Tag: Horror

What Ever Happened to Spooky — Part II

In our relentless campaign to Care Bear each and every unpleasantness out of our society, in the last few decades, we have literally kicked the hell out of Hallowe’en.  We have turned witches into kindly grandmas, ghosts into benign (and oddly talkative) spirits, ghouls no longer eat the dead, and God only knows what happened to zombies.  (The Apocalypse may be upon us, but, people, those aren’t zombies!)  So, now, having glossed over all the best bits of October 31st, we’re left with nothing more than a gross-out Gorefest.  All Hallow’s Eve has become a do-it-yourself Slasher Movie, complete with severed arteries, pulsing internal organs and body parts hacked off or hanging open.  Unfortunately, these things aren’t scary.  They’re disgusting — an adolescent attempt at grotesque.  In our zeal to make sure everybody gets a rainbow, we missed the point, with disastrous results – again.  Hallowe’en was never about monsters; it’s was about embodying evil so we could cope with it.  So how did we go so wrong, so fast?  Vampires!  The minute we turned vampires into gentle, misunderstood creatures of the slightly cloudy afternoon, we were paving the road to hell with our good intentions.

Contrary to popular belief, Bram Stoker did not invent vampires in 1897; vampires have been around in folktales for centuries.  Stoker invented Dracula, who was a vampire.  He gave him all the bibs and bobs that we commonly associate with vampires — like bats and Transylvania — but Stoker got most of his ideas from another author and therein lies a tale.

A couple of centuries ago, in 1816 (the notorious Year Without Summer) a bunch of English somebodies were hanging out in a house in Geneva, bored out of their skulls.  It was too cold and rainy to go outside and play, so they were spending their days getting wasted on claret (red wine) and laudanum (a very legal 19th century opium concoction.)  They were, in no particular order, Lord Bryon; his personal physician, John Polidori; Percy Shelley; his fiancée, Mary Godwin; and a bunch of other revolving also-rans.  Given the big brains on these folks, I imagine their slightly inebriated conversations were something to behold!  Anyway, one afternoon/evening they got to talking about the nature of horror: what is evil and why are people both revolted and attracted to it?  It was decided that rather than just sitting around jawing about it, they would all write a horror story, check and compare, and see what they’d come up with.   The two big Kahunias, Bryon and Shelley, wrote perfectly acceptable, ultimately forgettable stories, but Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) went all out and wrote Frankenstein.  Not to be outdone — except by word count — John Polidori wrote a long short story called The Vampyre.  Each tale was published soon after, and each was a huge popular success.  It turns out people are, indeed, both revolted and attracted by horror.

Pretty much everybody knows the Frankenstein story — if only in its various misinterpretations.  Actually, the horror of it was never simply the nameless monster, who, quite frankly, has a case against Victor Frankenstein, his creator.  The horror was the complexity of the creation of life itself and the perversion of self awareness made hideous without a governing soul.  Hard to translate into a 90 minute movie or a two-hour stage play, so most people just went with killer/monster and got it over with.

The Vampyre story, however, was a completely different beast.  Lord Ruthven is a member of the British aristocracy — a gentleman who travels in the best London society.  Yet he is not.  He is a vampyre, a man undead, refused by heaven and hell.  A soulless horror, he hunts from the shadows, preying on the innocent, drawing them to him and seducing them to satisfy his bloodlust.  He exists undetected and unwatched — a nameless evil that walks among us, haunting the night and quietly waiting for his chance to strike.

Now why would we turn that guy into a brooding teenager with bad hair?  That’s like turning Odin’s wolves into Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua.

A society without fear has let its ego run rampant.  It has become so self absorbed that even its imagination has been confined to the boundaries of its own existence.  Our greatest fear, as demonstrated by the scariest night of the year, is now bodily harm.  It’s not the corruption of the soul, nor the torment of a life squandered, nor the dark loneliness of our isolated existence.  It’s a cut, or a wound, or an injury (however serious) treatable by our science and technology.  We are turning our individual bits of time, a mere blink of the eye of eternity, into the pinnacle of all creation.  Unable to comprehend the vastness beyond our own lives, we have reduced its frightening power to a lunatic in a hockey mask.

From the beginning, Hallowe’en was the contemplation of the unrecognizable fear of what lay beyond the reach of our understanding.  We shaped it into a child’s game to treat its terror with nervous laughter.  But we need to keep its eerie foreboding to simply remind us that “there are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.”

What Ever Happened to Spooky — Part I

As I’ve said before, Hallowe’en is one of my favourite occasions.  However, I’m starting to get a little disappointed with the whole business.  For the last several years, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of costumes that are, at best, inappropriate and, at worst, downright disgusting.  I’m not talking about the tawdry sexual innuendo that populates Generation Y’s trick or treat choices.  Hallowe’en has always had sexual undertones; this current crowd is just so repressed they can’t control themselves.  Honestly, if you need a child’s holiday to justify unleashing your libido once a year – well, so be it — I don’t care.  No, it’s more than that, getting reflected in how we conduct ourselves on All Hallow’s Eve.

I’ve seen little kids walking around with great huge spikes in their heads, or bloody ax blades sprouting from their stomachs.  I’ve seen their older brothers and sisters as amputee Bo Peeps and their parents as various fairy tales gut-shot and/or eviscerated.  This isn’t right.  There’s nothing frightening about a bad night in the emergency ward.  Vital organs flung around promiscuously aren’t scary; they’re grotesque.  It’s like slowing down to rubber neck an accident: we’re not afraid; we’re curious.  So how did Hallowe’en go from spooky to sickening?  I blame the vampires.

Sometime in the last 30 or so years (oddly enough, the tenure of Generation Y) vampires became cozy.  They lost their edge.  They went from that sinister thing that moves in the night like a dry whisper to the guy next door, lighting his barbeque.  These days, vampires are no more dangerous than the neighbourhood Rottweiler, and quite a bit less likely to bite you.  They (vampires, not Rottweilers) hang out at sporting events and go to high school dances.  They host dinner parties and probably haul out the Trivial Pursuit™ on sunny Sunday afternoons when they can’t go outside and play.  They aren’t evil anymore.  Nobody’s scared of vampires.  In fact, there are battalions of young girls who think it would be cool to marry one.  No big deal, you say?  Crap!  If the evilest of all the evil things human beings have ever thought up in all of our history isn’t evil anymore, then what is?

By teaching an entire generation that vampires are just misunderstood creatures of the slightly cloudy day, our society has, once again, shot itself in the foot — and this time we used a silver bullet.  Like it or not, we need evil and vampires are the embodiment of it.  They haunt the night.  They creep into our dreams.  They coerce our thoughts to satisfy their lust.  They live off the very lifeblood of you, me, Winona Ryder and the kid who delivers the newspaper in the winter morning darkness.  They are supposed to scare the bejesus out of us.  That’s they’re job.

Humans are the dominant species on this planet.  We have no natural predators, so we had to invent some to keep our egos under control.  That’s why we have folktales.  They tell us there are still things that live beyond the reach of our intellectual fires — things that we neither know nor understand.  They are the shadows that shift in the darkness, the glint of momentary eyes and that faint sound of leaves, dry in their rustle.  Without them, we, bold in our knowledge and technology, become godlike in our conceit.

Our ancestors understood that humans are puny in the face of an overwhelming universe.  They honoured their gods and were afraid of their demons.  As we systematically Care Bear that universe we are losing our natural wariness.  If we fear nothing, it’s not because we are brave or there is nothing to fear; it’s because we are childlike in our arrogance.  Vampires and their ilk remind us that “there are more things in heaven and earth” than we, 21st century humans, can possibly understand.  We need them to keep us humble.

Monday: Where did vampires come from and why we still need spooky.

How to Write a Horror Movie

The last horror movie I paid money to see was The Exorcist in 19 [mumble, mumble.]  It’s a good movie, but I was old enough to know better.  Since then, I’ve lived a full and rewarding life without ever again shelling out coin for cheap adrenaline thrills.  Actually, I’ve had the hell scared out of me for real a couple of times, and I’m in no great hurry to have those feelings artificially induced.  Besides, contemporary horror movies are totally unimaginative.  For the most part, they’re just a series of heart-shocking surprises, stuck together with literal bursts of exaggerated gore.   Let me show you how it’s done.  Here’s a simple three part program that will help you write your own horror movie, and depending on how ambitious you are, take you to the very gates of Horror Movie Heaven: The Slasher Franchise.

First of all, horror movies are driven by the vivid portrayal of a single requisite character: the half dressed young woman.  She is as essential to the horror movie as the horse is to the Western.  If you don’t have at least one girl falling out of what’s left of her clothes, you simply don’t have a horror movie.  Ideally, you need one Alpha female and a couple of expendable best friends who get butchered early, to prove the villain/monster/psycho is serious, but strangers will do.  Actually, the best friends don’t even need names; all they have to do is scream.

From there, you need a boyfriend (he can be a husband as long as he’s newly minted.)  The boyfriend/husband is the catalyst that causes all the problems in the first place.  He’s the guy who ignores everybody’s advice to get the hell out of there and convinces them all to hang around and get murdered.   He comes with his own set of friends, usually a larger, stronger man and an idiot.  The larger, stronger guy gets hacked up later on to prove the villain/monster/psycho can’t be stopped, and the idiot is there for comic relief.  (Nothing much ever happens to him.)  Likewise, the boyfriend, is normally never killed, although he can be badly hurt (and usually is.)  He’s kind of a handsome Wile E. Coyote type who always survives his dumbass schemes to defend himself and the half dressed female.

Secondly, you need to drop everybody’s IQ by about 25%.  Once again, this is a fundamental feature of the horror movie.  The future victims have got to be dumb as a box of hammers and take an active part in their own demise.  For example, when confronted by a dark, rambling mansion or a deserted campsite or what-have-you, the first thing horror movie characters do is the stupidest thing possible: they split up and go exploring.  Together, they could probably protect themselves properly and possibly even beat the villain/monster/psycho bloody; individually, they’re just candidates for a toe tag.  Nor do they ever arm themselves with anything more than a toothbrush.  The villain/monster/psycho has any number of ingenious weapons available to him, but these clowns never even think to pick up a rock.  There is a willing suspension of disbelief in the movies, but the future corpses of horror must defy all reasonable thought.  Never let them grab a garden tool, pick up a kitchen knife or — heaven forbid — in a country as gun crazy as America, carry a pistol.  Also, they must run headlong down blind alleys; wander aimlessly down dark, creaky hallways and never — under any circumstances — turn on the lights.  In short, they should all be stupid enough to get outwitted by sheep.

Third, and least importantly, you need a villain/monster/psycho.  Actually it really doesn’t matter who or what this guy is.  He just needs a steady supply of sharp and/or pointy things to jab into people until they gush for the camera.  Simply remember not to kill him off at the end of the movie — in case the studio wants to pick up an option on Freddy Jason Myers, Part II.

Of course, there are all kinds of things you don’t want cluttering up your movie like plot, character development or dialogue, but those are just tricks of the trade you can learn to suppress as you go along.  Actually, for a quick shortcut to horror movie heaven just get some old Archie Comics, piece together a few of their adventures, add a villain/monster/psycho to massacre a few of them, and you’ve got it made.  Good luck!