**********THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR House on Haunted Hill, Alien, AND Insidious**********
Take my favorite horror movie of all time House on Haunted Hill (1999) in which the titular house is a very interesting, and frightening character. The entryway is a gigantic and beautifully creepy room in what I can only describe as "modern Gothic" with a magnificent and terrifying stained glass window in the ceiling (which is obviously going to shatter and nearly impale someone). There is a staircase down to the labyrinth of the basement with disturbing dissected creatures, twisting stone hallways, cobwebs, ghosts, ghouls, torture rooms, vats of blood, and a "scare chamber." The last part of the house, the attic, is filled with all sorts of clockwork and mechanical, weighted devices for controlling various parts of the house. The house on haunted hill is a magnificent work of design and really comes alive in House on Haunted Hill. Now, to be fair that isn't the only reason I like that movie, but I have a soft spot for labyrinthine films such as Cube, Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, Triangle and any film that shows me a beautifully realized, otherworldly place.
But, settings are not the only unique and fascinating aspect of horror movies. To quote Clive Barker, "what are these stories but extended dances with death, refreshed now and again by a change of mask, a change of step" and he's right. Horror movies all deal with the idea of death, either directly (someone is going to kill me) or indirectly (fighting spirits of the dead). In order for these movies to scare us they need to both prey on our unconscious fears and force us to confront something we don't understand. The idea of death is nearly universal in horror movies but some movies play on other fears.
Take, for example, Ridley Scott's iconic 1979 film Alien which plays on not one, not two, not three, but at least four things we unconsciously fear. First, there is death: the Xenomorph (as it would later be known) is a vicious predator and it's going to hunt down and kill the members of the crew. Already we're fighting for survival and fearing death. Then there's the faceless Weyland-Yutani corporation which considers human life expendable, we have fear of big business (a fear that has worked its' way back into our horror movies recently, but we'll get into that in a bit).
Now, for the third fear we get into the meat of the movie, what really gave it it's punch, so to speak: Ridley Scott's Alien is about rape. Without getting into too many specifics, nearly all of the iconography in Alien is either phallic or yonic. The Xenomorphs as a species reproduce via forced oral rape, they then gestate inside a person for a period of time and finally burst through their chest, killing them. This is clearly playing on the fears of rape and unwanted pregnancy. Then, look at the design of the aliens themselves, they were created by H.R. Giger and are almost literally an exercise in seeing how many phallic objects he could fit into a single creature. We have the extended penis head, the extended penis tongue, the four penis barbs coming out of the aliens back, and finally the tail which is sharp and used to penetrate things, specifically people. The Xenomorph is a collection of penises which gained sentience and decided to rape and kill.
This leads us into our fourth fear: emasculation. Who is the main character of every traditional Alien movie other than the xenomorphs? Ellen Ripley. Ellen Ripley is a strong, confident, capable, independent, loving, and maternal woman. Ellen Ripley is the embodiment of femininity and yet, while pretty, she is not hyper-sexualized. This is what we call a character and she is everything we could have hoped for in a character. Generally speaking women get raped in the real world. What worse way is there to break someone then to dehumanize them so much that, to the rapist, they exist for no other reason than to rape? A rapist takes the generally enjoyable act of sex and intimacy and turns it into a horrible reminder. Rape breaks people. It is absolutely crushing. Which is why Ridley Scott decided he was going to rape every single man who sees his movie. The xenomorph physically rapes the male characters, it emasculates them, it forces them to deal with troubles that were primarily exclusive to women. The xenomorph even forces an unwanted pregnancy upon the men which ultimately kills them. This was all intentional, and it worked. When Alien was released it was absolutely terrifying and emasculating.
Like all movies, horror movies are products of their time. A horror movie will not generally work as well on an audience from a different time, this is one of the reasons why so many older horror movies don't scare modern audiences and neither do many of the throwback "remake" movies either. However, there is one genre of movie in particular which is terrifying audiences today and that's the paranormal haunting movies. While I can't pin down exactly when this started, the first movie that comes to mind is Paranormal Activity (the first, and only good one). Some of the scariest movies of the day are these paranormal haunting movies; Paranormal Activity, Insidious, the Conjuring, A Haunting in Connecticut, and, like their predecessors, these movies play on the unconscious fears of the audience. So, what is the biggest fear of the modern film audience? Big business (told you I'd get to it). But, not just big business, big government, and any faceless entity we, as a population, don't understand and don't want interfering with our lives. Take the recent NSA scandal (for those of you don't know, to put it simply the government is spying on anything and everything you do).
How are these organizations structured? There isn't one evil face to point to and say "that's it that's what we have to stop" (no matter what those people who think Obama is the anti-christ say) but culminations of people. And none of the people who work for these corporations are evil, they're just greedy and selfish. But these government entities and big corporations are so complicated and convoluted and we don't understand them, but they exist and they're watching us. Now, lets compare that to the horrors in modern scary movies. From watching the first (and only the first) Paranormal Activity the audience doesn't know what's going on throughout the entire movie, not at the end. They have some idea, a girl gets possessed and kills her boyfriend, but that's not it, all throughout this movie you don't know what's happening, how many evil things there, or how many of the small hauntings throughout the movie will really affect the characters. All they know is that an invisible force is watching them and interfering with their lives, just like big business. Consider Insidious, the hauntings here come from not just one demon but a group of dark spirits. It's a large, mostly disconnected, and very convoluted faction of ghosts and demons that want the child's body. None of the ghosts are evil (the demon is but that's not really the point) they all just want the child's body for themselves; they're greedy. And throughout the movie all we know of them until the end is that there are faceless monsters interfering in their lives. That sounds suspiciously similar to the way people think of these big, faceless corporations.
I know this has been a long article but the point is that horror plays on our unconscious fears, it can show us terrifying and beautiful worlds, and it can help us deal with our insecurities and fears. A good horror movie can change you and help you, or it can frighten you and crush you.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN
Credit to Clive Barker
