Old Horrors and New Monsters

I've seen a lot of horror movies, which is partly of the consequence of growing up in the '80s when Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers were loosed upon the world, and partly a strange fascination with the form.

But looking back at the horror icons of my youth, they seem rather quaint now, almost sweet even, from the perspective of the current crop of monsters. I do not wish to see young nubiles sewn together to form one enormous gastrointestinal tract in The Human Centipede, nor endless torture sequences poking me in the eye in Saw 3D. The rules of horror, once iron clad, have largely been junked like old VCRs, relics of times past.

The decline of horror films has been bemoaned by purists, who cite the endless regurgitation of old ideas onto young pretty flesh as evidence that the genre is exhausted. The old auteurs are toothless lions. Carpenter, Romero, et al totter along making films that are pale limp versions of the films that cemented their reputations, while other masters of the form like David Cronenberg or Sam Raimi have made their way into more rarified air and bigger budgets.

This being Halloween weekend, you can judge for yourself, as both old and new films are thick on the ground. The Rio Theatre is playing a double bill of the classics, John Carpenter's Halloween and William Friedkin's The Exorcist. There is even a burlesque stage show before the films roll. Personally, I find burlesque the most terrifying thing of all time, so the evening bodes well. At the Vancity Theatre, they are also unwrapping some extremely old monsters with Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein on Sunday afternoon. There is even a horror documentary called Cropsey about a real-life monster on New York's Staten Island. Meanwhile new horror in the form of Paranormal Activity 2 and Saw 3D are making a mess in theatres.

Telling bloody lullabies

But are the hoary monsters of old still scary? If you're 9 years old they are. After admitting that I had seen perhaps more then my fair share of horror films, my son Louis asked me to recount the plot of every scary movie I could remember. How did Freddy kill people in their dreams? Who was Leatherface? What does being possessed mean? What happened at Camp Crystal Lake?

What's a mother to do?

Dear reader, I scared the crap out of that child.

My beloved grandmother did the same thing to me when I was about the same age as Lou. But her tales of demonic possession, ghostly visitations and mysterious entities were all the more terrifying because she swore on a stack of bibles that they were, in fact, true. The ancient green farmhouse where my grandparents lived was built by a French Canadian farmer named Pierre Longueval, who was either mysteriously drowned or murdered by his girlfriend for a cache of gold coins that he's supposedly buried somewhere on the property. Either way, he was dead as a doornail. But despite his state of decease, Pete's ghost was a lively presence, regularly slamming through the farmhouse, banging and crashing. Other than being a noisy nuisance, there wasn't much to fear from him. The really scary story involved "a thing" that took up residence in the upstairs bedroom, and proceeded to wreak havoc on the house, throwing furniture and bouncing my grandmother up and down in her bed like a rag doll, "wanting to get inside," as she said.

These stories pushed me into a strange new territory of fear, a state of passivity beyond regular terror where you are resigned to your fate and simply want to get it over with. When you're young, fear cuts as deep as Freddy's razored fingers. Like a brand upon the brain, it imbeds itself, becoming part of your subconscious mind. Is this why, even decades later, that scary movies still have such compelling power for me?

It is somehow reassuring that the things that scared me as a child, still work. The random creaks and groans, and tapping on the wall that signaled the initial presence of Pazuzu in The Exorcist are present in the Paranormal Activity 1 and 2. The heavy thump of footsteps on the stairs announcing that something wicked this way comes. I lay awake many nights trying to distinguish between the ordinary noises of the farmhouse settling, and something that did not belong in this homely and domestic realm.

The combination of fear and fascination is powerful stuff, and oddly enough, you may find yourself drawn to relive it in cinematic fashion. Even a hint of the familiar orchestral loops of Mike Oldfield or George Crumb's violin shrieks that accompanied The Exorcist, and I crawl behind the couch and stay there until the sun comes up. But I still keep watching. So too, Night of the Living Dead. The first time I saw this film, it was the middle of the day, but still I kept having to turn it off, recover for a moment, and then gingerly hit the play button once more. All the running zombies in the world cannot hold a candle to the slow-shuffling horror that is Romero's original. The thing that these films captured best was the entrance of the uncanny into the plain old ordinary world. It is this quality that is fundamentally unsettling, whether it's Regan's little-girl nightgown spotted with demonic barf or dirty desperation of ordinary people trying to not be eaten alive.

In a state of supreme terror, all pretence, all civilized behaviour falls away, and you are left with your most naked and true self, alone in the darkness. Which is perhaps the most frightening thing of all because it is the most true. But whether the face of fear has actually changed is subject of some debate.

The monster is dead! Long live the monster!

Vampires or werewolves have turned into teen models. Zombies have become something of a social outing, with zombie walks around the globe drawing thousands of annoying hipsters. Even good old-fashioned demonic possession is not what it once was since the majority of the population no longer has much faith in the fire and brimstone of the Old Testament.

The figure of the vampire is a particularly curious example of the shifting role of monsters. In the current issue of Harpers Magazine, Téa Obreht's essay Twilight of the Vampires examines the differences between the old fashioned vampir and the new modern edition. The changes are legion (used in the Satanic sense if the word). The article ends with a statement about the clash of old and new ideology within the body of the undead. Writes Obreht: "The Americanized vampire is the ultimate fantasy of a nation in decline: the person who has been able to take it all with him when he dies, who has outlived the vagaries of civilization itself. Having abandoned the culture that forged him, moreover he deceives us into thinking that he has moved beyond what he has always been -- a disease. Now the plague he spreads is a therapeutic fantasy in which the embarrassment of wealth and youth and hedonism is acceptable as long as its beneficiary is equipped with the right intentions."

Thus we have met the vampire and he is us... Or perhaps we are he?

The place where true terror seems to live is right in your own house. The film phenomena that is Paranormal Activity, like the Blair Witch before it, succeeds on the basis that the convergence of reality with unreality is where fear breeds. The idea that the people we sleep next to every night, and trust with our vulnerable selves, could, in fact, be other than what they appear is fundamentally terrifying. This is where the real horror lives, in the murky bubbling at the base of your skull, where your most primitive self lurks. So, too, the reality that we understand, and live with every day -- be it killer email, killer cell phones, killer surveillance cameras -- has formed the premise of many a scary film. The use of surveillance and home movie footage as a device to interject the real into fantastic, novel in The Blair Witch Project, now teeters on cliché.

Old fears must be constantly reinvented, rendered anew to keep the blood pumping. It is this process that I find most compelling. Even as old filmmakers stumble and fall, new directors take their place, and reinvent the form. Thus the vampire is rescued from fashion victim and returned to its rightful place as blood-sucking fiend in Jim Mickle's Stakeland. The emergence of French horror films continues to surprise. And, most wonderfully of all, smart filmmakers create entire worlds with little more than imagination and guts.

Perhaps, the reason we traipse regularly into the dim cave of the movie theatre is to visit the darkness at the centre of life, the void where we will all end up eventually. It's waiting for us to come and take up residence there forever.