“Horror Films No Longer Had to Make Sense”

An interesting observation by Stephen R. Bissette when I interviewed him for my Bill Rebane piece — the understanding that seemed to pervade horror movie makers in the early eighties that logic and coherent plotting was obsolete, that it was potentially scarier, and easier, to just throw random shit at the audience, to baffle and disorient them with impossible plot twists and contradictions.

This was so widely understood — whether audiences LIKED it or not, and I think audiences often get cross about this stuff, even if it works on them emotionally — that Bill Rebane, who was hardly at the centre of the horror genre and professed not to be a fan of it, could apply it wholeheartedly to his DEMONS OF LUDLOW, and Stanley Kubrick could impose it on his adaptation (with novelist Diane Johnson) on THE SHINING. (Stephen King’s novels are fairly coherent but he usually depends on the forces of evil, when the story is supernatural, having vaguely-defined and conveniently-expanding powers.) The novel already mingled telepathy, violent psychotic breakdown, and ghosts, which is nearly triple voodoo, but Kubrick inserted the weird time-slip material, deciding that the Overlook shouldn’t blow up, and eventually rejecting the conventional closeup-of-a-bee ending he’d shot where the Overlook manager is somehow an avatar of the hotel — which didn’t make any sense but feels like other horror movies.

And when John Carpenter and Debra Hill realised they couldn’t sell THE FOG as a restrained, spooky ghost story, it was easy enough just to add a few zombie scares that didn’t exactly make sense, and they could be confident this wouldn’t stop the film being commercial.

Does this date back to SUSPIRIA? Who invented the incoherent narrative? It seems to make sense that it would be an Italian, though I wouldn’t put it past the Japanese — but it would be less likely to cross over.

(Afterthought: THE TENANT isn’t logical either — it predates SUSPIRIA — but doesn’t seem like it had the same broad influence.)

In DEEP RED, there’s a murder mystery with an answer that kind of makes sense, though for a moment there the hero has to be quite convinced that the killer was someone who was with him at the time of the first murder, an unbreakable alibi one would have thought. But in SUSPIRIA, randomness rules. The giallo knifings aren’t really motivated by anything in the story, which turns out to be about witchcraft, the first time that the earlier Italian Gothic horror genre infected the giallo — unless I’m missing something.

Argento’s dream illogic is his second-best trait, below his flamboyance — for me, now that he’s lost the wild visual imagination he’s lost everything. His dreams are amazingly banal. Men with knives chase women. And of course, he’s rewriting his dreams to make them about sexy girl victims instead of himself as victim, making them more commercial and more banal. By rendering the situations preposterous, overheated and surreal, he at least frames them in an unusual way.

The abandonment of logic is the second major step in the evolution of horror movie narratives. And the first was an Italian development also: in BLACK SABBATH, Mario Bava presented what seems to be the first horror movie with an unhappy ending –in fact, three of them. Previous horror movies might be a bit tragic — we feel sorry for Larry Talbot each time he perishes, at least until he’s done it once too often — but the ending was always about reestablishing the natural order, as in a Shakespeare tragedy. Mario Bava realised that was making things LESS SCARY, and why would you want that? And without the Breen Office or a similar censor imposing a morally uplifting The End, Finis or Fine, why should you let the viewer off the hook?

Similarly, even in a dark, violent story in which terrible things happen and evil wins, a logical, sequential story is somewhat reassuring. Pull that rug away!

Here’s an image that ties in directly with yesterday’s post…

Of pre-Argento horror movies, DEMENTIA and CARNIVAL OF SOULS feel somewhat “non-Cartesian,” as he would say, but their narrative frameworks put the weird events into some kind of structure that does make sense, even if the precise events we have to watch are somewhat inexplicable. The endings wrap things up neatly rather than exploding them in our faces.

Next question: can we imagine a next stage in the evolution of horror that would make the films generally more terrifying, less reassuring? I can only think of ways of intensifying the insanity, which isn’t a paradigm shift, just a small evolutionary step.

There’s also been the opposite movement towards realism, where you get HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and his more melodramatic cousins.

And the most interesting combined approach might be THE EXORCIST, which tries to make everything seem forcefully real (like HENRY), follows an accepted mythology (like DRACULA), AND has a crazy, why-is-this-happening randomness and a willingness to let plot points be obscure which anticipates Argento and his goofy followers.

If anyone has a great idea for how to transform the medium, let me know!

Dummy Images

Mario Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE has one of the greatest opening credit sequences ever — greater than anything else in the film, in fact, though the film has magnificent stylistic tour-de-forces throughout. Most of them are killings, and they’re “nakedly sadistic,” to use Kim Newman’s evocative phrase in The BFI Bumper Boy’s Book of Horror Movies or whatever it’s called. The queasily sexual come-on approach to the snuffings rather spoils my pleasure. I think Bava was trying to top PSYCHO, and had analysed the effect of the shower scene accurately, probably, but was mixing things up in a disturbing way.

In PSYCHO, Hitchcock wrong-foots the audience by preferring a suggestion of (unseen) nudity — one “perks up in all manner of ways,” said Jonathan Demme of the prospect of a naked Janet Leigh — though one should also be repulsed by Norman Bates’ peeping, even as Hitch teases us with the prospect of sharing in it. Then any erotic potential is quashed by the brutal slashing.

In BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, the terrorizing of the female victims is given a big, suspenseful but somehow sexually-tinged build-up, the killings are unnecessarily elaborate and exotically varied, and the women always manage to tear their clothing, exposing undergarments. The first murder is particularly striking in the way the victim is dragged off by her feet, so that her skirt is tucked up exposing stocking tops and panties. So the murders are not only sadistic but necrophilic. She may be dead, the movie says, but we can still enjoy looking at her body.

But that kind of discomfort is missing from the opening titles, which I find deeply joyous in their mock-sinister mood-setting. Objectification is still going on, though — the cast are posed like mannequins. Some kind of hierarchy seems to be present: some of the actors get to slyly glance towards us, or offscreen with furtive intent. Eyes and eyelids are the only parts permitted to move. Otherwise, only Bava’s gliding camera is permitted motion, which makes the still thesps seem even more frozen.

This seems like a wry comment on the script’s very basic characterisation, and an acknowledgement that the people we’re going to see hacked up are in no sense real humans — perhaps a reassuring wink to anxious moviegoers, like the hilarious Karloff stuffed horsey-ride at the coda of BLACK SABBATH? But, coming at the head of the film, it has less of a comforting effect — as the stiff mummers set about personating their cardboard characters — the twitchy dope fiend, the throat-clutching “epileptic”, the fake Chinese girl and the fashion boss ice queen — they do acquire a certain limited life, or at least they seem like crudely-sketched avatars of humanity, so to see their deaths served up as pseudo-sexual spectacle still disturbs me.

Funnily enough, the first time I saw the film was on a crappy VHS, so the colour was terrible and the framing was ruined by pan-and-scan, the titles were the US version made by Filmation (who at least tried to mimic a Bava lighting style) and all the murders had been crudely truncated by the BBFC. And the film was still recognizably an amazing piece of tacky but beautiful, nasty but evocative cinema.

There’s a Thwap! for That

Continuing my summer of actually going to see films. Edinburgh currently lacks a real art cinema — Filmhouse closed but will reopen, YAY! — Cameo is mainly showing multiplex stuff — so I’m booking a visit to “that other, much darker city,” (per Anna Karena) where I will see THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD and SERPICO on Saturday (Glaswegian Shadowplayers, hit me up!), and am planning a couple of trips to Edinburgh International Film Festival, which, despite being rendered homeless by the Filmhouse closure, is striding boldly forth under the able direction of Kate Taylor. Please consider going to see something — it’s a reduced programme this year but a strong one, I think.

But meanwhile, I strolled over to my local, Vue Ocean Terminal (don’t like the name — why pick something that doesn’t sound like a cinema — what’s wrong with Roxy, Ritz, Odeon, Regal?) and saw SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE. Which was plenty of fun.

I tried to wean myself off Marvel and DC movies. Succeeded pretty well with DC, except for lapsing into SUICIDE SQUAD. I generally enjoy Lord-Miller stuff though, and the first of these animated mixed-media romps was very enjoyable. The second one suffers a bit from series bloat and repetition — they strim off the less appealing elements of the last one (gone is the cartoon Spider-Pig, a relief) and add a few new wrinkles on the concept (I liked Hammerspace — where cartoon characters like Bugs produce their big hammers from) and the combination of cinematic and comic book language is still remarkably successful.

You see in things like CREEPSHOW an attempt to combine the comic book with film — you see it in occasional TV experiments like the wretched Jane. But these always seemed gimmicky, half-assed and totally unsuccessful. Romero was a smart guy, but the formal elements he ported over from EC Comics always just seemed pasted on, and they screwed up the pace.

The team here (three writers, three directors, an army of others) use captions as footnotes, and make it a rule never to allow any of them to delay the action — you’re either quick enough to catch them or you aren’t. If you struggle, that’s good, it forces you to sit up. Rather than changing screen ratio to simulate comic panels, as Edgar Wright did in SCOTT PILGRIM, or inserting shots into actual panels, as Romero did, intermittently and laboriously, they use occasional splitscreen effects, always at key moments when they’re useful. The whole gorgeous stylisation of the thing means such moments never stand out as particularly contrived. You’re never yanked out of the film because you have a one-foot-in, one-foot-out relationship to it anyway, enjoying the story and characters (I hope) and admiring the sheen and brushstrokes and futziness and show-off energy.

The vocal performances are lovely, distinctive without being overly cartoony. I particularly admire Hailee Steinfeld’s ability to sound like she’s constantly on the verge of tears without wearing out the empathic response or getting tiresome. The teen angst of the original strip was its best innovation: this whole movie strikes me as a coming-out story, which is cool. Although it would be nice to have some actual gay characters. If you have an infinite number of Spider-Man universes, would he not be gay in at least some?

My other gripe about the movie, which I mostly found dazzling and even moving, is the nightmare the animators have been put through: we know it must have been really awful because word has gotten out. Despite all the professional pressures in place to prevent anyone complaining. The movie already looks like ten times the work of any normal film, and if sequences had to be fully-rendered four times, with complete returns to the virtual drawing board each time, because the producers couldn’t make up their minds or couldn’t imagine what something would look like without seeing it complete, that sounds like a nightmare. Being able to previsualize is part of the job, or ought to be if you involve yourself in the visuals at all. Personally, I always try to avoid changing my mind and I certainly feel bad if I’m forced to do it because something hasn’t worked.

“If something doesn’t work first time, you’re an asshole.” — Mario Bava. “That’s how it is in this business: you’re either God the father or you’re an asshole.”

This movie had been and gone but Vue seem to now have a habit of bringing stuff back for single showings, a policy I approve of. Maybe we can turn our multiplexes into rep cinemas. Get the Vue bit by a radioactive arthouse.