The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Halloween@TFL: The A-Z of Horror - J To L

Yes, I do know what the entry for Q is.

J for J-Horror!

So the quesiton is - is J-Horror (horror films from Japan or, more accurately, Asia) dead? During the 90's Hollywood horror went jokey and meta with the Scream films deconstructing horror cliches even as they increasingly relied on them. The glut of 'metoo' films starting killing the genre once again (perhaps it is the perfect genre for zombie status) and left a gap in the market for serious horror films which the Asian film industries, by luck or judgement, happily filled.

Films like Ringu and Ju-on were serious, dark and deadly effective at scaring the crap out of people. I didn't sleep properly for a month after seeing Ringu for the first time.

The hallmarks of these films were a mostly quiet atmosphere, a deliberate, observational pace and repeated motifs of water and young dead girls with long black hair down over their faces. They were mostly very fatalistic, where the malevolent force would focus on you for some simple or arbitrary reason and there would be no way to escape its wrath.

Whether these films genuinely tapped into a new set of fears in western audiences or were simply something different from the clever-clever tone or clumsy brutishness of Hollywood fare is up for grabs, but they became so popular that, of course, Hollywood starting remaking them (The Ring, The Grudge, Dark Water).

Asia is not above riding a trend either - the director of Ju-on has essentially remade the film around seven times now, including the American version (The Grudge).Later entries in the J-Horror wave were more or less effective, as western distributors started picking up the second tier stuff after the gems had already been released. The Tale of Two Sisters is beautiful, atmospheric, very dark and makes absolutely no fucking sense. Kairo (remade as Pulse) is dull and silly but gets marks for being technically superb and uncompromisingly bleak.

It is certainly good to get some cross fertilisation of our filmic cultures, and the alien-ness of much of Asian culture (not to mention their obsession with alienation) certainly plays in to the horror genre. Unfortunately, even the low rent Scary Movie franchise has picked up on the 'long dark haired girl' trick for parody so its days could well be numbered.

K is for Kill!

You'd think this was an obvious one, but why does there have to be so much killing in horror movies? The build up is what is scary, and pain is far more unpleasant than a quick death.

The Exorcist has 3 deaths (I think) and they all happen mostly off screen. Halloween has only 3 on screen deaths. Cronenberg's The Fly only has one, unless you count the baboon.

These films, however, deal in characterisation and lethally accurate thrill-building, which most horror films can not be bothered with. For most horror films the build up is jus a cost effective way to pad the running time and the star of the film is the make-up guy getting the 'knife-through-the-throat' appliance ready in the back room.

The slasher film evolved into nothing more than a sequence of kills, with the good ones having as little in between them as possible and most recent entries having a 'jump to a kill' option on their DVD menus.

But fuck quality, kills are great, even if we have just been trained to love them by decades of crappy movies. Tom Savini, who learnt his gore trade by actually being in war zones and did the never-bettered kills in Romero's second two Dead films, is not worshipped as a god for nothing, despite being a weird plastic-faced whore these days. See also Braindead, aka Dead Alive.

The fetishisation of the kill is pretty low, but it's not like it's new (See Gladiator) and when a film gets it right, like Final Destination 2, which really isn't much more than highly elaborate kill sequences, it's a six pack of fun.

L is for Lovecraft!

H.P. Lovecraft was a horror and fantasy author writing around the beginning of the 20th Century. While some of his ideas were very modern, dealing with psychology and the subconscious, he mixed them with very ancient ideas such as fatalism, millennarian fears of the collapse of civilisation, and pagan cosmologies.

His work is most memorable for not dwelling on the specific objects of the characters' fears, but their reactions to them. As he stated:

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

The monsters and terrible events in his stories are usually only ever seen in glimpses, usually of a giant tentacle, there are lots of descriptions of terrible smells, or of foreboding atmospheres, or of characters becoming suddenly overcome with inexplicable fears. This works really well with the written word but, by its nature, it is not very visual.

As such, his works have been fairly under-represented in film - mostly consisting of awesome but not particularly faithful adaptations like Re-Animator and From Beyond. However, his most famous creation - the Cthulhu Mythos - has influenced countless strands of fantasy and horror over the century. The mythos dealt with ancient and evil beings living in alternate universes that, when they impinge upon our world, are worshipped as gods. In this mythos, humanity is small and powerless, and our young civilisations are fragile and fleeting when they come into contact with the Cthulhu.

Japanese anime and, infamously, Hentai, is full of giant tentacles doing terrible things, often to young females.

John Carpenter's last half-decent film, In The Mouth Of Madness, was full of Lovecraftian imagery such as half glimpsed monsters, portals to evil dimensions and lots of gooey tentacles.

Even comedies like Ghostbusters have plots revolving around ancient gods resurfacing in the modern world and threatening the thin patina of civilisation we so hubristically believe is powerful and stable.

While Lovecraft possibly didn't invent evil interdimensional beings with giant tentacles, it is his gooey terrors that so much of modern horror is referencing when they break out the eldritch atmosphere.

Guillermo Del Toro directed Hellboy, an adaptation of Mike Mignola's comic books that revel in gothic myths and horror legends. In the film, giant tentacled interdimensional beings threaten the modern world. Again. He also keeps promising to make In The Mountains of Madness, one of Lovercraft's best books, telling the tale of an expedition to Antartica where a huge and ancient city is found in which live, you guessed it, huge tentacled ancient evil beings that we only see in glimpses.

While the easy parts of Lovecraft's work (tentacles) have seeped into almost every aspect of fantasy and horror, the best parts are still largely missing. The sense of fatalism and of humanity being small, powerless and irrelevant are much harder to put across, especially as the horror genre is still mostly about delivering cheap thrills to young audiences. His stories very rarely have happy endings. It is not that the evil wins, it is that there was never any fight to begin with - the main character mainly just uncovers a vast and ancient secret that all his reason, knowledge and civilisation is powerless to resist. That inability to escape, as well the total emasculation of our conscious selves at the hands of our subconscious fears, is still too dark for most films and, as such, still gives Lovecraft's work a power even today.

Let's hope that Del Toro, who has just made the extraordinary Pan's Labyrinth, will stop playing around with the fun but shallow Hellboy and get down to perhaps our best chance of seeing some real Lovecraft on our screens with In The Mountains of Madness.