Jacob's Ladder and Postmodern Horror Cinema

Horror films have always used an object of fear to grab a reaction from the audience. This fear manifested itself in many forms, depending on the subject matter. It included anything from aliens (Aliens), serial killers (Halloween), supernatural entities (13 Ghosts), even zombies (Dawn of the Dead). However different these manifested fears were, they all had one thing in common. These were ultimately escapable from the audience, eliminating the true fear. Audiences could displace the creatures as not being real, or simply be comforted by the fact that the protagonist destroyed the creature at the end of the film (unless they’re planning for a sequel or three).

The one escapable horror, of course, is man’s own mortality. Death cannot be avoided, yet man makes every attempt in his life to circumvent it. This is the focus of Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder (1990). The fear that is faced within the film, the fear of death, is one that can never be manifested in physical reality. The fear of death is fundemental and primal. This is part of what makes Jacob’s Ladder a postmodern horror film. This essay will examine the primary aspects of postmodern horror cinema and show how Jacob’s Ladder exemplifies the definition of what a postmodern horror film is.

An integral aspect of postmodern film is the violence, sometimes sexualized, contained within the film. In Jacob’s Ladder, director Adrian Lyne felt that it was necessary to show explicit violence in order to potray the true horror of Jacob Singer on his downfall into his own personal hell. An especially gruesome and graphic scene is when Jacob injures his back and is taken into a hospital. All “appears” normal, until he is wheeled away towards the operating room. Things begin to turn gruesome, body parts on the floor, strange creatures, and demonic imagery. Jacob is pulled onto an operating table, and surrounded by men in surgical masks. He pleads for his life and to be allowed to go home. The surgeon simply tells him, “This is your home, you’re dead.” Again, this plays on the primal human fear of death, hell, and ultimately of being damned.The startling visual imagery in the film, obviously frightening, was groundbreaking as well, and has been duplicated by many filmmakers since. The most noticeable is the “rubber man” effect shown in many different scenes in the film. This involved filming an actor with a very slow film rate, and then speeding up the film and inter-splicing the shots with normally shot scenes. What this created, in fact, was a blurring effect of insanely fast head movement. One of the more notable scenes is a seemingly limbless black man, cloaked in a death mask, violently shaking his head at a blurring speed. Adrian Lyne , in a behind-the-scenes DVD documentary, professed that the true horror in film imagery comes not from the images on screen, but from the audience’s imaginations themselves. This “rubber man” effect created an almost human creature, but still was startling and inhuman enough to provoke a response of fearful wonderment from the audience. “What is this thing? Is it even human?” In the terms of postmodern horror, this gruesome and violent imagery contributed to the graphical representation of Jacob’s inner demons, another aspect of postmodern horror that will be discussed later in this paper. The inspiration for this graphical imagery, according to Gordon J. Smith, the make-up effects artist on the film, came from the surrealist paintings of Francis Bacon. These surrealist paintings depict somewhat human creatures in positions of torture and pain. Lyne’s goal, cinematographically, was to show the surreal visions that Jacob Singer was having, but to keep the film grounded in reality. What this created was, in effect, a blurring of reality and dreams. The audience, watching the film, begins to second-guess themselves, not knowing whether the gruesome images or people they are seeing are part of Jacob’s reality or his hallucinated nightmare. Again, as an aspect of postmodern horror, violence is shown as a part of everyday life. In Jacob’s Ladder, the demonic images begin to invade his daily life. Jacob sees a homeless man on the subway with a fleshy tail that is suddenly hidden under his coat. When he goes to visit his doctor, the nurse leans over and her hat falls off, revealing a horn-like growth protruding from the side of her head. All of this happens where Jacob lives, in New York City, practically the archetype of modern American living. This is done to show the reality of his situation, and how it could happen to any man, not just one in an extraordinary situation. Another pioneering effect in the film comes from the use of a camera rig attached to the actor. This camera is facing the actor, creating the effect of the actor in non-movement, with the rest of the background flying by as the actor moves outside of the frame. This is a dizzying effect, and was used primarily to show scenes of Jacob’s descent into madness. An example of this is during a party scene, where Jacob finds himself surrounded by disturbing imagery in a claustrophobic scenario. The camera view enhances this effect.

All of these visual demons that Jacob Singer sees throughout the film are hinted throughout to be personal demons that he, himself, is dealing with. This, being another important aspect of postmodern horror, is an example of the inner horror that people deal with today in a manifested physical reality. The inner horror in this film is Jacob’s fear of death. Ultimately it is revealed at the end that Jacob was in a sort of purgatory throughout the film as his body fought for life on a death bed in Vietnam. The creatures Jacob faced during the film were aspects of that purgatory, whether they are angels or devils, and it was Jacob’s fear of death that warped them into the terrifying demons. Jacob’s chiropractor, the only true “saint” in the film to assist Jacob, even tells him, “If you’re frightened of dying, and you’re holding on, then you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But, if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.” Adrian Lyne’s monster in Jacob’s Ladder is not a maniacal creature, alien, or some sort of serial killer, but Jacob’s internal struggle to deal with death.

Sexualized violence, or a combination of sex and violence, is also a feature found in postmodern cinema. Contemporary culture has created a link between the primal urges of sex and violence in music, literature, and film. The character of Jezebel, played by Elizabeth Pena, personifies that relationship. Jezebel, Jacob’s girlfriend in the film, is the culmination of everything Jacob would want in a woman. She is overtly sexual, deviant, and headstrong. She is the opposite of Jacob’s wife. It is her sexual being that is present in some of the more violent and disturbing images in the film. For example, she is one of the surgeons at the operating table in the scene referred to earlier. She ignores his pleas for help and assists with the operation. In fact, Jezebel appears to ignore Jacob’s requests and please throughout most of the film. When Jacob comes down with a dangerously high fever, Jezebel torturously puts him into a bathtub full of ice water, ignoring his pleas for solace. She is ambivalent to any of Jacob’s needs. Most disturbing, however, is during a party that Jacob and Jezebel attend. During a shot sequence of quick cuts and flashing strobe lights, Jacob begins having hallucinatory visions and imagines Jezebel sensually dancing with another man. Slowly the man becomes a demonic being, almost satanic, with flesh covered wings in the air and a scaled tail that explores the lower areas of Jezebel’s body. The sequence ends with a horn being jammed out of Jezebel’s throat, symbolizing a phallic and demonic penetration into Jezebel. She is not his protector or his savior, seeks only to undermine him, and Jacob continually trusts her throughout the rest of the film.

Towards the end of the film, Jacob attempts to find answers to why he is having these hallucinations. He contacts friends of his that were in his regiment to see if any of them have been having flashbacks. One friend of his, Paul, has been having the same hallucinations. Paul says that the government is out to get them, and this is corroborated by Michael, a scientist who is revealed to have worked on “the ladder,” the drug that was apparently used on Jacob’s regiment. Postmodern horror films have recently been using the government as a target of speculation, playing off the paranoia and fears that the government, our once great protector, is now trying to undermine the common man. This occurs in Jacob’s Ladder, as Jacob is stopped at every turn while trying to blow the whistle about the government testing. After he attempts to get a lawyer to investigate the matter for him and his regiment, the lawyer tells him that the government lists Jacob as never going to Vietnam and being discharged for psychological reasons. All of Jacob’s friends suddenly back out of Jacob’s plan, and it appears that the government has somehow erased records of Jacob’s military service and “gotten” to all of his friends. Jacob is the common average man, who is a bug under the big shoe of the government. This is a fear that many Americans had about government control, especially during the late eighties and early nineties when communism was rampant in Eastern Europe.

Jacob’s Ladder, at the time of its creation, was a groundbreaking film aesthetically. Its use of blurred motion, camera rigs, and makeup effects set a standard that many horror films use today. Beyond the surface, however, is something much more complex. This film is a key figurehead in the postmodern horror movement. Jacob’s Ladder deals with the idea that death is the fear of all fears. It is a fact of life, one which is ignored by everyone until it happens to them. The film portrays death as a passageway into another existence. The manifested fears in the film, the “monsters”, were the representations of the internal struggle that one deals with to accept death into their life. After all, how accepting can one be of the end of their life? Jacob’s journey into death was plagued with demons and the film’s blend of realistic settings with disturbing surrealistic imagery helped create the nightmare that we, the audience, journeyed through with Jacob. In postmodern horror, the fear is not a villain, but something within the real world that cannot be readily identified. The authority sources are untrustworthy and unreliable, and there are no protectors of order. This creates a sense of paranoia, and in Jacob’s Ladder, the paranoia is that of the claustrophobic chasm of life. There is no escape. You are going to die.