Monday, October 30, 2006
Halloween@TFL: The A-Z Of Horror - U To W
One more day to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween!
U is for Underwater!
Death by drowning scares the crap out of me. There's something about the way you are compeletely conscious of slowly using up the oxygen in your blood to the point where you are going to have to take another breath...
The Omen 2 has a death where a man gets chopped in two by the cables of an elevator, but the bit I most remember is the kid under the ice trying to find air while the adults rush helplessly about on the surface.
Das Boot, while not technically a horror movie, still conveys the horrible claustrophobia of being under hundreds of feet of water. The Abyss, equally, managed some very effectively creepy moments involving the isolation of the deep sea before it turned into a space-fairy musical.
Any good Freudian will tell you that the sea, with its vast but unseeable depths, is often a symbol of our subconscious fears, both of something terrible waiting in the darkness for us and of the terrible things we fear are in ourselves. I'll let your draw your own phallic conclusions about the shark in Jaws (or the female symbology of the ocean) but Spielberg used a special camera that sat just on the surface of the sea so the waves would cause the water to lap over it, giving us images of the humans splashing about on top mixed with flashes of the the dark world beneath them. It very viscerally gives the audience the idea that our human world is a fragile thing resting on top of a much more powerful other world in which we are nothing but food. The fashions may have dated, but the scares still bite.
V is for Volume!
Probably the easiest scare tactic in horror movies is the massive blast of noise. Everything is quiet, someone is walking down a corridor and then something jumps out from around the corner and the soundtrack is suddenly filled with every instrument of the orchestra being honked, an entire zoo of angry critters screeching, or a hundred radios hissing. The audience will jump. They can't not jump as it is a visceral, instinctive reaction of the nervous system to go tense at a sudden violent change in circumstance. This makes it a favourite with really bad horror film-makers as it is a guaranteed response. Put the volume over any crap at all and the audience will jump.
Next time you watch a horror movie, count the number of 'noise-scares'. Anything much over three and you'll know you are watching a terrible movie.
Which is not to say it can not be used well. Even purely emotional horror movies like Cronenberg's The Fly use it once or twice. In this film, after Seth Brundle is spliced with the fly, we see the starts of his transformation and then we are told that some time has passed, thus building up an expectation of how bad, horrible and evil he is going to have gotten. Cronenberg holds off the reveal for quite some time, building the tension until, finally, Brundle suddenly emerges from the shadows accompanied by a huge blast of noise...hunched over his walking sticks and looking like a frail old man. This confusion of tone sets up the emotional core of the movie, with the audience having pity for the monster while still being repulsed by it.
Boo!
W is for Womb!
Men are terrified of women, especially their mothers. Horror films are filled with ideas of revulsion concerning reproduction, the gestative period, and births.
Cronenberg's The Brood has evil children killing people, all controlled by an even evil-er mother with an external womb. Cronenberg's unique ability to physicalise fears and our more uncomfortable emotions (this time linked with an acrimonious break-up he had just gone through) gives us an image of 'mother' as malevolent, mutated and unhuman.
Peter Jackson's Brain Dead (aka Dead Alive) has a hero with an dominating, overbearing mother who turns into a vicious inhuman zombie. The film ends with his zombie-mum literally sucking him back into her womb, which he finally manages to escape in a blood-soaked second birth killing the mother for good. It's a comedy.
Other examples of 'things growing inside you' horror include Alien, The really apalling Species 2 and Slither.
Maybe we want our women to be virgins? Maybe we just want mummy to love us? I don't know and until we figure it out we can have plenty more icky wombs to look forwards to in horror moives.
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