Horror and the Holocaust: Genre Elements in Schindler’s List and Psycho

Abstract

��� Schindler’s List is now the primary source for the popular understanding of the Holocaust, having achieved the status of sanctioned history. 1 The movie “has provided millions of Americans with what will surely be their primary imagery, and understanding of, the Holocaust.” 2 However, when we juxtapose Schindler’s List with Claude Lanzmann’s Holocaust, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved and Survival in Auschwitz, and even Hannah Arendt’s much contested Eichmann in Jerusalem, we believe Spielberg’s work is revealed as a rhetoric far less commensurate with the trauma of the Holocaust because it ultimately falls back upon the visual rhetoric and narrative devices of classical Hollywood cinema, which glamorize the exploitation of suffering, while posing as a “realistic” narrative. 3 Horror films are arguably symptomatic of responses to, and reflections of, societal anxieties. 4 In working through the Holocaust, we believe Spielberg repeats a narrative structure in Schindler’s List that he used in the construction of other horror films. Our objective is to conduct a close reading of Schindler’s List as a text, first locating it as a member of the horror-psychological thriller genre, and then considering its portrayal of perpetrator and victim. 5 The horror genre can be distinguished by the presence of monsters that “breach the norms of ontological propriety.” 6 These monsters display evil that is

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