| May. 16th, 2007 @ 01:01 am (no subject) |
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Introspective 1
I took this film class once, and my teacher was like, in love with horror movies. She told us during her first class that horror, as a genre, was declining. She mused that it was a lot like when Latin was dying out, although the process took a lot longer. The thing was, she said, horror was the purest form of cinematic expression that there was, and that it had said almost everything that it needed to say.
What made it pure, she said, was that it evolved in a way that other genres didn't. Movies are the most obsessively current artistic medium in existence. Action, romance, comedy, they all evolved with the times but really they were just showing us the same basic truth in a new setting. Horror is different. Horror needs to scare you, but fear is dynamic. Fear evolves, moreso than other aspects of the human psyche.
Its not something immediately apparent. I mean, all fear comes down to the unknown, and death is the most immediate form of something you can't explain (whether or not you believe in some sort of after-life, the moment of death is one of separation from everyone and everything and there is always going to be a fear of it). So death is always scary. Horror works on the basis that you don't want to die, and thus you don't want the characters in a movie and by extension yourself to die.
Okay, so no one wants to die. But that's just the end result. Its how the death comes that changes, that reflects the fear of the generation that created it. Now, there were horror movies before it, but the one everyone knows is Nosferatu, which is basically the story of Dracula. Nosferatu is a monster; a thing beyond human reckoning and understanding, something we can't imagine having to contend with and thus are horrified by.
The first few decades of horror films were characterized by these monsters. Most of them resembled humans, but they became a concept that, even in human guise, was so inhuman that it was doomed to die out. The point was they were close, but in the end they weren't us, and there was only so many of them that could be shown before they became familiar.
So then we get the sixties, and the merging of horror and the thriller. Rather than monsters and ghosts, the great stories of this time were about murderers and generally psychotic people, a trend that has continued into today and, in its turn, become stale. People stopped being afraid of monsters; they were more afraid of other people now, it was a time based more in realism and people had real things to be scared about.
My teacher said that the fear of war creates more horror stories than real war. Its an interesting concept but a digression in this case.
So what am I getting at? Its this: action movies are always going to work the same. Horror movies from the twenties and horror movies now share thematic elements, visual cues, but there is an underlying truth that has changed.
Case in point: no one cares about murderers anymore. Everyone's getting murdered all the time, so we only fear it as much as we fear anything else we fear usually. So what does the aspiring horror film need to portray now?
Zombies.
Zombies are, right now, the most horrifying thing that humans can imagine. Not everyone is as scared of zombies as, say, I am, but I would say that's because they don't understand them well enough. Zombies are scary for several reasons.
A.) Numbers. One Dracula is never going to be as fearsome as two hundred zombies.
B.) Familiarity. Zombies may seem like normal monsters but they're only humans whose Ego is taken away. The Zombie is the Id incarnate, and people are scared of what they have the potential to be.
C.)Undeath. The one comfort of any scary situation is that you have the potential to kill whatever it is that's chasing you. Undead have already died, and thus this comfort is removed; over time, the Zombie has become much easier to destroy, and this is the most regrettable thing about current Zombie movies. Either way, the fact that they feel no pain and can operate without limbs and organs is certainly not nice.
D.)Belief. Somewhere, deep in the heart of humanity, lies the belief that Zombies are the most likely threat to humanity, and that they have the best chance of succeeding in our obliteration this side of atom bombs. |
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