***
As an adolescent and then later a
teenager, I wasn’t a consistent fan of the horror genre. I mostly
devoured science fiction novels and comic books and Saturday morning
cartoons, though childhood staples such as these certainly possessed
enough strains of horror DNA in their own right, even back then. But
mostly, I was a Flash Gordon, Star Trek, Star Wars, Spider-Man &
His Amazing Friends kind of kid. So memories of the few times I
actually saw something that frightened me stand out vividly.
The earliest incident occurred in a
movie theater lobby, when my father took the family to see Never Cry
Wolf. The movie itself wasn’t scary. But in the lobby before the
movie, while waiting in line, I saw a poster for My Bloody Valentine.
My memories of the poster’s exact details are sketchy – a
shadowy face in a blood-smeared gas mask – but I remember a very
visceral reaction, deep inside. Something seemed wrong about that
poster, that hidden face and those wide, crazed eyes.
The second incident occurred a few
years later around Christmas, visiting my Aunt and Uncle’s. Bored
and ready to go home and flipping through the television channels, I
came across Vincent Price’s House of Wax, circa 1953. Apparently,
the adults must have been busy elsewhere, because I kept watching
uninterrupted. And while the concept of being turned into a living
wax dummy – unable to speak, talk, or move, dead and alive at once
– was frightening enough, the scariest scene came when a female
character (if I’m remembering the right movie) was impaled through
the abdomen with a metal pipe, pinned to the wall. But that wasn’t
the worst. The worst was watching blood slowly trickle out of the
pipe’s end. Like she’d become nothing more than a bag of blood
drained by a big metal straw. Like those weird “space milk”
pouches they’d started serving with our school lunches.
The third incident occurred many years
later, when I was fifteen. One day in Art class, I went into the
storeroom for supplies. There, I accidentally discovered my Art
teacher’s old stash of EC Horror Comics. In one of them, I read a
story about these two brothers, out in the woods. They came across a
swamp or bog or something. One brother got stuck, sucked down by the
mire. The other, a coward, left him there, fled home, and lied to
his parents about his brother’s whereabouts, saying he didn’t
know where he was.
Of course, it wasn’t long – after
the dead brother was declared missing – that the cowardly brother
heard slurping, mucky footsteps outside his window at night. Driven
mad by guilt and fear, he eventually returned to that bog,
and...well, I guess we all know how that story ends.
And it certainly left me disturbed.
Filled with an unsettling disquiet. How could someone leave their
brother to die like that? How horrible would it be carrying all that
guilt...and think about the OTHER brother, the one now transformed
into a walking mud-thing. He may’ve gotten his vengeance...but he
was still dead. And made of mud, forever. Nothing good about that,
at all.
Looking back on those three very
different experiences, I can recognize in them now the seed of what
the horror genre has tried to grow in readers (and by the 1930’s,
viewers) for centuries. Fear. But not fear for mere sadistic,
masochistic enjoyment. Not for ghoulish pleasure, or for the
satisfaction of watching others suffer. But fear of things that
violate our sense of what is right and natural. Fear of things that
aren’t supposed to be.
And, even though my retrospective is
certainly colored by hindsight, an ironic thing: how relieved I felt
after leaving that movie theater and my Uncle and Aunt’s. Because
in both cases, the safety of the family car, the familiar sounds of
my parents’ conversation and music from their favorite light rock
station reaffirmed my unconscious belief in things as they were meant
to be. Even as I shivered a little, gazing into the dark night,
normality had been restored, and I felt happy for it. And my
happiness, I believe, had been intensified by the fear I’d felt
only moments before. In a strange way, my fear had reaffirmed my
belief in and desire for normality.
The emotional fear and eventual relief
I felt in the first two incidents - my reactions to a movie poster
and snippets from a movie playing on television - embody decently
enough the function of a “classic” horror movie. Essentially,
in classic horror movies, the narrative opens with the violent
disruption of the normative order by a “monster".
The monster could be almost anything, of course. Aliens,
supernatural beings, mad scientists, even a deviant transformation
from within a person. The rest of the story then revolves around the
“monster” wrecking havoc, instilling terror in the hearts of the
people (and the audience) and the people’s ineffectual attempts at
defeating it. Eventually, either violence or knowledge is used to
defeat the monster, restoring the normative order. In essence,
the unnatural thing or “monster” is bested, and everything
becomes as it once was – as it should be.
Also, the boundaries between “good”
and “evil”, “normal” and “abnormal”, “human” and
“alien” are clearly marked in classic horror movies. In the
classic horror movie, threats to the existing social order are
external, and eventually, human agency – or the forces of “good”
- prevail. My perception of My Bloody Valentine’s movie
poster was informed by this paradigm. A strange, inhuman thing
leering at me with an almost tangible air of malevolence - I knew
that was bad. When a little older and bit more sophisticated, I
viewed the killer in House of Wax as clearly evil, killing innocent
human beings (even though, in the fullness of the plot, the killer is
seeking revenge for a crime perpetrated upon him).
My reaction to my third fear
experience - the EC horror comic I discovered -was a little more
nuanced. Because, really - who was “evil” in that story? One
brother was certainly a selfish coward, abandoning his other brother
to die in a swamp. And it could certainly be viewed as a morality
play, the moral of the story being: “Don’t desert your loved
ones, because they’ll come back and get you from beyond the grave.”
But his guilt and remorse for this
cowardly act seemed to exempt him from being truly evil. And the
swamp monster his brother became wasn’t exactly evil, either.
Merely a sorrowful, vengeful wraith seeking vengeance. I came away
from that story feeling uneasy, because I didn’t know where my
sympathies should lie. With the wronged brother, now turned into a
lurching, gurgling horror that would never find any peace? Or with
the weaker brother whose worst crime was merely fear and indecision
in a crisis?
This reaction more closely resembles
what has become known as post-modern horror cinema. Very much like
classic horror cinema, post-modern horror revolves around the violent
introduction of a “monster” upon a normative state. People
ineffectually try to defeat this monster. However, post-modern
cinema differs from classic horror cinema in ways similar to my
reaction to that EC horror comic.
Because throughout the post-modern horror
movie’s narrative, lines of “good” and “evil” are blurred.
Very quickly, characters – and by proxy, audiences – learn or at
least suspect there’s no way to beat this monster. “Good” (or
whatever is loosely defined as “good”) will not win in the end.
Audiences are left perhaps feeling uneasy, unsettled because the
narrative’s resolution doesn’t offer closure. The monster still
lingers at the movie's end, ready to strike again....
***
And that's all for now. More later by the end of the week, hopefully. Thoughts?
This makes me want to read the rest of your paper, lol. Great intro.
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