I’m not going to try to be Joseph Campbell here, but there are certain patterns in horror narratives that are very common, even across cultures, and that interests me. I’m convinced that the most effective horror is so effective because it taps into archetypes, and those archetypes that cross cultural barriers are likely to be more deeply rooted and primal, and thus more effective.

One of those archetypes is a female ghost with long hair and/or an otherwise shrouded face and eyes, who’s associated with bad luck and death for those who see or summon her. She’s also very often dressed in white. If you’ve not been living under a rock the last few years, you’re thinking about Japanese horror movies right now.

And it’s true, Yurei have had a lot of exposure in media lately, most notably in Ringu, the US remake The Ring and their sequels and variants, but also in Ju-On: The Grudge and the US remake The Grudge. The original Japanese Dark Water also featured the concept, although less prominently. In most Japanese narratives, the figure is a harbinger of death. In The Ring, you bring the curse upon yourself by watching the cursed video tape, in The Grudge, it’s enough to come into contact with the ghost or her previous victims to be marked yourself. It’s also interesting to note the association with water in The Ring, water being a female element, and the TV screen as a window or gateway into another world (in the US remake, there’s also a reflection in the screen of a dormant TV set as an early sign of the spirit).

But it’s a mistake to think that the archetype is Japanese, just because it has a long tradition there. The predominantly Mexican, but generally Latin American myth of La Lllorona, the weeping woman, which I’ve mentioned here before, has many similarities. La Llorona murdered her children (the reasons and circumstances vary between versions, but almost always by drowning) and was doomed to wander the earth looking for them. She is often dressed in all white, and her eyes may be empty sockets. Seeing her or hearing her cries is often seen as a harbinger of death or misfortune; in some versions, she actively hunts children to drown them, perhaps to replace her own children. Again, there’s a strong association with water.

La Llorona is also quite similar to another powerful and very common female spirit, Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary is a witch or ghost which supposedly can be summoned by saying her name three times in front of a mirror in a dark room. Often named as “Mary Worth”, she is frequently described as a child-murderess, and she will stalk and/or kill those who summon her. If that sounds familiar from fiction, it might be because Clive Barker used parts of the legend in his short story The Forbidden, which formed the basis for the movie Candyman. In the Clive Barker version, the wronged and vengeful spirit so summoned is male, but other aspects of the Bloody Mary myth are retained.

In one of my favorite pieces of feature journalism, Myths over Miami, from the Miami New Times, there are powerful descriptions of urban legends and emergent mythology amongst homeless children on the streets of Miami. Female spirits feature centrally in this mythology, especially one known both as Bloody Mary and as La Llorona, who cries tears of blood from empty eye-sockets and feeds on the fear of children. Seeing her means you’re marked for death. To summon this particular version of Bloody Mary, the mirror must be coated with water from the ocean. The Wikipedia article on Clive Barker notes that he’s been working on a movie based on this article. Even though Barker’s adventures in cinema have been of uneven quality, it certainly fits in with his favorite themes.

The Miami New Times article mentions a possible reason for the mirror used in summoning the spirit: In an experiment designed to test reports that schizophrenics were prone to seeing hallucinations in reflective surfaces, even nonpsychotics reported seeing vague, horrible faces after looking into a mirror for about 20 minutes in a dim room.

In Gaelic folklore, the Banshee is a fairy woman who originally sang funeral laments for members of certain families. In the translation to English, she took on other characteristics, her wails were harbingers of death. Hearing the banshee’s wail foretold a death in the family, while seeing her presaged your own death. Banshees were often dressed in white, and had long hair (although the hair was fair, not black as in Japan, probably for obvious ethnic reasons).

The Nix in Scandinavian and German folklore is not female, but is a water-spirit who foretold drowning deaths by a wail that could be heard at the spot in the river where the drowning would take place.

There are a lot of common themes here. Femininity, white clothes, long hair, shrouded or missing eyes, the power of seeing and being seen (the motif of harmful sensation), a connection with water and reflective surfaces, presaging death or misfortune, revenge… And most of them occur in at least two relatively unconnected cultures, and across centuries.

I’m uncertain why the myth has worked itself into similar forms on separate occasions. There seems to be some deep archetype at work here, but it’s unclear to me what, exactly, is the basis for it. Comments are most welcome.

Tobe Hooper‘s work has always been uneven. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is of course the original modern slasher movie (although the movies of Herschell Gordon Lewis in the 60s came first, they were not even close to as grueling). It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of slasher movies, but TCM has an intensity beneath the rough look and low production values that’s very real, and very unsettling even today. Poltergeist is one of my favorite horror crossover movies, although Hooper’s exact involvement with it is somewhat disputed. And, unlike some people, I liked The Toolbox Murders quite a bit, at least the supernatural non-slasher parts of it.

On the other hand, he’s also made some really bad movies, so I was uncertain what to expect of Dance of the Dead, the third installment in the Masters of Horror series. As it turns out, it’s not bad, although it has problems. In the near future, chemical warfare and terrorist chemical attacks have killed millions of people in the US, and disfigured and scarred many more. Society is falling apart, anarchy reigns, and as usual when anarchy reigns, there are seedy nightclubs, people in leather and latex sporting piercings, and a whole lot of drugs.

You may have heard that this is a zombie story, but that’s not really true. There are reanimated dead in it, but their reanimation is a side-effect of chemical agents, and they’re not aggressive or cannibalistic. Instead, it’s the story of an overprotective, secretly evil mother, and her daughter, who wants out, and falls in love with a young criminal. On the way, daughter discovers what really happened to her rebellious older sister, and mother’s dark secrets.

Apart from the fact that this is basically Cool as Ice in the post-apocalyptic future with zombies, it works fairly well. The mother overacts, people’s motivations aren’t always clear, and the inevitable twist isn’t so amazingly shocking as you’d like it to be, but in general it’s a decent story. There’s also a scene of the reanimated dead being coldly dispatched into a dumpster and set on fire, which is quite effective and concentration camp-like, but it would have been better if Hooper didn’t try to milk it for emotional effect quite so much. As it is, something that could have been chilling and uncomfortable becomes exploitative and a bit cheap. And speaking of exploitative and cheap, there’s an enormous amount of naked tits in this movie, both reanimated and otherwise, and I think Robert Englund gets a blowjob from a reanimated corpse at one point. Possibly a little excessive, I think.

But why is there a horrible visual effect, a sort of splitting of the image into several superimposed versions which then shake around for a second, accompanied by a screechy sound, that gets used all the time? It’s literally used at least once per minute, and it happens equally in a quiet dialogue scene as in the climactic scenes of the dead dancing. Did someone get a new Shake plugin to play with? I found myself shouting “Fucking stop it!” at the screen several times, through gritted teeth.

But all in all, I think this is the best Masters of Horror episode so far. The setting and concept are original and decently interesting, and it held my attention. It’s far from perfect, but it’s definitely watchable.

Stuart Gordon, along with longtime collaborator, producer and director Brian Yuzna is definitely the foremost adapter of H. P. Lovecraft’s work for the screen. The classic horror comedy Re-Animator is probably the best known example, but the recent Dagon is supposed to be quite good too. I admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Gordon’s work. It has the trappings of Lovecraft’s fiction, but none of the mood. The adaptations to modern times are often incongruent, especially given Lovecraft’s insistence on archaic vocabulary and a gothic mood. Also, there’s frequently both sex and comedy mixed in. Lovecraft himself probably never laughed in his life, and had little if any sex life to speak of. So the tone, for me, just doesn’t work, although I think Re-Animator is hilarious, of course.

Episode 2 of Masters of Horror is an adaptation of Dreams in the Witch-House, one of my personal favorite Lovecraft stories, along with The Rats in the Walls. Both of these stories prominently feature rats that are heard scurrying around inside the walls (which, in turn, makes me wonder how much of horror/comedy classic Of Unknown Origin was inspired by Lovecraft), but that’s not what I like or find scary about them. Unlike some people, I’m not particularly scared of rats. Indeed, the first year I was in Mexico, we trapped a rat by hand in the kitchen of our rented house, Hans Petter, in an act of physical elegance and swiftness I’d thought him incapable of, trapped the fleeing rat under the sole of his combat boot, holding it fast without killing it, and it fell upon me to bash its head in with a piece of pipe. I didn’t particularly enjoy that experience, and I was shaken by it, but it didn’t scare me.

What always scared me about Dreams in the Witch-House was the brooding, creeping menace of the setting. It’s told in retrospect, so there’s an inevitability of the goings-on, and, as in many other Lovecraft tales, the certainty that they can only end badly.

Stuart Gordon keeps a lot of the main threads of the story in his adaptation. Most of the characters are maintained, merely updated to the modern-day setting. There’s also little to no comedy elements, which seemed like a good idea to me. However, there are also large changes. Gordon’s Gilman character knows nothing of the house and its history when he moves in, which presses the plot into a standard complex discovery pattern. Also, Gordon introduces a love interest, a poor next-door neighbour with an infant child, and then uses a vision of her naked body in a gratuitous scene whose ending echoes the beauty-to-crone transformation in The Shining, but is much less effective.

The updating of the “science” is surprisingly effective. While Lovecraft’s original concept was based on (then very new) quantum physics and a somewhat twisted reading of non-euclidean geometry, Gordon updates it to involve superstring theory and brane cosmology, and doesn’t even screw up the terminology or the explanations too much. Within the setting of the story, it makes a lot of sense, even though our protagonist’s acceptance of the weird angles in his room being exactly like the ones he’s working on for his thesis is a bit convenient and hard to believe.

In what I think is the biggest problem, the Cthulhu mythos aspects of the story are replaced by a rather conventional setup involving a traditional witch, satan worship, and the blood sacrifice of infants. Instead of making the traditional witch folklore of New England a part of the greater cosmic horror of the mythos, with the witch sabbat Black Man being a form of Nyarlathotep, like Lovecraft does, Gordon takes the witch stories at face value, making the story much more small-scale. The love interest’s child is of course the one chosen for the blood sacrifice, and Gilman himself is compelled to perform the deed.

Also, Brown Jenkin, the rat-human hybrid familiar to the witch, is not at all as creepy and monstrous as in the story. It’s a human actor’s head pasted onto a rat’s body, and although the compositing effect isn’t bad, the result is more slightly comical than it is terrifying. And Brown Jenkin was scary as hell in the story, so that’s a bit of a disappointment for me.

It’s not particularly creepy or scary throughout, and it’s largely predictable, especially the parts that are different from the original story. What does work is the ending. Instead of shying away, Gordon forges ahead with a downer ending in which almost everything that can go wrong, does. People end up in insane asylums, commit suicide, are tunnelled through by rats, etc., and those final 5-10 minutes work well. The final shot of the “Room for Rent” sign outside of the witch-house is slightly reminiscent of 80s horror which always ended with a “get ready for the sequel” shot, but it works. If the tension and stakes had been higher throughout, and perhaps the special effects a bit more subtle, and more emphasis had been placed on the mood, this would have been great. As it is, it’s actually pretty good, definitely one of the better Lovecraft movie adaptations, and one of Stuart Gordon’s best works, too. Like the first episode of the series, it’s not particularly scary, but it is enjoyable.

Masters of Horror is definitely worth watching, and my respect for Stuart Gordon as a more serious horror movie director has increased. I’ll be on the lookout for Dagon now, I want to see if this is part of his development as a director, or just a fluke.

I’ve just started watching the Masters of Horror TV series. Episode one is Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, by Don Coscarelli, creator of the Phantasm and Beastmaster movies, as well as Bubba Ho-Tep. Like with Bubba Ho-Tep, Joe R. Lansdale had a hand in writing this episode.

It’s fairly straightforward slasher fare, really, with an above-average resourceful female protagonist. The serial killer is called “Moonface” (can we get a moratorium on -face serial killer names, please), and is big and ugly and mean and whatnot. He has a leatherface style cabin in the woods, surrounded by rotting corpses on stakes, and is quite unpleasant. The twist here is the female protagonist, who not only proves to be quite a match for Moonface, but also has some secrets of her own, revealed in flashbacks.

It’s not bad, but it’s not terribly exciting either. It’s competent enough, but I felt like I’d seen most of it before. And, like most slasher movies, at least to me, it’s not scary at all. There’s maybe a jump or two, but jumps don’t equal scares. The series introduction is actually scarier and moodier than the episode itself, which is not really a good sign.

The acting’s uneven, the protagonist is good enough, and Moonface is fine for what he is, but the protagonist’s wacko survivalist husband is not too great, and an old guy who’s trapped in Moonface’s cabin with our protagonist, well, he gets very annoying after two sentences, and he won’t shut up.

It also suffers from the curse of format. Everything has a format, if you want to make a feature film, it’s one and a half to two and a half hours, sometimes more. If you want to make a Masters of Horror episode, it’s one hour, and so on. This idea isn’t really complex enough for one hour, it’d be better as an half-hour movie. But, of course, there’s absolutely no market for half-hour short movies.

I’m hoping the later installments in the series will be better, it’s a promising start, after all. I hear good things about the Dario Argento (DARIO ARGENTO!) and Tobe Hooper episodes, so I’m looking forward to those. The John Carpenter one sounds interesting too.

I just saw King Kong today, and this isn’t so much a review as it is some general first impressions.

I used to be very skeptical about this project, when I first heard about Peter Jackson doing it, right after Lord of the Rings. I had seen the original once, and the 70s remake once, and I didn’t think of it as anything special. I didn’t think the story was good enough to work as a modern movie. But now that I’ve seen the remake, I have to say that there’s more than enough story there. And if this was the movie Peter Jackson saw in his head when he thought back to the original, I see why he liked it so much.

Just to get the complaints out of the way: It’s a tad too long. It could have been cut maybe 15 minutes in total, and it would have had better flow. Also, a few effects don’t look great, the compositing is a little lazy, and the perspective is a little wrong. But the vast majority of the effects look amazing, so all in all, I’m not going to complain too much about it.

Peter Jackson hasn’t forgotten his horror skills either. The second act is grueling, and it goes on and on. About midway into it, I was thinking “Peter Jackson should do a horror movie again, and make it this intense. It would be the scariest, most impacting thing in the world”. A while later, though, I was revising that thought. If this much intensity was put into a pure horror movie, of the kind I like, where there’s little humor to offset the grimness, it might well become totally unwatchable. At the very least, it would create reactions like the ones people had to The Exorcist when it was new; people in hysterics running from the theater, sobbing and screaming.

There’s hardly a phobia, at least not a phobia of mine, that this movie doesn’t poke at. There are confined spaces, wild animals, giant insects and spiders, heights, darkness, giant bats, and god knows what else. And the fucking centipedes. I hate centipedes, and I feel like this movie made everyone else in the audience understand me completely. Burroughs would know what I’m talking about. And giant fleas, and leeches, and spiders, and ants, and dinosaurs, and breakfast cereal, and I was pretty exhausted. But in a good way, like after a lot of good sex. But with giant leeches. You understand.

(Sean T. Collins seems to agree with a lot of the things I’m saying, only, as usual, he says them better. Check out his review.)

Hans Petter: Thanks for the comments. Yes, technology-enabled monsters are interesting, and a relatively new thing. They seem to be more common in Japanese horror, perhaps because of the Japanese technology fetish. As technology has been integrated into our lives, technology’s role in horror has changed. Compare the medical examinations in The Exorcist, portrayed as terrifying, invasive, and unable to help, in stark contrast to the spirital world of demons and priests, with the use of technology in The Ring, where technology is key both to the monster and curse itself, and to the means of avoiding a horrible fate at its hands.

In what Noël Carroll calls “the complex discovery plot”, with its four phases of onset, discovery, confirmation, and confrontation, technology is increasingly used in the discovery and confirmation phase, to research and discover more about the monster. Your Sixth Sense and Alien 3 examples are typical of this.

To reveal the hidden in an indirect way is a staple of horror. It’s more suspenseful if the monster’s existence is implied by seeing the results of its rampage, than by looking directly upon its tentacled visage. An animal staring at or fleeing from something unseen implies danger without having to show it, which contributes to the feeling of uncertainty and tension, in addition to having obvious budgetary advantages. Children sometimes take the role of animals in the same way, because they’re on one hand very honest and open-minded, and on the other hand are seen to have problems telling reality and make-believe apart, again creating an uncertainty that wouldn’t be possible by just showing the monster directly.

The motion sensors in Aliens, the infrared video camera in The Descent, the machine that makes invisible monsters visible in Lovecraft’s From Beyond, the flashlight in Doom 3, the sprayer with the powder of Ibn Ghazi in The Dunwich Horror, and the ghost-viewing glasses in the rather awful 13 Ghosts, all make visible the hidden monsters that we suspect exist all around us, but that we disconcertingly can’t see.

In many cases, what you can’t see actually can’t hurt you, though, so it’s not always such a great idea to use the technology to reveal the hidden. That’s common in the Japanese technology monsters too, when you see them, they look back at you, and they’re coming to get you. Seeing them is viral, just like a zombie’s bite, it inevitably leads to succumbing to and/or becoming part of the horror yourself.

Regarding Winona Ryder in Alien: Resurrection, I’ve seen your comparison before, and I think it’s both insightful and amusing, but I’m curious what it really means that the android is Winona Ryder in that movie. That technology is female, cute, and fuckable now? Or that it shoplifts? I’m honestly interested.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between technology and horror lately. In most cases, technology is starkly contrasted with The Horror, shown as something that breaks down in the face of the unexpected and the unknown. Very often, it’s the weapons and tools that humans place their trust in that are shown as insufficient (as in Aliens), but other technology often fails too. The cage can’t contain the monster (Akira and many, many others), the readings are off the chart (too many to count), the computer’s going amuck and printing apocalyptic messages (Prince of Darkness), we can’t make sense of the data (again too many to count), the video tape doesn’t have a control track (The Ring), there’s nothing but static on the radio (The Mothman Prophecies), and so on.

Even in movies and stories where technology is brought in to record or control the supernatural, with some knowledge of what it’s up against, it usually fails. The paranormal researchers in Poltergeist see the time-lapse recording of a toy car moving a few feet in the span of many hours as their crowning achievement, and in the face of the movie’s haunting, they can’t believe what they’re seeing, finally cracking under the strain and giving up, leaving the resolution of the problem in the hands of a midget medium. The curse in The Ring is ambivalent in its relationship to technology, on one hand, it’s centered around and transmitted by a technological medium, on the other hand, the video tape has no control track, and those cursed can’t be photographed or videotaped without unexplained distortions of the image.

I think that’s a generally very unimaginative and maybe even luddite use of technology in horror. Instead of using science and technology as something that breaks down in the face of the horror, it’s much more interesting and chilling to let technology calmly document and verify the unthinkable, confirming to us that what we do not want to believe is, in fact, true. The technology confirms the impossible, discarding the possibility of the “it’s all in his head” mental illness explanation.

There have been a few attempts at this. I remember one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, Season 8, Episode 7, The Terror From the Year 5000, actually tries to do this. The example is interesting because it’s not a horrible idea, but it’s incredibly inept. The scientists in the movie attempt to carbon date something that’s come through a time warp from the future, and the carbon dating verifies that it’s indeed from the year 5000. It’s sheer idiocy, of course, given the way carbon dating works, but it’s at least trying to make technology into a cool, objective witness to the impossible.

In Lars Von Trier’s The Kingdom, technology is put to use once or twice to confirm paranormal phenomena. Specifically, a computer is used to enhance audio from an empty room until a ghostly voice is heard, to chilling effect. However, the whole of The Kingdom is very anti-science, with the premise of the story being that there’s too much science and rationalism (in a hospital!), and that’s what’s causing many of the supernatural problems.

It’s hard for me to come up with more examples, although they surely exist. It’s clear, however, that they are few in comparison to the counter-examples. It’s possible that the tendency to show science and technology as limited in scope and failing when confronting the Horror is something that we’ve inherited from horror’s romantic roots. The romantic poets were very opposed to rationalism and and reductionism, a mark that often shows in their work.

Horror as a genre has been good at using technology as a creator of the horror (Frankenstein and innumerable other over-reacher/mad scientist stories), sometimes as a medium for the horror to twist and distort or use for its own ends (The Ring, The Mothman Prophecies), and often as a feeble strawman for the horror to destroy as an illustration of man’s impotency (Aliens, Akira), but it’s rarely been used for that which science and technology is good at: Recording and verifying. There’s untapped horror potential there, I believe.

And for those who fear idiotic pseudo-scientific overexplanations of the paranormal that will destroy all mystery, a la the dread midichlorians from the Star Wars prequels, that’s not what I’m talking about. But if someone actually took the time to establish science as useful and not just for narrow-minded professors in tweed, it would at least be a bit more shocking when science finally failed to explain something. As it is, we’re pretty used to it.

I apparently own the term “mexploitation” on Google. The only other contender is a porn movie of the same name – “They did it all for the American cream!” – and some talk about a book called Mexploitation Cinema: A Critical History Of Mexican Vampire, Wrestler, Ape-man And Similar Films, 1957-1977, which actually looks pretty interesting, so I’ve added it to my list of books to get the next time I order.

The definition of mexploitation, of course, is exploitation cinema from Mexico (as opposed to many other -sploitation cinema genres, where the prefix names that which is exploited). So we’re talking Mexican B-movies here. The all-time king of the genre is of course El Santo, the silver-masked Mexican wrestler who became the star first of comic books, then of a long series of movies. Sometimes alone, sometimes teamed up with other wrestlers like Blue Demon, he generally fought monsters and evil masterminds. Even though he died in 1984, he’s still a folk hero in Mexico, and his son now wrestles under the Santo name (he was known as Son of Santo for a long time before that, a name that in itself is very B-movie like).

An interesting thing to note here is that the Santo movies, (and other Mexican monster movies, like The Robot versus the Aztec Mummy) are the only real examples of horror in Mexican cinema. Santo versus the Vampire Women, in particular, is an honest attempt at gothic horror, at least in parts. Disregarding the fact that the horror of the antagonists is somewhat diminished by it being possible to defeat them by body-slamming, it’s obvious that the intent of especially the opening sequence in the crypt was to horrify. But apart from these movies, and especially after them, there have been very few attempts at working within the horror genre in Mexican cinema. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is the work of Guillermo Del Toro, but only Cronos is really a Mexican movie (and a quite good one, definitely worth watching). His other work has been in American or Spanish productions.

That’s curious to me, since Spain has produced a fair amount of horror movies, especially lately, by Guillermo Del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone), Jaume Balagueró (Darkness), Alejandro Amenábar (Tesis, The Others), Álex de la Iglesia (The Day of the Beast), etc., and it would seem that Mexico has the same potential, if not more, for telling good horror stories. In fact, with the exception of The Devil’s Backbone, not many of the Spanish horror movies are typically Spanish. Mexico, on the other hand, has a rich mythology and a grim history, which should be perfect as a foundation for horror stories. Mexico even has La Llorona, a folk tale that has elements that seem straight out of J-horror (the ghost of a woman who killer her children, dressed all in white, walking around weeping, those who see her are marked for death, her eyes are empty sockets). It’s a waste that noone’s done anything good with that story. I actually sketched out a simple story outline around it about a year ago; if there’s no good Llorona horror movie by the time I finish up other projects, I might well try to write it.

Of course, Mexico also has the Day of the Dead (not the movie), a whole holiday dedicated to dead people. That in turn has its roots in prehispanic festivals celebrating the dead. Of course, the history of the conquistadors, the war of independence, the revolution, and the more-or-less dictatorship of the 20th century is also steeped in blood. This whole country is flush with the macabre. But yet, not a single serious or semi-serious filmmaker has seen fit to make a horror movie in Mexico in the last 10-15 years.

I don’t know why that’s so, but if I get my way, I’m going to try to change it.

I’m not going to make a habit of posting reviews, I think, but I just watched a movie that I thought it’d be worth talking about a bit. It’s Neil Marshall’s The Descent, a British horror movie that’s been talked about and hyped quite a lot. Neil Marshall made Dog Soldiers in 2002, a movie I liked quite a bit. Dog Soldiers was a fairly basic, but solid and tense horror/action deal, using werewolves as monsters in a “group of soldiers isolated and fighting against overwhelming odds” story along the lines of Aliens and Zulu. I know people who hated it, but I thought it worked well, and was a good example of what could be done with a tight script and a small budget.

I had fairly high expectations about The Descent, since it seemed like a good concept, a group of female cavers get trapped in an uncharted cave system and are hunted by strange predators. There’s a huge list of phobias to exploit here, from fear of the dark, claustrophobia, fear of heights, etc., to the more mythological fears of monsters living on the bowels of the earth, places we never see, Lovecraft’s “Dark corners of the earth”.

I watched this with Øyvind, who’s a bit of a caver himself, and knows a bunch of people who basically dedicate their lives to it. As I expected, there were things in the movie that were unrealistic from a caver’s point of view, but maybe not as much as I had feared. The cavers in the movie wear too little clothing, they act foolishly at times, and one of the main turning points is sadly unrealistic, but apart from that, it’s not too bad.

What really doesn’t work is very simply the script. Characters lack motivation for the things they do, especially the Sarah character at the end is acting totally irrationally, and quite cruelly. Although that specific incident can be explained by her mental state, it totally robs us of any sympathy for the character, and we simply don’t care much if she lives or dies. The plot is extremely simple, and the characterization scenes in the first act, that are supposed to build the characters and make us care about them, are unfocused and generally fail completely.

The characters are hard to tell apart, with the exception of Sarah, since she’s surly and depressed, Juno, since she’s Asian and good looking, and Holly, since she’s, god help me, punk rock or something. It gets better once some of the characters are knocked off, as they always are in movies like these, and when they get split up, Marshall sees fit to give them different color lights, so it’s easier to know who we’re looking at. But still, it seems like a defeat to have to color-code your characters for your audience to be able to tell them apart.

The main problem is simple. We don’t really know much about these people, we don’t care too much about them, when they die, we’re not sure who died, and by the time the ending rolls around, we’re tired of it all.

There are some visually and stylistically nice touches in this movie, though. There’s a car crash in the first act that is very naturalistic and comes on in an unexpected way, but still manages to maintain the horror movie standard gore. Right after that, there’s a “lights go out sequentially in a corridor” scene which is also nice looking, even though we’ve seen that in The Matrix Reloaded already (in the trailer, even). Some of the monster effects are nice, they’re shot in that strobed fast exposure look that worked so well for 28 Days Later, making their movements all chaotic and hard to follow, and also freeze-framing arcs of brilliant crimson drops of blood in the air. Also, the required claustrophobia works fairly well, although Øyvind was slightly dismissive, he seemed to think that the tightest corridors people in the movie squeezed through were quite roomy and comfortable compared to some he’d seen.

In summary, it’s decent, but it’s it’s not good enough. It’s interesting to see that some of the user comments on IMDB are praising it for being a break from “the usual Hollywood fare”, when it’s actually an incredibly typical horror plot, and it also derives most of its scares (or rather, jumps) from monsters popping up after 20 seconds of characters looking around in the dark while the creepy music builds. It’ll make you jump, and it’s tense at times, but it’s not particularly scary. I’m convinced there are much better movies that can be made about horrors that lurk in the dark, forbidden corners of the earth.

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.