Like the guys running around the mall in Dawn of the Dead, I’m continuing the mopping-up operation.
Bill Sherman and Johnny Bacardi have finished their thoughtful film-by-film responses to my 13 Days of Halloween movie selections. Bill uses the occasion to propose three categories for horror fans: old-schoolers, thrill-seekers, and purists. (You can guess which category I fall into.) He’s also got some thought-provoking comments on the differing tactics of The Shining and Blair Witch, by way of explaining why he prefers the latter. Johnny, meanwhile, runs down my top six, with an eye on how the venues in which one sees such films can affect how effective you view them to be. He also offers critical beatdowns of Nicholson’s performance in The Shining (the way his character is written and performed is a sticking point for many Shining detractors) and, in a separate post worth reading for his hilarious description of the film’s central fright device as “a weird Nine Inch Nails video” alone, The Ring. He also adds Last House on the Left and The Devil’s Backbone to my must-see list….
Jason Adams is also responding to the horrorthon, with a series of posts commenting on my choices and suggesting his own. The first takes issue with the climax and priestly protagonists of The Exorcist, which in my opinion are the two strongest aspects of the film. However, he does raise (mainly in his second post) the interesting issue of how Ellen Burstyn’s mother character is shuffled offstage while the Men of God duke it out with the Devil. Do you think a message is being conveyed there? I sure do. Still, Jason Miller’s performance is too heartbreaking, and that climax too crescendoingly terrifying, to write them off just because Burstyn’s powerful presence was absent. Anyway, post #2 also nominates Frenzy (onto the gotta-see list with ye!) over both Psycho and The Birds as the most appalling Hitchcock film, which in both of our books is ultimately a good thing to be. Jason’s third post nominates and subsequently rejects Rosemary’s Baby, Seven, and The Game as the movies that most horrified him, and finally goes with Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream. I’d say that the latter two have to go on that to-see list, but I’m starting to sound like a broken record, aren’t I?
The two Daves of The Intermittent offer dueling posts on the failure of comics to generate truly horrifying moments, and on what makes for a horrifying moment generally. Dave Intermittent says that it’s hard for comics to shock the reader with anywhere near the force that film can, and that the medium therefore has emphasized “conceptual horror,” which as he delineates it is more effective when focusing on the horror of awful human behavior. Dave Jon tries to trump his colleague’s arguments by saying that yeah, comics can shock, and they can disturb, and they can fail at both too–ultimately it’s in the eye of the beholder. This is of course true, but the same can be said of any kind of emotional or intellectual response engendered by art–“beauty” and “goodness” and “suckiness” and whatever else is all ultimately in the eye of the beholder. The job of the critic is to sift through her own responses to find out what is prompting them, and why, and whether this can be extrapolated to other art. I don’t think this is as useless or reductive an enterprise as Dave J. seems to suggest. But as to his rhetorical question of “what is horror?”, I recommend Noel Carroll’s masterful book The Philosophy of Horror and H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal treatise Supernatural Horror in Literature. Taken together, they’re offer the best definition of what makes horror-art horrifying around, and I can’t stress strongly enough how much people who are really serious about the scary stuff should read these.
I’ve been thinking about Eve Tushnet’s comments on our difference of opinion re: Kubrick’s The Shining, specifically how she wants films about sin, not Calvinism, and how I have a much higher tolerance for “random, absurd evil” than she does. You know what? This makes a great deal of sense. In my struggles with Christianity and the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God, I’ve never been able to buy the tortuous logic by which Catholicism and the mainstream Protestants say “see? it really does all make sense, and it’s good, honest.” I think that when you accept the basic precepts of Judeo-Christian monotheism, you’ve either got to go the completely nonjudgmental, essentially nondenominational route my wife has, or the predestination route of the Calvinists; everything in between is a dodge born out of unwillingness to actually follow the “logic” of faith to its inevitable, contradictory conclusions. (A succint example would be this whole “God didn’t create evil, since evil is just the absesnce of good” jive–what, is Creation like a condom with airbubbles in it that He got too excited and forgot to smooth out?) I’m an unbeliever, mainly, yeah, but nevertheless I’m still not satisfied with my unbelief; so I see a real appeal in the essential capriciousness of the universe present in what I guess Eve would call “Calvinist horror.” Sin, meanwhile, I see as nothing but a bonafide racket. (I’ve got very, very little use for guilt and shame, even though that’s pretty much what shapes my whole personality if you ask my therapist; honor and duty–that’s another story entirely.) So to sum up: I like The Shining. (If that was confusing, my apologies. Hey, there’s a reason I don’t talk about religion all that much around here.)
Finally, it was truly an honor to see Dirk Deppey break his comics-only commandments to compliment the horror-blogging I’ve been doing. Seriously, if he’d started a thread on the topic he’d have been booted off his own messageboard. Damn the Man, Dirk! And thank you! (And another movie, Audition, gets added to the list….)