Horror comes home

The development of horror from its origins in eighteenth-century Gothic fiction and dark romanticism* to the present day has always closely mirrored the historical development of society. Early horror was a reaction to the industrial revolution, the enormous development of the productive forces creating a contradiction between an increasingly urbanised population and the countryside, now thought wild and uncivilised. The ‘dark places of the earth’ (Joseph Conrad) became an Other, a canvas on which both fears and desires were projected. Thus in Dracula Jonathan Harker travels to a world in which the achievements of civilisation are noticeably absent (no trains in Transylvania). In some senses, it’s an alluring world: most obviously the Count’s polygamy and sexual voraciousness offer an enticing alternative to the public rectitude of Victorian England. But the inviting Other also seeks to devour Harker.

If horror is found outside the bounds of civilised society, it’s not always so easy to keep it out. In Dracula, the titular vampire soon comes to England and terrorises Lucy Westenra. It is this invasion of the domestic sphere by the Other that is the most defining trait of post-war horror. The blank spots on the map had disappeared. To be sure, the city-countryside contradiction still existed and was in many ways at its starkest. A string of horror films and thrillers of the 1970s – Deliverance (1972), The Hills Have Eyes (1977), I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and others – dealt in no uncertain terms with the horrors that befall people from the city as the countryside avenges its victimisation (Carol J. Clover). Of these, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) comes closest to being a slasher film, but it’s not quite there: the distinguishing feature of the slasher, as typified by Halloween (1978) and Black Christmas (1974) before it, is that evil is no longer on the outside. It has invaded the home itself.

Halloween establishes this paradigm in its famous first scene. After opening credits featuring John Carpenter’s incredibly creepy theme, we are outside a small-town house on Halloween night, 1963. A stalker lurks in the bushes, observing a young woman and her boyfriend inside. His perspective is our perspective: the entire scene is presented as a single scene from the first-person perspective (although Carpenter hides a cut at one point). The stalker sneaks around the house, then enters through a back door. He picks up a kitchen knife and a Halloween mask. The couple go upstairs, oblivious to the world; the boyfriend leaves shortly afterwards, rather smug about the world’s shortest teenage sex. Our stalker goes up the stairs. He brutally stabs the girl to death before running outside, where he is confronted by two adults. As the man takes off his Halloween mask, we leave the killer’s perspective for the very first time and realise, to our horror, that he is a six-year-old boy with a disturbingly blank expression.

The killer, Michael Myers, is placed in a psychiatric institution for life, but manages to escape almost fifteen years later, on October 30, 1978. His therapist, Dr Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), suspects that Michael will return to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, to wreak more murder, and tries to enlist the help of local police in chasing down Michael. Meanwhile, local teenagers Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in her film début) and Annie (Nancy Loomis) are babysitting local children, while their friend Lynda (P.J. Soles), obviously unaware she’s in a slasher film, thinks the absence of adults presents a great opportunity for sex with her boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham). Needless to say, ‘the night he came home!’ will be bloody.

Halloween’s greatest strength is its simplicity. You’d think the old ‘escaped lunatic’ trope would make the film tired, but instead it imbues the proceedings with an archetypal character. Michael Myers kills because he is evil, pure and simple; he is only technically human, knowing neither love nor hatred. He cannot be bargained or negotiated with; he does not want revenge. He doesn’t want anything. He is a machine, pitiless and unfeeling. You cannot propitiate him by changing your behaviour. If he comes across you, he will kill you, and therein lies true terror.

On the receiving end of that terror are our actors. Most of the characters, frankly, are paper-thin. Lynda and Annie are both defined chiefly by their great interest in sex, and can only be distinguished by hair colour and the former’s tendency to say ‘totally!’ a lot. Donald Pleasence makes the most of heavy-handed dialogue. The standout is Jamie Lee Curtis. She is at once convincingly caring and tough, afraid and determined. Her hard, almost androgynous features are a perfect fit for the role. She doesn’t exactly confirm to the Final Girl mould, either: while she is indeed a virgin, dialogue establishes that this is for lack of opportunity rather than moral uprightness. I am unsure about the usual pseudo-Freudian psychosexual interpretation of the slasher film. It seems to me that Laurie’s superiority over her friends is not to do with sex, but with emotional maturity. Michael in his mechanical nature represents primordial unreason, but Laurie is mature enough to take responsibility for others as well as herself. While Annie dumps the girl she’s babysitting on Laurie, the latter protects the kids in her care. Laurie has learned to master her baser desires, while her friends’ enslavement to these causes their deaths.

Speaking of deaths, there aren’t that many. Five people and a dog are murdered in Halloween, but two of these killings (including the dog) occur off-screen. If, as the great Tim Brayton has said, the number of murders in a given slasher film is inversely proportional to the movie’s quality (which explains the scores slaughtered in any given Friday the 13th sequel), Halloween must be pretty good. Which it is. Nor are the deaths very bloody: although Halloween is brutal, scary and nasty-minded, there is virtually no gore.

About the direction and cinematography no words need be spoken, for they are fantastic. Some of the most famous compositions (Michael in his white mask rising behind Laurie, for instance) are at once beautiful and horrifying. Carpenter’s pacing, too, deserves praise. In a world in which many horror directors feel the need to pile up the deaths to stop audiences from dozing off, Carpenter devotes the middle section of the movie solely to building an all-encompassing atmosphere of dread. And how well he does it: when night falls, each death is as harrowing as about twelve of the same in the Friday the 13th series. I joke, of course: deaths in Friday the 13th are never harrowing, only mildly diverting, if you’re lucky.

Halloween is a short, taut film. It’s also art. And it’s very scary. It is, then, all the things the slasher genre that exploded into mainstream popularity a few years later with Friday the 13th (1980) and its sequels was not to be. But the sad decline of the slasher film from bad movies into unspeakably horrible movies cannot taint the terrifying power of Carpenter’s greatest work.

*I desperately tried to fit my beloved E.T.A. Hoffmann into that sentence, but just couldn’t. Read the man, will you?

In this series: Halloween (1978) | Halloween II (1981) | Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1988) | Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) | Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) | Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) | Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998) | Halloween: Resurrection (2002) | Halloween (2007) | Halloween II (2009)

Ein Sturm vom Paradiese her

In seinem Essay "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" schreibt Walter Benjamin:

"Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heißt. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht, als wäre er im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen, worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen und seine Flügel sind ausgespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muß so aussehen. Er hat das Antlitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablässig Trümmer auf Trümmer häuft und sie ihm vor die Füße schleudert. Er möchte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene zusammenfügen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Flügeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, daß der Engel sie nicht mehr schließen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Rücken kehrt, während der Trümmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wächst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm."

Damit hat Benjamin den bürgerlichen Fortschrittsbegriff radikal verworfen. Im Historismus, der unser Geschichtsbild noch heute bestimmt und auch immer wieder in die Wissenschaft sich einschleicht, erscheint die Geschichte des Menschen als triumphaler Weg nach oben: von der Primitivität in die Höh', von der Finsternis ins Licht der Zivilisation. Der Historismus tendiert somit, wie Benjamin richtig erkennt, zu drei Schlußfolgerungen:

1. Er schreibt letztlich Universalgeschichte, denn wenn er die Geschichte als Aufstieg beschreibt, nimmt er sie insgesamt in Besitz.

2. Er begreift die Verlierer der Geschichte nur als Fußnote, als Hindernis auf dem Weg zur Zivilisation, als Sackgasse, kurzum: als überflüssig.

3. maßt er sich an, der Hegelsche absolute Geist habe gesiegt, und die Gegenwart besitze alle Weisheit und Vernunft, die den armen Barbaren der Vergangenheit fehlte.

Der Historismus ist somit tendenziell positivistisch, bejaht stets die herrschenden Verhältnisse, und vermag sich die Umwerfung letzterer gar nicht vorzustellen. Merke wohl: es gibt auch einen sozialistischen Historismus. Er zeigt sich wohl am klarsten und schrecklichsten im Stalinismus, der sich dazu berechtigt fühlte, seine Gegner auszulöschen und aus der Geschichte zu schreiben. Damit wurde in die Tat umgesetzt, was im Historismus ideologisch schon vorgezeichnet ist und sich im Werk stalinistischer Historiker wie E.H. Carr zeigt, die für die Verlierer der Geschichte keine Zeit und kein Verständnis haben.

Marx hat den bürgerlichen Fortschrittsbegriff, der noch Hegels Werk, in dem dialektische Entwicklung eben als Fortschritt verstanden wird, ausmacht, durch den historischen Materialismus ersetzt. In Marx' System gibt es Revolutionen der Produktionsmittel, aus denen sich gesellschaftliche und weltanschauliche Umwälzungen ableiten. Nur werden diese Revolutionen eben nicht als Fortschritt verstanden. Durch sie wird stets nur eine Gewaltherrschaft durch die andere ersetzt, werden die Produktions- und Vernichtungsmittel immer mächtiger, wächst die Gesellschaft an, vervielfacht sich das menschliche Elend. Eben das liegt Benjamins Geschichtsbegriff zugrunde: die Geschichte als immer weiter anwachsender Trümmerhaufen.

Weil der Marxismus sich für den Menschen als "ein erniedrigtes, ein geknechtetes, ein verlassenes, ein verächtliches Wesen" interessiert und ihn zu befreien sucht, kann er mit dem Historismus nichts anfangen. Das aber hat die Linke nicht davon abhalten, dem positivistischen Fortschrittsbegriff in die Falle zu gehen. Der evolutionäre Sozialismus eines Bernstein zum Beispiel nimmt schlicht an, daß dank dem Fortschritt schon alles in Ordnung kommen werde. Er übersieht dabei, daß Marx' Dialektik, im Gegensatz zu der Hegels, offen ist: der Gang der Geschichte ist eben nicht ein unvermeidliches Fortschreiten auf vorgezeichnetem Wege, sondern wird von Menschen geformt. "Sozialismus oder Barbarei" ist eine echte Wahl. Wohin der evolutionäre Sozialismus führt, sieht man, als sich im ersten Weltkrieg die Sozialdemokratie mit den reaktionären Kräften des Kaiserreiches zum Burgfrieden verband.

Walter Benjamins Zerstörung des positivistischen Fortschrittsbegriff ist ein hervorragendes Beispiel negativer Dialektik: das bejahende Selbstverständnis unserer Gesellschaft wird auf den Kopf gestellt. Aber aus dieser Zerstörung wächst erst das Potential für ein Umdenken, für die Vorstellung einer Zukunft, die der Gegenwart dialektisch gegenübersteht. Der Historiker ist Trümmersammler.

I know, and I don't care

It is, perhaps, a poor idea to begin by reviewing a film I loathed. Relentless negativity may be progressive, if Adorno is to be believed, but it is hardly pleasant, and it is difficult to form objective judgments while still fuming from the experience. I nevertheless feel compelled to lambaste I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Needless to say, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) is a core example of the second wave of slasher films that began, by common consensus, with Wes Craven's Scream (1996) and unceremoniously fizzled out in the first few years of the current decade, replaced by splatter films (Saw, Hostel) and the current flood of remakes. The film also rather undeservedly did much for the careers of its stars, and the title has entered popular culture, with some wonderful results. I, of course, like to think of myself as a child of the 1990s, even though I was in fact too young to actually see these films at the time. (The first film I did see at the cinema was Roland Emmerich's Godzilla, back in 1998. I loved it. Clearly, I was not too discriminating when I was ten years old.)

Enough unjustified nostalgia for now. Back to I Know What You Did Last Summer, which opens with a fairly ambitious shot of the coast of North Carolina, and rapidly goes downhill from there. We are introduced to our protagonists (heroes is hardly the right word): high school seniors Barry (Ryan Philippe), Helen (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Julie (Jennifer Love Hewitt), and Ray (Freddie Prinze, Jr. - remember those days? I certainly don't), who is the only one of the four not to be filthy rich, a fact he complains about incessantly. The establishing scenes are decent; strangely, '90s teen idols are rather good at playing shallow party-folk. Driving home from the beach late at night, our plucky heroes accidentally run over a man, apparently killing him; fearing for their future they decide, as you do, to dump the body in a nearby river.

ONE YEAR LATER (so the movie solemnly declares) Julie returns home from her first year at college and finds a note declaring (surprise) 'I know what you did last summer'. An inane plot then ensues in which the protagonists are stalked by a mysterious fisherman who kills people with a fish-hook (yes, really) and must find out his identity in order to... what? The revelation of who the killer really is is hardly a twist (since we are not given enough information to figure it out), and the ending is bog-standard slasher film cliché.

Why is I Know What You Did Last Summer a bad film? The trouble begins with the script by Kevin Williamson (writer of Scream and creator of Dawson's Creek). It's generally a lame re-tread of other, better films, although Williamson is generous enough to introduce his own plot-holes (you'll forgive the spoilers). There is, for instance, no convincing reason as to why the killer actually knows the identities of the teens. The entire middle act is an idiotic detective plot; moreover, the killer murders five people in this film, two of whom were not guilty of What You Did Last Summer, but merely in the way, and one of whom is killed for absolutely no reason at all. This renders the premise (a revenge killing spree) entirely void.

Nor does Jim Gillespie's direction help things, for Gillespie simply does not know how to film horror. Good slasher movies work by slowly but steadily increasing suspense and creating an overwhelming atmosphere of dread, followed by short, sharp and brutal pay-off. Gillespie is evidently not aware of this. He barely builds up atmosphere at all, and as a result the Fisherman does not feel like the hand of inexorable fate (the ideal of a slasher movie villain), but like some dude who likes to kill people. The kills themselves are shot downright incomprehensibly, another major faux-pas (the audience should be scared, not confused). There is, in short, not one frightening moment in the entire film, and it is almost as if Gillespie knows this, for he uses cheap shock tactics in an attempt to compensate, to no avail.

These directorial failures place a considerable burden on the actors, and they fail miserably. Ryan Philippe is, of course, ideally cast in the role of an arrogant upper-class kid (effectively the same role he was later to play in Cruel Intentions), and does fine with the part. Sarah Michelle Gellar is also passable, but Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr. are both awful. Awful. Neither makes their respective character believable for even a second, and I would not hesitate to call their strained attempts to convey emotions as befitting a school play, had I not seen some school plays that were rather better than this. They do not once succeed at making us see the characters, only pretty young actors trying and failing to be said characters. One wonders if Gellar might have made a better Final Girl than Hewitt, but she would likely have appeared too smart, too knowing, lacking Hewitt's wide-eyed vacuity.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is, in short, terrible. It is not terrible in an enjoyable way, like, for instance, this year's Sorority Row (which, despite being a remake of a 1983 film, borrowed liberally from I Know What You Did Last Summer). Instead of so-bad-it's-goodness, this film merely delivers badness, entirely without redeeming traits. And that, I think, is a bit sad. For my part, I have certainly had a much better time bashing it than watching it.

In this series: I Know What You Did Last Summer | I Still Know What You Did Last Summer | I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer