ARTS
The new face of horror
Every so often this film genre needs to be revitalised, says Michael Harrington Why does a horror film such as The Blair Witch Project achieve such a vast impact at the box office? It is by no means an isolated example. At present films which specialise in horror, terror or the supernat- ural are experiencing a boom. Bruce Willis's The Sixth Sense actually outgrossed The Blair Witch Project in the United States; Stigmata has done well; and soon Arnold Schwarzenegger will be appearing as an honest cop fighting the devil himself in The End of Days.
Is this all down to millennial anxiety among the public or perhaps in the film studios? Up to a point, Count Dracula. Actually, the gothic tale, which is a more exact term for what we are looking at, has been going strong in Europe for more than 200 years, starting with Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole first published in 1765. The somewhat narrower tradition of the ghost story can be found in ancient litera- ture, in Pliny the Younger for example, and also in China.
However, a gothic story does not have to involve the supernatural: Nigel Kneale's Popular Quatermass series in the 1950s used space aliens as its source of menace, and Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) also had a rationalistic explanation. R.L. Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) occupies the no-man's-land some- where between science fiction and the supernatural, rather like Freud and Jung whom Stevenson anticipated in some respects. H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) offers a vision of science cor- rupted beyond repair. All these stories have been filmed with varying degrees of success.
Every so often one particular horror film causes a sensation which re-invigorates the market. We can be sure that The Blair Witch Project will have many imitators. Yet nothing dreadful is actually seen in this film, and it is very likely a case of bud- getary limitations giving rise to artistic ingenuity. For this reason The Blair Witch Project has seen nothing like the war of controversy provoked by William Fried- kin's The Exorcist in 1973 or by Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960.
Both The Exorcist and Psycho raised questions of taste, more so in the case of the former where blasphemy and obscenity were issues. Certainly the later scenes in which Linda Blair plays the young girl pos- sessed by a demon are obscene by any nor- mal definition, but the blasphemies are of a kind one would expect in the circum- stances. The overall effect of the picture, frightening though it is and in many places disgusting, is to support a conservative Roman Catholic view of the world. It led to a revival of media interest in exorcism and demonic possession which many Catholics found vulgar and even disturbing. Only recently has The Exorcist been given a cer- tificate for video release.
In its day The Exorcist was a box-office phenomenon, giving rise to two sequels, and it undoubtedly helped to provoke the highly successful The Omen (1976) directed by Richard Donner, in which Gregory Peck tried hard to murder the devil's son. Had it been made more recently, The Omen could plausibly be described as 'millennial' since it relies for its plot on a somewhat literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation. Both films involved children who turned out to be different from what their parents had expected. Were they playing on a fear widespread in the 1970s?
Such questions are the stuff of books and courses on film studies but have little sub- stance, I suspect. What about Village of the Damned, made in 1960? In this film the women of an English village become impregnated by space aliens and later give birth to malevolent telepaths. It was based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwych Cuckoos, which was published in 1957. No, the fear that one's children will turn into monsters is traditional and deep-seated, and sometimes justified, and will always respond to a vivid and dramatic presentation.
Taken together, The Exorcist and The Omen revitalised a genre that had become moribund. For some years 'horror' had meant Hammer films and by the early 1970s that well had run dry. Even Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, both of whom deserved better, could not bring life to inept scripts and moth-eaten productions. There does seem to be a kind of trade cycle at work in horror as in other genres. Decay sets in after a period of youthful vigour. In the 1950s, for example, Hammer was a new voice. I remember bunking off school to see Dracula in 1957. All the other children were there, too, although it had an X certificate. Christopher Lee defined Dracula for a whole generation. He was the kind of villain we all wanted to be: a rich aristocrat, whom women fancied, and who got to stay in bed all day. Peter Cushing's Victor Frankenstein, on the other hand, had no interest in sex, only in his deluded quest to create life and become therefore a kind of god. He had to be stopped.
These were popular gothic films, but was anybody ever frightened by them? Probably not in the 1950s, but there is ample anec- dotal evidence that an earlier generation, in the 1930s, were scared by Bela Lugosi's Dracula (1931) and by Boris Karloff as the monster in Frankenstein (1931), not to mention Elsa Lanchester as Bride of Frankenstein (1935). At the last count there have been 38 Frankenstein films, and 41 Draculas, not including television pro- grammes. Clearly these were durable sub- jects. Back in the middle years of the 19th century, stage adaptations of Frankenstein and an earlier vampire story called Varney the Vampire were popular.
Yet recent attempts by Kenneth Branagh and Francis Ford Coppola to make them work for contemporary audiences have failed commercially, if not critically. They can neither frighten us nor entertain us any more because no amount of Hollywood skill can make them credible. You cannot be afraid of what you cannot believe in.
Here, of course, Hitchcock's Psycho, and all the 'slasher' movies which followed it, derived ultimately from Jack the Ripper, had the edge on the Count — for a time. Probably the high point was the Jodie Fos- ter/Anthony Hopkins film Silence of the Lambs. Even comparative realism, howev- er, cannot save a worn-out formula; and the slasher film now only works as a paro- dy, as in Was Craven's Scream and its sequels.
So The Blair Witch Project has come along at a time when the market was ready for a new face of horror. Even in the lean
years it never goes away entirely, of course. Vincent Price's pictures were not big hits in The Omen class, but the tragic anguish in his face and voice always reached a decent audience as he struggled with some family curse or other. Do we like to be fright- ened? Not, I think, exactly. The pleasure of a horror film that really works is the plea- sure of waking up from a nightmare. Many films arouse our discontent even as we enjoy them. When we see a romantic com- edy with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, say, or a glamorous drama with Michael Dou- glas we are looking into a world we cannot enter, though we would like to. They tend to show up the drabness of our everyday lives. A good horror film is quite different. We are glad it is not happening to us, we are glad about the security of our lives. Even the drabness and the boredom seem comforting for a little while. To the extent that it reconciles us to our lot, the horror film can be viewed as a form of Tory popu- lar art.
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