In-Text Citation

702 Steffen Hantke

haunting the submarine. His emaciated body is what the bodies of the other sailors will eventually become. His gradual dissolution prefigures that of the body politic he serves.

Johann embodies not only an eruption of the gothic into twentieth-century technology. He is also an uncanny reminder that the military submarine, as a space devoted to and associated with war, is a place of death—imminent, inevitable, violent, inexorably physical, and omnipresent: bloody death, grim death, death without metaphysical or transcendent comforts. Death, in Das Boot as in most other war films, is the bottom line, both of the world depicted and of the genre depicting it. It is, therefore, a small step from Das Boot to David Twohy’s Below (2002), a film about a submarine haunted by literal ghosts. Many of the elements in Das Boot are recast by Below in the vernacular of the gothic. What looks like the crew’s inexorable bad luck turns out to be a curse, their fallen comrades return as ghosts, and the eerie sighing and creaking of the boat at low depth is the voice of dead matter coming to life. While Petersen’s film plays on the gothic, Twohy’s film embraces it whole-heartedly, pushing unambiguously across the line that separates the war film from the horror film. ‘‘It would be hypocritical to deny,’’ director Samuel Fuller has mused about the war film, ‘‘that, as crazy, violent, and tragic as it is, war lends itself to filmmaking by stirring up the entire palette of our deepest feelings’’ (219). Significant parts of this ‘‘palette’’ are emotions connected to individual and collective acts of violence, and it is this insistence on violence that constitutes the link between war and horror films. What defines ‘‘the specificity of [the horror] genre [however] is not the violence as such, but its conjunction with images and definitions of the monstrous’’ (Neale 21). At this convergence point, two genres meet and a new hybrid—the military horror film—is created. Both genres share basic thematic concerns, but representational and generic registers differ. What can only be articulated metaphorically within the codes of realism can appear as palpable physical reality in the modes of the fantastic. The bottom line of war films—‘‘war is hell’’—applies to military horror films as well. The only difference is that, in military horror films, it really is.

The Military War Film: History, Typology, Morphology

Though the convergence of the horror and the war film genres has never solidified into a recognizable subgenre of either one of its two