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This life's five windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from pole to pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro' the eye.
-William Blake
Thoreau, meditating upon Waiden Pond, once described his private lake as the surrounding landscape's most "expressive feature," a sort of giant "eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature."1 Today technological culture seems to have made such solitary retreats a rarity, though it has, after a fashion, continued to acknowledge their necessity by furnishing an alternate version of this reflective experience which we enjoy in the movie theater. Within that dark world the viewer privately encounters familiar images of reality with which he is encouraged to identify and relate, often even in a more moving or meaningful fashion than occurs outside the theater's confines. More importantly, though, the movies also bring him face to face with a kind of intelligence, alive even as Thoreau's woods were and similarly challenging him to a level of introspection. As Bruce Kawin has shown, movies all, in their own way, "imitate mindedness"; that is, they confront us with images which are "the result, and the indicator, of directed attention," of another, narrating intelligence directing its perceptions to us.2 Of course, that intelligence is essentially our own, that narration emanating from our own involvement in those projected images we so raptly follow. One consequence of this singular encounter, though, is the generation of a new manner of seeing, one in which we see not simply with, but "thro' the eye," thereby glimpsing not only the world we inhabit but also our own place in that context. What the best films can offer us, then, is a type of "eye contact" which, like the experience of Thoreau's pond, might prod us into seeing beneath the surfaces, even into ourselves as we are mirrored in their shimmering image patterns.
This perspective seems a particularly appropriate one to take to the horror film, for it is a genre especially concerned with conjuring up for our consideration images whose existence we might previously have hardly suspected or perhaps sought to suppress from consciousness. Through its frightening scenes, R.H.W. Dillard contends, the horror film functions in a decidedly "instructive"...