What’s scary? (continued)
I seem to have left that last post a bit unfinished.
Reading Sean Collins’ The Monumental Horror Image again (it’d been a few months since I last read it when I wrote the last post), I see that in his conclusion he makes much of the same point as I wanted to make. He talks a lot about “Otherness”, and “Cosmic fear”, or “things that should not be”, which closely parallels a point that often comes up when I discuss what makes horror work for me; The feeling that’s something’s very wrong. It often takes the form of reality breaking down, like in The Ring and parts of Jacob’s Ladder, but it can also be much smaller, more localized things. For instance, Cronenberg’s The Brood is an uneven film, and towards the end it’s more tense than scary, but the feeling of wrongness is incredibly strong in a few places, especially the first time we see one of the Brood. It’s just a very short flash, but the monstrosity of the thing gives that particular sinking feeling, the one that says “Oh no, that’s not right at all”.
Some horror movies are pedestrian in general, but succeed in creating this effect in a few scenes. A recent example is Jaime Balagueró’s Darkness, which is generally quite boring and uninteresting, with a contrived plot. But the last 10 minutes, where the gates to hell are opened, are quite good, and feel very, very “wrong”.
There’s been a trend with many horror fans lately to denounce Lovecraft as being “interesting and cool, but not scary”. I don’t think that’s right at all. Certainly his prose isn’t wonderful, and he repeats himself a lot, but when he got it right, there are few that do it better. Dreams in the Witch-house, one of his less “cosmic” stories, has a rat-creature with a human face in it, described circumspectly and in vague detail, which evokes (at least in me), a feeling of wrongness so strong that the first time I read the story, I had serious problems turning out the lights at night.
Just to get a few more examples of what I see as typical “wrongness” off my chest: The spiderwalk scene in the rerelease of The Exorcist, any scene ever with kids acting like adults or in other abnormal or creepy ways, the card-guessing scene in The Evil Dead (a highly creepy movie, although people tend to focus on the comedy elements), or any of these two purportedly real stories.
So, horror is at its most scary when it shatters the audience’s perception of reality in a believable way. It can be anything from expectations of behaviour (this is why mentally ill people can be so scary), to the Order of the Universe.
I’m sure I have more to say about this, but this is getting long, and I’m tired. I’ll leave you with something I posted on my old activity log years ago, and which has stayed with me since. It contains several excellent examples of wrongness, some of which are very creepy:
At Luthz at the foot of the Vosges Mountains in May 1589 the villagers were celebrating a pagan festival. Claude Cothéze was returning in the evening from that village to the next, which is called Wisembach, and had already climbed a good part of the hill which separates the two villages, when he was suddenly caught in a whirlwind and stood looking about him in amazement to see if he could find any cause for such an unusual occurrence, for the air was most calm and still everywhere else.
Then he saw in a sheltered place six witch women dancing round a table sumptuously decked with gold and silver, tossing their heads about like people afflicted with madness; and near them was a man like a black bull watching them as if he were a casual passer by. He therefore stood still for a while collecting himself and making sure that he saw quite clearly; and when he had done so, they all suddenly vanished from his sight.
Recovering from his fright he then started on his road again and had already passed the top of the hill when behold, those women were following him from behind, throwing their heads about as before and keeping a deep silence, while before them went a man with a black face and hands curved like talons, with which he would have clawed his forehead if he had not turned and opposed him with his drawn sword; but then the man ceased to threaten him and vanished as if in fear of his life.
That’s from the Compendium Maleficarum, which was written in 1608. Whatever’s scary, it doesn’t seem to have changed much lately.