Vulnérabilité et intronisation carnavalesque dans le film d’horreur américain des années 1970-80

Abstract

This article is concerned with a series of American horror films directed between 1971 and 1984, the plots of which revolve around the story of a bullied social outcast avenging his (or her) persecution by murdering his/her tormentors in a series of gory set-pieces. The most famous example of this genre which has never been theorized in American film history is Brian De Palma’s Carrie (1976). By laying the exercise of (rough-) justice within the hands of a vulnerable “misfit” or “fool,” these movies radically invert the traditional representation of justice in American culture. Indeed, this function has been traditionally taken on by the heroic vigilante figure of the Frontier myth, or the “hard-body” of contemporary super-hero/action movies. The figure of a vulnerable, physically disabled vigilante seems to belong to an archaic cultural frame: the European carnivalesque judicial rituals such as the charivari, in which marginalized people were ritually invested with political powers. In North America, this cultural tradition was repressed by Puritanism. Therefore, how can one account for the emergence of this genre and of this figure of a vulnerable, persecuted outcast becoming a murderous vigilante in the early 1970s? And what led to its disappearance in the mid-1980s?