Few genres rely on
audience stimulation like Horror. All genres seek to stimulate, but only two –
Horror and Pornography – completely fail if they do not. While other genres can
rely on their message and just good workmanship to communicate, horror is to be
experienced. And that is because horror seeks to tap into the psyche, the soul,
and raw sensory reaction more than any other. There lies the line between good
horror and bad horror: good horror does this while bad horror does not.
Most good horror on the screen is adapted from the page. And
this goes all the back to the birth of the screen. From Mary Shelly’s
“Frankenstein” to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” all the way to William Peter Blatty’s
“The Exorcist”, Stephen King’s “The Shining”, and Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s
Baby”, so many great and awful reiterations of horror come from the great
writing that taps into our collective anxiety, trauma, and nature.
That being said, books have the time, the space, and
relatively small marketplace to work us over slowly and methodically. Unlike
sight and sound, words on page serve only to communicate by way of the reader’s
capacity to empathized, imagine, and analyze. It’s an intellectual medium. In
that sense, it’s the highest.
Writing, while important, relies on its audience for
effectiveness. Only the interested and capable literate can experience words on
a page.
Films, however, are far reaching. Anyone – who is NOT
staring at their friggin’ phone – can experience a film. While the terror and
dread on page requires intellectual work, on the screen, most of the work is
already done. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the trip. It’s a direct
sender/receiver medium. Dread on the page is immersive, dread on the screen in
unforgettable.
That being said, over the course of my life, horror on
film has almost completely lost its ability to truly effect its audience on any
level deeper than the immediate reaction of screaming teenager girls with names
like Katelyn, Kelly, and Kayla at the local Cineplex.
It is a landscape of sudden twists, predictable plots,
cheap sex, and jump-scares repeated again… and again… and again… and again.
This degeneration has its roots in the decade before I
was born. It was in the 1980’s that lurid sex, gruesome violence, and monsters
that you always saw on screen were taken out of their home in the grindhouse
theaters and made into mainstays of the film industry. In the quest for
blockbuster openings, video rentals, and merchandizing the decade that began
with Stanley Kubrick’s Rubik’s Cube adaptation of “The Shining” ended with “Friday
the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan”. And while America’s jean-jacket wearing
youth had a movie to rent while they ate Domino’s Pizza, horror films as a
legitimate avenue for exploring our collective anxiety, trauma, and nature was
permanently crippled.
In this, and arguably long before this, was lost a most
important element of horror: ambiguity.
Today’s audience has no capacity to watch a long shot,
listen to silence, or interpret a shadow. Instead, they rely on instant
gratification and jump scares. For this reason, horror as genre, not only in
film but in writing, is withering a long, slow death. My proof comes in the
form of comments like, “The Exorcist is a comedy.” The idea of audience
interpretation is mostly a lost one.
But it’s in ambiguity that horror lives. Director William
Friedkin has even stated that he purposely used silence, shadow, and stillness
to disturb the audience in 1973’s “The Exorcist”. Few films capture their
source material like “The Exorcist”. It is widely regarded as one of the most
frightening and psychologically disturbing films ever made. Audience reactions
when it was released included panic attacks, physical illness, and a rise in
psychotherapy.
While these reactions seem apocryphal, it was not scenes
of head-spinning, vomit, or sacrilegious masturbation that affected audiences
the most. It was the moments of silence, shots of shadow, and tense stillness
that overwhelmed viewers.
Friedkin has admitted to deliberately mixing the films
audio to include dense quiet and even utter silence so that he could break with
loud, brutal noise. He’s also admitted to using darkness and slow camera work
to build an atmosphere of tenseness and abysmal mystery. In this way, he
created a canvas for the audience to project the worst of their imaginations.
Many horror films from the “Silent Era” do this too.
Filmmakers with limited resources and almost no special effects created
negative space, forcing audiences to project and interpret darkness.
While F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” may seem tame, the images
on screen of almost entirely cast in shadow. Now, while this was probably a
means of cutting production costs, it created an entirely unforgettable and
hypnotizing film. In its time, it disturbed audiences. Blacken doorways and windows,
dark rooms, and dream-like pacing built suspense and menace. The darkness
became the villain, because the darkness could be anything a movie goer in 1921
imagined it as. In this way, “Nosfaratu” probably captures the spirit of the
Bram Stoker’s novel better than any other version ever made.
1999’s “The Blair Witch Project” was incredibly effective
at horrifying and traumatizing its audience. In its claustrophobic setting,
where the only horror that’s actually seen is the disintegration of a human
group, the mostly unintentional minutes of utter blackness and shots of the
deep, dark woods create a film that pulls us in and leaves us terrified of
something that we never see or hear on screen. At least the first time we see
it.
Horror is not boogeymen and bloodletters. True horror
does not live outside the viewer, or the reader. Horror is within. Horror lives
in silence and darkness. In the ambiguity of shadow, where perception is so
distorted that we can’t see, sight turns inward towards the mind and the soul.
It’s the demons we don’t see that are the most terrifying, the most clarifying,
and often, the most liberating.
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