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TA C K L I N G W I C K E D M O N S T E R S : T H E H O R R O R FILM AS EXPERIMENT IN LEADERSHIP

ANDRÉ LOISELLE

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Trying to defeat a monster, the wicked problem par excellence, implies the demonstration of some degree of leadership. As the monster threatens normality, the “Normal” must take action to defeat

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the menace. In recent years, zombie narratives have become especially conducive to the exploration

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of issues of leadership, as epidemics of flesh-eating ghouls compel the Living to come together and adopt various forms of leadership to respond to attacks from the Undead. But while zombie films

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are the most obvious example of leadership in horror cinema, this article argues that most types of scary movies are also preoccupied with leadership. Whether it is the “Final Girl” resisting attacks from a masked killer, paranormal investigators battling demonic entities, or a poor fool forced to confront a giant beast to save himself, his family and perhaps the world, the horror film explores extreme scenarios that prompt the audience to respond to, evaluate, and reject or accept, various leadership modes, ranging from autocratic and hierarchical to collaborative, emotional and abject.

Introduction: Leadership in the Face of a Monstrous Threat Films have the ability to illustrate several concepts from management and organizational studies and, for that reason, are frequently used as teaching tools to examine different modes of leadership (Champoux, 2001). Rajendran and Andrew (2014), for instance, have demonstrated the value of relying on films like Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998), and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) to enable students to critically

assess the behavior of leaders. Long (2017) has drawn an extensive list of useful dramas and documentaries from what he calls the “Film & Leadership Case Study Club” (or “FLiCS” Film Club), which range from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part II (David Yates, 2011). However, Long and other scholars have generally ignored the horror film as an effective genre to study leadership. As this article contends, the very nature of the horror film provides a perfect opportunity for the viewer to JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES,

© 2018 University of Phoenix View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com • DOI:10.1002/jls.21551

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observe the behavior of leaders confronted with the terrifying challenge presented by the monster (whatever it is). One of the reasons why the horror film has been overlooked as a heuristic tool to study leadership is that, on the face of it, the state of crisis that this genre presents might be deemed to allow for only one style of leadership: authoritarian individualism. This might encourage leadership scholars interested in cinema to choose other genres, such as the historical drama, the biopic or the romantic comedy, whose less intensely focused conflicts might offer more obvious examples of multifaceted leadership. However, as will be discussed below, an analysis of the horror film’s scary scenarios reveals that there are options other than autocracy for individuals or groups who are presented with monstrous challenges. As Regester and Larkin (2008) suggest in Risk Issues and Crisis Management in Public Relations even crisis situations must allow for the emergence of various kinds of leadership. The authoritarian leader might initially arise as the one who is most able to act decisively in the face of a serious threat. However, autocratic leadership also has serious shortcomings that might prove detrimental in times of crisis. Regester and Larkin note that the authoritarian’s uncompromising stance inhibits creativity in the group and this might thwart the ingenuity necessary to find innovative solutions to extreme circumstances. Furthermore, for Regester and Larkin authoritarian leaders tend to demotivate team members, and a drastic decline in morale can lead to devastating outcomes for the group (p. 214). In his contribution to the anthology of essays Leadership in Extreme Situations, Olivetta (2017) argues that maintaining morale is so critical, especially in the context of dire military conditions, that the most imperative skill for a leader might very well be emotional intelligence. Olivetta stresses the crucial importance for the military leader to have empathy, to understand what soldiers are feeling and thinking. For Olivetta the military leader working in a highly stressful environment must be able to tune into a wide range of emotional signals, capturing the unspoken but perceptible emotions of the individuals or group. By listening carefully, the leader can grasp the group’s perspective and respond in a way that is most effective given the collective state of mind (pp. 87–88). In the same anthology, Rosinha, Matias,

and de Souza (2017) argue that in order to manage the primary emotions of fear, anger, hate, and pain that group members might experience under severe stress, the leader does not only need emotional intelligence, but must also possess social and cultural intelligence (pp. 97–98). These are qualities that self-centered, narrowly focused authoritarian leaders are likely to lack and, thus, their ability to lead successfully could be dangerously hindered. Therefore, following the arguments presented by Regester and Larkin, Rosinha et al. and Olivetta, it could be argued that, in fact, authoritarian or autocratic leadership would be the worst possible alternative to adopt under threatening circumstances. Using the horror film as an example of leadership under catastrophic pressure, this article suggests that, indeed, various forms of leadership beyond authoritarianism are essential when having to tackle monsters. As such, this article might be instructive to leaders as it shows how leadership under severe stress does not need to result in totalitarianism, despotism, and tyranny. Leaders in the face of horrific threats can still adopt varied approaches that allow for collaboration, collective understanding, and emotional engagement. Undoubtedly, trying to defeat a monster, the wicked problem par excellence, requires some form of leadership. As the monster threatens normality (Wood, 1979), the “normal” must take action to resist the menace. This may or may not be successful, depending on whether the narrative is progressive or belongs to horror’s “reactionary wing” as Robin Wood calls it (p. 23). But regardless of the outcome, when monstrosity raises its ugly head characters are forced to either give in to the threat or assume a leadership role in opposing it. In traditional folktales of confrontations between valiant heroes and heinous creatures, the dragon slayer must always prove to be a fierce leader in the face of overwhelming danger. As Gilmore (2012) points out in Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors, the in archetypal hero myth, “some brave champion goes forth to test his mettle in a climactic battle of good and evil, the latter always embodied as some monstrous beast” (p. 5). In recent years, zombie narratives have become especially conducive to the exploration of leadership, as epidemics of flesh-eating ghouls compel the Living to

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JOURNAL OF LEADERSHIP STUDIES

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come together and adopt various leadership styles to respond to attacks from the Undead. But while zombie films offer the most common examples of leadership in horror cinema, other kinds of scary movies are also preoccupied with issues of leadership. Whether it is the “Final Girl” resisting attacks from a masked killer, paranormal investigators battling demonic entities, or a poor fool forced to confront a giant beast to save himself, his family and perhaps the world, the horror film shows leadership scenarios that the spectator can observe and evaluate. This article will focus first on “zombie leadership” before proceeding to examine other horror subgenres in which different character types must engage in leaderful actions to tackle wicked monsters.

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Zombie Leadership The term “zombie leadership” has been used to discuss various concepts related to organizational management. Rehn (2009) finds the term useful to critique current managerial models by satirically speculating on what an organizational theory of the living dead would look like. Smyth (2017) in The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology relies on the metaphor to describe senior academic leadership as cadaveric. Niesche (2017) uses the expression to critique the very notion of leadership as a moribund concept that refuses to die. Within the context of this article, “zombie leadership” refers to the forms of leadership and followership that are deployed, tested, and appraised in zombie films. From their beginning, zombie films have focused on issues of leadership. Early examples based on Haitian voodoo legends, such as Victor Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie, expose despotic leadership, where the zombies embody subjugated slaves at the mercy of a tyrant. Those zombies are not the result of a viral outbreak or some other unexplained phenomenon. Rather, they are purposefully reanimated through black magic to be enslaved by a dictatorial leader. Well into the 1960s, zombies were associated with this demonic practice, as in Hammer Studio’s Plague of the Zombies (John Gilling, 1966), in which an evil mine owner uses voodoo to create a zombie labor force. In 1968, George A. Romero’s Night of The Living Dead fundamentally reshaped

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this trope, using the monster narrative as a metaphor for societal collapse rather than slavery or proletarian exploitation. In fact, Romero’s “ghouls,” as he initially labeled his undead creatures, are not strictly speaking zombies. The term “zombie” is never used in Night… But after fans started using the word to describe his creatures, Romero accepted the terminology and included the word once, in a passing comment, in his sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978) (Flaherty, 2010). Regardless of terminology, Night of the Living Dead is a veritable essay on leadership in the face of catastrophe. This film inspired dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly themed films and television series including The Walking Dead (2010-), which will be discussed below. Romero’s film focuses on a group of survivors huddled together in a farmhouse to escape the flesheating fiends. It shows the clash between the autocratic, dogmatic, patriarchal leadership style of middle-aged white character Harry (Karl Hardman), who dominates his wife (Marilyn Eastman) and daughter (Kyra Schon), and the cooperative leadership mode adopted by the African American character Ben (Duane Jones). Ben is a cooperative leader insofar as he does not operate according to any pre-existing dogma or ideology. He is pragmatic and proactive, and emphasizes team work to attain the group’s common goal of surviving the onslaught of ghouls. He is opened to suggestions, but does not invite lengthy conversations about the goal that is to be achieved. There is a third leadership option incarnated by Tom (Keith Wayne): collaboration and consensus-building. Tom is conciliatory and engages his girlfriend Judy (Judith Ridley) in discussions on the value of staying in the farmhouse as opposed to seeking refuge elsewhere. Harry, Ben, and Tom represent three modes of leadership described by Wilkinson in his book The Ambiguity Advantage: What Great Leaders are Great At (2006). Wilkinson contrasts the cooperative leader with the technical leader, on the one hand, and the adaptive/ collaborative leader on the other. The technical leader is associated with hierarchical, autocratic, conservative, and ideological forms of leadership that are based on formal authority and where challenging situations are understood as “technical” problems that can be resolved through the rigid, top-down methods that have traditionally worked (pp. 71–84). Collaborative


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leadership is drastically different, as it is fully opened to collective, consensual decision-making and embraces the idea that to accomplish shared goals there must be share values (pp. 92–97). Cooperative leaders are in between, willingly accepting input from others but only to achieve a specific goal and without seeking consensus or the promotion of shared values (pp. 86–90). Significantly Harry’s autocratic approach to leadership, which could misguidedly be seen as the only option in the context of this horrific scenario, is portrayed in an entirely negative light and dismissed by Romero as a valid choice. This is in keeping with the teachings of Regester and Larkin, Rosinha et al., and Olivetta, who suggest that repressive authoritarianism might very well be the worst possible choice when presented with a monstrous menace. However, Tom’s and Ben’s respective approaches are both shown as positive options that are worth exploring under these dire circumstances. Tom is inclusive and consultative, and comes across as the most ethical character of the group. But he also proves to be less effective and driven than Ben. Since Ben is the last surviving character of the group, cooperative leadership appears as the better strategy to deal with the situation at hand. However, Ben’s demise at the end, when he is killed by an allwhite sheriff’s posse, deeply problematizes any straightforward interpretation of the film. Romero has resisted interpretations based on Ben’s racial identity, having always claimed that he hired Duane Jones for the part only because he was the best actor he could find (Kane, 2010, p. 31). However, the film’s highly racialized conflict between white dogmatic conservatism and African American goal-oriented proactivism makes it difficult not to read it as a social commentary on the struggles of the 1960s civil rights movement against a reactionary white culture that was pigheadedly opposed to the kind of transformational leadership it so desperately needed at the time. Since Night of the Living Dead, there has been countless zombie movies and television shows that have used the outbreak of flesh-eating ghouls as a framework to explore issues of leadership under pressure. The most successful of these is probably The Walking Dead, which serves as a veritable laboratory for the observation and evaluation of various forms of leadership as groups of surviving individuals must manage themselves to

oppose swarms of infected “walkers” and, more importantly, other groups of survivors who fight savagely for limited resources. While there are numerous leaders introduced throughout the series, the narrative revolves primarily around sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), whose leadership style changes over time as he is tested by various horrific experiences that challenge his moral core. In her essay “Take Me to Your Leader: Rick Versus Shane and the Problematic Representation of Leadership”, Findley (2016) contrasts Rick’s uneven leadership to that of his friend and colleague, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal). Shane and Rick end up in the same small group of survivors early in the series, which also includes Rick’s wife Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) and his son Carl (Chandler Riggs). Because of their training as cops, Rick and Shane quickly become the natural leaders of the group, but it is the former who emerges as the primary decision-maker. Findley argues that time after time Rick makes wrong decisions, and therefore, it is misguided to see him as the best leader for the group. Rather it is Shane who proves to be the more rational leader. While Findley is right in observing that Rick often proves to be a deeply flawed leader, this does not constitute a weakness in the series, for the point of the show is not to embrace Rick as a perfect hero. Rather, The Walking Dead is to be viewed as an experiment in leadership, and Rick is the main subject of this experiment. His decisions, actions and reactions can be evaluated contemporaneously by the fans within each episode and reassessed in hindsight as the series unfolds. The series thus functions as a sociological study in leadership, where actions and conducts can be re-interpreted over time, reflecting the dynamic nature of leadership (Schedlitzki & Edwards, 2014, p. 7). It is not surprising, then, that leadership development experts such as Chris Cancialosi, Deb Calvert, and David Khan among many others would look at the series to identify “Leadership Lessons from The Walking Dead” (Calvert, 2014; Cancialosi, 2013; Khan, 2016). As a brief example of how Rick adopts what could be called “plural forms of leadership” (Ropo, Salovaara, Sauer, & De Paoli, 2015, p. 2) as external factors and internal group dynamics affect his responses, one can look at the narrative arc that flows from Season 2 to Season 3 during which he moves from an authoritative

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position to a more collaborative approach. By the end of Season 2, which takes place primarily in and around an isolated farmhouse, Rick has reached such a point of frustration and exhaustion that he rejects consensusbuilding and imposes himself as the undisputed ruler of the small group of survivors who have recently challenged his authority. Rick’s last words to his followers at the end of the season’s last episode are: “You can do better? Let’s see how far you get. No takers? Fine. But get one thing straight... you’re staying. This isn’t a democracy anymore” (Episode 2.13). By the end of the following season, Rick has realized the error of his ways and chooses to adopt a collaborative mode, where his “inclusive practices… emphasize the need for shared vision and values, and a real sense of ‘team’” (Wilkinson, 2006, p. 96). Facing his group, Rick reflects on his past mistakes and contrasts himself from the Governor (David Morrissey), a charismatic villain who leads another group of survivors with an iron fist. What I said last year, that first night after the farm...

themselves. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead provides a brief but striking example of pure selfless leadership, or “abject leadership.” This peculiar form of mindless collective action will be further discussed at the end of this article. The next section will leave aside the zombie narrative to explore other horror subgenres that also offer noteworthy examples of how people choose to manage themselves when faced with wicked monsters.

The Scholar, the Fool, and the Final Girl

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willing to do, who we are, it’s not my call. It can’t

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be. I couldn’t sacrifice one of us for the greater good because we are the greater good. We’re the reason

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we’re still here, not me. This is life and death. How you live... how you die, it isn’t up to me. I’m not your Governor. We choose to go. We choose to stay. We stick together. We vote. We can stay and we can fight or we can go. (Episode 3.15)

The conspicuous emphasis on “we” in this passage is central in denoting the shift in mode of leadership from a traditional, individualistic, top-down model toward collectivist, shared governance which, one might argue, is the only way for the survivors to reestablish some semblance of democratic normalcy in the face of catastrophic social breakdown. This is a valuable lesson in leadership. However, the kind of collaborative leadership presented in The Walking Dead ultimately remains individualistic as Rick, the “subject” of the experiment, is always the main point of reference for spectators and instances of collective decision-making are always processed through his experience. A few zombie films offer intriguing alternatives to this individualistic structure, where the leadership model is embodied by the undead

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it can’t be like that. It can’t. What we do, what we’re

The thoroughly self-referential slasher Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012) identifies five fundamental archetypes of the horror narrative: the Whore, the Athlete, the Scholar, the Fool, and the Virgin. While this Proppian functionalism does not actually work for most horror films, these archetypes do reflect some common trends in the genre. More importantly for the purposes of this article, they point to different kinds of leaders who regularly appear in scary movies. Often, a group of five “college kids” functions as the core of the narrative. Two of them tend to immediately stand out as the initial leaders of the group. These two prototypical leaders (Schedlitzki & Edwards, 2014, p. 87) are usually attractive, rich, arrogant typeA personalities: the popular jock (the athlete) and the sexuality assertive mean girl (the whore). Much of the strength of the prototypical leaders comes from their ability to give other members a sense of direction and certainty about the group’s identity. However, those characters generally lose their leading roles very quickly as their traditional form of ascendency is inadequate to meet the unsettling challenge presented by the monster. As the prototypical leaders fail in the face of situations they simply cannot handle, there follows the emergence of unlikely leaders who must come up with alternative solutions to deal with the situation. It is thus left to the Scholar, the Fool and the Virgin, better-known as the “Final Girl,” to assume leadership and achieve a transformative outcome without relying on formal authority and traditional power. The Final Girl is the best-known of these character types and the most common emergent leader. Indeed, several recent films have paid tribute to her importance in their titles, including Tyler Shields’s Final Girl (2015), Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015),


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and Matt Stroc’s Final Girls: Take Back the Knife (2015). Clover (1993) coined the term Final Girl in her seminal book Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film to describe the character who usually defeats the masked killer in 1970s and 1980s slasher films: The Final Girl of the slasher film is presented from the outset as the main character. The practiced viewer distinguishes her from her friends minutes into the film. She is the girl scout, the bookworm, the mechanic. Unlike her girlfriends… she is not sexually active. Laurie (Halloween) is teased because of her fears about dating, and Marti (Hell Night) explains to the boy with whom she finds herself sharing a room

masked killers he inspired, such as Jason Voorhees of Friday-the-13th fame, are dead set on punishing premarital sex. While it is true that many victims in slashers are young people who indulge in intercourse, it is not the case that Michael Myers is out there to exact moralistic vengeance on post-coital teenagers. One of his victims, Annie (Nancy Kyes), does not have sex before getting killed. What Annie does, however, is shirk her responsibilities as a babysitter, as she drops off Lindsey (Kyle Richards), the little girl she is supposed to be looking after, with Laurie who is also babysitting a little boy, Tommy (Brian Andrews). Michael killed Judith back in 1963 not because she had sex, but because she was an irresponsible babysitter, ignoring him while she was with her boyfriend. In 1978, he returns to exact revenge on irresponsible teenagers who do not take care of children. But then the question arises: why would Michael try to kill Laurie who is neither sexually active nor is she an irresponsible babysitter, on the contrary. This is an important question for it is at the heart of this article’s argument about leadership in the horror film. Why would a monster target good people? The answer is that the monster, Michael Myers in this case, functions as a challenge or a test to lethargic normality. Michael attacks meek, bookish Laurie to test her resilience as a babysitter, and compel her to assume a leadership role and take decisive action to defend the two small children in her care. Laurie unflinchingly meets the challenge, guiding Tommy and Lindsey, reassuring and protecting them and, most importantly, ensuring that Michael never gets to them. She has a strong emotional commitment to her role as the protector of the children, and Michael serves as catalyst for the enhanced manifestation of this commitment. In Halloween, as in several other slashers, the Final Girl’s ability to save herself and others is rooted in her deep emotional commitment to individuals around her. Observing Laurie allows the spectator to reflect on leadership as emotional labor (Iszatt-White, 2013). From the outset, the viewer might note a rudimentary form of capitalistic emotional labor already imbedded in Laurie’s job as babysitter. She is being paid to be nice to, and play with, the children, as well as to display an appropriate level of authority to control their boisterous behavior. This basic emotional labor is greatly

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that they will be using separate beds. … The Final Girl is also watchful to the point of paranoia; small signs of danger that her friends ignore, she registers. Above all she is intelligent and resourceful in a pinch. (p. 39)

Her modesty (she does not have to be a virgin, but she cannot be promiscuous) and nerdy personality make her an unlikely leader. But her resourcefulness “in a pinch” is representative of the type of leadership that can arise in times of crisis. Her strength as a leader is also often related to her emotional intelligence and fierce commitment to those around her. Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) famously opens with a lengthy point-of-view shot that aligns the spectator’s gaze with that of 6-year-old Michael Myers (Will Sandin). Michael spies on his sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) who is supposed to be babysitting him, but is making out with her boyfriend (David Kyle). After sex, the boyfriend leaves the house. Michael takes a knife, puts on a clown mask and proceeds to stab Judith to death. The parents return to discover Michael with a bloody knife in his hand. The film then cuts for the first time to a reverse shot showing the child’s innocent face behind which pure evil resides. He is sent to an insane asylum where he remains for 15 years. On Halloween 1978, an adult Michael (Tony Moran) escapes the asylum and returns to his childhood neighborhood where he proceeds to strangle and stab several teenagers, and pursue most viciously our Final Girl, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis). The fact that young Michael kills his sister after she had sex gave rise to the cliché that he, and all the

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magnified when the threat emerges in the final third of the film, and Laurie’s skills as an emotional laborer are put to the test by the monster. Emotional labor is an on-going activity that must be performed longitudinally to create the positive environment that is vital for the accomplishment of leadership (Iszatt-White, 2013, p. 7). It is made clear early in the film, when Laurie casually meets Tommy in the neighborhood, that she has already established a solid caring relationship with the boy whom she has often looked after. The routine emotional labor she has performed over many, probably very boring, evenings of babysitting serves her well at the moment of crisis when extreme urgency requires the children to obey her quickly and precisely. Through her steady, monotonous, small acts of kindness toward the children, Laurie acquired over time emotional capital: the positive feelings that a leader can draw on in times of crisis (Durkin, 2005, p. 187). Emotional capital is fundamental to leadership when it is understood as a “never-ending, continuous process of becoming” (Schedlitzki & Edwards, 2014, p. 247). It is Laurie’s sustained emotional investment in the children that allows her to become a successful Final Girl. It should be noted that the Final Girl is not exclusively defined by her degree of emotional commitment. Indeed, she is usually portrayed as a level-headed intellectual whose mental acumen is as important as her emotional intelligence. She regularly appears as a character with impressive scientific expertise, like Ripley in the Alien series (1979–1997). She is often a graduate student or researcher, as in Thesis (Alejandro Amenábar, 1996) and Paranormal Xperience 3D (Sergi Vizcaino, 2011); a medical doctor, as in The Dreaming (Mario Andreacchio, 1988) and Coma (Michael Crichton, 1978); or an FBI profiler as in The Cell (Tarsem Singh, 2000), Untraceable (Gregory Hoblit, 2008), Mindhunters (Renny Harlin, 2004) and Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). As such, she often doubles as the Scholar. It is nevertheless useful to establish some distinction between the Final Girl and the Scholar to account for instances where the latter is not the last “surviving female,” to use Isabel Pinedo’s (1997, p. 75) term. Moreover, the Scholar often displays a different form of leadership from the Final Girl, which results primarily from the different contexts in which the two types find themselves. Whereas the Final Girl

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is often unwillingly thrown into a horrific situation, the Scholar generally chooses to get involved in challenging circumstances where their expertise is called upon. As a result, the Scholar’s situation showcases mainly the “nexus between leadership and expertise” (Chalofsky, 2014, p. 192). The most common Scholars in the horror film are probably paranormal investigators and psychics, as in James Wan’s The Conjuring (2013) and Insidious (2010) or, most famously, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982), who are brought in to apply their particular expertise to haunting or possession cases that defy rational explanations. The form of leadership assumed by the Scholar is one which allows for mobility based on specific knowledge relevant to a specific time and place. As Schedlitzki and Edwards write, this represents a new paradigm in leadership studies where focus on the role of expertise enables a move away from the asymmetrical power relations of leaders and followers (p. 108). Scholars become leaders at certain conjunctures that favor their emergence because of skills and knowledge that are ideally suited for these circumstances. They might not succeed in fulfilling their assigned task. In The Dead Room (Jason Stutter, 2015), for instance, the three ghost hunters who investigate an alleged haunting on behalf of an insurance company are all dead by the end of the film, killed by an evil spirit. But regardless of their success, they still offer a valid lesson in leadership, namely, that within a context that requires flexibility, creativity and the distribution of responsibilities, “expertise rather than formal position should form the basis of leadership authority” (Timperley, 2009, p. 211). Poltergeist shows a prototypical leader being quickly replaced by a less authoritative, but more knowledgeable individual when the situation calls for a different kind of leadership. As an early 1980s film, Poltergeist can “naturally” introduce the father of the family, Steven Freeling (Craig T. Nelson), as the initial leader. He is a successful representative for a real-estate development company and is the one who goes to work and earn money while his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) stays at home and takes care of their kids: Dana (Dominique Dunne), Robbie (Oliver Robins) and Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke). He is a typical fatherly figure, a big guy who watches football with his


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rowdy buddies and admires traditional leaders such as Ronald Reagan (he reads Hedrick Smith’s Reagan, The Man, The President [980]). As strange events start taking place at home, especially in the kitchen (utensils bending, furniture moving), and Diane suggests to her husband that the bizarre phenomena are “like another side of nature, a side we’re not qualified to understand,” Steven still wants to take charge, decreeing “no one is going in the kitchen until I know what’s happening!” Within a few moments however, his position of ascendancy is radically challenged by the threat of an enormous tree breaking through Carol Anne and Robbie’s bedroom window grabbing the little boy, and a supernatural portal appearing in the closet dragging the little girl into televised otherworldliness. Realizing that he is indeed not qualified to understand what is happening, Steven enlists the help of parapsychologist Dr. Lesh (Beatrice Straight) and her assistants, Ryan (Richard Lawson) and Marty (Martin Casella). As he speaks with the scholars in their university office, Steven appears exhausted, unshaven and scruffy—he no longer looks like a leader. Dr. Lesh initially replaces him in the leadership role. But she soon recognizes the limits of her own expertise, and thus calls upon a real expert, psychic Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein). Tangina’s first appearance at the Freeling’s is visually significant in terms of the film’s depiction of the change of leadership from the formal authority to the expert. As Diane explains their experience to a yet-unseen person, she, Dr. Lesh and Steven are standing in a room while Ryan is videotaping. A visibly skeptical Steven stands in the doorway as Tangina enters slowly. She is a very short woman, made to look even shorter as she is first seen walking by the tall, imposing Steven. She also has a high-pitched voice which makes her sound almost like a child. She is thus the opposite of the father as prototypical leader. But as she walks toward the camera she comes to dominate the frame, dwarfing the others in the background, visually taking her place as the lead expert. Tangina quickly figures out the situation and explains to the others the strange circumstances in which Carol Anne finds herself, torn between spirits who have attached themselves to her and a powerful demon, the Beast, who is entrapping her. She then starts directing the operations for the parents to save

Carol Anne from the other side. An ironic sign of Tangina’s position as the new leader of the group is her capacity to compel Steven to perform fatherly authority. She orders him to loudly threaten Carol Anne with a spanking to scare her into responding from the depths of tv hell. In the end, the Freeling house is destroyed. But diminutive expert Tangina does succeed in leading the group through the process of rescuing Carol Anne. As such, this peculiar little person provides a memorable example of how the Scholar can broaden the boundaries of leadership by showing that it is not limited by formal role or position but defined by expertise and creativity in the context of specific situations (Pont, Nusche, & Moorman, 2008, p. 84). The boundaries of leadership are further expanded by the Fool, who demonstrates most intriguingly the leadership potential of collective followership (Tee, Teoh, & Ramis, 2016, p. 202). As a character whose humor and happy-go-lucky temperament are his (it is usually a ‘he’) best assets to achieve collective outcomes, the Fool is often very effective at fostering shared and distributed leadership among followers, which depends on “acquiring lateral influence, compared with traditional top-down leadership” (James & Collins, 2012, p. 498). Through his weirdly appealing personality, the Fool creates an environment where the group feels comfortable and empowered to join forces toward a common goal; where “leaders and followers are understood to be equally engaged in the process of leadership” and “leader and follower identities [are] mutually influencing and shifting” (Schedlitzki & Edwards, 2014, pp. 108–109). As Kets de Vries (2003) observes in Leaders, Fools and Impostors: Essays on the psychology of leadership, the fool is endowed with uncanny powers of insight. He is a jester who produces order out of chaos by connecting the unexplainable to the familiar (p. 62). There are several examples of the Fool’s uncanny ability to rally people in an equalitarian fight against evil, especially in horror-comedy hybrids. Films like Idle Hands (Rodman Flender, 1999) Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004), Stan Helsing (Bo Zenga, 2009) and Bloodsucking Bastards (Brian James O’Connell, 2015) show likeable but ineffectual young men who, when faced with threatening creatures, find it in themselves to team up with family and friends to defeat monsters. Typically, these films include more comedy

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than horror, reflecting the Fool’s ability to rise above anxiety and fear through humor. As Zoogah (2014) suggests in Strategic Followership: How Followers Impact Organizational Effectiveness, in the context of followership, humor can mitigate the tensions that often arise in teams especially working under pressure (p. 181). An excellent example of a Fool who enables a truly shared experience of leadership is found in Joon-ho Bong’s The Host (2006). The film tells the story of single-father Gang-doo Parks (Kang-ho Song) and his family, father Hee-bong (Hee-Bong Byun), brother Nam-il (Hae-il Park), and sister Nam-joo (Doona Bae) who try to rescue his daughter, Hyun-seo (Ah-sung Ko), after she was carried off by a horrible monster that suddenly emerged from Seoul’s Han River. At first, Gang-doo comes across as a weird, immature, irresponsible 40-year-old father to Hyun-seo. As the film progresses, however, he displays a peculiar type of leadership and resourcefulness through his fluid interactions with his family members. In the end, the monster is defeated, but it is too late to save Hyun-seo. In a final gesture asserting his new-found maturity, Gangdoo commits to taking care of an orphan boy, Se-joo (Dong-ho Lee), whom his daughter had managed to save from the monster before her death. From the start, The Host exposes the flaws of traditional authority and formal leadership. A prologue shows an arrogant American forensic pathologist (Scott Wilson) ordering a South Korean subaltern (Brian Rhee) to empty several bottles of formaldehyde down the sink. Although the subaltern is reluctant to obey this misguided order, he feels compelled to respect his superior’s authority and pours the dangerous chemical down the drain. The monster appears as a direct result of this action, and thus clearly embodies the irresponsible and narcissistic leadership of the American pathologist. Immediately after the prologue, a close-up shows Gang-doo sleeping on the job at his father’s small snack bar. Gang-doo immediately appears as a Fool. He seems unable to perform any of the simple tasks that his father requests of him; he fails to show up at Hyunseo’s school for “parents day”; and with his silly blond hair and sweatpants he looks about the same age as his 10-year-old daughter. The monster thus arises as a challenge for Gang-doo, who must assume his responsibilities as a father and, ultimately defeat the creature.

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Through his endearing foolishness, he becomes a skillful facilitator of shared leadership, allowing his father and siblings to step up to the plate and prove their own worth through the experience of confronting the monster. Brother Nam-il is a reckless drunk and sister Nam-joo is an archery athlete who always chokes under the pressure of competition. Yet when this dysfunctional family comes together to face the monster, they learn to overcome their flaws and prove highly capable. Nam-joo demonstrates her ability to perform under pressure by shooting an arrow straight into the beast’s eye; and drunken Nam-il skillfully uses alcohol bottles as Molotov cocktails to set the beast on fire. The sense of shared leadership is evocatively represented in a collective dream scene halfway through the film. As the four family members are gathered in a small space, exhausted by their efforts to save Hyun-seo, they collectively imagine the missing girl appearing among them during a makeshift dinner. Each member of the family then proceeds to feed the missing child in turn, symbolizing the equalitarian communal efforts of all family members to save the girl. The Final Girl, the Scholar and the Fool offer instructive illustrations of the emergence of non-traditional forms of leadership. But as mentioned earlier while discussing Rick in The Walking Dead, despite their adoption of alternative approaches, these archetypes ultimately remain individualized incarnations and, as such, are still anchored in the traditional perspective of the leader as distinct subject. While it might be impossible to dispense entirely with an individualized perspective on leadership, there are certain moments in a few horror films that suggest the potential for a kind of leadership where the ascendancy of the subject is fundamentally challenged. These are moments of abject leadership.

Conclusion: Abject Leadership In Leadership as Identity, Ford, Harding, and Learmonth (2008) demonstrate that in order to uphold a dominant status and guarantee that everyone in the organization submits to the collectivity, conventional leadership must ensure that followers are perceived as objects with no claims to subjectivity (pp. 157–160). In the process, the followers are not only objectified,


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they are also abjectified, reduced to worthless servility. “The very presence of leadership,” the authors claim “renders others, ‘followers’, abject.” (p. 169). Within the peculiar logic of the horror film, however, abjection can be cast in a more positive light. “To be abnormal is to be abject, and to have an unliveable life,” say Ford, Harding, and Learmonth speaking of the denigrated followers of traditional organizations (p. 104). But the abnormality and abjection of those who lead unliveable lives might be a powerful tool of collective leadership for the undead who roam the shopping center in Romero’s Dawn of the Dawn. The film takes place sometime after Night of a Living Dead, when the initial zombie epidemic has reached disastrous proportions. Four survivors, a television line producer, Francine (Gaylen Ross), a helicopter pilot, Stephen (David Emge), and two S.W.A.T. officers, Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) and Peter (Ken Foree), seek refuge in a large mall, where they can find provisions and equipment to keep the undead at bay. Although the shopping center is surrounded by ghouls, only a few have managed to enter the mall and they can easily be contained as the group blocks off parts of the space, where they can live rather comfortably using the goods and supplies from the stores. As Francine and Stephen observe the odd zombie wandering around the mall, she asks “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” to which he responds tentatively, “Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do.” Because the undead are drawn to the mall to consume flesh the same way they used to consume goods, several critics have read Dawn of the Dead as an apt metaphor for mindless consumerism (Paffenroth, 2006). A different way of interpreting the film is to focus on how zombies work together to achieve the common goal of eating the living. Without having to be convinced by the rhetoric of a charismatic despot or chatter endlessly to reach consensus, the undead instinctively move in concert toward the same objective. Nor do they mind whether one wears an expensive business suit, tee-shirt, and jeans or a Hare Krishna robe. They operate on a truly equal plane. The most meaningful moment of abject leadership occurs late in the film, after a gang of bikers break into the shopping center and, in the process, let in “a thousand zombies” (the one time the word is used in the

film). The three remaining survivors – Roger turns into a zombie earlier in the film and is killed by Peter – must thus battle both the bikers and the ghouls. The last 15 minutes of the film depict the main characters’ frantic attempts to survive, especially Stephen. Having been shot in the arm by one of the bikers, Stephen is weakened by his wound and ends up cornered by zombies in an elevator. As he struggles to escape through the ceiling hatch, ghouls ferociously tear at his flesh. This is one of the most disturbing sequences in the film, as the spectator is subjected to protracted images of Stephen’s extreme suffering, anxiety and desperation as he collapses on the elevator floor. A few minutes pass before Stephen’s fate is revealed, as ghouls are shown walking through the mall to the sound of a darkly amusing piece of Muzak—referred to as “zombie music” by some scholars (Carpenter, 2013). Eventually Stephen emerges from the elevator as a fully fledged, disgusting ghoul. What is most striking about this moment is that his excruciating struggle is finally over. Other zombies no longer present a threat. Having become one of them, no longer being a self-aware subject constantly fighting to save his conscious existence, he can now walk safely through the mall without any fear. He has been set free. In psychoanalytic terms, he is experiencing “the masochistic pleasure of no longer being an ego” (Wyss, 1973, p. 520). He is a gory, egofree nonperson. He is abject. While on the face of it the term abject carries exclusively negative connotations, when theorized by scholars such as Kristeva (1982), it can become an expression of resistance against dominant patriarchal subjectivity. Masculine subjectivity is generally understood to arise from a process of separation, first from the Mother and, by extension, from all others. In this process of subject-formation the masculine “I” emerges as a being distinct from all objects over which he must exert domination to reassert his discrete subjectivity (Weir, 2014, p. 49). Kristeva in The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection contends that the abject is a powerful affect that challenges this notion of the separate, impenetrable male subject. The abject is “is what disturbs identity, system, order” and refuses to “respect borders, positions, rules” (p. 4). The experience of abjection results from anything that threatens to break the boundaries between the self-contained

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masculine subject and otherness. The ultimate abjection for Kristeva is thus the cadaver, which represents otherness completely overtaking the subject: “the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer ‘I’ who expel. ‘I’ is expelled” (p. 3). Stephen as an abject zombie is thus the incarnation of broken boundaries, of non-separation, of collapsed subjectivity and of merger with the totality of the horde of undead to which he now indiscriminately belongs. As such, he embodies the indefinable opposite of traditional, individualistic, authoritarian, egocentric, Trumpian, primitively masculine leadership. Yet, there remains a leading gesture in what was once Stephen. As he mindlessly staggers through the mall with his new undead friends, he suddenly feels obligated to lead them toward the concealed area where Francine and Peter are hiding. “Some kind of instinct” induces him to point toward where the last two survivors are barricaded. Freed from self-interest, he and the other zombies function as an undifferentiated collective that shares one goal and selflessly work together to achieve it. This is abject leadership: a fundamentally altruistic compulsion to engage in a communal movement where self-motivation and self-interest have been bled out. This is pure selfless leadership. In The Audacity of Leadership: 10 Essentials to Becoming a Transformative Leader in the 21st Century, Anton Gunn (2009) suggests that in order to be a transformative leader, one must restore the proper image of selfless leadership (p. 54). Gunn refers to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as true selfless leaders. It might appear rather sacrilegious to compare those revered pacifists to Stephen-the-zombie. However, within the strange logic of the horror film, the throng of ghouls marching toward their collective goal is not unlike the crowds of civil rights activists marching from Selma to Montgomery or the thousands who joined the Salt March. They all selflessly defied established social order and challenged dominant ideology. As the horror film’s experiment in leadership shows, in times of crisis, there is an urgent need to adopt new approaches to collective action that contest traditional, individualistic, prototypical modes of governance. The horror film’s audience generally tends to be more interested in thrills than in

ideas. As such, scary movies can convey this message to spectators who might otherwise never think about issues of innovative leadership. Perhaps the state of constant terror in which the world currently finds itself might lead even more people to heed the horror film’s teachings.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank the members of Carleton Leader’s first cohort (2013–2014) for their insightful comments on an early incarnation of this article. The author also wishes to acknowledge the invaluable help of Graham Johnson of The Leaderful Partnership, as well as Cindy Taylor and the members of Carleton University’s Office of Quality Initiatives for their kind support.

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