Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [57]
Dark Star began small and kept growing, expanding, slowly mutating into something very different from what it was originally. It started as a forty-five-minute film. This was too long for a collection of shorts that could play at festivals and too short for theatrical release. To fill it out, Carpenter and O’Bannon decided to add a monster. That also seemed like the commercial thing to do. But in introducing an alien that chases O’Bannon playing Pinback through an elevator shaft, the philosophy of rooting fantasy in something real ran up against the limits of special effects. It’s one thing to put together a control panel using garbage, but how do you make a scary creature from the beyond that would not look like a silly man in a rubber suit? This was not just a problem of resources.
The toughest challenge of every monster movie is making the appearance of the creature live up to expectations. It’s what everyone is waiting for. If you do not show the fifty-foot woman or the blob or the human fly, the audience will be disappointed. Then again, the giant man-eating rat under the bed will always be scarier than the one in front of your face. This is simply how the mind works. No matter how monstrous the giant rat appears, it is never as big or as vile as the rat you dreamed up inside your brain. This is the reason that most horror movies fall apart soon after the monster appears. O’Bannon and Carpenter agreed that the scariest parts of their favorite horror films were in the waiting. But the audience would also feel cheated if they never saw the monster. That presented the critical challenge of the horror movie. Call it “The Monster Problem.”
“The majority of horror and sci-fi films were not badly made,” director John Landis says about the monster movies of the fifties and sixties. “They are not badly written, badly acted, or badly made—until the monster shows up. And then it’s some guy in a stupid suit. The monsters are stupid and the plot is smart. That changed in the seventies when the plots became stupid and the monster smart.”
The best horror films of the seventies came up with clever solutions to the Monster Problem. In Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the monster stays offscreen almost entirely. Carrie turns the victim into the monster. Targets preserves the mystery of the monster by keeping its motivations unclear. But the greatest monsters of the decade, the ones dreamed up by Carpenter and O’Bannon in Halloween and Alien, had their roots in H. P. Lovecraft.
Lovecraft’s stories solved the Monster Problem in the ineffable quality of his prose. Even after he described the monster, it remained out of focus. You got a sense of its claws or teeth but not the whole. In “The Outsider,” for instance, when the narrator notices his reflection in a pane of glass, seeing what he actually looks like for the first time, Lovecraft writes a dense paragraph of description that says everything and nothing at once.
I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world—or no longer of this world—yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines and leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its moldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.
This characteristic paragraph contains the germs of almost every monster in the modern horror film. It hints at the decay and uncanny of the zombie, the abnormal of the freak, the unwholesome