An Examination (Part II: Wolves and Sharks)

This is where I should have started, but (and this is also why I get hiccups) I am often too excited for my own good. If I breathe in and breathe out and imagine starting this whole conversation over again, I find myself twisting and turning in my childhood bed.

I grew up on a homesteader-type spread in the middle of Indiana. We lived in a tiny blue cottage on the edge of 20-ish acres of  forest and marsh. The cottage was as tired and achey as a septuagenarian and correspondingly vocal. The largest of the outbuildings was a large, red barn that we only partially used, and its darkest rooms were full of rusted tools and small, skittering shadows. Night was not orange but black, black, black. But I digress. When I was extra-tiny, before it occurred to me that my surroundings could be frightening, my mom read me fairy tales. Old World fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm's "Little Red Cap" was the first work of fiction that gave me The Fear.

Arthur Rackman: "Little Red Riding Hood"

Little Red Cap

I had the most ferocious nightmares about wolves for months afterward, and one of my first memories is my mother apologizing for reading me this story.

As I grew and began moving independently outward from the cottage, exploring the barn or climbing in the woodshed or playing in the forest, I operated on fairy tale logic ("wolves live here, here, and here and I won't go there unless I have a big stick"). Without a television (or friends), there wasn't any outside "static" interfering with my bloated imagination, so I spent a lot of time being horrified: mostly by choice. When I first heard Vincent Price's monologue on Michael Jackson's "Thriller," it only confirmed what I already knew (that, at night, things were crawling up to the house from the marsh).

It's easy to romanticize the Girl Explorer/Wolf Meat phase of my childhood, because children have been poking around in the woods and scaring the hell out of themselves for eons. But the Event that turned the pokin' stick into a remote control happened when I was ten and my dad finally allowed a television and VCR player into the house. I was ecstatic because that meant I finally got to see...

Wait, let me back up...

I remember being incomparably excited about three things in my childhood:

1) The Jem pink punk rock wig I asked for one Christmas
2) Being tall enough to ride the Vortex at King's Island
3) JAWS

From the moment Jaws went into the VCR, I was so engrossed that I lost all concept of self. My parents were as entertained by me as they were by the film because, although I started out sitting about 3 feet in front of the screen, by the film's end I had scooted and scrambled all the way across the living room and was wedged and cowering against the couch. For the next five years, I had wolf-grade nightmares about sharks. The dreams went something like this: I would be walking through my school's gymnasium and the floor would open underneath me and I would plunge into the ocean with one or many sharks circling me. I would wake up with my sheets twisted off the bed, as if I had been trying to swim. The nightmare didn't always end right away because, in that heightened state of arousal, I would sometimes see Frankenstein's Monster silhouetted in my bedroom door or hear wet footsteps coming up the hill from the marsh. No matter how much teenaged hormones dampened my lively imagination, sharks would sometimes transport me back to that wonderful, porous childhood mindset.

Reading over this, it sounds like a set of reasons to hate horror films. What makes one person love being scared and another hate it? I'm trying to imagine what went on when I was being assembled in my mother's womb. There's a big production line and a switchboard for turning on and off certain genes. The workers are all tiny forest animals, and there's a drunken rabbit at the switchboard.

God gene off!
Horror gene on!
Allergic to...everything!
Cries during previews!
Man...this kid's gonna be a WEIRDO!
Gary- send more tequila!

And out I pop, poking things with sticks and trying to sneak onto grown-up roller coasters and peeking from between my fingers at the movie theater.

So, that explains that or, rather, explains nothing. Because, as tempting as it is to "p-shaw" at the thought that liking horror means anything about me, it quite obviously does. But that's for next time, and now's for sleeping.

An Examination (Part I: Invisible China Teacups)

A still from Cronenberg's Rabid

Thus far, the blog experiment isn't much of a success. I have some half-finished writing on Event Horizon (in response to some comments I received from friends about my last set of screenshots) and the excellent Cold Prey (Uthaug, 2006), which has been called "the perfect slasher." However, all that writing is languishing (festering?), because summer classes and various parks, beaches, and patios have prevented me from finishing...anything. A recent email exchange serves as good motivation though, so I think I'll break my silence by writing about why I love horror.

I imagine that people who are primarily interested in "legitimate" film genres spend less time mentally circling their interests and trying to figure out what being interested in That means about Them. More than (most) other genres, horror seems to encode its viewer with a set of (mostly) undeserved characteristics. I've recently read some theory that helps me being to understand it all. In "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess," Linda Williams examines the form, structure, and functions of pornography, horror, and melodrama, which are awarded a low cultural status for their excessive display of sex, violence, and emotion. I find it particularly interesting when Williams cites Mary Ann Doane’s writing on the “textual rape” of the viewer, who is “feminized through pathos." Each genre can be seen to victimize (feminize) the viewer through the objectification of women in porn, the “fight or flight” response elicited in horror, or the simulation of intense loss in melodrama. The key is the greater degree of bodily violation, even though we are always, always, always seeking a sensory experience whenever we buy a ticket or press "play." Although comedy seems to be a counterexample (because it can also elicit a powerful physical response from viewers), only the three aforementioned genres present a special challenge to their audience, who sit in the dark: jerking in fear, arousal, or sadness. I really can't recommend this essay enough to anyone who wants to explore these cultural "dark alleys." It has become an important piece of writing in my quest to more reasonably respond to the following proclamation:

 

On more than one occasion, I've found myself responding to what I perceived (correctly or not) as a value judgment in one of three ways:

1) Explain that I also enjoy foreign films, baby animals, and lying in fields in the sunlight

2) Push up my glasses and blather about horror's function as "cultural problem solving" 

3) Ask the naysayer why they don't like it

If I asked you which of the three yielded the more interesting conversation, I'm guessing you'd choose 3 (so choose 3). Interestingly, 3 is rarely a revelation. Turns out, horror is scary. Imagine. Or, if you have the pleasure of insulting the good taste of an academic, horror objectifies women and rubs our faces in the consequences of challenging patriarchal capitalismblahblahyawn. Lately, 2 is getting the better response, because (I think) it gives people a safe distance from which to engage the topic of What Frightens Us All. Because, after all, it's not that I'm not scared of sharks and men with mommy issues and the shambling dead...it's that I can engage with these images rather than reject them. In the BBC documentary Why Do We Dream, it is asserted that nightmares have served an important function in human evolution. Perhaps without dreaming of fanged things, humans would have gone the way of the dodo bird. It is only natural that, given the power, we would project these dreams (which serve such an important function in our lives) onto the screen. Yet, it certainly means something different to have nightmares and to willingly subject ourselves to horror films.

Coming up in Part II: Wolves and Sharks (Or How I Learned to Stop Shivering and Love the Horror Film)

Screenshots + Celebration

An unusually intense semester has ended, so here are some celebratory screenshots. I had intended to write something of substance, but right now I just need the catharsis. And what could be more cathartic than a wall of blood?

Anyhow, Event Horizon has always unsettled me. I guess that's probably because it completely annihilates all my Utopian notions of sub-light travel. In EH, humanity's greatest ambition leads straight to hell...and Sam Neill. Anyhow, despite the film's tendency to push some of my buttons, the wall of blood has always stood out as beautiful to me...so, here you have it.

Screenshots: Suspiria

 

Despite Suspiria's overabundance of pretty, this hallway bewitchment scene never quite leaves my mind. As
an incurable fairy tale addict, I think it's the combination of the red and black mise-en-scene and strange pairing of the toad-like woman and the demented Little Lord Fauntleroy that does it for me. It seems like something I'd dream after overdosing on Brothers Grimm and melatonin.

Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977)

Hour of the Wolf

Alma and Johan at the worst dinner party ever

It's a wonderful day to start a horror film blog. Of course, by "wonderful day," I mean that it is gray and storming outside. Because the weather seems to be demanding I write about something black, white, and brooding, I'll start with one of my favorite psychological horror films: Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf (1968). It's not one to reach for if you're looking for laughs or buckets of blood, but you'd be a rare bird if it didn't stir you. Because I can, I'm going to link to other synopses and reviews of the film: 

Roger Ebert's Review
Bergmanorama

One of my favorite approaches in film analysis is to try and establish a film's geography. With psychological films, this task is complicated because, the further a character descends into psychosis, the more their physical surroundings become divorced from reality. Since we can't be sure what is real in the film, I've chosen to treat even the most fantastic settings and images as literalizations of Johan (and Alma's?) fractured mind. In other words, this is a literal mapping of a surreal text.

Alma and Johan arrive at the island on a small boat. Aside from the couple, the sailor in the boat is the only character in the film that we can be reasonably sure exists. Perhaps because of this, the camera holds on him for a long time, until the boat disappears behind a rock. This "parting shot" is important because, for the rest of the film we are trapped on the island, which functions as a psychological as opposed to physical landscape: separated from the “mainland” of rationality and reality.

Goodbye, you're screwed.

The events of the film play out in four major settings on the island: shoreline, cottage, castle, and forest. The shoreline is rocky and inhospitable, but Johan chooses to paint and draw here. It's also where Johan literally embraces his sexual insecurities. First, he is visited by an old flame, Veronica Volger (Ingrid Thulin). She warns him that “You can't see us, but we can see you. Awful things can happen. Some dreams can be made known.” Rather than listen to her warnings, he kisses her.  Later, he kills (or thinks he kills) a seductive young boy in an apparent effort to quell latent homosexual desire. As the boy lies sunning on a rock, Johan attacks him and bashes him against a rock. Kids, close your eyes. But neither apparition disappears; Veronica later resurfaces in the castle and the young boy hovers just under the surface of the water where Johan dumped him. In allowing his most primal sexual fears to play out on the shoreline, they eventually overrun the entire island.

Johan's visitors

Alma and Johan’s cottage is located on the bluff above the shoreline. It is the picture of cozy domesticity: small, well-worn, and surrounded by a walled-in yard containing a single flowering tree. The one moment of happiness that we see them share occurs underneath this tree. Alma spends most of her time here; her influence makes the cottage a relatively stable environment. We cannot trust that she is totally sane (she wonders aloud if Johan has “infected” her and she is also able to see his demons), but we can say that she is more sane than Johan. Though they find footprints around their cottage, Johan’s demons are seemingly unable to reach him there. Initially, it serves as a refuge for Johan, but as his psychosis ripens, he shoots at Alma and flees the cottage. Neither Alma nor the domestic sphere can protect him from himself.

The cottage

Johan’s demons convene in the von Merken castle, the exterior of which we only catch a glimpse of in the dinner party sequence. Most of the castle is obscured by trees; it is impossible to tell how large it is. Inside, it is labyrinthine. Some rooms are furnished with expensive furniture and heavy drapes, but other areas are empty, shadowy, and filled with hordes of crows. It's also an absurd space; inside, hosts are not hospitable, puppets move on their own accord, and the laws of physics get a bit...slippery.

"I can assure you, I suffer"

The after-dinner puppet show scene is especially interesting, because Johan’s demons use it to show him that they, too, can move of their own accord. The stony beach is a space where Johan allows his demons to run wild, so I like to think that the stone castle is formed from the raw, psychic "materials" of the shoreline. Here, the demons take on a life of their own (as twisted, aristocratic shrews) and build a structure in which they thrive. Johan can control what happens at the beach but, once he enters the castle, he is at their mercy.

In case you weren't scared of puppets already...

You can draw your own conclusions about the piece of music in this scene: The Magic Flute

Finally, there is the forest, where last climactic scenes of the film play out. Johan (feminized, humiliated, and convinced he has murdered Alma) runs into the trees. The forest is dark and twisted, a fairly in-your-face articulation of overgrown madness. Alma manages to find Johan and calls to him. He is shown in long shot, standing in a copse of trees with branches that seem to wrap around him. As Alma watches, his demons morph from impish to wholly malicious and take turns hitting and cutting him, until they (along with Johan) disappear into thin air. Alma rushes to where Johan had just stood, in the same framing and long shot, surrounded by dead limbs and stagnant, frothing black water.

Alma alone in the tangled forest

Unsurprisingly, the settings in the film serve a narrative rather than spatial function. Restated, the film's settings function as points on a psychological continuum. I group the four locations into two pairs: the beach and the cottage (where Johan creates and Alma nurtures), and the castle and the forest (controlled by Johan's run-amok sexual insecurities). What I find so horrifying about this film is the embodiment of personal demons that possess the capability of creating physical environments that function according to their rules. The scene I keep coming back to is the one in which Johan embraces Veronica Volger. The seems to best-articulate Bergman's warning about allowing the artistic process to overtake one's persona (Johan "embraces the dream").

I'd hate to think what my demons would look like. They'd probably be clowns. I'm fairly well-vented, psychologically, but it's the clowns that continue to haunt me. Puppets, too.