s family.

But poison? What an interesting choice. Especially potassium cyanide, a poison that in the book kills quickly and without much apparent gory side effects. According to the CDC, potassium cyanide is typically odorless, ships in easy tablets or pellets, and is rapidly fatal – so, at least in this part of the novel, the information is accurate.

What is so surprising to me is the lack of gore involved. Merry’s family twitch and convulse for a brief time and then collapse dead to the ground – no oozing, bleeding, gushing, bursting – no nothing. Merry even keeps asking Marjorie when she is going to wake up after she has already fallen to the floor dead, perhaps because she still looks so normal she could just be sleeping.

After the gruesome deaths and moments in The Exorcist, including people being thrown out of high windows and splattering on the ground below with their necks turned 180 degrees, I expected a more dramatic ending for the three other members of the Barrett family. In that sense, the poison was an anticlimax for me, as I had been expecting from reading the book that the moments when the whole family was together, things often became disgusting, but not the case here. On the other hand, because I was not anticipating the poison, it was also quite a plot twist, ending that plot line much different than I thought it would.

Of all the ways that Marjorie, the mom, and the dad could have died, I wasn’t expecting poison to be one of them. Compared to a demon possessing you, poison seems almost laughable.