FUN HORROR
By Gemma Files, for Patreon
My Facebook friend
Daniel Braum calls fun horror "the smallest category in [his]
genre food pyramid," but to me, that's the category from which
all Halloween playlists should be programmed. Because Halloween is
mostly about a celebration of horror culture, it should embrace the
grotesque and spectacular—the monster movies/mashes, classic and
otherwise, from Tim Burton's
Sleepy Hollow or
Dark Shadows
to the original Universal
Invisible Man,
Mummy, Wolf
Man, Frankenstein and
Dracula variants, all
those ones people usually complain “aren't very scary.” The
Nightmare Before Christmas end of the scale, in other words.
Let's pause for a moment to examine
this particular complaint, however, since it's one I've also seen
levelled at almost every new horror film anybody makes the amateur
mistake of telling somebody else they enjoyed online, at one point or
another. Immediately, a horde of people will show up to put your
enjoyment in context, assuming that their lack of enjoyment
vis-a-vis the same thing must necessarily trump it: How
could you like that crap, let alone proselytize for it? is the
clear implication. As though a horror film's sole function was to
frighten across the boards, and any film that claims to be horror
which doesn't is just a big, creepy joke being played at their
expense. As though any narrative, horror or not, could ever
hope to produce exactly the same effect in every person who
encounters it.
Consider the jump-scare, that bane of
modern horror—a classic bait-and-switch once used to great effect
in movies like Val Lewton's Cat People (1942): through careful
cueing, a character/the audience is led to expect something (direct
threat) before suddenly being given something else (not that, not at
all). The scare in question might be as elaborate a set-up as a New
York City bus abruptly pulling up right next to the woman
who's just spent five minutes thinking she's being stalked by a
panther while simultaneously making almost the same sound such an
animal might emit as it pounces, or as simple as a lost pet falling
on you from an upper cupboard, a noise in the dark loud enough to
make anybody flinch, or a
child in a mask jumping out to scream in your face sheerly for the
pleasure of watching you freak out.
Most people agree that jump-scares are
the lowest rung on the ladder of purely autonomic horror responses,
the simplest possible effect to achieve—and that, no doubt, is why
genre-literate horror fans have become so reflexively contemptuous of
them rather than delighted by them. Other such autonomic effects
include low-decibel sound to create a mood of impending doom, use of
frame, darkness contrasted with dimly-seen or out-of-focus images,
whip-pans, sudden appearances in mirrors, et cetera...all the
myriad ways in which filmmakers try to trick us into mistaking
something normal for something not, a long-established vocabulary of
fright developed over almost a hundred years of Hollywood film
history. Unfortunately for genre fans, however, the more you
encounter these techniques, the easier they become to recognize in
action—until that recognition itself, eventually, serves to defuse
or callus over the same inherent human fight-or-flight prey reflexes
on which the techniques rely most directly to work.
So we ask ourselves, as horror fans,
what are these tricks being used in aid of, exactly? Are they tools
being used to construct something, some greater argument/narrative,
or is the point of the exercise the use of the tools themselves? Are
these mere mechanics what make up the mechanism itself, in its
entirety? When we talk about something being a simple “thrill
ride,” this is what we're saying—that while the film may work
moment to moment, it contains nothing we can take away from it,
nothing which will make us want to take that particular trip again.
That it's a haunted mansion without a ghost, empty as any given
cartoon Halloween Disney ride, and we should feel bad for even
meeting it halfway.
Or, to put it another way: I was scared
on an autonomic level by Annabelle: Creation because it does
these particular things very well, but does that make it a “good”
movie, enduringly so? Probably not, objectively, any more than making
me cry makes a movie from some other genre “good”...I'm easy like
that, annoyingly. All you have to do is press in the right places,
and it's like turning on a faucet.
One reason that people who otherwise
love the genre of cinematic horror may start to have a flinch/cringe
reflex around so much of its established vocabulary is that the jolt
of “seeing the strings” often causes them to assume there's
nothing there but a big ball of string. For me, even though
the more often I view something I already enjoy, the more strings I
see—those moments in Blade and From Dusk 'Til Dawn
where Stephen Dorff and George Clooney get switched out for their
stunt doubles, for example—it actually somehow increases my
affection for those things, instead of diminishing it. It's like a
bad retro haircut on an old familiar friend.
So we have to ask ourselves: is the
goal simply to scare people, or is the goal to make them afraid—aware
of their own fears, their own mortality, the things they don't know
and never will? To make them question themselves, their own sense of
reality; to put them in a bad place, then help them back out of it?
Or not, depending. I'd argue it's always the latter, or should be,
because the latter is far, far more difficult to achieve. Not that
anything's inherently wrong with the former, if that's all you want
to do, but that means you're going to end up creating something that
probably passes right through people, pretty much undigested—you
won't get a lot of repeat business. It's the repeat business that we
all long for, though; whatever that itch is that makes you want to
scratch, and re-scratch. To return to the moment of your own fright
and study it, break it down so you can figure out why it works for
you, and—hopefully—how to make it work for somebody else.
As my husband Stephen J. Barringer
points out, when you define your genre by its subjective effect
rather than its objective content, you will always run into trouble
convincing people who are genre-literate to look deeper once that
effect wears off for them. Which explains why “It's not scary”
is, from my POV, an evaluation so subjective as to be empirically
useless as a mode of assessment. In my own work, I concentrate on
what scares me personally, what disturbs me most, and trust that
there'll be people out there in my prospective audience for whom it
works the same way...and as for the rest, well, fuck 'em. They're not
for me and I'm not for them; it happens. It is, in fact, life.
What might be threatening about this
methodology beyond the fact of mere rudeness, however, is that it's
sort of the reverse of the logic that people who complain about being
triggered in some way appear to be employing; by pressing on my own
scabs, I feel as though what I'm trying to do is to tell all the
people out there who jump at the same things that their response is
valid: their fear, their pain, their grief, their hurt. Their wounds.
That pressing on those wounds—embracing and familiarizing oneself
with pain, rather than avoiding it—may be, in the end, more helpful
than not, because it has been for me. And if they can't make that
leap with me, I understand, but it's never going to stop me from
doing it—because, on some level, I need to. Like Joan Didion, I
need to write about things to understand what I think about them, and
in a way, my fiction can be read as a series of metaphorical essays
about certain moments in my life.
As I've said before, turning things
into fiction gives me retroactive control over them. I can change how
I remember things, and de-fang them in the process. E.M. Forster said
it very well: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say
[about anything]?” This applies to most types of writing, in all
genres—personal honesty and delight in your own storytelling trumps
mere cold mechanics, especially when reduced to pure tropery in hopes
of reaching the widest possible audience. It's the theory behind PG
horror, supposedly—but always remember, by today's standards,
Rosemary's Baby is PG. The Exorcist is PG. It doesn't
necessarily have to mean what we've all been trained to think it
means, in other words: to pitch your story only to some amorphous
mass of white, straight, mainstream teenagers out there in the dark
somewhere, never thinking—never recognizing—that some of those
teenagers might in fact grow up to be people like me (and you, I can
only assume).
One of the biggest advantages of horror
is that, like erotica, its fundamental techniques are inexpensive and
you will always find a market for the type of thing you're selling.
In fact, the people you end up targeting will be so happy to see
themselves reflected back, centre-stage at last, that they will
respond with instantaneous affection—and better yet, they'll spend
as much of their money on you as you want to take, just to get
another hit of that good stuff, the stuff that's for them. It's a
crass way to put it, but it's true. It's like flipping a house—you
can get out of it far more than you put in, depending on what
you put in.
So...with the whole “but it's not
scary!” thing hopefully gotten out of the way, let's go back to the
idea of “fun horror” in general—what's so fun about it? For me,
it all boils down to the element of delight: what makes a horror film
“fun” is that it's someplace I want to inhabit over and over, to
explore as I would a landscape, or re-play as I would a curated
playlist. The entries on such a program would have to consist of
films that each represent a bunch of strung-together moments I
thoroughly enjoy, pretty much from beginning to end. They might range
from eccentric picks like Big Trouble in Little China (aka
John Carpenter Does Urban Wuxia, at least in my house), with
its crazy pacing, screwball comedy dialogue and genuinely weird
supernaturalism, to supposedly mainstream stuff like Paul W.S.
Anderson's Event Horizon, which doesn't in any way set out to
be funny yet nevertheless ably manages to juggle both Hellraiser
In Space antics and deadpan action-film comic timing throughout.
(After having finally viewed the titular lost ship's final
space-bending hell-dimension body horror flesh apocalypse log entry,
badass space-rescue captain Laurence Fishburne has only one thing to
say: “We're leavin'!”)
Most of Clive Barker's work qualifies,
to my mind, because it takes place inside a clear horror universe
where magic is to some degree routine: Hellraiser, Hellbound, Lord
of Illusions, Nightbreed. In Barkerlandia, even relatively
“normal” impulses, like cheating on your boring-ass American
husband with his dirty yet sexy-ass brother, lead not to divorce so
much as to, oh, say, being flayed alive and torn apart by the demon
Leviathan's representatives, then put back together by an insane
psychiatrist who conjures your living corpse out of a mattress
watered with the blood of a self-harming psychotic. It's all about
the truly big issues, in other words: Immortality and destruction,
transformation and transfiguration. As John H. Frank observes, in
Lord of Illusions the “fun horror” is front-loaded
by concentrating on Scott Bakula's black magic P.I. Noir shenanigans
while the back half eventually turns out to involve pure cosmic
Gnostic nihilism, as Aleister Crowley/Charlie Manson-style cult
leader Nix announces: “I was born to murder the world.”
With a
lot of my Fun Horror faves, gore is a given, since once you push
things past a certain level everything tends to take on a Grand
Guignol quality of inventive nuttiness. Sam Raimi's Evil
Dead II: Dead by Dawn is as much a slapstick comedy as it is a
horror film, and I love it for that—both sides of the pie are
equally valid; I'd also throw Fede Alvarez's equally gonzo yet
totally straight-faced re-visioning of the original Evil Dead into
the mix, noting that its French title is something like
L'Opera des Terreurs. But then there's Dan O'Bannon's punk
extravaganza Return of the Living Dead, in which we learn that
nihilism won't help in the face of mucky, brain-eating tar-man zombie
attacks, that apparently “It hurts to be dead!” (which is why
zombies want to eat those damn brains in the first place, who knew?),
and that no matter how shitty a part of town you're calling from or
how decayed your voice sounds when you say it, some moron down at the
9-1-1 answer line will always “ssssend... morrrrre...
PARAMEDICS.”
(Always remember, O'Bannon also wrote the screenplay for Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce, which adapts Colin Wilson's The Space
Vampires into the best
schlock sci-fi horror movie Hammer never made. The end result plays
somewhat like a Nigel Kneale softcore, and is probably best known for
its liberal use of the often completely-nude Mathilda May, in her
English-film debut, and her amazing gravity-defying breasts. The
moments that have stayed with me the longest, though, are the hellish
spectacle of thousands of zombified Londoners simultaneously
energy-vampirizing each other while crumbling to dust at top speed as
the space vampires' umbrella-shaped ship sucks up their residue,
counterpointed with that one time our protagonists try to locate
May's astral form by slapping possessed lunatic asylum director
Patrick Stewart in the face over and over again before finally making
out with him.)
Peter Jackson also has a fair deal to
answer for, in this respect—Lord of the Rings Oscar-winner
loot aside, his early filmography mostly looks like the work of an
incredible talented New Zealander ten-year-old gross-out artist on a
sugar high. My favourite of these entries has to be Dead-Alive,
the hands-down foulest, most suppurating, over-the-top cartoon zombie
film ever made. Thrill as a hapless nebbish cuts his way through
acres of pus-filled undead Kiwis with nothing but a manual
lawn-mower, eventually rescuing his lovely girlfriend by cutting his
own mother in half and “returning to the womb” in style! The
sight of an otherwise mild-mannered cleric drop-kicking half a dozen
zombies—including a rotting infant in a baby buggy—through a
graveyard while announcing: “I kick ARSE for the LORD!!!”
is worth the price of admission alone.
Stuart Gordon's early films—Re-Animator
and From Beyond, in particular—are prime Fun Horror
material, consistently rocking both that all-important retro pulp
vibe and a certain Saturday morning serial sense of constant
acceleration; they satisfy even with their downbeat Lovecraftian
endings virtually intact, exhilarating me in a way that makes me
laugh out loud during certain sections of both. In a lot of ways, it
boils down to exactly how many moments per film there are of: "Oh
my God, ha ha, you actually went ahead and went there, didn't you?
Dude, you really did! Good for you."
But then there's also Neil Jordan,
who's directed three films I could watch again and again (and have),
immersing myself inside them like a bath of glorious, sensual
darkness: The Company of Wolves, Interview With the Vampire, and
Byzantium. Much like Guillermo
del Toro in his own Fun Horror triptych (Pan's Labyrinth,
The Devil's Backbone, Crimson Peak),
Jordan comes at horror from the Gothic side of things, with all that
that entails intact—Romanticism with a big “R,” sexuality both
vanilla and bent, mis en scene
so lavish you live in it (“Welcome to my haunted garbage dump,
Edith!”, as the primary Tumblr meme about Crimson Peak
goes).
It's
just not debatable that all these films are made by masters operating
at the very top of their respective games, no matter whether or not
you find their actual content a tad shallower than you might
otherwise hope. What's equally undeniable, however, is that both
Jordan and del Toro know exactly what they're doing, and that they've
studied the same sort of films they're trying to craft for years—del
Toro in particular, that gigantic monster-loving fanboy. Like Martin
Scorsese, they can cobble together visual, character and mood quotes
from their own internal library of films with ease, because they know
its various entries both inside and out.
In a
way, you could claim that all horror films made before a certain
era—your own, most probably—tends to fall under the category of
Fun Horror simply because of the way they were made, which can derail
even the most devoted of viewers' sense of internal reality just on
grounds of “but wait, real life is in colour” or “but wait,
real life comes with sound.” I've had film history students who
literally claimed they just couldn't watch genre staples like The
Silence of the Lambs because
“those fashions are so awful, and that music!” (“I was born
in 1990,” one once told me, almost causing me to choke on my own
spit.) People in the past looked and acted differently, news at
eleven! Suck it up and move on, folks. On the other hand, the
same can be said of almost every advance in special effects. For all
the people who decry computer-generated imagery, there'll be somebody
for whom practical effects or stop-motion animatronics look equally
ridiculous.
Willing suspension of disbelief is what
carried everybody through the long phase of film production during
which something as simple as a mobile camera seemed an impossible
dream, or in which all vehicle shots were achieved with
rear-projection on a studio back lot because the idea of actually
filming outside on location
was fucking crazy-talk. So to my mind, affection—sheer delight in
the way all a film's elements come together, grinding gears
notwithstanding—is the only thing that's ever
going to make you want to make that particular leap of credibility,
to agree to pretend you just don't see the seams and the pulling, the
slight pixilated blur, the zipper up the back. The first step in
suspending any disbelief is to stop looking for excuses not to.
It's
like Stephen King says in Danse
Macabre, talking about
watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon
from the back seat of his Mom's boyfriend's truck at a drive-in: most
of the time he knew it was just a guy, a stuntman who could swim
really well and didn't mind being encased in rubber...but every once
in a while, if he didn't watch himself real close, it suddenly turned
into something else—this horrible thing, muck-encrusted and
primordial, building a dam to trap its prey where it could get at
them, handful by slimy handful of mud and sticks and hate. “Its
ancient, evil eyes...”
That's
what I'm looking for with Fun Horror, and on really good days, that's
exactly what I get. That's what makes it so fun.
THE
END
AN
INCOMPLETE LIST OF FUN HORROR FILMS NOT DIRECTLY COVERED HERE
Francis
Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula
Attack the Block
The Lost Boys
Scanners
The Fly
(David Cronenberg's version)
The Hidden
Vamp
Species
Poltergeist
The Wolfman (Benicio
del Toro edition)
House of Dracula
House of Frankenstein
Bride of Frankenstein
Son of Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
The Raven
The Black Cat
The Mind's Eye
(aka The No-Budget Telekinetic Exploding-Head Scanners
Successor You Never Knew You Were Missing)
The Legend of Hell House
Brides of Dracula
Dracula A.D. 1972
Dracula Prince of Darkness
The Abominable Dr Phibes
Twins of Evil
Happy Birthday to Me
City of the Living Dead
Zombi
The Beyond
Demons and
Demons 2
House of Dark Shadows
John
Badham's Dracula (1979)
The Hearse
John Carpenter's
Prince of Darkness
Hausu
Phantom of the
Paradise
The Howling
Tales from the
Crypt: Demon Knight
A Nightmare on
Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
WolfCop
As Above So
Below
Warlock
Splinter
Dean Koontz's
Phantoms
Dog Soldiers
John Carpenter's In
The Mouth of Madness
We Are The Night
Ravenous