Critical Mass

What makes a horror film memorable?

Vincent Price starred (with the title character) in William Castle’s schlock classic The Tingler.
Vincent Price starred (with the title character) in William Castle’s schlock classic The Tingler.

Some of our first stories were of horror.

Maybe this is because our sense of being human proceeds from the certain knowledge of our own end. We mightn't be the only animal with a sense of our own mortality -- we aren't the only ones who grieve -- but we may be the only ones with the ability to travel time in our minds in order to make art. In any case, it's something we've always done.

Sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis haunt Greek mythology, as do vampires, which appear in Aristophanes' The Frogs. There's the story of Philinium, who returned from her grave to sleep with her lover. In the Bible, Saul consults with the Witch of Endor, who calls up the ghost of the prophet Samuel. Then there's Beowulf, the monster epic. Chaucer and Shakespeare advanced the tradition; Machiavelli wrote a novel about an arch-demon called Belphegor who assumes human form and marries, only to discover hell was preferable.

It may be because our world is dangerous and because there is much we cannot control that we manufacture ways to summon fear when we are safe. A horror movie is like a theme-park ride, only safer, for we are not placing our trust in bolts tightened by carnies. A horror movie is a way to experience the kicking in of our flight-or-fight response without putting ourselves in actual danger.

But how safe are we? A 2014 study published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology lends credence to the claims of schlock showman William Castle, who warned that his movies could be fatal to the weak-hearted. His 1959 film The Tingler -- which posited a parasite that attached itself to the human spine and fed on its host's fear -- featured a gimmick called Percepto, a vibrating device installed in some seats that mimicked the onscreen action. Castle suggested audience members could find relief through screaming; it might even be necessary to keep them from dying of fright.

Some people like horror movies more than others. Not everyone is willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of a scare; some horror fans' enjoyment is more informed by their appreciation of how a given film handles the genre's conventions and tropes.

One can appreciate Dario Argento's The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970) as much for the style with which it is realized as for its sense of dread and unease. When the film was released, Roger Ebert allowed that it scared him "on a much more basic level than ... say, a thriller by Hitchcock."

Yet most Americans probably don't consume Argento's giallo films because of the adrenaline they produce. They're indulging their connoisseurs' taste for the esoteric, reveling in some very real pleasure that might not be available to the casual or inexperienced user. The more you know about any subject, the greater its potential for fascination.

For some, camp enters into it -- most people who genuinely appreciate a movie like Don Coscarelli's Phantasm (1979), with its ridiculous flying sphere and slightly-taller-than-average villain called the Tall Man -- online sources claim actor Angus Scrimm was 6-feet-4 and to appear taller he wore platform shoes and too-small-suits while in character. My friends and I saw the film when it was released, and we thought he was more like 5-foot-11 -- take it as a kind of comedy. The same might be said of most slasher films, or any horror movie that sports a less than plausible antagonist.

Freddy and Jason are frightening only if we contract with them. They might operate as allegories or as manifestations of sublimated fear, but they are not real in the same sense that Perry Smith and Richard Hitchcock, the murderers portrayed respectively by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson in the movie of Truman Capote's nonfiction novel In Cold Blood are real.

No horror movie will scare you if you don't want to be scared. All movies are by their nature resistible; just as you don't have to buy a ticket to any given film, you don't have to make yourself available to any film's advances. While a movie might startle you with pop-out ghosts and ringing phones or shock you with escalated levels of gore and violence, the key to a genuinely scary movie is the voluntary enlistment of the audience. There's always an escape hatch, a well-lighted exit sign the moviegoer can escape through if he wishes.

Maybe that willing suspension of disbelief becomes harder to obtain after awhile. Maybe we get jaded, maybe we build up tolerances. In any case, a genuinely scary movie is fairly rare. Some of us have trouble forgetting it's only a movie.

This makes the exceptions, well, exceptional. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) is a profoundly interesting movie, but I suspect modern audiences might not find it scary. Critic Pauline Kael wrote that it was "one of the most gruesomely terrifying movies ever made" and argued that its "grainy, banal seriousness works for it -- gives it a crude realism," a factor that was also at play in 1999's The Blair Witch Project. On the Monday morning after its opening weekend, at least three people called this newspaper to ask if it was indeed a found-footage documentary.

Jaws (1975) is genuinely suspenseful, and set the template for a certain kind of mathematically precise thriller, including John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and David Gordon Green's just released mythology-resetting sequel of the same name. The Shining (1980) was the most overt of all Stanley Kubrick's monster movies (2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, Lolita -- you can make any of his movies fit the description).

My first encounter with the deep fear movies could produce was Rosemary's Baby, although I can't remember exactly what it was that disturbed me in 1968 and doubt my 9-year-old self was equipped to understand much of Roman Polanski's Gothic masterpiece. If nothing else, it probably prepared me to laugh at 1969's The Green Slime.

But there was no laughing at The Exorcist, terrifying for the pervasive atmosphere of tension and dread director William Friedkin was able to sustain. It builds slowly, almost subconsciously, through the funereal pacing of the first hour of the three-part structure. What's really scary is the way Friedkin manipulates our mood, punctuating this oppressive tone with torrents of graphic language and grisly atrocities inflicted upon Linda Blair's preteen Regan MacNeil.

While conventional wisdom holds that The Exorcist is the "scariest" movie ever, people seeing it today cannot experience it the same way those who saw it in 1973 experienced it. The Exorcist changed the way horror films are made, and the intervening 45 years have inoculated us against what were then concussive scenes.

. . .

This past summer, as either an apology for having put up with a movie they found unrewarding (or as revenge for having failed to appreciate that movie) I screened for my Lifequest class a movie I consider to be among the scariest ever made: a 1988 Dutch-French production called Spoorloos, directed by journeyman director George Sluizer, who worked with journalist Tim Krabbe to adapt Krabbe's novel The Golden Egg.

It is a simple idea. A man and a woman are on a road trip. They stop at a convenience store and the woman disappears. He is frantic. Three years later he is still searching for her when he receives a message from a stranger, who indicates that he is responsible for the woman's disappearance. He offers the man a chance to learn exactly what happened to her. But to do so, he must put himself at the stranger's mercy.

If that synopsis sounds familiar to you, it may be because Sluizer remade the film for Hollywood five years later, with Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and Sandra Bullock in key roles. That version, called The Vanishing, is not the one you want to see. It has a Hollywood ending.

Spoorloos does not.

It is an understated film, with little violence and no onscreen gore, low-tech documentary-style textures and a cast of regular-looking people who mainly worked in European films. (Though Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu appeared in Polanski's 1976 film The Tenant, a psychological horror film that rivals Rosemary's Baby as the director's most unsettling work.) And it will chill your blood.

When I watched it again last summer, after not seeing it for 20 years or more, it chilled my blood. And my seasoned audience audibly gasped at its ending.

Happy Halloween.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

photo

Johanna ter Steege and Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu star in 1988’s Spoorloos, a Dutch-French film that may be the scariest of all time.

Style on 10/28/2018

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