Jurgen Anger: What is the connection between the three genres: Horror films, Porn films and Melodrama, let’s say a melodrama by Douglas Sirk?
Katharina Klewinghaus: All of these genres are concerned with bodily responses. In fact you could argue that, if such a film doesn’t produce the respective bodily response, it was not doing a good job. So it has to frighten you, make you sad or turn you on, to be an effective genre film. Moreover, and this is what Linda Williams analyzed in one of her writings, the production of liquids becomes important, where instead of staying inside the body, they spill out: the tears in melodrama, the blood in horror and the ejaculation in pornography. But also in relation to what is happening off screen, the reception of the spectator, where you elicit tears, sweat when being frightened or get wet when being sexually aroused. There are different ways to compare them and “Science of horror” takes a look at the connection between horror and pornography.

Jurgen Anger: In your film we see the scene of the "final girl" in “Texas Chainsaw Masscare”, an androgynous but clearly feminine hero. Women are horror’s favourite victims but also its heroes. The phallus, indicator of social power, becomes a flexible object in horror: The chainsaw in the "final girl’s" hands allows a different look on the cultural norms of Western societies – the genre undermines heterosexual attribution. In what sense?
Katharina Klewinghaus: It undermines heterosexual attribution in the sense that it dissolves it. Gender and the related attributes become flexible. This is mainly done through the figure of the final girl, a term developed by Carol Clover. Most feminist writings emphasized the woman as victim in these films, before Clover argued that the woman often is the heroine, who survives at the end and who also offers a masochistic experience to the male spectator rather than the often claimed sadistic experience. It is a complex and very interesting reading, which is why the final girl, her construction and function, becomes a main focus in Science of horror. The final girl has gone through different cycles now and over the years became more and more powerful. She is not only the survivor at the end of the film, but she is also the one who possesses the weapon. So if we read the weapon as a phallic instrument, and the phallus as the indicator for social power, then we discover, through the figure of the phallusised woman, that social power, as well as gender, is constructed and exchangeable.

Jurgen Anger: Judith Halberstam develops a queer reading of the genre and illustrates along the “Chucky” series how explicitly sexuality runs through horror and which sexual vicissitudes the genre offers. Can you say something more about the queer reading of the genre?
Katharina Klewinghaus: I would say the birth of the term final girl was the beginning for a new reading of horror, one which went beyond the established psychoanalytical and feminist ideas. It gave way for a queer reading which, for example, was developed by Judith Halberstam, when she suggested a very interesting reading of the “Chucky” series, particularly of the last two parts of the sequel. On the surface “Bride of Chucky” depicts heterosexual structures, but as these are shown through two plastic objects, Chucky and his bride (Halberstam even calls Chucky an “animated dildo”), these structures shift into something else, showing that sex and sexual attribution is transformable.

Jurgen Anger: You have played the 2nd lead in Otto; or, up with Dead People. Do you consider this film a horror film?
Katharina Klewinghaus: I think “Otto” rather borrows from these genres, in order to do something different with it. It is certainly not the common zombie film. Although it uses the implications of the figure of the zombie (e.g. the zombie as an allegory of capitalistic consumerist society) it also adds to it, when the zombie figure is a gay boy, desolated and disoriented. Also, “Otto” doesn’t want to scare us. If “Otto” wants to provoke a bodily response, it is one which has more to do with disgust, but not just in a simple “gory” sense: The film bravely combines the two genres which are usually incompatible: Horror and pornography. As Linda Williams has claimed “If you put conventions of horror next to conventions of pornography, people freak out”. A couple of scenes in “Otto” do exactly this and as certain reactions at festival screenings of “Otto” have shown, she was right. The incompatibility of these genres is reason for the excessive sexualisation of violence, now most visible in the so called “torture porn” films. I personally would always prefer a film which makes explicit or reflects on the affects it is working with, such as “Otto”, rather than, and this is typical for the double moral standard society we live in, to disguise itself as being ‘just’ violence, when in fact it is miles away from being just that. In the case of torture porn, it is primarily sexually coded violence, excessive and unmotivated in content. It is the false moral disguise, which is the perversion itself.

So to answer your question, I think “Otto” essentially is a Bruce LaBruce film more than anything else.

“Science of Horror” will be screened at the 3rd Pornfilmfestival in Berlin, held October 22nd to 26th, 2008. Buy your airline ticket now and see you at the screening in Berlin. It is in English!!! And “Otto” will have its New York premiere on October 27th, 2008 at the Museum of Modern Art.

In June I will be in Tel Aviv to meet the guys who did “Too Hot in Tel Aviv”, the first gay porn ever made in Israel. Let’s see what they have to say about porn.