The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Halloween@TFL: The A-Z Of Horror - X To Z

Now I know my ABC's, won't you come and slay with me!

X is for Xenomorph!

Proving that our base fears never really change, Ridley Scott's Alien is nominally about deep space exploration, rocket-ships, aliens and nuclear explosions but, at its heart, it's a traditional 'old dark house' movie. There's the huge but enclosed space, there's the only-glimpsed monster hiding in the shadows and there's the terrified humans running about in the dark.

Equally the monster - the Xenomorph - is the vampire, the midnight rapist and the incubus; monster-archetypes stretching back hundreds of years.

This is not to say that Alien is just a rip-off, but that it is a film that shows that genre rules are there to be played with, not slavishly followed. If you mix up the old rules in the right way - and here they add hard sci-fi and an explicitly gynecological approach to the rape metaphors of the old monsters - the audience will feel those old fears as if new. As a result movies have been trying to copy this new formula ever since, from Galaxy of Terror, to Species, to Event Horizon, to Star Trek: First Contact, while Ridley Scott went on to redefine the visual palette of Sci-Fi with Blade Runner and, two decades later, re-invent the costumed epic with Gladiator.

Meanwhile, and almost uniquely for a horror monster, the Xenomorph was redefined itself in the Alien sequels - as a family-metaphor in James Cameron's Aliens, as a symbol of unavoidable fate in David Fincher's Alien 3 and as a total pice of crap in Jeunet's Alien: Resurrection. I'd argue that the first two sequels are successful but the fourth turned the Xenomorph purely into a cool piece of design as, as such, neutered its power as an object of fear. Alien vs. Predator marked its final descent into a collectible toy.

But the rot still started with Cameron. However great Aliens is (it's great), it still turns the Xenomorph from an almost perfect representation of 'the other' into a mother. Aliens humanised the Xenomorph - a transformation made literal at the end of Alien: Resurrection with the 'newborn' which, as I think we covered, is shit. We managed to turn its beautiful, ineffable form into just another mirror of ourselves. Who's the real monster here, huh?

Brain Gremlin!

Anyway, if it wasn't for all the crap that came afterwards, I would argue that the Xenomorph is the best movie monster. Ever!

Y is for Young!

Kids are scary. See the 'P' entry for the horrors of reproduction. See the 'W' entry for how disgusting pregnancy is. Things don't get any better when they're born.

In The Omen the creepy kid is the devil and kills people a lot. The bastard.

In The Ring the creepy kid is the embodiment of immortal, implacable rage, possibly caused by the loss of her hairbrush.

Dakota Fanning is not technically evil in Hide and Seek, but she is really creepy.

At the end of Poltergeist, I would have chucked out the kid and kept the TV.

Kids are dangerous and evil and will lead to violent death, even if it is self-inflicted after listening to that whispering shit in the trailer for Lady in the Water.

No wonder when kids finally stop being kids and turn into teenagers, horror films spend all their time killing them off. The fuckers.

Z is for Zombies!

BRAAIIINNNSSS!!! I'm willing to argue that the post-Romero zombie is the quintessential modern horror monster. Their unthinking and unstoppable attacks on outposts of civilisation bring up fears of 'the other' bringing down society, whether they be muslims, poor people, black people, homosexuals, goths, religious fundamentalists or republicans. The zombie plays on this reactionary fear of 'the horde' so prevalent in today's society. The zombie is also the purest expression of the fear of death. They aren't the undead, the immortal, the unnatural creation, or any other romanticly poetic expression of death - they are just rotting corpses, plain and simple and they want to eat you. That slow, shuffling advance, agonisingly drawn-out but utterly inevitable, devoid of individualism or personality, is as direct an expression of our fear of death as the horror genre has.

Running zombies, by the way, do not work at all if the film-maker is going for the fear of death. It works fine if it's the fear of 'the other' or 'the horde' that the film-maker wants, as in 28 Days Later. And if all the film-maker wants to do is make a kick-ass action film (the Dawn of the Dead remake) then sure, have them run. I mean, why not have them be able to defy gravity and run up walls too! Oh wait, the Day of the Dead remake has done that.

I'll leave you with a 'Z' double word score by giving you the greatest zombie ever: Robert Z'Dar as Maniac Cop: