Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [105]
Critics fixated on the scenery-chewing performance of Jack Nicholson and, for that reason, The Shining is often viewed as a great anomaly—the one Kubrick movie where the director was overshadowed by an actor. But Nicholson’s over-the-top performance was no less “real” than Michael Myers. As Jack Torrance, the novelist hired to maintain the Overlook Hotel during one long winter with his wife and child, Nicholson goes theatrically mad for no reason whatsoever. The book had elements that explained the haunting, that signaled that the alcoholism of Torrance led, at least figuratively, to his demons. King struggled with alcoholism. Kubrick, who collaborated on the script with a novelist, Diane Johnson, eliminated this theme and much of the backstory of the characters. King famously disliked the adaptation, calling it “a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside.”
Kubrick hollows out the explanations, as was then the custom in New Horror, and what was left was a mood of unease, a world of gapingly empty spaces, slow-paced scenes, and strange silences. An unmotivated killer surrounded by senseless images, Nicholson was like a monster from a fairy tale. When he breaks down the door, he tells his wife: “I’m going to huff. I am going to puff and blow this house in.” And when he chases his son Danny through a life-size maze, the child, to escape, retraces his steps just like Hansel and Gretel.
By the end of the 1970s, after The Exorcist, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre , and Halloween, the conventions of horror had become so familiar that audiences became scared as soon as they heard the first note of music or saw a shaky point of view or a knife rack. Horror meant something very specific and everyone knew what that was. “New horror cultivates not merely horror,” Ron Rosenbaum wrote in 1979, “but the horror of horror itself, the horror of being driven into madness by sheer horror.”
The New Horror movies are often celebrated for their raw documentary feel, their relevance to the times, how they reflect the national insecurities, but by the end of the seventies, they had transcended such limited descriptions. They were well known even by people who had never seen them. They had become modern myths.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE FEAR SICKNESS
How do I define horror? It’s affirmative action for the writing-impaired.
Sean Cunningham
WHY IN THE WORLD would you want to watch those awful movies?
Most horror fans have at some point struggled to answer this question. Those trying to convince a skeptic often argue how seeing fake violence allows audiences to grapple better with the real kind. The advantage of this explanation is that it doesn’t just excuse horror movies; it argues that they are good for you. That will do at a cocktail party and might make a mother feel better about her son watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the seventh time. But let’s be honest: most of us don’t watch scary movies for the artistic or emotional sustenance. Some of us simply enjoy being terrified or watching characters get terrorized. Others thrill to the pure sensory excitement. There is simply something irresistible about being scared. But where does that strange pleasure come from?
Pauline Kael understood the answer better than any other critic in the era of New Horror, even though she was brutally tough on many of its best movies. She didn’t like Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist, referred to Alien as a “haunted-house with gorilla picture set in outer space,” and insulted Halloween as a movie “stripped of everything but dumb scariness.” She also described the camerawork of The Shining as “like watching a skater do figure eights all night.”
It’s a testament to her analytical acuity and masterful style that Kael was the greatest critic of her generation despite serious lapses