Ever since there have been human beings, there’s probably been wonder, fascination, and fear of the unknown, as well as the unanswerable question of why bad things happen for what seems to be no apparent reason. An old movie with George Burns as the creator in chief posited the wisdom of dualism, with Burns’ God stating he could never figure out how to make a top without a bottom, an off without an on, happy without sad, or good without evil. This is represented in many philosophies, probably best in the yin and yang concept, representing (among other things) chaos and order, light and dark, and male and female. However, just like everything else, there are alternative opinions. For example, author C.S. Lewis, a Christian apologist who worked his faith into many of his works, believed the problem of evil was not the conflict between two separate and equal entities, but that evil only exists as a dark reflection of good. To Lewis, the natural state of the universe is perfection, since it was created by a perfect God, who passed on that perfection to his creations before they fucked it up with original sin. Therefore, any evil which exists inside that universe is only an aberration from the norm, not a different aspect of the universe itself.
This becomes important when looking at ideas that have been part of scary stories and horror for centuries, and which still perpetuate to this day. One of my favorite meta pop-culture arguments to ponder is the idea that the horror genre is actually “innately conservative, even reactionary” in ideology. The essence of fear as a tool to elicit an emotional response is to “re-establish our feelings of essential normality” in relation to the threat of change, whether that change be a fear of death or even radical social change. That’s why even though scary movies have more than enough violence and bare breasts to make most moral guardians clutch their pearls, most have a fundamental morality which allows the audience to accept the enjoyment of watching horrible things happen to people who break certain rules, with many of those rules aligning with the aims of Focus on the Family and other conservative assholes.
In fact, the Trump administration has been likened to Pennywise the Dancing Clown of Stephen King’s It, an entity which feeds on human fears while making targets of the vulnerable and exacerbating the overall negative emotions of everyone in the community. The great and terrible darkness we fight is not lurking to get at us from another dimension or a hell below us. It’s right here with us staring back in any mirror. The sad thing is these monsters are not just things which scurry about in the dark. The monsters of today stand in broad daylight wearing suits with flag lapel pins. These demons prey on children and the weak to gain their power. They have a cult of followers, some of which may be our own family members, united in fear and worship of their leaders’ every lie, some of whom lash out in violence against those who don’t believe.
For most people, Halloween is a holiday where little kids put on costumes and go trick-or-treating around neighborhoods. It's also a day/weekend where grownups get to play dress up and drunkenly make fools of themselves. But what is Halloween without a scary story? And what is the nature of those spooky tales? Most of the time they are rooted in very real issues.
So … what scares you?
The Rules
These movies usually operate under a set of rules, which conform to traditional morality. Any character that violates these rules tends to be either maimed, tortured, or killed in varying and creative ways.
- Teenagers + Premarital Sex = They Will Die.
- Also, as your friends/family are being hacked to bits day after day, it just sets the mood and is always the perfect time to have sex with the boyfriend, who may or may not be the killer.
- Teenagers + Alcohol and Drug Use = They Will Die.
- Instead of running out the front door when confronted by serial killer/monster/alien, characters will instead trap themselves inside their domicile by running up the stairs, or into dark basements and closets.
- If said characters should be smart enough to run out the front door, brand-new cars, which had no signs of problems earlier in the film, will not start.
- Do NOT go into the bathroom!!! Bad shit lurks in bathtubs and behind shower curtains.
- Do NOT go into the woods if you hear an eerie sound coming from that direction! Whatever it is can stay in the fucking woods. Let the squirrels and deer deal with it.
- If the lights go out, do NOT look for the circuit breaker! Look for the damn door!
- Cell phones and flashlights are affected with either low batteries or no signal at the most inopportune times.
- If something from outer space should land near you, do NOT be curious by running up to it and poking it with a stick. Run the fuck away!
- Although this trope is not as prevalent today as it once was, gays and trans folk tend to be serial killers in a lot of movie plots. Those stories usually try to justify it by having the character's sexual "confusion" be a part of the killer's psychosis, which leads to the implication that being gay and/or transgender is sick.
- Apparently all evil monsters, aliens, and serial killers are racists, since people of color hardly ever survive, and usually die first in horror movies.
- If you should hear something that sounds like screaming and/or a death rattle coming from the other room, the words "Let's go check it out" should not come out of your mouth. And if your friend, boyfriend, or girlfriend should say it, they're an idiot that's going to get you killed, possessed, or eaten.
- If in a group larger than three people, the characters must not do the logical thing of staying together when trying to escape from the haunted house, scary-ass woods, or other place in the middle of nowhere. No, they must split up so they can "Cover More Ground" and be killed off one by one.
- People over the age of 30 are useless. This includes the police and anyone of any authority. No matter how much evidence you may have that weird shit is happening, your parents will not believe you. In fact, the more you protest, the more they will think you are crazy and take actions that will indirectly help the killer to kill you (e.g., parents in the Nightmare On Elm Street films loading their kids up with sleeping pills).
- The character set up at the beginning of the film as the town drunk/idiot/batshit crazy person will always know more than everyone else by the end of the film. In fact, at some point toward the end, he will explain the entire plot to the main character (and audience), as well as the motivation for the monster/killer.
- The lead female character, who has done nothing but scream, run, and cry for 90% of the movie, will display a clever genius-level intellect by film's end when confronting the unspeakable evil.
- No monster or villain is ever dead, even when killed in the way that is supposed to kill them once and for all. And victory only comes through sacrifice. A character will do something incredibly brave, give up something of great importance, or get killed/seriously injured in the process.
Sometimes the scariest thing in movies or books is not the killer, monster, or demon jumping out of the dark. Sometimes it's the individual or societal anxieties that express very real fear-causing aspects of life, albeit in grossly exaggerated ways. Some of the best works scare people with what they can get the viewer or reader to imagine to be behind the creaking door, without ever spelling out what was really behind the door, or even if there was really anything behind the door. For a little kid, what lurks underneath their bed can be anything the fear of their mind can imagine. The best horror brings people back to that childhood innocence and then exploits it.
► Social Horror
After the success of Key & Peele, Jordan Peele proved he could do more than just make people laugh with his directorial debut Get Out, which was both critically acclaimed and a box office success. Get Out is a “social thriller” in which the horror scenario is a way for the story to expound into a damning satire about objectification and exploitation of black people and black culture, while assailing a type of white liberal guilt that talks a good game but does nothing to change anything. With his second outing as director, Us bases its action around a family being terrorized by violent doppelgängers attempting to take their place. The film is just as full of subtext as Get Out, but this time it’s a contemplation about the nature of how we define ourselves as persons, and the ways it spirals out into the lies we want to believe about societies
Other examples of the genre:
- The Purge series of films was originally written off as nothing more than schlock, but each new iteration has made the theme of social inequality more explicit. Set in a future where a right-wing party called the New Founding Fathers of America has instituted an annual holiday where all crimes are legal for one night under the claim of purging negative emotions, the propaganda of the regime claims instituting the event has resulted in 1% unemployment and an “America reborn.” In actuality, the purge is intended as a legalized form of mass murder, in which the poor and other undesirable elements of society are eliminated through death squads, and the purge itself is a metaphor for the destruction done by the social inequalities created by poverty. In the Purge films, the wealthy are able to protect themselves or take part in the holiday with a degree of safety, while the poor are preyed upon by racists and elements of government who have judged them to be burdens or non-human. The Purge thus becomes a story for how people will rationalize abandoning the unfortunate if given only a perception of fairness, even when the result is not (e.g., elevation of the idea of the free market as judging “winners” and “losers,” without allowing for the idea that hundreds of years of bias and discrimination plays a part in some of these things).
- Dawn of the Dead—The zombie apocalypse is a situation that brings out the worst tendencies in humans, and turns our best qualities against us. In order to survive, a balance has to be found between the two. With almost any zombie film, they can be seen in such an entirely different light when you realize the zombies aren't meant to be "evil" or even "the villains." The zombies are no different than a thunderstorm, or a hurricane, or an earthquake. A thunderstorm can cause bad things to happen, but a thunderstorm in and of itself isn't evil. It's just a part of nature that we deal with, and how we deal with it can sometimes depend on what kind of person we are. Therefore, the true evil in most zombie apocalypses is humanity. With the world crumbling around them, the human characters still can't put aside their differences (whether race, class or ego) to save each other. The survivors would rather fight over the last scraps of civilization, or hold on to prejudices that serve to help no one survive.
From Zack Handlen at the A.V. Club:
One of the core tenets of the zombie story, going all the way back to when George Romero basically created the genre in Night Of The Living Dead, is that in times of great stress and danger, people rarely make the right choices. Actually, that’s not quite right. People have instincts, after all, and those instincts kept the species alive until we figured out the whole “fire” thing. What Romero did is demonstrate how a threat is at its most deadly when it gives the victims time to debate; to talk amongst themselves, to doubt, to second guess, to grow bitter over proposed strategies, to resent the leader, to tear each other down, so that when trouble does arrive, no one is in any position to deal with it. It’s not that Romero considered team-work impossible. Just that it’s a lot more difficult than the Boy Scouts would have us believe, and that death doesn’t automatically bring out what’s best in us.
► Religious Horror
According to a recent survey, more than two-thirds of Americans are affiliated with some form of religion or faith, although those numbers seem to be in rapid decline. Religious horror basically takes the CliffsNotes version and various apocrypha of those religions and turns it into a scary story. For example, take the biblical book of Revelation. It's been the source of many, many spooky stories. However, the word “antichrist” does NOT appear anywhere in that book of the Bible. The word does appear in other books of the Bible (e.g., First Epistle of John), but not in the context or meaning that is behind supernatural horror movies like The Omen.
To get the little kid from The Omen, one has to combine characteristics of both "Beasts" from the Book of Revelation (i.e., the "Beast from the Earth" and the "Beast from the Sea") and the "Man of Lawlessness" in Second Thessalonians. This sort of thing happens in other areas too—for example, angels. The most common conception of an angel is a humanoid figure with wings and a halo, usually carrying a harp or sword. However, for the most part, the description given of what an angel looks like in the Bible is much, much different. In fact, the Bible's description of angels is more in line with Lovecraftian Eldritch abominations mentioned above. And that description holds true across the Abrahamic religions. The Quran describes a meeting between the Archangel Gabriel and the Prophet Muhammad in which Muhammad sees Gabriel's true form and is terrified.
In any horror movie, if it comes time to battle the forces of darkness and there is a possibility of defeating the evil by some vestiges of religion, the means by which it will be defeated will probably be quasi-Catholic. So thanks a lot for nothing, Martin Luther and the rest of you Protestants! The reason for this is the Catholic Church is old and has a history of ornate ritual and majestic symbolism. Plus, cursing out a demon in Latin just sounds cooler.
Notable examples of the genre:
- Hereditary—Written and directed by Ari Aster, the film, which many critics have called a “landmark” and the “scariest” movie in recent memory, is ostensibly about a family falling apart after the death of the main character’s mother. However, the secrets held by the mother lead to some heads coming off, and a breakdown of mental faculties. A pervading theme in the film is the idea of how people deal with grief, and no matter how much one may try there is no such thing as true “control” in this life. The characters are like dolls in a dollhouse being manipulated by outside forces.
- The Witch—An outcast family of puritans in 17th century New England build a farm on the edge of a large, secluded forest. One day, the family’s youngest child disappears and is killed for flying ointment by something or someone sinister. The film then documents how this act pulls the family apart in religious hysteria and madness.
- Rosemary’s Baby—The 1968 film by Roman Polanski, based on a novel by Ira Levin, is mainly a supernatural horror film, but it also has elements of psychological horror. The main tension of the story comes from a woman (Mia Farrow) coming to believe that everyone around her is manipulative and conspiring against her, and the conflict of whether she's right or going insane. Of course, she is right and her dickhead of a husband (John Cassavetes) made a deal with cultists to let Satan rape her for some acting gigs.
- The Exorcist—Based on a novel by William Peter Blatty and the first horror film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, the story was supposedly inspired by a claimed case of real demonic possession. The movie follows the life of a young girl named Regan (Linda Blair) as her physical and psychological state deteriorates. As the demon Pazuzu takes hold more drastic changes occur, which include green projectile vomit, spinning of the head, and bed levitation. The behind-the-scenes happenings on this film are also interesting. Director William Friedkin has a bit of a reputation for not exactly caring about actor safety if it means getting a good take for his films. With The Exorcist, Friedkin took enforced method acting to a new level. Max von Sydow and Jason Miller's shivering and visible breath in the film is no illusion. Friedkin refrigerated the set to get a convincing depiction of how hard it would be to keep chanting while freezing to death. Friedkin would also fire a gun off in between takes in order to keep everyone jittery and on edge. And on one occasion, just before shooting, he slapped one of the actors across the face as hard as he could in order to get the actor scared/enraged for the take. Friedkin's methods also caused permanent spinal damage to Ellen Burstyn for the scene where Burstyn's character is thrown across the room by the possessed Regan. Part of this film’s infamy comes from having a (possessed) teenage girl masturbate with a crucifix and spout lines like: “Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!!” On the first day of filming the exorcism sequence, Linda Blair's delivery of her foul-mouthed dialogue so disturbed Max von Sydow that he actually forgot his lines.
The interesting thing about both The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby is the subtext of both films is not really religious or supernatural. Rosemary’s Baby connects to real fears that women have during pregnancy of the possibility that something is wrong with their baby, that they’re losing control of their body, and the situation is one they’re experiencing but have little control over. The movie just adds in Satanic rape and devil worshipers.
The true horror of The Exorcist exists whether one believes in demonic possession, since the crux of the story is really about helplessness and a parent’s fear of having something wrong with a child that no one seems able to fix. In this respect, whether it’s mental illness, cancer, or a demon, the story connects on that emotional level.
► The Haunted House
1982's Poltergeist is now considered a classic of this particular genre. And that's interesting for a number of reasons, given some of the controversy and trivia which surrounds the movie. Poltergeist is a great example of a theme usually associated with Steven Spielberg's movies from the late '70s to the mid '80s (i.e., suburban, middle-class families dealing with extraordinary circumstances). One of the knocks usually levied against Spielberg is he idealizes American suburbia and visualizes it in a nostalgic tone. That's not exactly true. In E.T. and Poltergeist, both families have flaws and suburban life is one in which unsupervised children stay up all hours watching TV, eating junk food, surrounded by products and things which provide no meaning, while living in cookie-cutter neighborhoods. But if Spielberg sentimentalizes anything, he idealizes the ability of a family's love to overcome all obstacles.
Elements for what became E.T. and Poltergeist are derived from the script of an aborted '70s movie that would have been called Night Skies. In the story for Night Skies, a team of alien scientists land and begin testing around a family's home for any signs of sapient life. The aliens eventually turn their attention to the family itself, and begin terrorizing them. Melissa Mathison used the idea of aliens in search of life and communication for E.T., while Spielberg re-purposed the notion of a family being subjected to paranormal forces for Poltergeist. Also, the film borrows from Richard Matheson's short story “The Shores of Space,” which was adapted for television as The Twilight Zone episode "Little Girl Lost."
Matheson wrote the short story based on a real-life incident involving his young daughter, who fell off her bed while asleep and rolled against a wall. Despite hearing her daughter's cries for help, Matheson's wife was initially unable to locate her daughter.
Other tidbits about the movie:
- Skeletons in the pool: Allegedly, the skeletons in the pool scene features real skeletons. At that point in time at least, it was cheaper to buy real skeletons than to purchase prop-skeletons made out of plastic. Also, JoBeth Williams was afraid all of the lights around the pool might fall in and electrocute her while shooting the scene. So Steven Spielberg waded into the pool, and told her it was going to be okay. And he was so sure it was going to be okay that if the lights were to fall in, he would die with her. So, when watching the scene, Spielberg is actually in the pool with her (but off-camera).
- No deaths: This is considered among the best horror movies ever made, and none of the characters die in it. And the movie is actually rated PG. But, to be fair, it's an '80s PG. There's no way it wouldn't at least get a PG-13 in today's market, especially with the scene of a man ripping his face off. Plus, Poltergeist was originally rated R before Spielberg appealed and was able to secure the PG.
- Who actually directed the movie?: Officially, Tobe Hooper is listed as the director of the movie. But since the day it was released, there has been speculation that Hooper didn't really direct Poltergeist. Spielberg had a clause in his contract with Universal Pictures that stated he was forbidden from directing anything else while making E.T. However, Spielberg's fingerprints are all over this film, and no other Tobe Hooper film really matches the vibe of Poltergeist. And from the stories about the production, it seems like it was more of a TV-production type of directing, where Hooper called "action" and "cut," but most of the creative decisions were made by Spielberg, who also did the hiring, put Michael Kahn in the editing room, and developed and co-wrote the script.
- The Curse: After the deaths of Dominique Dunne and Heather O'Rourke, a myth began that the movie was cursed. However, the "curse" seems to have avoided almost every other actor in the film, as well as Hooper and Spielberg.
- That scary-ass clown almost killed the kid: The clown scene is probably one of the most infamous moments of the movie. Whenever I hear people talk about Poltergeist, that damn clown comes up. It's interesting to note that when Robbie (Oliver Robins) is being strangled in the scene, the material around Robins's neck became so tight he actually was choking. So much so that during the scene he screamed "I can't breathe!" Both Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper thought Robins was ad-libbing and continued to give him direction. It was only after Spielberg saw Robins's face turning blue the scene was stopped.
- Mood whiplash: Jerry Goldsmith's theme for the movie is so peaceful and soothing that it becomes unnerving when contrasted with the events that happen in the film. I remember the first time I saw the movie, and you get to the end where the family escapes to a Holiday Inn after skeletons come out of the pool, a closet becomes an inter-dimensional throat that tries to swallow two children, coffins shoot out of the ground, and a house implodes. And then that lullaby comes up with the credits, and it feels so creepy.
The thing that made Poltergeist work so well and scare the shit out of so many children is that it's set in a "normal" house and neighborhood, instead of the spooky haunted mansion/castle that had been the standard in most horror movies up to that point. So, if this normal house could be haunted with trees that want to eat little boys, killer toy clowns, and skeletons in the pool, anyone's home could potentially suck them into a closet.
Other distinctive examples of the haunted house genre:
- The Haunting (1963)—Based on the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, Robert Wise's film follows a group investigating the weirdness of Hill House. Many suspicious accidental deaths have happened at the home, and Eleanor "Nell" Vance (Julie Harris) has volunteered for a study on paranormal activity conducted by Dr. John Markway (Richard Johnson). Nell is a lonely, withdrawn woman who supposedly had a supernatural experience at the age of 10 and has devoted her life to caring for her invalid mother. Two other participants: Luke Sanderson (Russ Tamblyn), who stands to inherit Hill House, and Theodora (Claire Bloom) a supposed psychic. It's left to the viewer to decide whether anything supernatural actually took place, or the ghosts and haunting are figments of the characters’ decreasing sanity.
- The Shining—Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, loosely based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, centers on Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), his wife (Shelley Duvall) and son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Jack is an alcoholic writer who takes a job as the caretaker of the isolated Overlook Hotel during the winter. Torrance is warned the previous caretaker snapped and killed his family, but takes the job anyway. As time passes, Danny begins to exhibit psychic abilities, and Jack's sanity slips as the hotel begins manipulating him toward murder. Theories as to Kubrick's intentions for the film run the gamut from possible to borderline insane, with some seeing it as a commentary on Native American genocide to others alleging the movie was Kubrick's subtle way of confessing to faking the Apollo moon landings.
- The Amityville Horror (1979)—There is a house on Long Island at 112 Ocean Avenue, Amityville, New York, with a weird history. The facts that everyone can agree to is on Nov. 13, 1974, 23-year-old Ronald "Butch" DeFeo, Jr. shot his parents, two brothers, and two sisters with a .35 caliber Marlin rifle while they slept. DeFeo attempted to plead insanity, claiming voices had told him to commit the murders. However, he later recanted that story and admitted he killed his family while drunk and high on heroin. On Dec. 18, 1975, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the home with their family, and left 28 days later. What happened during those 28 days is heavily disputed and the source of more than a dozen lawsuits and many films. The Lutzes claim the house was haunted and they fled for their lives. The alternative explanation is the Lutzes bought a house the family couldn't afford, and concocted a story to sell books and gain notoriety. It should be noted there have been families living in the house since 1975. None of them have reported anything supernatural at the home. The only evidence ever presented as possible proof is a photograph taken in 1976 by Ed and Lorraine Warren's team of paranormal investigators, which seems to depict a young boy with glowing white eyes who is peeking out of a doorway. But others argue the photo is concocted and is of one of the Warren's team using an infrared camera to give the effect around the eyes.
- Hell House—Written by Richard Matheson and published in 1971, as well as adapted into the film The Legend of Hell House in 1973, the story of Hell House concerns a team of investigators hired by a dying millionaire, who wants proof of life after death, to investigate the Belasco House. The Belasco House is nicknamed "Hell House" because of the acts of depravity, perversion, and murder that have occurred at the home. The story pits spirituality and science against each other, as each member of the team tries to reason the events that occur at the home through their own perspectives and the house plays on their insecurities.
► Cosmic Horror
If there's one theme that resonates in H.P. Lovecraft's stories, it's how he gets across a nihilism of how insignificant humanity appears in the grand scheme of things within the tales. Not only are there strange, monstrous Eldritch abominations out there unknown to man that might kill us all or drive us mad at the very thought of their true nature, but the strange, monstrous things really don't give a shit about humanity one way or the other. It's just that they would not think twice about killing us, since it would be no different to them then stepping on a bug while going from point A to point B would be to us.
The other interesting thing about Lovecraft and this theme is how his work can be viewed as a reflection of racism. The biggest threat in Lovecraft's works is the unknown: discovery and knowledge always leads to a bad place, and "miscegenation" between humans and things that are not human creates abominations. In private letters, Lovecraft wrote about his dislike of racial impurity.
Notable works of this particular genre:
- At the Mountains of Madness—Geologist William Dyer is the leader of an expedition to Antarctica in 1930. While digging for ice cores, an advance group, led by Professor Lake, uncovers the frozen bodies of things unknown to science that can't be classified. Contact is lost with the advance group and Dyer's party goes to their last known location to only find a ruined camp and the slaughtered remains of Lake's party. Dyer and a graduate student decide to venture further over the mountains to investigate. What they find drives one man insane, and the other is left trying to stop a second Arctic expedition from taking place, but no one will believe the reason why.
- The Thing—Considered a flop after its initial release, John Carpenter's The Thing gained a huge cult following and is now considered one of his best films. Based on the John W. Campbell novella Who Goes There?, which was more loosely adapted by Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby as the 1951 film The Thing from Another World, Carpenter's film features not only an alien creature that's bizarre in its biology and who seems to have no interest in communication, but the tension of the story is predicated on a paranoia that can never truly go away given the threat. In any dangerous situation, the odds of survival go up if you can act rationally together as a team with the people around you. But how do you do that if you can't trust that the people around you are actually who they are?
- IT—Based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King, IT tells the story of a group of children combating a shape-shifting, cosmic entity that has taken the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown around the town of Derry, Maine. The creature has existed for eons, causing death and destruction whenever it awakens from hibernation, feeding on humans and children especially, instilling fear in them in order to “salt the meat.” The story hits many of King’s favorite motifs: the power of belief, especially child-like belief, and the facade of nostalgia. In fact, there are some striking similarities between the works of Steven Spielberg and Stephen King. In both, there’s a tendency for father figures to be absent or out of touch, children are better able to deal with the wonder of the extraordinary than adults, and the unity found in the love of family and true friendship is usually shown to be more powerful than the worst of evils. Where they differ is that Spielberg’s work glows with a sort of optimism, while King looks at memories of things past cynically and positions it as a facade which obscures something bad. And, ultimately, Pennywise is a bully … of a different sort.
"The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years — if it ever did end — began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain."
—Opening line of Stephen King’s
IT
- The Blob—Pro tip for all of you out there: if a meteorite should land in your vicinity, and gelatinous goo crawls out of said meteorite, please don't poke it with a stick. Otherwise you might get your face melted off and devoured by a giant alien phagocyte.
- The Conspiracy Against the Human Race—Depending on how you look at it, the philosophy of Thomas Ligotti's nonfiction novel was either paid homage or outright stolen for Matthew McConaughey's Rust Cohle in HBO's True Detective. Ligotti argues the very nature of reality is horrific. That we are paradoxical creatures, which are little more than "thinking meat," created by a universe that doesn't care.
We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does ... And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people ... Human existence is a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness—parent of all horrors.
For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.
► Gothic Horror
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel. Originally published in serial form for a magazine in 1890, Wilde's story tells the tale of a young attractive man named Dorian Gray who is the muse (and as close as you could get in the 19th century to a gay object of affection) for artist Basil Hallward. Dorian's life takes a turn after Basil paints a portrait of Dorian, and Dorian begins to worry his appearance will fade with time. Enter Lord Henry, who leads Dorian into a life of self-indulgence and corruption. Dorian cruelly rejects the affection of Sibyl Vane, and this act creates a chain of events that culminates in murder and destruction. Years pass, but Dorian doesn't age. But his image in the painting does.
Critics charged the story was indecent and immoral. Moreover, Wilde was put on trial under English sodomy laws for acts of “gross indecency” after his affair with Lord Alfred Douglas was made public by Douglas's father. The Picture of Dorian Gray was used as evidence at Wilde's trial, where he was eventually convicted and sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895.
Charles Gill (prosecutor): What is "the love that dare not speak its name"?
Oscar Wilde: "The love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art, like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as "the love that dare not speak its name," and on that account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an older and a younger man, when the older man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it, and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
Notable examples of the genre:
- Dracula—Bram Stoker's story is not the origin of the vampire myth, but most of the modern elements of vampire stories are taken from Dracula. The vampire story is usually seen as a metaphor for sexual anxieties and venereal disease. The victims in vampire stories are usually female, they come under the "thrall" of an attractive man, and that experience either leaves them dead or permanently changed.
- The Pit and the Pendulum—Edgar Allan Poe is considered one of the best writers of Gothic fiction, with prime examples being his poem The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, or the beating of The Tell-Tale Heart. With The Pit and the Pendulum, it's a short story first published in 1842 and details vividly the sensations felt by an unnamed narrator as he experiences sadistic torture at the hands of the Spanish Inquisition. Interestingly, the story has many elements of what people now call "torture porn" in horror movies.
- Frankenstein—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has a subtext of a fear that science and technology are encroaching on the territory of the gods. Hence the novel's subtitle: The Modern Prometheus.
I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.
► Psychological Horror
Director Michael Haneke is probably best known for films such as Funny Games, The White Ribbon, and Amour, all of which received much critical acclaim. However, his films are also a place where hope goes to die.
There are movies I can really appreciate and think are great works of art, but probably never want to see again. I pretty much have that reaction to all of Haneke's films. Haneke's The Seventh Continent is a haunting film which sticks with you, and leaves the audience contemplating the situation. The movie depicts a middle-class Austrian family that slowly destroys itself. The mental process by which someone decides they don't want to live in this world anymore can be fascinating to dissect. And The Seventh Continent does that by looking at a husband and wife that are successful, but numb to their lives. One day they decide to quit their jobs, withdraw every penny they have from the bank, and tell their young daughter the family is "moving to Australia."
One of the most disturbing sequences in the movie is when the husband and wife methodically destroy each and every one of their possessions.
Other examples of this genre:
- Psycho—Pretty much most of Alfred Hitchcock's filmography could be listed here. Based on the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert Bloch and loosely inspired by the crimes of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein (and a lot of movie murderers are inspired by Gein), Hitchcock's Psycho has two big twists, but is mostly remembered for the shower scene. The movie begins as a crime drama that has elements of film noir, and then shifts once things get to the Bates Motel.
- Blue Velvet—The opening of David Lynch's Blue Velvet is a montage of a beautiful suburban community, with all the vestiges of Norman Rockwell Americana, and finally ends on a man having a stroke while tending to his perfectly manicured lawn. The camera then pushes into the yard and we see all of the bugs crawling under the surface, which is a metaphor for Frank Booth's (Dennis Hopper) existence in the town. This movie is considered one of Lynch's best and is somewhat infamous for Roger Ebert criticizing it as misogynistic in its treatment of Isabella Rossellini.
- Suspiria—A young American dancer who enters a prestigious German dance academy. The academy is surrounded by weirdness, disappearances, and murder, which is ultimately revealed to be the work of The Three Mothers, leaders of a coven of witches. The original 1977 film is considered one of director Dario Argento’s finest films and a classic example of surreal horror with a distinctive visual style.
- Fatal Attraction—Ever notice the trait usually shared by Femme Fatale killers in thrillers? They're sexually aggressive. In most works, if a woman likes to have sex, she will almost always either be vapid, treated like a whore, or ultimately fall into being depicted as the "crazy bitch" in the story. The first time I saw Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction as a teen, I thought Glenn Close's Alex was a monster, and that she's tormenting this poor guy and his family. Now, every time I see it I see how awful Michael Douglas's Dan is, and how he exacerbates the situation. He cheats on his wife, knows on day two that he fucked someone who is very unstable. And when confronted with the knowledge that she's pregnant, he does everything he can to sweep it under the rug and/or browbeat Alex into going away. There's a great case to be made that for the first two-thirds of Fatal Attraction, Alex is a victim of the story. But everything changes after the bunny rabbit on the stove. From that point on, the audience wants her dead. This is also the reason why the film’s original Madam Butterfly-esque ending was changed to one that turns the Close character into one that would be at home in any slasher horror movie.
► Science-Fiction Horror
No matter how much a scientist, corporation or other form of authority is told their experiment/expedition is dangerous, smart people will ignore all the warnings staring them in the face and proceed to unleash something that should have stayed hidden forever, horrifically mutate themselves and others, or put the existence of every man, woman, and child in danger.
Or maybe the things which come from the sky seem to have the worst tendencies of humans given a new form. If people fear aliens, they fear them because they’re afraid they’ll treat us in the same shitty way we’ve treated every other underclass we’ve exploited through history.
- A Quiet Place—Over the course of three months in 2020, humanity is on the brink of extermination after the appearance of aliens who react with deadly violence to sound. All attempts to combat these aliens have failed. The only defense is to make as little noise as possible. The movie follows a family as they try to survive in this changed environment. Directed by and starring John Krasinski (The Office), who wrote the screenplay with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck, the film examines a very real and adult fear about protecting one’s children.
- The Fly (1986)—Canadian film director David Cronenberg is known for using body horror in his movies. And The Fly is a prime example of it. Very loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story and the 1958 film of the same name, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is trying to work out the kinks of the teleportation device he's been working on in secret, but decides to bring in journalist Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) to document the work. Brundle falls in love with Veronica as he continues his work. However, things take a fateful turn after Brundle decides to test the device on himself and fails to notice that a house fly was inside the teleportation pod too. The transporter becomes a gene splicer and slowly turns Brundle into Brundlefly. Cronenberg's movie has been interpreted as a metaphor for the isolation and feeling of detachment from humanity that aging and terminal disease can have for some. The makeup for the stages of Brundle's conversion was based on the asymmetry of real deformities.
- Alien—The 1979 film by Ridley Scott has been widely hailed and has been hugely influential in both the horror and science fiction genres. Because of that, the original film is notable for having one of the first truly strong female characters, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), that defied many of the stereotypes of women in both genres. Ripley isn't defined by the men around her, or by her relationship to them. Weaver's Ripley is a fully realized character that is dealing with a shitty situation the best she can. The spaceship Nostromo becomes a haunted house where the H.R. Giger-designed xenomorph stalks the crew. And the alien itself plays on a fear of rape. Not only does this creature kill you, but it defiles your body and forces you to serve its interests. And as crazy as the reproduction cycle seen in the Alien franchise might seem, it actually does have a basis in the biology of Earth. Yes, Mother Nature can be as scary, if not scarier than a horror film. The xenomorphs have similarities to the parasitoid qualities of wasps, who use other species as hosts for their larvae.
- Aliens—One crack made against Aliens is that it's an "action movie" and either created or uses a lot of familiar tropes of that genre. However, that's not exactly fair. Yes, it's an action movie, but James Cameron put a lot of subtext into Aliens. Supposedly, Cameron based the story around being a metaphor for Vietnam. The Aliens have no technology, but are an intelligent group who overcome all the weapons and gadgets of the technologically superior force. Moreover, Aliens builds on the idea of the greed of Weyland-Yutani. Paul Reiser's Burke represents the worst human traits coalesced into a junior executive. Cameron's Avatar is sort of a mirror copy of Aliens in some ways. In both films, humanity travels to a world far, far away and a corporation is trying to exploit its resources for our own gain. In both, humanity encounters a hostile alien species that we don't really understand and any attempt to control that species results in disaster. And in both, the military/corporate defense forces are ultimately overpowered by the lower-tech alien species. The only difference is that in Aliens the audience is totally on-board with nuking the bastards to Kingdom Come and making the xenomorphs extinct. And there is a theme of motherhood throughout the movie.
Whereas Alien presented a metaphorical approach to the horrors of childbirth, Aliens took on motherhood in a much more traditional way. Ripley and Jonesy the cat were the only survivors of the ill-fated Nostromo, and they were eventually rescued by her employer, Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Unfortunately, she’d been in stasis for 57 years prior to rescue. It’s in her debriefing, in a deleted scene, that we learn Ripley had a daughter that grew to old age and died in the 57 years she’d been asleep. It wasn’t enough to lose her crew, her job, and nearly her life- all in a traumatic event that left her with PTSD. She lost her role as a mother, as well. That emotional loss makes it easier to understand the maternal instincts that take over the moment she sees Newt, the sole survivor of Hadley’s Hope – a colony of terraformers on LV-426.
Like Ripley, Newt lost everything she knew. Her parents, her brother, and the life she once had. Something that Ripley relates to well and drives her to fight even harder to protect the girl. It’s forming a new family from two broken ones, culminating in that final emotional moment after Ripley saves Newt from one monstrous foe, and Newt calls her “Mommy” while clinging tight. More than acceptance, it’s a heartfelt example that mothers are more than just blood relations.
While Ripley’s entire arc in Aliens is defined by her relationship with a surrogate daughter, it’s matched by the epic reveal of the Queen alien. Aliens gives a face to the creature responsible for all of those eggs, and it’s far worse than any of the Xenomorphs encountered before. And the Queen Mother matches every bit of Ripley’s ferocious protectiveness of her children, building up to one satisfying final act as she seeks personal revenge against Ripley for destroying her eggs and the ovipositor in which she uses to lay them. Aliens pits mother against mother, and depending on your perspective, neither are wrong as they’re both driven by maternal instinct and preservation.
► Slasher Horror
In C.S. Lewis' novel The Screwtape Letters, there's a moment where a demon worries that a true victory over the forces of God may be fundamentally impossible, with his lament being based on the idea that evil is really a perversion of good. And without good's existence, there can be no perversion and therefore no evil. If you think about it, that same dynamic is at the core of most scary stories. They're usually based around the idea of something disturbing or perverting our preconceptions of how things are supposed to be. And in his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King argues along the same lines that most horror stories are centered around keeping the status quo and a fear of the change, with the change represented by a stranger or "other" force that has invaded the Norman Rockwell-esque family, house, community, etc., and corrupted it in some way. And most people note that the characters who "sin" in some manner will be killed and killed first.
With these sort of rules, as well as copious amounts of nudity, sex, and gore, there have been arguments as to whether the genre itself is sexist and misogynistic. Back in 1980, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel devoted an entire show to "Women in Danger" films. During it, Siskel proposed the theory that these films were a reaction to the gains made by the women's movement, and fulfill a fantasy for some men of seeing a woman cowering and being punished whenever they have sex or do something that’s not “lady-like.”
On the other hand, some of these films were the first to depict strong female characters that weren't dependent on men to "save" them.
From a 2009 Los Angeles Times article by Mark Olsen on feminism and exploitation films:
"Even in the mid-'70s, the kind of proto-feminist element was being written about," said Kathleen McHugh, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. "Feminist film scholars were writing about Roger Corman and Stephanie Rothman, locating a feminist impulse in the standard plot, where you have these powerful, self-assertive, one might even use the term 'extremely aggressive' women who are wreaking vengeance against forces, people, men who are trying to keep them down."
Notable examples from the genre:
- A Nightmare on Elm Street—People over the age of 30 are useless. This includes the police, your parents, and anyone of any authority. No matter how much evidence you may have that weird shit is happening, your parents will not believe you. In fact, the more you protest, the more they will think you are crazy and take actions that will indirectly help the killer to kill you, like loading you up with sleeping pills. According to Wes Craven, the movie's story was based on articles in the Los Angeles Times about Cambodian refugees who were dying for seemingly no reason in their sleep.
- Friday the 13th—If the counselors at Camp Crystal Lake had just been doing their jobs instead of sneaking off to the woods to have sex, think of all the lives that may have been saved.
- Halloween—This is considered a prime example of the slasher formula. A force, in the form of Michael Myers, has been unleashed. He preys on and toys with his victims. And eventually it comes down to one young girl (Jamie Lee Curtis), left alone as her friends are picked off one by one, to survive.
Roger Ebert: “Halloween” is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to “Psycho” (1960). It's a terrifying and creepy film about what one of the characters calls Evil Personified. Right. And that leads us to the one small piece of plot I'm going to describe. There's this six-year-old kid who commits a murder right at the beginning of the movie, and is sent away, and is described by his psychiatrist as someone he spent eight years trying to help, and then the next seven years trying to keep locked up. But the guy escapes. And he returns on Halloween to the same town and the same street where he committed his first murder. And while the local babysitters telephone their boyfriends and watch “The Thing” on television, he goes back into action.
Period: That's all I'm going to describe, because “Halloween” is a visceral experience -- we aren't seeing the movie, we're having it happen to us. It's frightening.