Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [30]
Winkless discovered that O’Bannon was so unusual early on, after walking into his room and finding a gun sitting on a stack of porn. That was not the kind of thing that you would expect from a film student in the sixties. Another time, Winkless went to a restaurant with O’Bannon, who ordered a cup of coffee, a tea, and a Coke. The waitress assumed this overdose of caffeine was a joke, and when she didn’t bring it to him, he flew into a rage. Dan could be tough to handle.
That’s why some of his USC friends were surprised when Carpenter approached him to collaborate on Dark Star in 1970. They were very different types. O’Bannon, wound-up and intense, delivered a steady stream of bile, provocations, and paranoid theories. Carpenter was by contrast aloof and easy-going. “John was very subdued and quiet and gentle. He’s got this soft Kentucky manner to him,” says Brian Narelle, who starred in their film. “O’Bannon was a bit crazed.”
Even if they seemed an unlikely team, Carpenter knew what he was doing. “Dan and I initially bonded over science fiction and movies,” Carpenter says. “We probably learned from each other. Dan had enormous confidence in his own imagination, and I think maybe I learned to have some amount of courage in my own.”
O’Bannon, a master at the bull session, had a head full of wild thoughts, sometimes inspired, other times crazy, often both. To take one example, he made his own board game called Poverty, whose object was for a player to get $300 and five gas coupons to escape the ghetto. Once you did that, you were supposed to exclaim, in the style of Yahtzee, “I got it made!” Then there was a riot and everything was up for grabs again. The kind of person who could dream this game up could be very helpful.
An artist with a strong vision, Carpenter also proved to be a natural father figure for O’Bannon. “I didn’t have a lot of friends,” O’Bannon said. “I needed a friend, a mentor.”
O’Bannon and Carpenter both felt out of place. O’Bannon’s favorite work by Poe was a poem called “Alone” that begins: “From childhood’s hour, I have not been as others were.” Carpenter recalls always feeling like an outsider in the South after his family moved to Kentucky, or as he puts it, “a stranger in a strange land.” Growing up a little eccentric in conservative small towns, science fiction and horror fans studying in a school that did not value those kinds of films, these young men did not feel part of the zeitgeist. In monsters and mayhem, they saw an escape. They brought a certain shared philosophy that was not the same as the reality-blurring ideas of Roman Polanski. To them, horror was sentimental, even romantic, the stories of outcasts and weirdos managing to survive in a dark world. For them horror was a state of mind.
SIGMUND FREUD wrote an essay in 1919 called “The Uncanny,” about a certain psychological category that described a feeling of unease created when something seems familiar and foreign at the same time. Freud was building upon the work of a German doctor, Ernst Jentsch, who thirteen years earlier had explained how the uncanny operated in stories by macabre writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann to create confusion and leave the reader in a terrifying uncertainty. This idea helped shape our understanding of the strange unease and dread evoked by zombies, robots, or even twins. They don’t need to be aggressive to make us feel unsettled. Martin Heidegger later approached similar territory in his discussion of “angst” in Being and Time. He explained that it was rooted in a vague threat rather than a concrete one. A man chasing you with an ax inspired fear, but the paranoid notion that someone might be around the corner with an ax is angst.
Carpenter and O’Bannon were hardly experts in Freud or Heidegger, but they understood the importance of the vague, elusive power of an unseen horror through another source: the stories of H. P. Lovecraft, the reclusive misanthrope and literary