Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Halloween@TFL: The A-Z of Horror - G To I
Continuing to teach children basic literacy, one death at a time.
G is for Gore!
Horror films are supposed to scare you, to disturb you or challenge your beliefs and values. They are supposed to affect you psychologically and images of violence can do this. However most horror films suck too much to get a genuine emotional reaction out of us. Most, fortunately, know how much they suck and just pile on the fake blood and pig guts for our amusement.
Cheering for the killer isn't what we are supposed to be doing, and neither should we be looking forwards to the violence, but we are all evil and film-makers know that, making the kills as gruesome and bloody as possible. Thank fucking Christ.
Modern horror is currently split between the PG-13 films, aimed at girls and definitely don't like the gore (See The Fog, The Grudge, The Covenant and The Etc), and torture porn flicks (like Hostel, The Devil's Rejects and The Hills Have Eyes) which focus on the pain and suffering of the victims, rather than the complex gooey prosthetics. Personally I like the early 80's style (The Thing, Day of the Dead, almost anything by Cronenberg) which raised gore to almost psychedelic levels of explicitness, all done practically and all bathed in rivers of sticky fake blood.
It may not be big or clever, but gore is awesome and should be in every film ever.
H is for Hell!
God bless Christianity for filling our cultural memories with images of fire, torture and eternal suffering.
What's interesting about hell is that the threat of it is usually more effective than actual depictions.
The Exorcist, despite its head-spinning, pea-soup spewing, crucifix-loving effects, derives most of its power from the idea that innocent Regan is trapped somewhere invisible and unreachable being tormented by demons. Even worse is the idea that that place is just underneath the poor girl's skin.
Hellraiser depicts hell as an S&M fantasy land of dungeons, chains, and bloody chunks of ex-humans, writhing in orgiastic pain. The sequel portrayed it as an Escher painting. It's all very impressive (especially on the budget they had), but the real creep-out in those films were that part of our nature might actually enjoy an eternity of pain.
Event Horizon has a ship that opens a portal to hell and, if you are the sort of person who goes frame-by-frame through the violent bits, contains a great deal of very nasty 'sharp things in people' imagery indeed. It still sucks though, so proving that all the brutality in the world isn't effective at giving you the creeps if that's all you have.
Doom, the computer game that Event Horizon nicked its 'portal to hell' idea from, went one worse when it was made into a film in which the monsters turned out to be genetic mutants rather than demons, which is a really pussy way to avoid any religious controversy and one of the few times it can be said that Event Horizon is better than another movie.
The problem with Hell is that it still plays into the idea of an afterlife and that, if you can be doomed, you can also be saved and go to heaven. I won't go into the possible truth of that, but I will say that, in terms of horror films, it's a cop-out. If death isn't the end then, really, what's so scary about death?
A real cinematic hell is anywhere you can not escape. Terry Gilliam's Brazil does this amazingly well, where Bureaucracy closes in on the hero in all its relentless and impersonal horror.
From Katanga's 'Holiday 05' Album
I'll leave the last word on this to Bill S Preston Esq:
'Woah, dude, my heavy metal album covers totally lied to me'.
I is for Itching!
What's so scary about itching? It's the cinematic shorthand for the first stages of a terrible disease, that's what, not to mention that it's a symptom of beng a total psychopath, who are alwasy good value.
The nerdy researcher in Poltergeist gets freaked out by some exploding meat, goes into the bathroom but the light starts to irritate his skin. He starts itching, then itches some more, then blood starts dripping into the sink, then hunks of skin, then half his face! He itches off so much of himself that he turns into a puppet, which is awesome.
In Hellraiser 2 an Evil Psychologist is caring for a disturbed man who thinks there are bugs under his skin. He itches so much he would scratch his skin off if he wasn't in a straight jacket. Evil Psychologist takes the patient's straightjacket off...and gives him a straight razor to scratch with. The director's cut of the scene then shows the poor man cutting himself to ribbons for a good minute or so. When the skinless demon-whore rises up from hell and sucks his blood out, it almost seems like a relief. A great scene.
What's wonderful about itching is that everyone does it, so horror movies can play in to the universal fear of 'OMG do I have a disease? Do I have the plague? Do I have an incurable and virulent flesh eating bug that will kill me and my entire family in 24hours? Did that gypsy I ran over just give me the ZOMBIE DEATH CURSE? OH NOES!!!!'. We've all thought that from time to time.
IMDB tells me there are currently no horror feature films called The Itch or The Itching. I spot a gap in the market.
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