Smart Horror
In Jason's recent blog, he commented that he wanted me to comment on my comments concerning his comments concerning Saw...which I haven't seen.
Let me try that again. Jason wrote a comment about Saw and in it, he explained that fans of horror are willing to suspend disbelief in order to make horror work. I disagree. In fact, I disagreed to Jason who then called me up to ask me to elucidate my response. Then, on his own blog he all but dared me to elucidate my response in writing. I could not tell if he wanted me to do this on his blog or on my own, but as such elucidation might take up some space I decided to do it here, rather than there. My postings have been a bit sparse lately and so I figured I should punch the thing up.
So, horror. Okay, first of all, I come by my knowledge honestly. I used to run many many adventures of Call of Cthulhu, which is basically the horror version of Dungeons and Dragons, and as such, I was constantly attempting to make my "adventures" scarier and scarier. To wit, I have thought up many a horrific episode--and case in point, I have used far fewer than I ever dreamed up.
The reason? Well, that's the thing. Horror allows a suspension of disbelief, but only in certain areas. For instance, you might suspend your disbelief that a race of half man/half fish creatures has been populating the world's oceans since the paleazoic era, but when they show up, and nobody calls the cops, you cry "Unrealistic!" Why? Well, barring giving my reading of Freud's "The Uncanny," I'll just say this: there's something horrifying in and of itself about something living outside the realm of nature. That is, we walk around making assumptions about the world. If we meet something or experience something that really threatens those assumptions at their core level, man, that's fucking scary. It doesn't matter whether it's realistic. That's the point. If it were realistic, it wouldn't be scary. The point is, it forces you to redefine "real" and in such cases, let's you know that you may have been very wrong about all those things that you thought were real previous to the encounter. Egads!
That having been said. It's not really that hard to come up with something that's scary--that isn't where horror gets its intelligence from. You learn one day that cows are our intellectual equal, you find out you are not alone in this knowledge, and yet, we still eat the intelligent cow. Even that lame ass example's kind of creepy.
Where horror gets its intelligence, where it requires its planning, is what the characters do in the face of such horrible knowledge. You see, in the real world, where things are realistic, when someone is trying to kill you, you go to the cops. If you don't do that, you are an idiot. When someone is stalking you for days on end, you call someone, you hang out at a friend's house, you buy a gun. Realistically, you're sitting in the attic of your home, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you hear a voice yell, "GET OUT!" What do you do? You get out. If you don't do that, you go call a priest or something. Moreover, after you've seen the devil, you pretty much don't have an excuse not to go to church. Realistically, you have a religious experience. There's a monster killing everybody in town? Where's the national guard? Because you can bet your sweet ass, they will show up for a man-eating radish monster from Planet 9. People find a corpse and it clearly looks like something busted OUT of its head. They don't just take that body down to get it cremated, people will investigate, and if more corpses start piling up, those people will be trained in the use of their firearms.
In other words, horror can quickly turn into action, in which case it is not horror, or it can quickly slip past the point of realism, in which case it becomes bad horror. In order to keep horror working--and we're not talking psychological intellectualism, we're just talking the kind of horror that really works--you have to make sure that the characters CANNOT do those things that would allow the horror to devolve into action. At the same time, you have to explain why the characters cannot do those things, or else the horror is going to be stupid.
Look, for instance, at the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Clearly, stupid horror. They're gross sure. Even entertaining. But they're not really scary in the way that say The Ring is scary or the way that Blair Witch is scary. Why? Well, there's this demon-esque character Freddy and he hunts people in their dreams. Then the people attempt to fight Freddy in their dreams. See, this isn't realistic. How in the world would anyone ever come to the conclusion that there's a knife fingered madman hunting them. Their friends die. Dang man, that sucks. But to be able to move from that moment to the moment when you're fighting Freddy, you have to be convinced somehow in this completely odd notion, and the only way to do that is to survive an encounter with Freddy, but how do you survive such an encounter without taking it seriously in the first place. Meanwhile, if this were really happening, every would-be psychic, scientist, and medical researcher would be on Elm Street. "These kids are developing laceration without explanation while they sleep." This shit would be front page news. There would be cults reacting to this shit by doing things five times more heinous then any of the crap Freddy could start.
No. In order for this to be horror, the Elm Street kids are going to have to want to go to the authorities and not be able to. We cannot just make the cops retarded. Keep dialing. Eventually you will find an authority figure that isn't. See how this works? Take, for instance, Dawn of the Dead. The characters would like to go to the authority, but they can't because what authority there is, is too busy fighting the zombies to worry about individual people trapped in houses. Blair Witch? She doesn't kill often enough for there to be a full scale investigation. Those kids just got lost in the woods. The Ring. Until you're dead, there's nothing to tell the authorities. Now, if a whole bunch of people were found dead after watching this tape, then the story would be different. But it's one tape, one person who then becomes one corpse.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep people from going to the police in order to make horror? I mean, sure, you can put every horror story out in the middle of nowhere, but after a while that gets old. There's a whole genre of horror stories devoted to the terror that lives next door to you. Investigative horror. Psychological horror. You aren't trapped. Pulling such stories off is a lot easier than if it were the love of your life living next door, as in a romance. "I found out my next door neighbor is the mass murderer the FBI have been looking for, and I think he suspects I know. Whatever will I do?" You call the FBI--end of the horror.
Horror is, in essence, a delicate set-up of dominoes. Its characters are trying, at every turn, to do everything within their spiritual, intellectual, and physical power to escape the horror, but to no avail. If you're designing the horror story, you have to account for how and why all these attempts fail--and I mean ALL of them. I mean, yeah, sure, you can totally forget about all of this and just make a monster and some people running from the monster until they get the monster's head under a pile driver, but the audience will know that they wouldn't have been so stupid, and the writer will no that the characters weren't supposed to be that stupid. The truth is, we don't really suspend our disbelief, not even with bad horror movies. Instead, we just turn the horror into comedy--is there really anything funnier than A Nightmare on Elm Street, part V. Aren't those soon-to-be-ex-counsellors making out in Camp Crystal Lake just slapstick with a machete.
So, finally to answer your point Jason. No. Horror is THE most difficult genre and it is precisely because it demands the most control over the realistic to keep it from becoming either action or comedy.
But then again, I still haven't seen Saw.
Let me try that again. Jason wrote a comment about Saw and in it, he explained that fans of horror are willing to suspend disbelief in order to make horror work. I disagree. In fact, I disagreed to Jason who then called me up to ask me to elucidate my response. Then, on his own blog he all but dared me to elucidate my response in writing. I could not tell if he wanted me to do this on his blog or on my own, but as such elucidation might take up some space I decided to do it here, rather than there. My postings have been a bit sparse lately and so I figured I should punch the thing up.
So, horror. Okay, first of all, I come by my knowledge honestly. I used to run many many adventures of Call of Cthulhu, which is basically the horror version of Dungeons and Dragons, and as such, I was constantly attempting to make my "adventures" scarier and scarier. To wit, I have thought up many a horrific episode--and case in point, I have used far fewer than I ever dreamed up.
The reason? Well, that's the thing. Horror allows a suspension of disbelief, but only in certain areas. For instance, you might suspend your disbelief that a race of half man/half fish creatures has been populating the world's oceans since the paleazoic era, but when they show up, and nobody calls the cops, you cry "Unrealistic!" Why? Well, barring giving my reading of Freud's "The Uncanny," I'll just say this: there's something horrifying in and of itself about something living outside the realm of nature. That is, we walk around making assumptions about the world. If we meet something or experience something that really threatens those assumptions at their core level, man, that's fucking scary. It doesn't matter whether it's realistic. That's the point. If it were realistic, it wouldn't be scary. The point is, it forces you to redefine "real" and in such cases, let's you know that you may have been very wrong about all those things that you thought were real previous to the encounter. Egads!
That having been said. It's not really that hard to come up with something that's scary--that isn't where horror gets its intelligence from. You learn one day that cows are our intellectual equal, you find out you are not alone in this knowledge, and yet, we still eat the intelligent cow. Even that lame ass example's kind of creepy.
Where horror gets its intelligence, where it requires its planning, is what the characters do in the face of such horrible knowledge. You see, in the real world, where things are realistic, when someone is trying to kill you, you go to the cops. If you don't do that, you are an idiot. When someone is stalking you for days on end, you call someone, you hang out at a friend's house, you buy a gun. Realistically, you're sitting in the attic of your home, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you hear a voice yell, "GET OUT!" What do you do? You get out. If you don't do that, you go call a priest or something. Moreover, after you've seen the devil, you pretty much don't have an excuse not to go to church. Realistically, you have a religious experience. There's a monster killing everybody in town? Where's the national guard? Because you can bet your sweet ass, they will show up for a man-eating radish monster from Planet 9. People find a corpse and it clearly looks like something busted OUT of its head. They don't just take that body down to get it cremated, people will investigate, and if more corpses start piling up, those people will be trained in the use of their firearms.
In other words, horror can quickly turn into action, in which case it is not horror, or it can quickly slip past the point of realism, in which case it becomes bad horror. In order to keep horror working--and we're not talking psychological intellectualism, we're just talking the kind of horror that really works--you have to make sure that the characters CANNOT do those things that would allow the horror to devolve into action. At the same time, you have to explain why the characters cannot do those things, or else the horror is going to be stupid.
Look, for instance, at the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Clearly, stupid horror. They're gross sure. Even entertaining. But they're not really scary in the way that say The Ring is scary or the way that Blair Witch is scary. Why? Well, there's this demon-esque character Freddy and he hunts people in their dreams. Then the people attempt to fight Freddy in their dreams. See, this isn't realistic. How in the world would anyone ever come to the conclusion that there's a knife fingered madman hunting them. Their friends die. Dang man, that sucks. But to be able to move from that moment to the moment when you're fighting Freddy, you have to be convinced somehow in this completely odd notion, and the only way to do that is to survive an encounter with Freddy, but how do you survive such an encounter without taking it seriously in the first place. Meanwhile, if this were really happening, every would-be psychic, scientist, and medical researcher would be on Elm Street. "These kids are developing laceration without explanation while they sleep." This shit would be front page news. There would be cults reacting to this shit by doing things five times more heinous then any of the crap Freddy could start.
No. In order for this to be horror, the Elm Street kids are going to have to want to go to the authorities and not be able to. We cannot just make the cops retarded. Keep dialing. Eventually you will find an authority figure that isn't. See how this works? Take, for instance, Dawn of the Dead. The characters would like to go to the authority, but they can't because what authority there is, is too busy fighting the zombies to worry about individual people trapped in houses. Blair Witch? She doesn't kill often enough for there to be a full scale investigation. Those kids just got lost in the woods. The Ring. Until you're dead, there's nothing to tell the authorities. Now, if a whole bunch of people were found dead after watching this tape, then the story would be different. But it's one tape, one person who then becomes one corpse.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep people from going to the police in order to make horror? I mean, sure, you can put every horror story out in the middle of nowhere, but after a while that gets old. There's a whole genre of horror stories devoted to the terror that lives next door to you. Investigative horror. Psychological horror. You aren't trapped. Pulling such stories off is a lot easier than if it were the love of your life living next door, as in a romance. "I found out my next door neighbor is the mass murderer the FBI have been looking for, and I think he suspects I know. Whatever will I do?" You call the FBI--end of the horror.
Horror is, in essence, a delicate set-up of dominoes. Its characters are trying, at every turn, to do everything within their spiritual, intellectual, and physical power to escape the horror, but to no avail. If you're designing the horror story, you have to account for how and why all these attempts fail--and I mean ALL of them. I mean, yeah, sure, you can totally forget about all of this and just make a monster and some people running from the monster until they get the monster's head under a pile driver, but the audience will know that they wouldn't have been so stupid, and the writer will no that the characters weren't supposed to be that stupid. The truth is, we don't really suspend our disbelief, not even with bad horror movies. Instead, we just turn the horror into comedy--is there really anything funnier than A Nightmare on Elm Street, part V. Aren't those soon-to-be-ex-counsellors making out in Camp Crystal Lake just slapstick with a machete.
So, finally to answer your point Jason. No. Horror is THE most difficult genre and it is precisely because it demands the most control over the realistic to keep it from becoming either action or comedy.
But then again, I still haven't seen Saw.
posted by Monstro D. Whale at
4:25 PM
1 Comments:
In short -- real horror we avoid because it is ... horrible. You fight or flight. But unless you are a sicko you really don't want to hear about real horror. We do a quick -- oh that's horrible, how sad -- and then try and blot the image from our minds.
But we like to be pretend scared. Which means we get into that whole, it's really not real, but I'm going to pretend it's real as long as it is entertainingly not real in ways that see like they could be real. Dominoes.
It comes down to plot. The best horror movie, or any movie really, is dependent on your not knowing what will happen next or at the end. But what happens has to appear that it logically could happen within the confines of the created world you have chosen to experience. A movie creates a world with certain laws. Hobbits cry. Jason keeps coming back. Somebody, most likely the character who has the most screen time, will survive to the end.
This is the most difficult thing to write though. As Doc Rawlins, put it in our Pulp Fiction course, it has to work on the first viewing. It has to make sense according to the laws of that creation. But it has to be a "surprise" that works the first time, is not forseeable, but on reflection is actually forseeable.
Tricky stuff. The best movies in the world actually attain the ability to be watched multiple times. It's like a joke. Funny the first time because the punch line is unexpected. But you hear it after that and you know what's what. The pleasure is in the craft of setting up the joke. Really good writers set up multiple layers so you gain appreciation for new levels you didn't see the first time.
_Saw_ is not one of those movies. Nor _The Usual Suspects_. You watch them twice and then have to wait another ten years for senility to make them watchable again. _The Element of Crime_ does, which Messr Jason so kindly informed me of. I'm still a fan of _Alien_ as a masterwork of suspense. Between Giger and Ridley Scott that movie still works. So too does _Blade Runner_ -- thanks again to Ridley Scott and Sid Mead. But horror movies rarely age well. I usually go for Sci-Fi horror as you can see. All the better if it is cross genre, Sci-Fi-Horror-Mystery. Yeah Pitch Black. And you guys suck. Callin each other up at the drop of a blog to argue great literary questions. I miss that. Damn different time zones.
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