In fiction filmmaking, as in most narrative mediums, character perfection is vital. Maintaining the delicate balance between specifics and generalities is particularly tricky. If your characters aren’t detailed enough, you risk making an inauthentic film. If your characters are too nuanced, audiences might not grasp your vision. Realism is often coveted—and rightfully so, but is there no place for the archetype anymore?
Well, that depends on the type of film. I’m not a huge fan of genre theory, the genres themselves are often too vaguely defined and, when articulating in those terms, you risk having a lot of people misinterpret your ideas. Purists may argue against “suspense,” “action,” and “horror” even being considered genres, but the terms merit use. I’d argue that films of that sort can actually be enhanced by the inclusion of archetypal characters (unlike the melodrama, for instance). Characters should never be cut from cardboard, of course, but sometimes it’s more engaging when their personas transcend their situation.
While “spectacle” may be the action flick’s most important element, the hero is likely its most important character. For an action film to be successful, the protagonist needs fresh quirks and a signature phrase, but also a plethora of qualities that exceed his particular situation and tie in closely with the genre. It’s important that our action hero is strong and decisive, or at least plucky and resilient. The hero unquestionably evolves over time—Dirty Harry was embraced as vigilant and anti-establishment because audiences in the early ‘70s were fed up with serial killers and corrupt politicians; Christian Bale’s Dark Knight, were he really to exist, would likely be involved in several simultaneous ACLU lawsuits, but audiences in 2008 are legitimately comfortable with police sometimes illegally tapping phones to triangulate the ne’er-do-well. Traditional heroes in any action film have more commonalities than differences. Each one, however, still embodies non-transferable traits specific to the context in which the feature was created. Society is always perpetually diseased and, ideally, the action hero personifies each new generation's cure.
In horror, the hero takes a backseat to the villain. If a hero represents a perceived solution, does it follow that the villain represents a perceived problem? To the anecdotal evidence, Batman! Some of the earliest celluloid villains come from German Expressionism. In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film, author and film critic Siegfried Kracauer argues Germans in the early 20th century suffered from “a fear of chaos and a desire for order, even at the price of authoritarian rule.”* His theory corroborates with M (Lang, 1931) and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Wiene, 1920).
Mary Shelley’s 19th century canonical novel, Frankenstein, is viewed by many as a cautionary tale of science and industry meddling recklessly in realms forbidden to man. The 1931 silent Universal film adaption (dir. James Whale) is markedly different. In the film, Frankenstein’s monster is humanized—his creator regards him as a man (he’s even given a name), though not an intelligent one. In Shelley’s novel, the monster self-educates himself with literature and eventually learns to speak—in the film, Boris Karloff is a mute and a simpleton. The contrast between the two sources is distinct: Shelley’s monster is a victim; Universal’s monster is a villain.
What then, does this cinematic monster represent? If German Expressionism warned us to fear the demons inside of us, Frankenstein (and The Mummy, Dracula, etc.) cautioned us against an external monsters coming to a neighborhoods near you. Universal’s "Golden Age of horror” catalog was really a cornucopia of xenophobic horror pictures. These villains were foreigners, they were sexually ambiguous, and they were Godless. Imagine all the uptight white men of that era who feared the influx of immigrants and the subsequent consequences (i.e. miscegenation). Here comes Count Dracula, an Eastern European heretic who is hell-bent on sneaking into your daughter’s room tonight to literally tarnish your bloodline.
Marco Lanzagorta of PopMatters.com explains, “Horror is about transgressing boundaries and norms. If you think about it, monsters are creatures that challenge biological, physical, social, and even moral rules. And truth be told, it is such an attitude of contravening rules that ultimately makes them dangerous to our world…” His statement is insightful, but perhaps less relevant to the genre as it exists today. If your goal is to frighten the conservative vanguard, then yes, you would certainly do well to challenge their various social and moral cornerstones. Change is inevitable and it can be fucking terrifying, but consider moviegoers in the 1960s and 1970s. The audience became increasingly younger. Do anyone honestly believe teenagers of that era were deeply threatened by boundary transgression or the violation of social conventions? Between the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations (of Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and Malcolm X), and the Watergate scandals, any vague threats of “change” or “progress” that remained had unsurprisingly lost their zest. Young men and women simply were not scared by a potential cultural paradigm shift because the shift had already occurred. Change was omnipresent, and the anachronistic scarecrows of the previous decades failed to frighten any longer.
So if communist body snatchers and Hungarian immigrants were no longer menacing, what was?
In the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg found unfathomable success with Jaws, his horror epic about a big fish that terrorizes a small town. Jaws. Consider the villain: a ferocious great white shark with an insatiable taste for human blood. The monster was absolutely terrifying, but could it challenge the biological, physical, social, or moral rules of its society? Not really.
Now consider the iconic opening scene of the film. A dozen long-haired teens sit around a bonfire at a late night beach party. They dance, drink, smoke dope, and appear to preparing for love and not war. Chrissie and Tom, who have just met, leave the party in search of a more private venue. Chrissie strips as she runs down the beach. Tom follows in hot pursuit and drunkenly speaks the film’s first line of dialogue:
“What’s your name again?”
Chrissie giggles, then dives—naked—into the dark blue water. Tom passes out while undressing on the beach. Seconds later, John Williams' infamous Pavlovian death-score is cued up, informing Jaws breakfast has been served. What, then, do we know about the first victim? Chrissie is young, she is blonde, she is attractive, she is part of the counter-culture, she uses drugs, she drinks alcohol, and she is sexual (if not promiscuous). Oh, and she is shark bait. When juxtaposed, there’s a complete reversal of roles. The victims are mostly benign, but they've challenging the societal norms. The villain, conversely, is assigned a new role—Jaws is the sentry! The shark literally swims around Amity Island, patrolling the waters for social deviants.
The 1930s-1950s villains represented unknown culture and institutional change, effectively frightening old audiences unsure of how to adapt in a modern world. The 1970s (and 1980s) villains were invariably shaped by the modern world itself—they existed because of the deviation in social norms. When newspapers reported declining church membership, people were especially terrified when watching The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973) or The Omen (Donner, 1976). Poltergeist (Spielberg, 1982) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1974) warned, in vastly different ways, against the potential pitfalls of rapid suburbanization. Carrie (De Palma, 1976) and Halloween (Carpenter, 1978), depending on your vantage point, were either horrific essays on the long-term and societal effects of child abuse or paranoid exaggerations of thalidomide birth defects.
The delineation was clear. Villains from the Golden Age of horror were mostly unsympathetic and always indiscriminate; villains of the ‘70s and early-‘80s were products of their respective environments. They were partially tragic creatures charged with bringing their wildly liberal youth movement back toward the center.
After approximately 497 million combined Friday the 13th/Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, producers shied away from big budget horror films through most of the 1990s. Several high grossing exceptions are The Silence of the Lambs (Demme, 1991) and Seven (Fincher, 1995), which are both grotesquely wonderful, but should probably be considered “thrillers”; the underrated Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola, 1992); stylistically provoking but canonically irrelevant The Blair Witch Project (Myrick & Sanchez, 1999); Universal’s family-style remake of The Mummy (Sommers, 1999); and the poetically intriguing Interview With A Vampire (Jordan, 1994). None of those films revolutionized the genre, though it’s worth noting all the vampires featured in Interview and Dracula are flamboyantly tragic figures.
Two films from then significantly affected the genre, The Sixth Sense (Shyamalan, 1999) and Scream (Craven, 1996). The Sixth Sense didn’t really have a villain, but it did pave the way for a new Hollywood sub-genre aptly titled "crappy M. Night Shyamalan films." Scream is perhaps the most interesting horror film of the '90s, in that it is sufficiently self aware. Its characters have seen more horror films than you; not only do they know the genre’s conventions, they'll iterate them to you didactically whenever convenient. The victims are killed off in an order we expect from a typical ‘70s slasher film (sexually deviant characters are killed first, drug users are stabbed next, etc.), but the film gives its audience reasons more satisfying than “God always smites the unrighteous.” The film's villains are actually unveiled to be students of the horror genre. They intentionally kill their victims according to the principles established in '70s horror; their well-machinated effort is equal parts social commentary and self-amusement. Wes Craven’s film is triumphant because it functions on two levels: a post-modern deconstruction of the genre, and a genuinely scary festival of death.
In the first half of this decade, American theaters were clogged with shot-by-shot remakes of Japanese and Korean horror. Since those films are essentially exact replicas of their foreign predecessors, and since I have zero understanding of the cultures from which they were appropriated, I cannot intelligently discuss their relevance to modern horror.
Over the past several years, a new theme has emerged: the heroes are the villains. Man as his own enemy is not conceptually new, but this isn't a Jekyll and Hyde/duality of man rehashing. Human perpetrated environmental fallout is the new cinematic rage. The appeal is obvious—an angry Mother Nature is a terrific catalyst of action, capable of causing many explosions. The story is poetic—in the end, we only hurt ourselves (and maybe kittens and puppies too). The ending is appropriately ambiguous—has man been salvaged? Will he survive for a sequel?
I’m not sure who to blame for the ensuing eco-horror trend (Al Gore, maybe?), but we inevitably must look at the recent resurgence in disaster films. The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, 2004) was a below average faux-apocalypse movie, memorable only because mankind was threatened—not because God was hurtling inter-galactic meteors at France or Zeus was downing trans-continental passenger jets with bolts of uber-lightning—but because our own species was irrevocably damaging its ecosystem. Mother Nature wasn’t angry, she was entering menopause.
The movie garnered lukewarm reviews, but the theme spread, and was eventually co-opted by the horror genre (including two "films" from earlier this year). In The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest pitiable effort, flora has declared war on fauna. In The Day After Tomorrow, men were slowly and indirectly driving themselves toward extinction; in The Happening, angry trees actually conspire against the pesky human opposition! The trees pump chemicals into urban parks and nearby citizens (litterers and recyclers alike) commit suicide en masse. I started to fall asleep in the last act, but I'm pretty sure the humans surrendered formally at Appomattox Courthouse (after promising the Plant King to reduce carbon emissions by 18% before 2020).
Most film historians remember the "carnivorous plant" subgenre peaking with The Day of the Triffids (Sekely, 1962). DreamWorks SKG, hoping to revitalize the elusive Little Shop of Horrors (Corman, 1960) demographic, released The Ruins (dir. Carter Smith) earlier this year. Unlike the vindictive trees in The Happening, the evil vines from The Ruins probably won't be voting for Ralph Nader. Their agenda really doesn't extend much further than devouring human flesh and giggling like school girls.
Where, then, do we go from here? Will horror filmmakers ever become innovative with these leafy-green villains? Is there a live action Bushroot film in the works? Are we five years away from another Wes Craven satire where a talking fungus (voiced by Matthew Lillard) explains to his furry forest friends that the next pretty young redwood to get chopped down will be the one who promises to “be right back” or engages in premarital sex with a lumberjack? Sorry folks, I don't have the answers. Horror films are more ridiculous than ever, but so is the world surrounding them. Perhaps our environment is indeed this generation’s super villain, but that only begs the next question—who will become our new heroes?
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FOOTNOTES:
*From Caligari to Hitler - I've never actually read this book... but I bet it's awesome anyway. So click on the link, purchase a copy, and let me know how it goes.
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