Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [5]
Rosemary’s Baby pitted the Old Horror tradition of the producer Bill Castle against the new art house ideas of Roman Polanski. The crafty commercial instincts of Cunningham and the confrontational philosophical bent of Craven provide the central artistic drama of The Last House on the Left. In Sisters and Carrie, Brian De Palma was not stealing from Hitchcock; he was in dialogue with him, and De Palma often disagreed with the master. The making of The Exorcist was a battle between the virtues of faith and those of more secular values. The aesthetic of Alien melded science fiction rooted in real-world technology with a gothic surrealism.
The tensions behind the making of these movies are not only reflected on-screen. They are essential to why they proved so scary. The disputes made the intentions of the filmmakers more inchoate and at times even incomprehensible. What the New Horror movies share is a sense that the most frightening thing in the world is the unknown, the inability to understand the monster right in front of your face. These movies communicate confusion, disorientation, and the sense that the true source of anxiety is located in between categories: fact and fantasy, art and commerce, the living and the dead.
Fear is personal. Whether it is heights or rats or failure, what frightens us is as varied as what makes us laugh or what we find beautiful. Taste matters. So do experience and culture. But just as there are some paintings that are simply beautiful regardless of context, certain scares transcend the particular phobias of time and place. When we see a sharp knife approach an eyeball, our response is reflexive and even primal. Who has never been afraid of the dark? Then there are the images that not only instantly frighten but endure, sticking in the subconscious and reappearing in dreams. The artistic task for these directors was to locate these enduring scares, the ones that, in a way, we all share.
Death may be the one thing that binds together all horror movies, but its role in scaring audiences is overrated. It’s not just that so much violence on-screen desensitized audiences. To some, dying seems rather simple and finite. There’s a reason that Hamlet can debate both sides of “To be or not to be” for an entire soliloquy. Dying is terrifying, but the confusion of life can be worse. That may be why some of the most horrifying images of the New Horror—the monster busting out of a man’s chest in Alien, the devilish baby carriage in Rosemary’s Baby—examine the beginnings rather than the ends of life.
We will never understand what a baby is thinking emerging from the womb. But try to imagine the shock of one world turning into another. Nothing is familiar and the slightest detail registers as shockingly new. Think of the futility of processing what is going on. No wonder they scream. One of the central pleasures of getting scared is that it focuses the mind. When you experience extreme fear, you forget the rest of the world. This intensity fixes you in the present tense. Overwhelming terror may be the closest we ever get to the feeling of being born. To put it another way, the good horror movies make you think; the great ones make you stop.
CHAPTER ONE
THE DEVIL’S ADVOCATE
Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic! But scream! Scream for your lives!
Dr. Warren Chapin, The Tingler
WILLIAM CASTLE was in bed sweating. This was a good sign. It meant that Rosemary’s Baby had done what it was supposed to do. But that was not all it did. At first glance, the novel appeared to him to be the usual nonsense about a young woman possessed by Satan, hocus-pocus that has spooked audiences since a three and a quarter-minute French silent film called The House of the Devil premiered in 1896. The book’s author, Ira Levin, was a comic playwright whose previous three Broadway