Horror, as a field of meaning where pleasure and death meet in the deepest and most dangerous way, is a privileged space for thematizing key anthropological preoccupations. Although on the surface the genre remains devoted to the production of fear, on a structural and semantic level, horror can take on the characteristics of a romance film, achieving an authentic melodramatic and romantic quality, not only despite, but precisely because of, an atypical sexual economy.
Therefore, romantic horror is not so much a genre 'aberration', a 'deviation' that irrevocably violates the generic constitution, but rather a necessary framework in which stories in which Eros and Thanatos are in an intriguing and apocryphal intertwining can be adequately told.
This multidimensional interweaving was already paradigmatically marked in one of the key texts of horror: the penetrating topicality of Bram Stoker's Dracula is perhaps best seen in the extraordinary ease with which the archetypal vampire template is adapted to various social and political changes, different social and ideological codes, sexual and gender issues. .
Among other things, the four film adaptations very significantly indicate the increased degree of erotic fascination with the vampire figure, which, with the passage of time and liberalization in the sphere of sexual relations, becomes more and more attractive for melodramatic reinterpretation.
Although today Tod Browning's Dracula (1931) stands as an important genre benchmark, Universal actually marketed the film as a love story, most evident in two taglines: 'The Story of the Strangest Passion the World Has Ever Seen' and 'The Strangest Love Ever Known to Man' '. Strange love: it is the code that 'unlocks' the erotic-thanatological constellation of horror. Terence Fisher's Dracula (1958) brought additional sexual energy to the narrative, where the primary forces are seduction and domination.
"Dracula", 1958.John Badham's Dracula (1979) responds, on the other hand, to the challenge of feminist intervention by postulating a much more decisive female subject, but still describes Dracula within a more romanticized perspective, precisely in order to establish the gender balance on a more 'emancipated' basis. The whole process reached its (dubious) climax with Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), which heartbreakingly translates the novel into a transcendent romantic melodrama.
Among the classic monsters, the Mummy also has its 'gentler' side. Karl Freund's The Mummy (1932) is an achievement of striking iconographic power: in it Boris Karloff plays the Egyptian priest Imhotep who sees in an American girl (Zita Johann) a reincarnation - a lead that Coppola will follow! - the princess for whom he died in the past.
"The Mummy", 1932The Mummy owes its visual and narrative strength both to the reliance on the legend of Isis and the resurrection of Osiris, and to Freund's directorial stylizations, which foreground the oneiric atmosphere where the Mummy - in an effort to regain his love - moves on a thin line that separates (or unites ) life and death. Paul Schrader turned the remake of Cat People (1982) into one of the most stripped-down and torn love films in the history of the seventh art, which was, at the same time, a desperately honest presentation of his then-relationship with Nastassja Kinski and an almost abstract look at male-female relationships of a certain (and ) animal passions.
For the author, the horror contextualization in the form of the transformation into a black panther is a powerful metaphor of the Calvinist postulate about fallen human nature, thus radicalizing to the extreme the question of realizing (romantic) love: Schrader uses the story of cat people to offer another complex staging organized around the metaphysical knot of predestination .
If everything is predestined, then what is the status of love, does it have an immanent transcending and/or redeeming power, is it congenial with fate? Schrader is more meaningful in Cat People: both Irena (Kinski) who remained in animal form due to the inability to fight sexual impulses, and Oliver (John Heard) by accepting loss in all its tragedy, experience that freedom can only be achieved if one unquestioningly accepts the prescribed path.
As already hinted by Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979), the other side of David Cronenberg's genre setting is actually melodrama, a disturbed look that observes the dissolution of love and family ties, which signals fear, but also the existence of a strong emotional component in the horizon of the physical of horror. The film in which both dimensions of the director's procedure culminate, in which both segments find their most excessive (or most sentimental) expression, is The Fly (1986): the terrifying process of metamorphosis of Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) into a fly, that is, a fly into a man, since mutual absorption reigns. the agonizing crossing of different life spheres and species, is accompanied by an increasingly strong melodramatic positioning of Veronica (Geena Davis) through whose lens the whole spectacle of transformation, disintegration and biological deformation is ultimately viewed.
Cronenberg's tightest connection of form and content in The Fly provides an ideal 'mutant': against the background of numerous gross scenes, a hopelessly romantic film grows. Through body politics, the director 'blasphemously' but with surgical precision compresses two body genres, and the result is an indistinguishably unified horror-melodrama, equally superior in its disparate constitutive elements.
Lyrically tender and eruptively harsh, unexpectedly intimate and coldly alienating Lat den rätte komma in (Let the right one in, 2008) by Thomas Alfredsson is the story of twelve-year-olds, Oskar (Kare Hedebrandt), who is abused by the other students at school and neglected by his parents, and Eli (Lina Leandersson), to a little girl who survives by drinking the blood of others. The two outsiders feel a closeness, that their situations - although at first glance clearly separated by the aggressor/victim distinction - strangely coincide in the social sense, since both are deprived of understanding and the necessary emotional support.
A desperate romantic relationship is born between them that indicates the depression of their position, childish lostness just before the transition to teenage sexuality: how dangerous, traumatic, even deadly that border is is best expressed by the sequence that gave the title to the film in which Eli - in accordance with the recognizable a detail from vampire legend - she must be voluntarily invited to cross Oskar's doorstep. Lat den rätte komma in i is a film about the border that separates different ontological regions, good and evil, children and adults, love and crime, about the horror and pleasure in the inevitability that this border must be crossed at some point, which can be both transgressive and cathartic, opening and healing wounds.
In that space, all the brilliance of the decision to place the ritualized depiction of growing up within the horror topography, within the vampire configuration, is reflected, because this is how graceful (and glacial, due to the snowy landscape in which the action takes place) sentimentality is emphasized, and violent ambivalence, and the radicalness of the decisions and the painful concreteness of the transition that both Eli and Oskar will go through. We are actually watching a love movie that owes its credibility precisely to the unorthodox genre framework.
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