Horror Films in all their Existential Guts and Glory

by Christopher Barr

Dr. Sam Loomis:  I met him, fifteen years ago.  I was told there was nothing left.  No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.  I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes…the devil’s eyes.  I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simple…evil.    – Halloween (1978)

 


Horror films are at their best when they chill you to the bone, successfully make you feel fear.  These days however we are getting startle movies, which jump out at you but don’t resonate.  Real horror films have to rip your guts out before you leave the theatre or they failed at their job.  So real horror I think is left to the imagination, this was perfectly executed in The Blair Witch Project (1999), where you never see the Blair Witch, but what the film does give you is a blank platform for the audience member to fill in with their own deepest darkest fears. 

Jaws (1975) did this brilliantly as well, as half the film goes by before you see the shark, but you know it’s there because of the masterful score of John Williams.  Blair Witch had a low enough budget that they couldn’t afford a monster so they worked with what they had, nothing.  Jaws did have the budget but the animatronic shark kept breaking so Steven Spielberg, in his genius kept filming anyway with less shark and in the case of both films, this little set back turned them into horror classics.

There is something inherently sexual about slasher movies.  Something pumping and pounding about people being chased down and slaughtered.  This of course is never to be confused with real murder in the real world, which is something that 99.9% of the horror movie going public would never wish to see.  But we love these movies because they aren’t real but feel like they are.  I think it’s like the ‘Brain in a Vat” philosophy where the relationship between mind and body come into question.  You became a witness to what is happening to you, in some cases sexually and in other cases, more unfortunate cases, you witness your own murder.  Your senses inform you of every slash to the face and stab to the body before the brain dies into nothingness.  So watching this on screen can liven up all your senses without all the real death and nothingness.

The granddaddy of horror has got to be Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a film loosely based off the real life killer Ed Gein.  Psycho, to this day remains a tense and nerve-wracking experience, it also marked the birth of the suspenseful slasher film and became a horror classic, a model of how future filmmakers could scare the living hell out of their audiences.  An argument can be made for Peeping Tom, also from 1960 as being the first to ignite the slasher craze, but Psycho is known all over the world as the first film with a psychological twist that made a man into a maniac, slashing his victims with a long shape knife while dressed as his dead mother.

Dracula (1931) was pretty freaky to watch, especially when I was young but I think out of them old horror black and whites, I’d have to say Frankenstein (1931) was my favorite.  It was very odd to me that a person could be made in a lab by another person, by way of various body parts.  I did like the parts with the little kid, where you know the monster wasn’t going to hurt the kid because he in some ways envied him, also the monster seemed to only have issue with the institutional men, those that wished to control him or kill him.  The kid didn’t fear him like the town folk did, and therein lies the tragedy and message of the film, we fear the things we don’t understand and we hate the things we fear.  Also we have a responsibility when it comes to science and in this case biology.  There are certain roads not ethically meant to go down and Dr. Frankenstein paid the ultimate price for going down that road.  This also reminds me of another horror movie about not leaving the dead as they are, dead.  Pet Sematary (1989) was about a place you can bury a dead body and the person would later magically come back to life.  This story, like Frankenstein was about forbidden knowledge, it was about not letting go and becoming desperate in the face of fear, the fear of loneliness.

We are animals and come from a long line of evolutionary violence as a stronger species wiped out a weaker species.  In spite of the fiction that religions hold, that we are birthed out of divine design, we are actually blood thirsty animals that have become domesticated and tranquilized in modern society.  But underneath all the fashion design and the technology lies a curiosity about death, pain and the fear that permeates within us all, a fear of our own death and the pain it might take to get there.  There is something to be said about voyeurism and violence, which dates back to the very birth of civilization and even before then, when we lived in the bush. 

In the case of the Zombie genre of horror films, the fear is being bitten by one and coming back as a brainless, flesh eating, reanimated corpse.  I love zombie movies because you can’t negotiate with zombies and to me, that’s pretty scary and it’s exciting to be scared.  I also enjoy the social commentary often underlying a zombie movie, like with all the Romero films; the zombies are a metaphor for the direction consumer culture is leading us.  We as a society are becoming more and more apathetic to our fellow human beings and more attached to the products corporations advertise to us.  Romero seen this as the death of humanity and that’s why his films often ended with Zombies overtaking the remaining survivors, assimilating them into their collective of bloody conformist.

Alien (1979) is up there, not only as one of my favorite Science Fiction films but also one of my favorite horror films.  It doesn’t get any better than a group of people locked in a confined space with a slimy creature that doesn’t appeal to reason.  One by one, this creature fulfills its evolutionary purpose of expanding its species by killing a weaker species along the way, hiding in the shadows as its terrified prey lurk through the steel, cold hallways of the space mining vessel, Nostromo.  This brilliant use of claustrophobic terror was also seen in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where a group of men in the freezing cold artic fall victim to a multi shape shifting alien that acts like a virus, also mimicking its victim’s likeness in order to jump from one to another to survive.  This fear of isolation follows a family to the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies over winter in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980).  Jack Nicholson plays a man hired to be the caretaker as the hotel is closed for the winter.  He’s a writer that suffers from inadequacy and alcoholism which as a result of his failure in life, goes insane and attempts to kill anything and anyone around him as psychotics tend to do. 

The Exorcist (1973) tells the shilling story of a little girl possessed by a demon and the exorcism required to get that demon to hell out of her.  This film is sick, in all its horrifying glory with the little girls head spinning around on her neck and all the vomit projecting, all over the two thankless priests.  This is one of those movies that a person should do a movie than dinner and not the other way around. 

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) dealt with a disturbing level of sadism, also very realistic and scary as shit.  This film, like Psycho, was loosely based on the necrophilia, cannibalism of real life crazy man Ed Gein.  With Leatherface wielding a chainsaw along with all the meat hooks and graphic violence, if you walked out of the theatre emotionally unscathed then…well…you might want to check yourself into a mental institution for the criminally insane.  This film also acknowledged a change in the current social climate, it showed its audience a form of violence that was a reminder of the direction society itself was heading.  A place where any kind of craziness a human being could think up to do to another human being, was possible.  After two World Wars and the Vietnam War just wrapping up at the time of this film’s release, people were getting the picture that the World is a pretty sick place and it isn’t because of God or vampires or aliens, it was because of us, we did this.  The human being is the monster and 70’s cinema was not sugar coating it anymore.  As in the case of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) where a psycho killer stalked his victims wearing a white mask.  Evil psycho, Michael Myers was the failure of the American dream and as that failure; he spreads his dread to his unsuspecting babysitter victims.  He carries a knife to make his kills up close and personal as humanly possible, so their fear would be their cause of death if he hadn’t got to it first.

Friday the 13^th (1980) followed the tradition of Chainsaw and Halloween where the psycho killer that just wants to slash you to death.  This film presented more gore than Halloween and more special effects, with arrows in the eye, hatchets to the face and throats being slashed on film.  Madman Jason, in his hockey mask became the Crystal Lake killer that murdered screaming teenagers, robbing them of a future of pencil pushing and machine operator professions, but really he robbed their naiveté.  He was the mutated side effect of the industrial revolution; he was nihilism and indifference in an ever expanding concrete and cold technocracy.

“1 – 2 – Freddy’s coming for you, 3 – 4 – Better lock your door, 5 -6 – Grab your crucifix, 7 – 8 – Better stay up late, 9 – 10 – Never sleep again…”

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was one of the greats in the Horror genre, a fresh story about a crazy man that attacks you in your dreams, so much so that the attack is manifested to your waking life thus killing you.  Freddy Kruger with his bladed fingers terrified a group of teenagers in the worst possible place, a place you can’t escape, your mind.  Freddy at the end survived because like in the case of Leatherface, Jason and Michael Myers, nightmares don’t die, fear is everlasting.  But fear is only everlasting through ignorance and these films are well aware that their target audience are impressionable teenagers, who themselves are still finding their legs and learning how to navigate an increasingly complex world, and are easy suckers for fearing what they don’t understand.  The social economical zeitgeist is what works best in films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, rather than a typical slasher movie this film expanded to the mind and the fear of not being conscious during your murder, being helpless to the psychological workings of the unconscious.

After the Horror genre bled itself dry with many sequels and rip-offs, it was looking like it was dead in the grave until Scream (1996) breathed new life into its dying corpse.  That movie succeeded by being aware of the horror movie genre itself, where the killer would quiz his potential victims on horror movies and if they got the answers wrong, they would die a horrible agonizing death.  The movie also didn’t take itself too seriously which is part of what made it work because a lot of those older horror movies are a bit laughable when you look back on them.  The social climate was changing with the advent of the internet and the use of cell phones; altering forever the way we communicate.  Modern victims had to be tricked a different way than they did in the 70’s, the information age demanded that they should know better.  So victims tripping and falling over themselves with a slow moving attacker pursuing them had to be done away.

Horror porn came with the likes of Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), two movies that didn’t use fear in its traditional sense.  These movies showed everything up close and in bloody detail, leaving nothing for the imagination.  Maybe they were pushing beyond the imaginations of the typical movie goer.  I think these films also represented what Romero’s Zombie movies warned us about, the death of humanity.  We live in a time now where nothing is sacred and everything is permitted.  Facebook and Twitter sealed the deal on that, with all the confessions and the full disclosure now seen on the internet.  People appear to have lost their uniqueness for the Faustian deal we all made with consumer culture; we have become Romero’s Zombies, aimlessly moving around from dead-end jobs to shopping centres to watching mindless TV with a lost sense of hope.  Like the Zombies, we have no future to thrive for anymore, we have squandered the gift of civilization and mental growth, we don’t read anymore which I think is death to the imagination, so now we have movies like Saw and all its sequels to just show us what our imaginations couldn’t.   No wonder Zombie movies are so popular in our vain narcissistic society, we love watching things about ourselves.

The one thing I find odd about Horror films is why would we put ourselves through watching them?  Maybe it just confirms the sick side of humanity and a side quite possibly worth celebrating.  There’s a lot to be said about these films.  Do they exploit women; do they punish women for being sexual beings?  Do they fulfill a violence obsessed culture with more brutal violence?  I think in the end they are about life, they are about feeling alive in a directly non-violent way.  It certainly may be true that those in the Roman Empire days, that went to the Coliseum to watch Gladiators actually slaughter other people, are themselves complicit in the act of murder but that can’t be said about Horror films.  What you are watching on the screen is not real, so that can make something that looks brutal and violent actually fun and enjoyable escapism.