POWER AND HORROR
LOOKING AT HORROR MOVIES AND POWER
The Hills Have Eyes (2006 version) is a fascinating and brutal film where a family are sabotaged in the middle of a desert and left to the mercy of a family of cannibal mutants. Stranded, they are attacked and forced to watch their loved ones brutally violated and murdered in front of their eyes. The characters in the film find power in trying to save the people around them.
We can better understand what is meant by power by
looking at the scene in the movie where most of the family dies.
This is a snippet of the scene from the 2006 remake:
The youngest daughter has just been raped screaming and crying when her sister rushes in to witness both her sister and her own baby in danger. The elder sister does not panic or give into her emotions like her younger sibling does but accesses the situation while she is forced to allow one of the mutants to breast feed from her. Following this she waits for her chance and shoots one of the mutants only to be shot herself soon after.
This is a snippet of the scene from the 2006 remake:
The youngest daughter has just been raped screaming and crying when her sister rushes in to witness both her sister and her own baby in danger. The elder sister does not panic or give into her emotions like her younger sibling does but accesses the situation while she is forced to allow one of the mutants to breast feed from her. Following this she waits for her chance and shoots one of the mutants only to be shot herself soon after.
She self sacrificed for
the ones she loves. Strength comes from interaction with other people. Weakness comes from personal involvement.
The Hills Have Eyes Trailer (2006 remake)
The Hills Have Eyes Trailer (2006 remake)
“It’s
about Power” (Whedon, 2002).
It Lives Again
In a lecture on Critical Theory Dr Steve Cramer told me about art which belongs to the semiotic order. Horror movies unashamedly portrayal of the human body is what makes them so popular with young audiences - the life or death situations that characters are forced into makes them act on an unconscious level driven by survival. In my mind these forced situations are ‘situations which reveal the real us’. It Lives Again is book which looks at horror movies from the new millennium:
*Warning - Spoilers Follow!*
The
Ring
A journalist investigates the legend of a tape
which ensures certain death seven days after watching it, unless you can make someone else watch it first. The journalist unearths the
mystery of the tape by watching it and finding the place it was made and the
people it featured. The only way to stop it and save her son however is to make
a copy of the tape and keep the cycle running.
A woman looks after her two children while
their father is at war. She and her two children are haunted by ‘ghosts‘ at the arrival of three new
housekeepers. The woman and her children live in curtained darkness because her children have a rare
intolerance to sunlight which means that all doors are locked once opened so
that no sunlight from any window can enter the house. As the story unfolds the woman
learns that she and her children are in fact dead and the ‘ghosts’ haunting them
are in fact living people who have moved into their apparent vacant home. The
reason she never realised before is because she was repressing the memory of
killing her own children and then shooting herself.
Saw
Two men wake to find themselves in a large bathroom, chained and separated by a supposedly dead man lying face down between them. As the movie progresses they discover they are part of a game conceived by a serial killer called Jigsaw who tests his victims desires to live. The ending is goose bumpingly amazing!
Saw
Two men wake to find themselves in a large bathroom, chained and separated by a supposedly dead man lying face down between them. As the movie progresses they discover they are part of a game conceived by a serial killer called Jigsaw who tests his victims desires to live. The ending is goose bumpingly amazing!
28 Days Later
The world has been overrun by zombies as a
result of a fatal virus. A group of survivors search for more survivors. The
young girl is forced to kill her father when he is infected. When the survivors find help they are
panic-stricken to realise that the British army are killing off the male survivors and
raping the females. To save a young girl the trauma of sexual abuse an older
female gives her drugs to put her into an unconscious state of mind.
War
of the Worlds
The world is overtaken by aliens and a father
and his two children fight for survival. The father spends most of the movie
literally shielding his young daughter’s eyes from the horrors around her
however by the end, after so much has happened, he can no longer protect her from
seeing the devastation that surrounds them.
Jeepers
Creepers
The beginning scene is the
most haunting
A young boy is working in a field which is scattered with DIY black clothed scarecrows. Out of the corner of his eye he thinks he sees something move but when he looks around everything seems normal. However to his immediate horror the Jeeper Creeper has been spying on him in the guise of a scarecrow. It violently flies over him and carries him away.
The magic of this scene is the director making something apparently normal, sinister. It helps that the ‘normal’ thing (the scarecrow) is a thing without a soul already.
This scare effect is used again in the movie when two young kids are chased by a blacked out old truck - we have no idea what is in the truck because we have not seen the Creeper but the mystery of what is inside is terrifying.
A young boy is working in a field which is scattered with DIY black clothed scarecrows. Out of the corner of his eye he thinks he sees something move but when he looks around everything seems normal. However to his immediate horror the Jeeper Creeper has been spying on him in the guise of a scarecrow. It violently flies over him and carries him away.
The magic of this scene is the director making something apparently normal, sinister. It helps that the ‘normal’ thing (the scarecrow) is a thing without a soul already.
This scare effect is used again in the movie when two young kids are chased by a blacked out old truck - we have no idea what is in the truck because we have not seen the Creeper but the mystery of what is inside is terrifying.
Gothika
Gothika is a psychological horror
where a Doctor finds herself a patient in the asylum she worked in without
knowing how. When everyone else around her seems sure that she is supposed to
be there because she is 'crazy' she begins to think the same. Like in Flight
Plan when a majority rules it is hard to stand against them even if you
know you are right.
The
Descent
A group of women go cave
diving and get trapped underground with a race of deformed human cannibals adapt to
living underground. One of the most heartbreaking scenes I have ever seen was in this movie. The last survivor sees light and follows it upwards to the world above. Free of the underground and the mutants she runs to her car and drives away. She pulls over about a mile away and throws up out of her window. When she sits back up in her seat she sees her friend she left to die underground in the passenger seat. She blinks and when she opens her eyes again she is back underground, the noise of the mutants impendingly close -
we realise that she blacked out and dreamt she escaped.
we realise that she blacked out and dreamt she escaped.
Grindhouse
Another zombie film descendant of I Am Legend where Quintin Tarantino physically disables
all of his characters to make them stronger.
30
Days of Night
A vampire film set in Alaska where every year
for thirty days and nights there is no sunrise. A group of survivors are forced
to hide from the unconventionally romantic vampires and the protagonist
sacrifices his humanity to save the woman he loves at the end.
The
Strangers
A game of hide and seek in a couples own home
as they are invaded by masked intruders. At the end as the sun comes up they
are tied to chairs and stabbed as we hear the wind chimes chime in the wind outside, the shuffle of
chairs, the cough and snobs of the characters.
http://youtu.be/LiqeyLevrNU
The
Blair Witch Project
A home movie which was marketed as a real tape
found in the woods where the characters in the film get lost.
Open
Water
A couple are stranded in shark infested waters.
Silent
Hill
A deserted town inhabited by deformed human
beings (based on a game)
In all of these films the characters remain in one
place throughout. The world in the
horror movie is created by a set of circumstances which holds them there
against their free will e.g. a car breaks down in a desert, two men chained in
a room, a group of women trapped underground, a family forced to avoid sunlight
inside their home, lost in the woods, stranded in the ocean. Perhaps there is
something in creating a world where your protagonists are unable to escape
which makes a performance able to really affect it’s audience…
_-_Wheat_Field_with_Crows_(1890).jpg)
