Análisis del proceso: Customer Journey. Omnicanalidad

The horror of In Cold Blood operates on several levels: its realism, the bru- tality of the crime, the random selection of victims (Smith and Hickock had never met the Clutters before the night of the killing), the incongruity between the primary motive (theft) and the ultimate outcome (multiple murders), the fear that swept through the state in its aftermath, and the cal- lous indifference and lack of remorse on the part of Hickock and Smith. So can In Cold Blood, which promises a journalistic account of actual events, be understood in terms of the horror genre as well?

By making this connection I’m not trying to minimize the real tragedy of these crimes. I’m merely suggesting that Capote uses some of the conven- tions of horror, as well as the suspense/thriller genres, to craft his rendering of these events. Capote himself labeled the work a nonfiction novel, and this invites us to think about the literary devices shaping In Cold Blood. “Journal- ism,” he said, “always moves along a horizontal plane, telling a story, while fiction—good fiction—moves vertically, taking you deeper and deeper into character and events. By treating a real event with fictional techniques . .

. it’s possible to make this kind of synthesis.”4 _{Capote’s fusion of reporting}

and fiction here enabled him to present Hickock and Smith’s crime and its subsequent investigation as a novelist. He could make choices to create a certain effect and to manipulate the reader’s response.

As suggested above, part of the momentum of In Cold Blood comes from the details that resonate with suspense/thriller fiction. A crime has been committed that launches a nationwide manhunt. Lead detectives work around the clock, piecing together clues and interviewing suspects in hopes of a lucky break. At one point, the special agent in charge learns that the men are back in Kansas, and the chase intensifies. But the facts of the case undermine these familiar-sounding conventions at every turn. The crime has been “solved” for the reader before the first page. The identity of the criminals is discovered by accident when Hickock’s former cellmate, who told him about the Clutters in the first place, hears a radio broadcast about

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the murders and reveals Hickock’s identity to the authorities. Smith and Hickock are caught not because of Special Agent Dewey’s hard work and ingenuity; they are apprehended because of their own incompetence and arrogance. The book also suggests that Smith’s abuse as a child, his family’s neglect, his inability to pursue an education, and his association with people like Hickock helped shape him into a killer. Such revelations often occur in the suspense/thriller genres as well, but Capote is using them here to create sympathy for the killer—a response that complicates our response to his execution. When the people of Holcomb first see Smith and Hickock after they have been apprehended, for example, Capote notes that they all respond with stunned silence. “But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped” (248). When faced with such horrible crimes, we expect the monstrous, the inhuman. Yet Capote’s sympathetic characterization of Smith, in particular, makes it difficult for the reader to view him as a monster.

This is where In Cold Blood intersects with the horror genre as well—an encounter with the monstrous. Noël Carroll, in his influential work The

Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart, argues that monsters are the

central feature of horror. Vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, are recognizable threats, and the danger they pose must be destroyed/de- feated to restore harmony. Monsters also elicit the emotional effect that the genre seeks—horror—because they literally embody the abnormal. As Carroll explains, “The objects of art-horror are essentially threatening and

impure.”5 _{They inspire revulsion, disgust, and nausea.}

A number of scholars have criticized this narrow definition, arguing that serial killers and more realistic monsters must be accounted for as well. David Russell, for example, offers a broader taxonomy for the horror genre, arguing that “some types of monsters may be explained as ‘real’ . . . [in that they] are not remarkable in any physical sense. Their threat to normality is manifested solely through abnormal behavior challenging the rules of so-

cial regulation through ‘monstrous’ and transgressive behavior.”6 _{He labels}

these monsters “deviant”—a category that includes stalkers, slashers, and psychokillers. Critic Matt Hills also responds to Carroll’s limited framework by suggesting an event-based definition of the genre (as opposed to Carroll’s entity-based definition) so that “we can take in the widest possible range of texts that have been discussed as ‘horror’ by audiences and labeled as such

by filmmakers and marketers.”7 _{Both of these characteristics are evident in}

Capote’s book. As a ruthless killer, Smith is certainly a realistic monster, and the Clutter murders qualify as horrific events.

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But let’s return to Carroll’s emphasis on monsters for a moment. Even though In Cold Blood doesn’t fit the supernatural requirements of his defi- nition of horror, Capote does present Hickock and Smith as monstrous on physical and psychological levels. His descriptions of their anomalous, dam- aged bodies attempt to ascribe some physical difference to their aberrant behavior. Smith is first depicted as a man with “stunted legs that seemed grotesquely inadequate to the grown-up bulk they supported” (15), and Special Agent Dewey takes note of Smith’s disproportionate body at his ex- ecution: “He remembered his first meeting with Perry in the interrogation room at Police Headquarters in Las Vegas—the dwarfish boy-man seated in the metal chair, his small booted feet not quite brushing the floor” (341). Likewise, Hickock has a tattooed body, serpentine eyes “with a venomous, sickly-blue squint,” and a face “composed of mismatched parts . . . as though his head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center” (31). As a boy-man (dwarf/adult) and serpent-man (with a divided face), Smith and Hickock are hybrid figures like the monsters that typically appear in horror fiction. Their bodies, like their actions, violate social norms and categories (moral/immoral, good/evil, human/inhuman), and this element resonates with Carroll’s argument about monsters as repelling and compel-

ling “because they violate standing categories.”8

At the same time, these physical aberrations are not so pronounced that the townspeople of Holcomb can comfortably “Other” Hickock and Smith. Their bodies do not live up to the monsters whom they imagined responsible for the killings. As noted above, they initially responded to these men with stunned silence, “as though amazed to find them humanly shaped,” but in many horror stories unreal monsters come in human form. The horror, in other words, resides within. Just like a serial killer who seems like a nice guy to his neighbors, werewolves “hide” inside human beings until a full moon; vampires can “pass” as human until they reveal their fangs. The notion of

a threat from within is integral to the terror of In Cold Blood.9 _{Smith isn’t a}

werewolf or a vampire. He is a person just like us, but a killer lurks inside. Like these supernatural counterparts, he can transform at any moment from charming loner to ruthless murderer, which is evident in his confession: “I thought [Herb Clutter] was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat” (244). What makes Smith so terrifying is not simply the suddenness of his transformation here, but the fact that he doesn’t physically turn into a monster. At some level, the town of Holcomb, as well as the reader, fears this lack of visual otherness because it implies that anyone can be like Smith.

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among them. On hearing the news of the murders, one townsperson re- sponds: “If it wasn’t him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street” (69). Another remarks: “What a terrible thing when neighbors can’t look at each other without a kind of wondering!” (70) And even when the kill- ers are apprehended, their suspicions don’t vanish. “For the majority of Holcomb’s population, having lived for seven weeks amid unwholesome rumors, general mistrust, and suspicion, appeared to feel disappointed at being told that the murderer was not someone among themselves” (231). Once they admit that anyone has the potential to be a monster, they can’t stop being afraid of one another.