Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [97]
Craven’s inspiration stemmed from his religious upbringing. Cronenberg rooted his movies in a rational view of the world. As outrageous as his plots were—filled with viruses and psychic powers and twin gynecologists—they were based in science, or at least a twisted version of it. Cronenberg and William Peter Blatty both believed that the supernatural in horror opens up the possibility of a belief in God, but Cronenberg is an atheist. “To me an act of murder is the act of total destruction, it’s absolute,” he said in an interview. “There’s no comeback, there’s no going to heaven, that’s it.”
He uses his lack of faith as a justification for not making light of death. In his films, there is always the looming threat of complete annihilation, manifesting itself in the decay of the human body. His movies moved the heart of horror from the limits of the mind to the decline of the body, and they were working on some of the same nerves that O’Bannon did with Alien. Cronenberg’s masterwork, The Brood, a revenge fantasy begging for Freudian analysis, released the same year as Alien, turned the sentiment that children are the product of love upside down. In an institute run by a mad scientist, a mother channels her rage to give birth to killer children to take revenge on her enemies. In one spectacularly sickening scene, a bloody, disgusting baby emerges from an egg attached to her body. She picks him up and licks the blood off of him.
In 1973, Larry Cohen imagined a killing spree taking place inside a birthing room in It’s Alive, a monster movie with music by Bernard Herrmann about a father who wants his wife to get an abortion but instead she goes through with having the baby—to disastrous results. Early on, right after the delivery, the hospital room is a crime scene, dead nurses and doctors everywhere. The baby attacked. Cohen, a New York–based director, said he got the idea for the movie from watching a child’s tantrum. “I’d never seen anything so violent in my entire life,” he says. “Pure id.”
The most surreal parenting nightmare of the decade was surely Eraserhead. David Lynch’s debut is far too bizarre to fit neatly into any genre. After an eerie prologue riffing off of 2001, the movie shrinks to a human scale inside a dingy, poorly lit room where the roar of a radiator and the mewling cry of a baby haunt two fragile new parents lying apart on a squeaky metal bed. This is not a normal premature baby, more like a mix between a watery dumpling and a swaddled little calf stripped of its flesh. The kid is sickly, vomiting pools of blood. The parents try to love it, but its unceasing cries and slithery skin disgust the father, who dreams its grotesque head replaces his in a disturbing sequence. Lynch apparently was inspired by the fears of being a new father, but also, like Cronenberg, he centers his horror on repulsion of the body.
O’Bannon loved that stuff. If you couldn’t scare an audience, the next best thing, he thought, was to disgust them. As a teenager, he loved practical jokes, the grosser the better. Once he tried to impress a young woman at a party by surprising her when she came out of the bathroom. He grabbed his stomach, looked ill, and pointed at a pile of rubber vomit. This seduction strategy didn’t work, but in the first kill of Alien, you might say that O’Bannon tried again, with better results.
As soon as he knew how the monster would emerge, O’Bannon thought the victim should be a man. He wanted to take the convention followed by Carpenter and break it. “Having the victim in a horror film always be a woman was a cheap shot,” O’Bannon said. “I always imagine