Euripides' Bacchae and the Birth of Western Horror

When does horror start? Where did it come from, as a genre?

Conventionally, people who study English literature say that “horror,” as a recognizable and distinct genre, originates somewhere between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Edgar Allen Poe has a big role to play, too. So, horror is a post-Enlightenment phenomenon, largely of the 19^th century and later. As literary genres go, then, it’s pretty recent, pretty fresh. Pretty modern. It’s not like epic or tragedy.

But hang on; what’s that bell?

It’s time for the world’s least popular game show…Ask a Medievalist!  

Interviewer (me): So, Professor Johnson, you’re a medievalist. Can you tell our audience when horror originates in the western tradition? Is it the late 18^th century?

<LOUD BUZZING SOUND>

Professor Johnson (also me): No, that’s extremely incorrect. But a great question, Eleanor. Horror originates much earlier than the Enlightenment. People assign horror to the post-Enlightenment era, because they associate it with science fiction (e.g.: Frankenstein) and sacrilege (e.g.: Dracula), and they assume that pre-modern western cultures, with their fixation on religion, such as Christianity, couldn’t or wouldn’t have had imaginative space for “horror.” But that’s super, duper wrong. Because, in fact, religion often plays a huge role in shaping and determining what horror is.

Interviewer (still me): No kidding. Can you give an example?

Professor Johnson: I sure can. Dante’s Inferno clearly qualifies as a horror narrative. It’s about vulnerability, abjection, mortality, physiological repulsion, fear, and—for sure—the uncanny. And it’s motivating force is, of course, Christian theology. In fact, although the demons and devils and monsters in The Inferno are doing most of the horrifying, repulsive, scary stuff in the narrative, it’s critical to remember that all of that terrifying stuff is sanctioned by God. Dante—and many other pre-modern horror writers like him—understood the divine as the point of origin for horror. I mean, in Dante, Satan is kind of a sad sack; he’s cold and crying and eating gross stuff in the pit of hell forever. He’s not a badass. He’s not someone to be afraid of. God, who doesn’t show up anywhere in Inferno but calls all of the shots from a distance, is the really upsetting one. Dante is showing us the dark side of our complete and total subjection to God; we are infinitely and irremediably vulnerable to God’s punishment and wrath.

Interviewer: I get it. So horror originates in the Catholic, European Middle Ages?

<LOUD BUZZING SOUND AGAIN>

Professor Johnson (channeling Pete Venkman): Sorry. This isn’t your lucky day. Inferno was just an example, meant to illustrate the proximity of religion and worship with horror. It was meant to illustrate that horror is definitely and decisively a pre-modern genre. But as for origins? Those go back before the Middle Ages.

Horror actually seems to originate as a sub-type of tragedy, way back in ancient Greece. In that context, as in the medieval context, horror is very much concerned with religion, with the gods, with worship, and with the vulnerability that comes from being subjected to the whims and power of the divine.

In ancient Greece, playwrights competed with each other in Athens for awards for having written the best plays. There were three great tragedians in classical Athens: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Aristotle, writing about a century after these tragedians, and having deeply studied their art, noted that tragedy was a dramatic mode that worked by eliciting fear and pity from an audience, in order to produce a catharsis. Tragedy, that is, makes you feel scared and empathic for the tragic hero, but then makes you feel better at the end, when order is ultimately restored. In Aeschylus’s three-part Oresteia, for example, we feel fear and pity for Agamemnon in The Agamemnon, then fear and pity for Elektra and Orestes in The Libation Bearers, and finally fear and pity for Orestes in The Eumenides. But at the very end of the triad, Athena shows up to discipline and control all the powers of fear (the furies) and to restore peace to the world. She does so by establishing the city-state of Athens. Phew, that was scary. But it’s done now. And we have Athenian civilization! So, as scary as it was, there’s something triumphalist in Oresteia.

That’s Greek tragedy. Especially when the tragedies are written by Aeschylus or Sophocles.

But then, about a generation later, along comes Euripides, who is on the very long list of historical figures I’d have loved to go out for dinner with, and then ditch in a taxi before going home. Euripides is, to use the technical term, a freak. Specifically, he’s a freak in how he understands and deploys the usual conventions of tragedy. Because in his hands, the fear and pity don’t ever go away. There is no real catharsis. You just kind of limp away from the ending, feeling mortal, abject, disoriented, shaken, and vulnerable. You end up, that is, where horror leaves you. Because what Euripides really did was to convert tragedy into horror, by refusing to make neat, tidy endings for his plays.

The best example of this, and the play that I personally think can best claim to represent the birth of western horror, is The Bacchae. In this play, we meet Pentheus, an uptight, controlling young man who’s just come into his power as prince of Thebes. We find out that Pentheus has a little bit of a problem on his hands. Some crazy guy—effeminate, Eastern, and otherwise unacceptable—has come to town, and this sexy stranger is inspiring the local women to misbehave. Badly. Sexily. The audience quickly comes to understand that this crazy guy is Dionysus, god of wine, but also god of Baccanalian revelry. The audience also comes to understand—through the god’s own explication—that Dionysus is seriously ticked off at Pentheus and the men of his house for despising and shaming his mother Semele, and for doubting and failing to worship Dionysus’s godhead.

So he’s going to put the Theban patriarchy through the absolute wringer. Show them who’s boss. And the answer is that he, Dionysus—part male, part female; part god, part mortal; part sexpot, part executioner; part fuckboy, part magician; part Greek, part Eastern; part taskmaster, part libertine—is boss.

Dionysus proceeds by seducing Pentheus. He inspires in Pentheus the desire to see Dionysus’s mysteries—to see women, frolicking in the woods, with hair unbound, nursing wild animals at their breasts, naked, alive, free. He inspires in Pentheus, in fact, a desire to be like these uninhibited women; Pentheus wants to look pretty, to spy upon the women so that he can experience their ecstasies by proxy. Dionysus, that is, makes Pentheus—until now the twitchy and panicky representative of the Theban patriarchy—suddenly very eager to jump ship on the traditional, patriarchal norms of Greek masculinity that he was initially hell-bent on preserving from the excesses and sexiness of this interloping stranger from the East. What Dionysus does, then, is to show the patriarchy its own shallowly buried desire to destroy itself, and to merge with something wild, sexual, unrestrained, orgiastic, collaborative, transspecies, and female.

Pentheus, all dolled up, climbs a huge pine tree to spy upon the reveling Bacchantes. I probably don’t need to invoke Melissa McCarthy’s choice comment from the film Bridesmaids, “I want to climb that like a tree,” to make clear that something sexual is going on with Pentheus’s scaling of the giant wooden phallus.  Once he’s up there, he sees it all: a world where women roam freely through the woods, joyous, drinking wine, pleasuring themselves and each other and the animals. The ground flows with drink; the plants profuse with fruit. The Bacchantes enjoy an Olympus-come-to-Earth, combined with what appears to be an opium den or maybe a dubstep rave in the woods, all because they freely consent to worship and honor Dionysus. Pentheus is consumed with admiration and jealousy: oh, how he longs to join them. But it doesn’t last long, because he is pulled from the tree by the women worshippers of Dionysus, and is quickly torn limb from limb by them—including by his own mother, Agave, sister to Semele, who had doubted and mocked her, and whom Dionysus then converted to his mysteries.

Agave returns to downtown Thebes—seat of patriarchy—where she reveals to everyone that she has her own son’s severed head (which she thinks is a lion’s head) in her hands. That is the birth of horror, right there. Uncanny, abject, mortal, physiological, unthinkable, terrifying, and vulnerable: a mother has unknowingly and brutally slaughtered her only son.

In so doing, Agave decapitates the patriarchy itself: she creates a succession crisis in Thebes, and there is no sense that the Bacchanalian revels will stop, or even slow their flow. There is no catharsis in this play—none at all—merely the recognition that there is a dark, wild, fierce, murderous, sexy, fun, joyful, natural, uncivilized, and decisively feminine power that has the power to run rampant over even the most patriarchal structures and societies. Look out, Athenian men, says Euripides, through his proxy Dionysus, you are holding onto all that delicious, patriarchal power by the skin of your teeth. If the women ever realize how much power they could have if they just said fuck it, this whole thing would come apart at the seams.

The female body, acting in concert with other female bodies, divorced from the usual concerns of civilization, domesticity, urbanity, or culture, that is scary, at least to the Athenian imagination.

In fact, Aeschylus had recognized that, too, in the third play of the aforementioned Oresteia. The difference is that, where Euripides allows the Bacchantes to rip apart Theban civilization, Aeschylus invited Athena in to humble and domesticate the Furies, literally burying them beneath the city of Athens, like the crazy aunt in some Victorian novel. If you can’t beat them, subjugate them, says Aeschylus. Euripides says something else, something more like, We men are never truly going to be safe from the seething, creeping, collective, bodily, sexy, violent, rapacious, natural power of women. Because there is something divine and irrepressible about it. Good luck sleeping tonight, Athenian citizens.

So, the first clear work of horror in the West was a work of eco-feminist horror. It warned a highly civilized, highly masculine Athenian public about the perils of unbridled, de-civilized female energy; it warned that that energy could somehow tap into the raw ferocity of nature and channel it into something horrifying.

Was this play an antecedent for a work like Gawain and the Green Knight? Almost certainly not; there’s no reason to adduce any direct line of influence at all between Euripides and anything in medieval England. But, if you look for it, you can see horror narratives that plow this imaginative furrow all along in Western history, from Euripides to the present day. My personal favorite example of the genre is the 1979 film Alien. But we’ll save that for another time.