In what I’m sure will come as a total shock to you all, I am the proud owner of a Lord of the Rings wall calendar (a gift from The Missus). I’ve owned various and sundry of these in the past, usually showcasing the art of one of the many Tolkien-inspired painters out there. I always looked forward to the month of October, because that was always the month with the baddest-ass picture of Smaug or the Balrog or Glaurung or the Ringwraiths or the Sauron-Wolf or what have you. Though I doubt that Halloween was a holiday Professor Tolkien much approved of, it sure did me right on all those wall calendars of yore.
But this time around the monster in question is an orc, shown in close-up, from the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring. And man, is it ever scary. Scary to the point that every once in a while it kinda sneaks up on you and you take a look and go “yaaah!” Scary to the point that when my mother-in-law was visiting and staying in room where it’s hanging we turned the page back to September (Galadriel and Frodo) so she wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and freak out. Scary enough that our cat sometimes stares at it and hisses. (Well, no, she doesn’t, but if she started doing that I wouldn’t be surprised.)
Back when they announced that Peter Jackson would be making a live-action movie trilogy out of LotR, I had actually decided about two days prior to the announcement that translating the books to the screen would be my life’s work. Had they picked any other filmmaker, I probably would have been pissed. But I knew Jackson’s work well, and he was more than okay by me. I knew he was inventive enough to do the material justice but restrained enough not to make it A Peter Jackson Film before it was a J.R.R. Tolkien one. I knew he had a knack for balancing effects and human drama, as he did in his tremendously entertaining, moving, and disturbing film Heavenly Creatures. And I knew (this was key) he could be scary.
A goodly chunk of the appeal of The Lord of the Rings is the scary stuff. I think this may stem from the way in which Tolkien, whose powers of description are nearly unrivalled when it comes to landscapes, architecture, civilizations, and so forth, stays deliberately shadowy when describing his monsters. This can occasionally cause some trouble amongst his readers–the debate over whether or not the Balrog actually has wings has raged for decades and is not likely to cease any time soon–but in the main Tolkiens flights of dark poetry in talking about his bestiary and rogues gallery allows the reader to fill in the frightening blanks. The chilling decrepitude of the barrow-wight, the relentless mindless evil of the Nazgul, the terrifyingly undefined leviathan known as the Watcher in the Water, the warcrime brutality of the orc catapults launching severed human heads over the walls of Minas Tirith–that’s some horror right there. (Stephen King has talked on numerous occasions about the impact the Shelob passage had on his formation as a horror writer, and for my money Tolkien’s description of her–“all living things were her food; and her vomit darkness”–is maybe the finest passage in all his books.)
Ralph Bakshi’s much-maligned animated adaptation of the first half of LotR is better than I think a lot of people give it credit for, though even quick comparison to Jackson’s adaptation is not kind to the earlier version. But one thing Bakshi managed very well is portraying the dread and horror laced throughout the books. The weird, ominous music and post-psychedelic lighting actually apes the nightmare-like quality of Tolkien’s horror prose quite well, and in some cases (as in the attack at Weathertop) Bakshi actually out-horrors his live-action successor. But Jackson is no slouch; indeed, he’s a horror master. His Uruk-Hai alone deserve a place in the great monster pantheon (and are a far superior film translation of the titular character in Clive Barker’s “Rawhead Rex” than the goofy-looking thing in the film that was made of that story). The ghosts lingering in the Dead Marshes were unexpectedly terrifying; the huge winged Fell Beasts the Nazgul ride upon are perfectly wrong, right down to that biting-on-tinfoil roar they emit; the Watcher in the Water is maybe the best Cthuloid creature ever committed to film; and on and on and on. Even Christopher Lee equals the madmen he’s played in the past with that utterly insane cry of “To waaaaaar!” in The Two Towers. In addition to making wondrous, beautiful, thrilling, exhiliarating, moving films out of LotR, Jackson’s made horror films out of them too–as well he should.
(As for Jackson’s interpretation of Shelob, of which we’ve only seen a fleeting glimpse in the Return of the King trailer, the director is said to have issued a prime directive to his creature shop regarding his specifications for the beast: “She’s got to scare me.” Now that’s my kind of standard.)