(Note: My column Rat Stew appears in the APA Zine: The Reluctant Famulus, edited by Tom Sadler. Please see link on right column of this page.)
Christmas is a time for horror movies so let’s dive in, shall we?
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came up and the question arose as to what movie if any is scarier. After all, we see a young, inexperienced field agent for the FBI, in a new Behavioral Sciences Unit program, facing down not only one of the nastiest, creepiest serial killers in movies, but being fixated upon and later manipulated by what just may be the world’s first virtuoso genius serial killer, Hannibal Lector. (This character in the books is a grandiose deadpan satire on demanding readers, by the way; Thomas Harris is nothing if not layered as a writer.) We are confronted in that movie with an all-too-realistic portrayal of the mundanity of serial criminal violence and gore, and brought to a fever pitch by the terror of not being able to see what’s in the dark all around us, while what lurks there has a pair of night-vision goggles…
What can be scarier?
This led me to think about scary movies in general. Here are some I’ve thought of and what I thought about them.
For scarier than anything, due to its calm, quiet, and inevitable plausibility, I’d vote for the original Dutch version of VANISHED. Utterly chilling and appalling as we watch a heartbroken man search out what happened to his fiancée, who vanished during a car trip they were taking together. What he learns and finds is beyond terrifying. Note: Avoid the American remake, it is risible how they ruined the entire movie for the sake of phony focus group feedback.
PSYCHO is a classic for very good reason. It is a pared-down minimalist masterpiece. Hitchcock made it on a shoestring with his TV show crew on black-and-white stock. He claimed the b&w was to cut back on the garishness of all the blood but that was sheer publicity; he shot it that way for money reasons. It was to be the proverbial “good horror movie” and its quality shines through, from its innovative switch of viewpoint character 20 minutes into the movie — which inaugurated our modern habit of seeing films from beginning to end because Hitch issued a policy that no one would be seated after PSYCHO began running, the first director to do that — to the spectacularly disorienting camera angles and references to German Gothic in the stage setting and lighting.
Hitchcock also gets mentioned for THE BIRDS, in which otherwise lovely and harmless birds become the harbinger for mankind’s doom. The way the story spirals from meet-cute little love story tightly focused on two people to the devastating last image of the Golden Gate Bridge covered in birds, hinting that this is a global phenomenon in the midst of news blackout is masterful.
Hitch directed many scary, suspenseful movies, including very early depictions of psychopathic sociopaths, as in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, (based on Patricia Highsmith novel), and SHADOW OF A DOUBT, (a Gordon McDonnell story), although he made only one overt horror movie, PSYCHO. Still, so many experienced so much tension from The Master of Suspense that Sir Alfred has the kind of Horror reputation Toby Hooper, George A. Romero, and others can only dream of.
THE EXORCIST is up there among the scariest movies, due to sustained suspense, but we cannot today experience the dread movie goers felt back when it debuted. The build-up for it was incredible. Stephen King in a recent interview has stated that he and his wife were tentative about going to see it, and that Tabitha ended up having a half-angry, let’s-get-this-over-with attitude as they went to the theater. They had people freaked out about the bedroom door, which later proved to have more subliminal imagery in it than in most other entire movies put together. So this one, good movie, great social event, cannot really be recapitulated today, even if you show it to someone virgin to it. There simply is not the context of dread anymore.
Not that one needs to dread in order to find a movie scary, but surprises, jumps, those startlements people seem now to equate with scary, are cheap and easy compared to anticipation and dread.
It is that latter pair of chaotic twins, anticipation and dread, that made PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, work so well. By setting us up to expect first odd, then spooky, then terrifying things, they were able to have us stare at a static picture of an ordinary room in an ordinary house at night for long periods of the most unnerving suspense a movie-goer can experience. Brilliant use of absence, a method Hitchcock endorsed. “You must show them something awful, then you can simply threaten to show it again and they’re full of fear,” he would often say. It works like a charm because we’re visual primates.
Worry, too, can creep us out. ROSEMARY’S BABY is insidious, even if it ends in dry camp. (Polanski tends to do that, as he does to even worse effect in THE NINTH GATE, which is otherwise damned good.) We see Mia Farrow at her most waif-like, with cropped hair and bubbly innocence, trusting and pure, and we see the shadows gather around her, and we know not to trust goofy old Ruth Gordon or overly suave Maurice Evans or crusty, gruff old Ralph Bellamy, let alone rely on self-absorbed, superficial John Cassavetes to save her. We care about this pregnant little girl who has apparently been raped by either her husband or some stranger or maybe even Satan, and we are riveted as we watch her grow increasingly trapped by their web of deceit and ulterior agendas.
As mentioned, it goes spilling over at the line, “He has his father’s eyes…” and the movie ends with a campy smirk the foregoing does not deserve.
As to THE NINTH GATE, which is a sub-plot lifted from the superb novel The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverete, we follow Johnny Depp as a rare book detective tracking down a tome for a mysterious, rich, and shady Frank Langella. Into the labyrinth our hero goes, bent cigarettes, rumpled suit, and leather satchel included gratis, but worry not: For every Satanist uncovered there seems to be a street-wise, touch angel to slam him out of harm’s way. The movie decays into scenery-chewing of the highest camp as things get hot, but the final shot is straight out of the Tarot deck and brings things home with a fillip of dignity, of a kind. Polanksi is fascinating when dealing with unnerving and odd people and their relationships, then loses interest when mere plot is all that’s left.
Curiously, the core McGuffin of THE NINTH GATE, that there is a cabal of decadent European aristocracy that celebrates the dark arts with orgies of black mass and so on, in order to maintain their talon grip on the fraying tatter of power they once enjoyed, (and to console themselves by being different from regular folks, I suppose), is the same McGuffin one finds at the heart of Kubrick’s final film, EYES WIDE SHUT, released the same year as THE NINTH GATE.
Although not a horror movie per say, it has horrifying implications about how power works in society, and how those who are connected enjoy an existence quite distinct from what we think of as normal. It is a demimonde in which killing a prostitute at a Christmas party is either an entirely understandable and forgettable accident, or a sacrifice to darker pagan gods, or perhaps to Satan, again. That formidable enemy is not alluded to directly but thoughts of the devil are unavoidable once the Tom Cruise character follows the Nicole Kidman character down the rabbit hole where he is not welcome… but she is.
EYES WIDE SHUT is based on a 1926 novella by Arthur Schnitzler called “Dream Story”, a work worth seeking out for its prescience, and for its reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
RED STATE, Kevin Smith’s movie about redneck religion and how it dominates society, along with strongly influencing our economy of violence, is terrifying in its depictions and implications; far too accurate for comfort.
This movie parallels FRAILTY, directed by and starring Bill Paxton as a highly religious father who raises his boys right — they kill demons when they come across them. Only problem is, the demons they see are just ordinary people who cross their paths. Worse, he makes his very young boys join in with the killing. It’s psychopath lessons for the home schooled, and appalling to see. The excellent cast includes Matthew McConaughhey and Powers Booth. Recommended, although again, not a Universal Monster Movie type of horror.
THE RUINS, screenplay by Scott Smith from his novel, manages to capture the book perfectly, although the reading experience is perhaps even more intense because the story is presented with no chapter breaks and the reader, stuck in all real-time narration start to finish, never gets a breather whatsoever. Bravura writing, vivid and realistic, deliver a nightmare vacation with mythic overtones.
Speaking of bad vacations in horror movies, THE HOSTEL is a descent into hell for innocent college students who discover that the eastern bloc countries, although perhaps unspoiled by common tourism, can be hard to take and harder to escape.
One is reminded of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, Toby Hooper’s brilliantly indirect movie based on Sawney Bean’s clan and other well-known Fortean facts about families that believe in eating dinner together when guests show up.
Rod Zombie deconstructs this pattern for his movie HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES, which starts at over-the-top, then floors it toward any and every edge he can find. It is a wild, fun ride with surprising touches of wit and many sage nods to slasher and gore movies, as well as to grindhouse films.
Kubrick’s THE SHINING, inspired by Stephen King’s rather different novel of the same name, (which started on a vacation King was taking), offers us the disintegration of Nicholson’s character in elaborate and spectacular surreality. Even if Kubrick leaves out King’s supernaturalism and opts for ice instead of flame at the end, in fitting with Kubrick’s icy existential take on reality, (think of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, where the most human character was the HAL 9000 computer), the movie is a tour-de-force that hits on the psychology as hard as a frozen axe blade swung full strength by a hyped up dry alcoholic.
DIARY OF A MADMAN with Vincent Price is a great one, based on Guy de Maupassant’s chilling story “The Horla”, itself encapsulating a scary idea many writers have touched upon, from Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse” through many of my own stories. The good man compelled to do evil by an unseen impulse, or voice, (shades of paranoid schizophrenia, which de Maupassant suffered from at the end), is terrifying. That we’re not in control of ourselves.
Maybe that is the key element in all horror movies, that we can find ourselves in situations that take away our self-control, our sense of driving our own destiny or of choosing our own moves. It’s an unsettling notion, to say the least, and exploiting it in its many variations is what a good Christmas scare is all about.
So what comes to mind when you think of scary movies and what about them is notable?
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