you know something's happening here, but you don't know what it is
paraphrased from Bob Dylan's "Ballad of a Thin Man"

My son had taken his girlfriend to see Paranormal Activity (the first one) on a Saturday night. "It freaked me out," he said. "It's one of the scariest movies ever." So, of course, I watched it myself. For over an hour I waited for something/anything to happen. Nothing much ever did, but I still had this vague sense that this was a frightening movie.

The 1999 Blair Witch Project was much the same. I found it unsettling, but looked at objectively, coldly, clinically, nothing much really happens in the movie. Some amateur filmmakers get lost in the Black Hills of Maryland, and hear things (which most often I, in the audience, could not hear) and see movements (not shown on screen). There is un-ease and lurking danger, but until the jerky, unspecified maybe-something-creepy-is-really-happening ending footage, the real monsters are short tempers and a vaguely pagan assemblage of twigs. Maybe the surrounding WEB presence (hyping this as a documentary) and warnings in theatre lobbies that the movie could cause vertigo, nausea and other illness helped (the way William Castle movies benefited from announcements that "A Nurse Will Be In Attendance In The Lobby" for his marvellous 1950's-1960's films; for his 1958 Macabre theater goers each received an insurance policy of $1000 payable if any of them were to die of fright during the showing).

The complete version of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) is horrific and/or arty and/or symbolic. It's hard to tell exactly what it is, but the grotesque parody of the family chicken dinner or the globby infant delivered to Jack Spencer and his wife, Mary X, leave the audience with dread. Like Franz Kafka's novella Metamorphosis, this is not necessarily a horror story, but it leaves the viewer/reader disturbed.

Once you read "The Shunned House" this week (you may choose to read another work, but this one is really very effective), you may feel much the same: this is really creepy, but you can't quite put your finger on what is happening that actually generates the sense of horror.

Like most genres, horror comes in many flavors.

scary monsters (and super creeps)

The YouTube clip at the top of the lecture is the trailer for a re-release of Robert Weine's 1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the silent movie that is often credited as the first true (certainly the first truly influential) horror feature film. This German Expressionist film and some of it's followers, particularly F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu (note: both are available in their entirety on YouTube), were to define the classic Universal Studios monster/horror film for decades. As Germany became less hospitable in the years leading up to WWII, and with Hollywood soundstages featuring then-state-of-the-art film technology in abundance, German Expressionist filmmakers brought their eerie lighting; surreal, spare sets; a bold sense of emotive melodrama to Universal, which produced Lon Chaney in the hugely-successful silent film classics The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera in the 1920's.

In 1931 two sound pictures, Todd Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein were released. They were so well recieved they not only elevated Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff to monster/actor fame, they set in motion a string of movies (The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), Werewolf of London (1935), The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and dozens of mad scientists, subterranean laboratories, invisible rays, ghosts, phantoms, half-humans well into the 1950's. Not to be left behind, rival RKO Studios gave birth to King Kong (1933) and several sequals, but Universal monsters are the prototypes for hundreds of movie monsters still to this day.

It's hard to say where to draw the line between horror monsters and science fiction (see next week's lecture) monsters. Clearly if a movie has a title It Came from Outer Space (1953), we can place that in the Science-Fiction (space!) category, but what about Godzilla (Gojira 1954, released with Raymond Burr's English narration for American audiences in 1956)--prehistoric monster awakened by U.S. nuclear testing? It's that world-of-the-atom feature that typically puts the giant radiation-breathing monster in the sci-fi category (though what should we think when he actually battles King Kong?).

to build a monster or not

Audiences, in general, like horror movies. They don't always generate huge box office revenue, but they often turn a profit; even the B pictures (lower budget works) often do well if they skip theatrical release and go straight to DVD. This genre, more than most, has launched the careers of still-in-or-just-out-of-film-school directors such as George Romero, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Sam Raime, David Lynch and so on. Part of the attraction is the range of creative tools available to the filmmaker, and since so much of the horror takes place in the mind and gut and dark places within the viewer, the filmmaker doesn't always have to spend a lot of money to create state-of-the-art Avatar effects. Movies like The Blair Witch Project, Halloween, Saw were made with few name actors, simple sets and costumes, miniscule budgets. A hockey mask effectively makes a monseter when the character seems unstoppable and just won't quit threatening a desparate baby sitter.


Opening swimming scene from Jaws

When Steven Spielberg made the movie Jaws (1975), the gosh-darned mechanical shark kept breaking down. Time was passing, and this was not a low-budget piece; filming had to continue. A decision was made to show the actual shark as little as possible (what else could they do), and this bit of mechanical misfortune gives us one of the mose powerful opening scenes in film history. WARNING: you may not want to play the clip; it's still very effective, and it (along with Peter Benchley's novel) managed to make a good part of a generation afraid of going into the ocean. Note that there is no blood in the scene. It works because we suspect something lurks in the depths, something dangerous. The innocent girls legs dangle, enticing the unseen and (by her) unsuspected predator. The shot is dark with halos and/or sprinklings of light, just enough to make out the horror without actually being able to see things distinctily. This partly-seen, partly-imagined event is at the heart of most horror movies. The filmmaker provides something (a camera angle, indistinct lighting, a powerful soundtrack, a peaceful interlude that will be suddenly interrupted with violent action and movement); the audience builds on this something to create as frightening a monster as that audience can imagine.

This isn't always the case. Sometimes graphic gore and blood and torture is the stuff of horror, and effects designers unleash their inventiveness building more realistic blood packets and dismembered bodies with still-beating hearts visible as zombies tear off chunks of flesh. Gore is definitely part of the genre. But the subtler approach is often more effective. If you do get a chance to watch the two silent films mentioned at the beginning, pay particualr attention to the sets and lighting effects in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and then the coffin scene and lighting effects in Nosferatu. In Weine's film things are of disproportionate size and often placed at odd angles. Zig-zag paths lead nowhere, and spinning contraptions create a vague impression of a carnival. This is all dream-like, and dreams often feature the stuff of horror. Things are molassas slow or panic attack quick. Objects appear out of context to create an uneasy sense of "this is not right." In Murnau's famous coffin scene he uses stop motion (take a shot, move the coffin, take another shot, move the coffin some more) to create this impossible/magical scene (yes, it's child's play nowadays; we can do the same with the video cameras on our cell phones, but in the 1920's this really did seem magical to audiences). His use of silhouettes and shadow images of the creeping vampire distort size and create the outlines of actions; audiences fill in what is inside the outlines. And if you find these examples interesting, you may want to add Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932).

It is with this spirit of invention and an awareness that horror is as much about suggestion as it is about gore that forced a young Sam Raime, who had a shoestring budget that would not allow him to put a menacing Kandarian at the center of the action, that allowed him to create the compelling chase scene in Evil Dead 2. Note: producers have blocked content on YouTube, but you can somtimes find the scene by searching "Evil Dead Chase"; there is actually some pretty funny parodies of it online. We see Bruce Campbell's reaction, even the suggestion of his possession mid-way through the chase, but it is the camera movement that IS the monster in this clip. The effect was simple in retrospect, but he needed to produce a certain perspective (low to the ground, nipping at Campbell's heels), a jerkiness of motion that suggests the lurching monster as it pounds through doors and snaps tree branches. The effect was achieved by having two a camera mounted on a long board suspended at each end with a short rope; two cameramen walked the rig through the set; the film was speeded up in spots; bits of smoke covered some of the paths, and lighting was alternated to show impossible transitions from daylight to nighttime in the span of moments. It's a much-admired scene, and the Evil Dead franchise made stars of both Raime (director) and Campbell (actor). Don't worry; this one isn't too scary :)

Sometimes it's the sheer weirdness of a movie that makes audiences uncomfortable. Movies such as Dead Ringers (1988), Boxing Helena (1993), Suicide Club (aka Suicide Circle 2001), and The Human Centipede (2009) are just plain disturbing--WARNING: you might want to steer clear of those. But a movie such as Higuchinsky's Uzumaki (2000, based on Junji Ito's manga) is, what? It's horrific, yes. My daughter finds this one of the most disturbing films she's seen. But where is the monster, the danger? It's in spirals. Uzumaki means spiral; the town of Kurouzu is caught in a "spiral curse." It's odd. And the fact that it seems off, beyond the normal, is what generates the horror.

the monster from the id
reference to the movie Forbidden Planet, a re-make of Shakespeare's The Tempest

The real difference may be in the root of the monster. Horror films conjure up unconscious and sub-conscious fears. The dark places within us correspond to dark closets and the dark under the bed. Terrors lurk in the shadows, at night, in the untapped bits of our psyche, and they creep up on us when we are vulnerable.

Revenge, suffering, psychosis, abuse, uncontrolled lust--these human conditions gave birth to monsters in Ringu, The Grudge, The Eye; the movie monster created by Dr. Frankenstein is monstrous because he has been given a deviant's brain; colonies of vampires find their transferral of fluids and sapping of control from the ancient myths of succubi and lamiae who represented, among other things, sexual potency.

Regan's possession in The Exorcist forces a loss of her personality. Ghosts often haunt the guilt-ridden, those with unfinished business, or individuals incapable of handlling the powerful emotion of loss.

And if we revisit Paranormal Activity, we have the childhood fears of the Boogey Man, of things that go bump in the night, of the monster in the closet. The creaking door, the closing door, the sudden drop in temperature, the unrecognized screech in the distance, fear of the unknown--these are the sources of much horror.

There is also the other side of psychology--the monster created by sociopathy or psychopathy. The cannibalistic, in-bred killers lurking in decrepit houses or dank caves in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1977) come to mind when we find ourselves on unfamiliar back roads. There is panic associated with being hopelessly lost (how could, asks Heather in The Blair Witch Project is it possible to get lost in 20th-century America?). Irrational murder, serial killing--the stuff of post-Manson-faily life appears as Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), Jason in Friday the 13th (1980), "Jigsaw" in Saw (2004).

In the end, the fears are primal. They tap into our most basic emotions, our sense of mortality. The beast will outrun and eat us; guilty secrets haunt us; our inability to control our enviornment threatens us; dark figures from the evening news transform and grow out of all proportion an overwhelm us. Horror, then, may just be what we want to be able to control but can't.

a segue...

This makes a nice transition from horror to science fiction (and it makes for a fun midnight show): "Science Fiction Double Feature" :)