Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [58]
Dario Argento, who loved Lovecraft as a child, explains, “Lovecraft describes horrors but doesn’t explain exactly what they are. I like that.” Guillermo del Toro, the director of Pan’s Labyrinth, says that the genius of this tactic was how it worked on the imagination of the reader: “Lovecraft had a gift for making everything specifically ambiguous,” he says. “He would say ‘the leering face loaded with madness’ or ‘the evil perverse entity of unnamable,’ everything was ‘unnamable,’ ‘indescribable.’ When you’re reading you go ‘Whoa!’ and your brain fills those spaces. For every creature, everyone has a secret mental image of what those creatures look like.”
In “The Outsider,” the thing is not a thing, but a compound, and in that, we see the idea of a creature of horror straddling two worlds. There is also the suggestion in this story that if being different is monstrous, then it is a rather normal quality for humans. “My first conception of a living person,” says the narrator, “was that of something mockingly like myself.”
Lovecraft could pull off this feat, making his monster sound human and foreign, grotesque and too familiar, extreme and yet vague, because of his particularly literary style. As a visual medium, however, film demands the concrete. That’s why O’Bannon’s original idea for Dark Star was to build an old-fashioned monster. He bought a rubber costume from a rental house in Hollywood. The seams showed. It looked fake. This turned their wry philosophical comedy into a lame joke. So they continued brainstorming. Inspiration struck when O’Bannon and Carpenter were lounging around the set and saw someone carrying a beach ball, revealing his feet underneath, making it look like it was walking. Carpenter and O’Bannon fell down laughing. “We realized we couldn’t do real, so how about going for funny?” O’Bannon says. In a way, the randomness of the object evokes nothing specific, just like Lovecraft’s description.
Carpenter had a less absurd sense of humor than O’Bannon, but he liked the idea, in part because he thought that it would enable him to get around the tediousness of explaining the killer. A beach ball could not be psychoanalyzed. O’Bannon spray-painted it red, put some rubber reptilian feet at the bottom, and they were done. Their friend Nick Castle, who would go on to play Michael Myers in Halloween, manipulated the puppet.
Carpenter mapped out this chase very carefully and with an eye to horror. The ball didn’t skip or bounce around. It just sat at one end of a hallway staring. Turn away and it would disappear. The camera glided across the body of the victim, with the ball showing up in the least expected moments, to pulsating computerized music composed by Carpenter. It began in a closet, moved down a dark corridor and ended up at the top of a very high and brilliantly lit elevator shaft, where it attacked Pinback, played by O’Bannon, grabbing at his back while the elevator descended on his head. To Carpenter, the silent scene was the “old-fashioned high and dizzy,” the kind of thing Hitchcock pulled off in North by Northwest.
The corridor seemed to go on forever, like the designs of the ships in Alien. And the stalking had the economical suspense of Halloween. The scene would become a blueprint for these later works, but its greatest impact might be the injury sustained during the shoot. O’Bannon spent three days of shooting on his back, inside the sweltering corridor, pretending to be fighting the pull of gravity. The illusion that his character was hanging in an elevator shaft was achieved by simply turning the camera on its side. During this sequence O’Bannon developed an excruciating pain in his side that stole his appetite and sent him to the hospital days later, for the first time in a lifelong struggle with a bowel condition