The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Halloween@TFL: The A-Z of Horror - D To F

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D is for Dreams!

Dreams and dreamlike imagery pop up in horror movies all the time. Most of our basic fears come from our subconscious so dreams, where our subconscious plays out scenarios, digests, synthesises and repurposes our conscious experiences, andjust generally fucks around with us, make for fertile horror ground.

The vulnerability of sleep is well used in A Nightmare on Elm Street, where Freddy Kreuger attacked teenagers in their dreams. Invasion of the Body Snatchers plays on the theme of 'sleep as death' where the parasites get you and turn you into a zombie when you fall asleep. Edward Norton's character in Fight Club is an insomniac who wonders, if he wakes up in a different city in a different time zone, whether he is the same person, capturing the waking nightmare of the sleep deprived.

Dario Argento's films rarely had dream sequences in, but were themselves cinematic dreams, playing out with a dream logic that, on the surface, really made no sense at all, but have a strange hypnotic effect. Why is there a room full of barbed wire in a girl's school? Because!

Dreams are also an excellent cinematic device for playing with audience expectations. This is used well in An American Werewolf in London where our hero dreams about his family being butchered by Nazi demons then wakes up in a hospital bed only to have the nurse get butchered by a Nazi demon before he wakes up for real. It puts the audience on edge, not knowing what to expect and so priming them for future scares. Also Jenny Agutter is hot, but that doesn't have anything to do with this.

On the other side, dreams can also be used in a lazy way to give a fake scare that doesn't affect the plot, allowing the film-maker to shove some violence and horror into the first half of a plot he knows isn't very scary or effective. An American Werewolf in Paris does this, as does crappy new Brit horror flick Severence.

'It's only a dream', the film says, and after wasting two hours watching yet another terrible horror film, you kind of wish it was.

E is for Explode!

F is for Forest!

You are a spunky young film-maker with lots of ambition, variable amounts of talent and absolutely no money. What do you do? You go to a forest and film a horror movie, that's what. Forests do tie in to some of our deepest fears:

The Unknown: If you get lost in a forest you get really lost. There are no paths, no landmarks and only identical trees as far as the eye can see. Then it gets dark and low budget film-makers attack you all night (see The Blair Witch Project). Scary.

Nature vs. Civilisation: The forest is usually huge and primevil and the sense of comfort and safety we get while in the city is lost when we get to the forest. There's no electricity so at night it is pitch-black, there's no police or ambulance service and there is no reasoning with (or bribing) the bear that wants to eat you. We like the rules we have set up to give our lives meaning and structure. The forest strips those rules away leaving us trembling and tasty in the middle of a hundred miles of danger (see Blair Witch again, Limbo, The Edge) or, worse, replaces them with something else's (possibly demonic, usually sharp) rules (See Evil Dead, Friday the 13th).

Sex: Fairy tales are full of forests because they represent temptation and our wild, animalistic sides - the side we (and our traditionally Christian upbingings) try to repress. Pan is the mischeivious god who lives in the forest. The wolf is waiting to eat Red Riding Hood if she strays from the path. Neil Jordan's extraordinary A Company of Wolves covers this well, but this aspect of forests is not used that often in horror movies these days - mostly, it has to be said, as it involves a bit too much thought.

Get a woman and a masked man, drive to your nearest forest and have the latter chase the former and hey presto! you have half a film (see Friday the 13th and a thousand other slashers from the 80's). As long as young men and women are willing to douse themselves in fake blood for no money at all, forests will always be a part of horror movies. Who knew squirrels were so terrifying?