If you ask someone (other than a philosopher) what comes to mind when you say, “the other,” chances are the reply will refer to a monster of one kind or another. In my line of work, as a scholar and teacher of horror studies with a research expertise in the horror film, otherness is a constant theme. If otherness can be defined on the most basic level as the quality or state of being different, then it follows that the other often stands in opposition to the self and the familiar. The other is what differs from the self, what is strange and unfamiliar. And of course, it’s a short ride from the strange and unfamiliar to the monstrous and horrific.
Otherness entered cinema and media studies from long-standing traditions in philosophy, psychology, and critical theory, where thinkers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Emmanuel Levinas, and Frantz Fanon deployed the concept of otherness to theorize the experience of difference. The sense of difference associated with otherness includes questions of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, and ethnicity, as well as questions about the constitution of human psychology and human subjectivity.
The concept of otherness began to be especially prominent in cinema and media studies in the 1970s. Two seminal examples are Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and Robin Wood’s “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (1979). For Mulvey, woman is the objectified other within the dominant male gaze of narrative cinema. If man is the active agent doing the looking, then woman is the object being acted upon, being looked at. Therefore, woman is the other in the gendered grammar of narrative cinematic images. For Wood, the horror film deals with the other through its monsters. The horror genre’s monsters are the embodiment of everything that dominant, mainstream society sees as threatening due to their difference from the perceived normal. Wood’s basic formula for understanding the structure of the horror film is that “normality is threatened by the monster,” or the other. For Wood, the monsters of the horror film stand in for those others that dominant society fears in real life: others that embody difference in terms of categories like race, gender, class, and sexuality.
For example, Wood sees the “monstrous” cannibal family of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) as the others to the “normal,” comparatively affluent young tourists that they menace. For Wood, the cannibals are victims of an unforgiving capitalism that leaves them behind as unemployed slaughterhouse laborers and marginalized as working-class rural people. Our fear of them as murderous cannibals stands in for our fear of them as poor, lower-class casualties of the capitalist system that our own “normal” society relies upon. In both cases, they are our others.
As important and influential as Wood’s model has been, turning to an example like George A. Romero’s landmark Night of the Living Dead (1968) shows the limitations of thinking through horror film and otherness in terms of relatively fixed categories like normality and monstrosity. In this pioneering independent horror film from Pittsburgh that established the zombie subgenre as we know it (and merited a recent restoration by the Museum of Modern Art), the recently deceased rise from the dead to eat the flesh of the living. The film’s action follows a small group of survivors under siege by the zombies in an isolated rural farmhouse. In a scene near the film’s end, our protagonist Ben (Duane Jones), the last remaining member of the embattled farmhouse group, sees the arrival of his rescuers and is promptly shot by them. Since Ben is Black and his rescuers are white, the question arises about whether they have truly mistaken him for a zombie or whether he is killed, at least on some level, for being Black. This question gained even more force during the film’s reception, since Night of the Living Dead was completed prior to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 but did not reach viewers until after that shocking event.
So, is Ben othered for his Black humanity or for his proximity to the inhuman zombies? If we think of normality and monstrosity as fixed, then humans are normal and zombies are their monstrous others. But the film shows us over and over again how humans can be even more dangerous and monstrous than the zombies; squabbling over power, influence, and resources ensures that the humans veer constantly toward self-destruction rather than cooperation. The zombies, on the other hand, demonstrate a unity of purpose that makes them unstoppable as a mass even if they are weak as individuals.
Otherness in the film is not set in stone but transformative—it changes over the course of the film, so sometimes the zombies are more monstrous than the humans, and sometimes the humans are more monstrous than the zombies. We can’t simply divide normality from monstrosity, human from zombie, self from other. Night of the Living Dead shows us how these categories are always undergoing metamorphosis and bleeding into each other. Romero even includes an aerial shot near the end of the film that makes it hard to distinguish the humans from the zombies on the ground—a visual reminder of the film’s conceptualization of otherness as transformative.
By the time Ben’s corpse is placed on a bonfire along with all of the other dead zombies, the only one who knows that this was a human being and not a zombie is us, the film’s viewers. It is up to us to carry that painful knowledge with us: to know that the other is never only just a monster; that normality is never only just normal; and that we are all at risk of becoming and being seen as the other. Ben’s legacy is to remind us that horror’s otherness is transformative, not frozen in place. His corpse may be indistinguishable from those of the zombies, but we know he is human.
Ben may be treated as the other—notice how the men disposing of his body won’t touch him with their bare hands but instead use meat hooks to move him—but we understand the reality in a more complex way. Ben, like the zombies themselves, may be mistaken for the other, but he and they are really standing in for ourselves. What the horror film communicates so profoundly is that otherness is a matter of ongoing metamorphosis, not static categorization. In today’s world, where demonization and othering constitute so much of our political discourse, it might seem counterintuitive to insist that we have much to learn from the horror film. But we do.
Against all odds, horror’s potential to question the self and humanize the other is something we need now more than ever. If we really want to understand otherness, we need to realize that horror is our ally, not our enemy.
Adam Lowenstein
Adam Lowenstein is director of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is also professor of English and film and media studies. He is the author of Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia University Press, 2022) and serves on the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation.
