A Note on Horror Movies/'Scream'

We sit in the dark, and they happen to us. We have to let them, of course; passivity is requisite.  That’s the deal. It only works if we’re strapped to the guillotine: completely helpless in the face of oblivion. That’s how horror films work, isn’t it? They prey on our weakness and cackle maniacally at our pretence that we once weaned ourselves into independence. Perhaps that’s how all of these silly little things we call movies work, yes, but with the shockers the mockery seems so much more damn insidious.

I just sat down and watched Scream with my little sister. There was a reason for this. She’s nearly fifteen, and was lamenting that nothing she had seen really scared her - so jaded for one so young.  Isn’t that a shame? Many of her friends had seen The Human Centipede, and had described its narrative to her in vivid detail (a detail more imaginative, I imagine, than that belonging to the director). Its crass grotesqueness had appealed to her search for sensationalism, and she was eager to see it. I suggested we watched the Craven movie instead. 


I was eager to see what it’d do. I remember it had had a strong effect on me when I was fifteen; I remember the uneasy laughter I shared with those characters so close to my own age who were so soon to become mincemeat. And that opening scene - don’t get me started on that opening scene. It was an assault, systematic and vindictive, on the sense of security that I relied upon in so many things: the divide between fiction and reality, my parents’ home, and - I readily admit here that I wasn’t at the age where Janet Leigh bowing out halfway through Psycho was as shocking as it should have been - the belief that a film’s biggest star would categorically make it through to the final reel.

Watching it again, I enjoyed the mechanics of it, the way it plays with you. It revels in its postmodern game in a manner which is still infectious, even today. At certain points it reaches the heights of pantomime - he’s behind you! The character of Randy works brilliantly in this respect, an audience surrogate who’s as vulnerable as anybody else (what a shame – though what a masterstroke – that they killed him off in the sequel) to the slaughter.  How wonderful, I thought, to be a lamb.

My sister’s reaction was somewhat less effusive.  She reassured me she’d enjoyed it, but also bemoaned that it hadn’t frightened her as much as she would have liked. I panicked, instantaneously taking her on a kneejerk youtube odyssey, showing her trailers for great horror films which have scared me so much in the past – The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Thing, The Descent, and so on. All the great Thes. She admitted they looked sort of creepy, yes, but she told me that nothing she had seen her really disturbed her.  

This saddens me. I hope it’s not just simply I’m prematurely ageing into a nostalgic curmudgeon, and I can’t authoritatively promise this isn’t the case. But I hope it isn’t. I really do. I think a film can still work wonders and make us search frantically for the nightlight, if it’s made intelligently enough, with enough wit and verve and mania. It doesn’t need to have a scene where three cardboard cutouts masquerading as characters are sewn together anus-to-mouth, surely?  We need a danse macabre - not an arse palaver.

Crass, yes - but valid, I think. I’m perpetually excited by the possibilities of horror, and I honestly believe in it as a force for good. Everyone has nightmares, and horror is one of the only ways we have at our disposal to confront and - if not to conquer - then at least to accept them. It’s an important life experience, and it’s something that art is uniquely suited to do. I enjoyed watching Scream tonight, because it dares to have a go at playing peek-a-boo with people who are otherwise too old to play such games, and it does so marvellously.

Despite this entry’s sense of eulogy, I am reassured that not all hope is lost. You should have seen her face during the opening scene.

Cue manic cackling...