Of all film genres, horror should be the most timeless, since
fear is a primal emotion, immune to cultural trends. Yet more often
than not, horror films become period pieces, scaring one
generation, provoking laughter from the next. The exceptions —
take your pick which they are — only confirm the rule. Consider
the police-station coda tacked on to Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho, in which a psychiatrist (played by Simon Oakland)
provides a painstaking explanation of Norman Bates’s madness.
Oakland is really explaining the movie to the audience, which in
1960 did not come across homicidal transvestites too often. Once
shocking, the movie’s subject matter is now ho-hum. Hitchcock’s
techniques have been borrowed and distilled so widely that even a
first-time viewer must really know that Janet Leigh is going to get
it in the shower, must really know that the woman in the rocking
chair is dead; must really know, somehow, that Norman Bates and his
mother are one and the same.
And so Oakland’s potted Freudian lecture now seems embarrassing,
even campy, surely not an effect Hitchcock sought. “Is this guy
serious?” a friend asked when we watched the movie a few years
back.
That’s the problem with horror films: they are serious, at least
when they’re made, but the culture plows over them eventually,
leaving not much behind but caricature. In fact, one horror
franchise, the Scream series, is based on this premise.
Steeped in irony, it attempts to scare us even while mocking horror
film conventions; this makes the filmmakers clever, at least in
their own minds, but does not succeed in making their films scary.
It’s hard to be ironic and terrified. If we felt enough of one, we
would never feel the other.
The irony quotient has increased exponentially even since 1978,
when the low-budget indie film Halloween debuted, becoming
a surprise smash and earning the dubious distinction of spawning
the slasher flick (though some horror buffs claim that credit
should go to a film made three years earlier, the still-scary
Black Christmas). But Halloween had its own
merits. Its story is simple, with none of the confusions of
Psycho: just a little boy, Michael Myers, who kills his
sister on Halloween night for no apparent reason, is
institutionalized, breaks out 15 years later, and sets off for his
hometown to re-enact the mayhem — on Halloween night. No
explanations are given other than scattered musings about evil from
Michael’s psychiatrist, played by Donald Pleasence in a performance
several pay grades above these B-movie trappings. It all works in a
film where darkness and shadow are costars and a diabolical human
monster lurks behind them. Like Psycho, Halloween
works mostly by suggestion, lifting the curtain only in brief,
supremely shocking moments. Even when it shows us something, it is
often tangential — glimpses of the killer in the corner of the
screen, always lurking, but only rarely striking. My favorite is
when the camera shows us what a little boy sees when he looks out
the window: the killer, carrying one of his victims into a house
across the street. We understand that only the kid sees this, and
if the movie is working, we are the kid at that moment.
Yet nearly 30 years later, Halloween’s descendants are
so numerous and varied that it is difficult to imagine a younger
audience being frightened by such things. Halloween is now
predictable; its pace is slow, by current standards; it only has a
few “kills.” Like Psycho, its special surprises have been
adapted so many times that their novelty has worn off. Anyone
coming to the movie fresh will know without being told that the
killer will not be stopped the first time, or the second, or the
third (never mind the sequels, in which he is transformed into a
superhuman being). Unlike Psycho, Halloween’s
acting and screenplay are mediocre, so its rickety foundation, once
redeemed by directorial freshness, now stands out more glaringly.
Once the scares have been absorbed into cliche, a viewer notices
only the potholes.
Maybe the source of the problem is that horror films are
uniquely captive not only to their cultural moment, but to the age
of the viewer when he or she sees them. Unlike great dramas or
comedies that can capture us at any age, if a horror film hasn’t
found its way under your skin by the time you’re 21 or so, it
probably won’t. Horror buffs will disagree, of course, but I can
only speak from experience. I couldn’t have been older than 10 when
I stumbled onto an eerie black and white film one day on
television, which showed a woman being stalked by a ghoulish
presence who kept showing up in her rearview mirror and nearly
everywhere else. It was Carnival of Souls, now regarded as
a B-movie horror classic, but I would have forgotten the movie by
now if not for my age and the circumstances under which I’d seen
it. Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of good horror films —
The Exorcist, Night of the Living Dead, The
Shining, Evil Dead, Carrie, The
Omen, and others. But besides Carnival of Souls, the
only ones that really stayed with me are Psycho and
Halloween, both of which I saw by age 15.
I haven’t kept up with the horror genre, but judging from a
Bravo special on “scariest movie moments,” many recent films, even
the highly imaginative ones, seem to confuse sadism with suspense.
Some of the films profiled — with titles like Hostel,
Saw 2, Old Boy, The Grudge, Cabin
Fever, and others — have as their defining scene something
truly vicious and demented, like tossing a woman into a pit of
hypodermic needles. Hostel, which earns the special’s top
honors, appears to be an extended torture film set in a dungeon.
The special’s talking heads rave about how scary these various
scenes are, yet there seems little that is frightening about them.
The movies are less about horror than about chronicling human
depravity — the latter certainly a worthy subject, perhaps for a
documentary. But there is a difference between sick and scary.
However disturbing as an image, a pit of hypodermic needles is not
what comes to mind when you arrive home to a dark house; who might
be upstairs, or what might be down in the cellar, are still the
thoughts that count.
“He’s gone,” the Donald Pleasence character bellows early in
Halloween, upon discovering Michael Myers’s escape from
the mental institution. “The evil is gone!”
How right he was. The very idea of being frightened by a movie
like Halloween is gone. By now, Michael Myers seems
terribly slow out of the blocks — his deliberative pace hasn’t
kept up with a quick-cut age, and his modest goal of merely killing
people, as opposed to ritualistically slaughtering them, seems
tame. Give it another 20 years, and Michael will seem like a
restrained, almost Victorian villain. And like the Victorians, who
couldn’t be blamed if people didn’t understand what was good for
them, it’s not his fault that people don’t know anymore when to be
frightened.
