Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [112]
The best examples today of classic New Horror scare tactics are outside the genre, and the finest horror scenes are in prestige movies. The 2010 critical hit Black Swan may be a lavishly shot portrait of the world of New York ballet with an A-list cast, including Natalie Portman, that is led by one of the most ambitious art house directors of the day, Darren Aronofsky. But it’s also a nasty little horror movie that uses the conventions of classic fright films. The psychologically fragile heroine, whose dream life keeps interfering with her real one, is straight out of Repulsion or Rosemary’s Baby; the tactile gore is the stuff of Eraserhead and The Brood; and the thematic preoccupations (doubling, voyeurism, sexual control) are firmly in the tradition of Carrie and Dressed to Kill. The trash of the sixties and seventies has become the art of today.
Look at the movies that show up at the Academy Awards. The Silence of the Lambs is not the only highbrow horror movie about a serial killer to win an Oscar for Best Picture. No Country for Old Men, which won the Oscar in 2007, tells the story of an unstoppable bogeyman who calmly strides through the movie killing his victims without revealing any motivation or psychology at all. It’s more faithful to Halloween than its remake. The New Yorker’s David Denby was one of the few critics to notice how the killer here is a figure out of a horror film, but he meant the comparison as an insult. Among the nominees for Best Picture in 2009, for instance, were a movie that owes a debt to the Alien series (District 9, for its rusty near-future aesthetic), a revenge fantasy whose finale is an elaborate homage to the prom scene in Carrie (Inglourious Basterds), and another cryptic Coen Brothers movie that is the scariest take on religion since The Exorcist (A Serious Man).
Winning Best Picture was The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s brutally violent war movie that dramatically articulates an idea that is a major theme of most of the great horror movies of the seventies: how easy it is for otherwise peaceful people to become addicted to the thrill of violence. In its penultimate scene, the veteran returning home from Iraq tells his child that you only really love one or two things in life, and explains why he needs to go back for another tour of duty. Like horror fans, he’s hooked on the fear sickness. The movie suggests that the roots of this desire are deep and planted early. After all, as the soldier looks bored at home, his son plays with a jack-in-the-box.
ONE NIGHT during the final months of finishing this book, I came home to find an e-mail from a Hollywood producer asking me if I had any good ideas for a horror movie. This was bizarre. I had never written a single screenplay. The producer, whom I had never met, made some of the highest-grossing scary movies in history. He is the kind of person from whom screenwriters dream about hearing.
He contacted me after reading a Vanity Fair story I wrote criticizing the revered screenwriting guru Robert McKee for misunderstanding horror. The producer said he was looking for the next big thing in horror and wanted to see if I knew what that would be. I had no clue, but knew enough to realize that I should rustle up an answer fast. I looked over some of my interviews with William Friedkin, Wes Craven, and Dan O’Bannon, imagined what it would be like to walk down a red carpet, and got to work mapping out an idea that I thought could scare a mass audience. Here it is.
Start with a very pretty, slightly pregnant female victim. Think Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, but instead of dreaming of domesticity, she is a modern