Hungry Ghosts Feast on Existential Dread and Contemporary Fear

There are many different kinds of horror films.

There is the campy set — films like Scream, The Cabin in the Woods, and Nightmare on Elm Street. There is the torture porn genre, like Saw I-VI, The Purge series and Hostel. An entire subset of found footage films kicked off with the Blair Witch Project and staggered through six different iterations of Paranormal Activity. And, then there are the classics, The Exorcist, Carrie, Halloween, etc. A great many of these are playing in Vancouver this pre-Halloween weekend.

Finally, there are certain films that don’t seem particularly frightening, but somehow manage to wiggle under your skin, and remain there, battening on your flesh and growing ever more disturbing with time. Three such films including David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls and Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf are playing at the Cinematheque in a special series devoted this darkest time of the year.

It is a curious program, but kudos to the Cinematheque for conjoining this unholy trio, out of which emerges a kind of meta-narrative that is far more disturbing than any single film could be. Watching all three is a distinctly unsettling experience, and not simply for the atmosphere of dread, fear and mushrooming rottenness, like black mould of the soul, or, more correctly, of the mind, that suffuses the action. But also, most creepily, with the way that each film seems to leach into the larger world that is filled with its own monsters at the moment.

Of the three, Carnival of Souls (1962) is the weirdest, perhaps because it is the most innocent, and, for lack of a better word, unintentional, in its depiction of the horror of alienation and loneliness.

The story staggers to abrupt life when a group of thugs challenge another car filled with three young women to a race. Things don’t end well. The women’s car plunges off a bridge and disappears into the river below. As the townsfolk drag the dark water, searching for the lost vehicle, a young woman emerges from the river, bedraggled, and mud-streaked, but seemingly OK. Meet Mary Henry. If she was a difficult person before the accident, things have gotten exponentially worse after her extended immersion. Determined to go on with her life, Miss Mary leaves town, headed for Utah, of all places, to take a job as a church organist. Like Lost Highway, things go bump in the night on long dark stretches of road, when blackness hovers thick and fast at the edges of a car’s headlights, and the Morse code blips of broken white lines, appear like some form of SOS.

In the middle of an extended nighttime drive, Mary suffers a visitation of sorts, when a pale figure pops up in the middle of her windshield and sends her careening off the highway. Even as she is recovering from the crash, the rotted hulk of a nearby mansion seems to issue some kind of siren’s call. Or maybe it’s just the damn creepy organ music warbling out of her car radio. Either way, some strange shit is going down. The local gas station attendant explains that the building that has so transfixed Mary has been through several incarnations including dance hall, bathhouse and finally a carnival pavilion.

Despite having a couple of near-death experiences under her belt, our heroine makes her way into her new life, she starts her job, finds a place to stay, goes on a couple of dates with her lecherous neighbour, and even has time for a psychiatric session with the town doctor. But all the while, something is growing, a sense of wrongness that reverberates like the whine of tinnitus. This buzzing burr needles into your head, and manifests in moments of profound disconnection when Mary seems to disappear from the real world. Wandering through crowds of people, who brush past her like she isn’t there, she begins a slow slide into madness, punctuated by visions of a spectral dance at the abandoned old carnival pavilion.

Carnival of Souls is rightfully famous, not only for its wooden acting, and insane Wurlitzer organ soundtrack, but also for the fact that it only cost $33,000 to make. The cheap and dirty methods employed by the filmmaker are well in evidence, as is the deadpan Bressonian performance at its centre. But, in spite of its flaws, something persists, some terrible, and, quite profoundly sorrowful quality that wafts out of the narrative, a grey coating of despair and almost existential angst.

It is one of the most efficient, and effective renditions of true spiritual loneliness that I have ever seen. For this alone, it deserves some praise. But the film’s penultimate moment is also a thing of dark and terrible beauty.

The final scene in Carnival of Souls has arguably influenced a swath of other filmmakers, most notably David Lynch, but there are elements of Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining that also seem to have lifted the same quality of eerie unease. As Mary finally severs her ties to reality, and steps inside the abandoned pavilion, a ghoulish dance springs to eternal life. Cut loose from history, and suspended in time, the pale couples twirl amongst rotted party streamers. It is simultaneously lovely, and deeply horrifying, swaying back and forth between these two polarities with exquisite ease. It is little wonder that other, better filmmakers, purloined this quality for their own work.

A similar frisson of two worlds coexisting cheek to cheek, one real (sort of), and one perhaps only a figment, sinuously twines through Lost Highway (1997). Inspired by O.J. Simpson and the murders of Nichole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Lost Highway is not an easy film to wade into again. But the idea that the mind can hide the most horrific realities, even from itself, reaches some kind of apotheosis in Lynch’s work.

The film has been subjected to every possible form of analysis from random fanboys on YouTube to Slavoj Žižek spitting and frothing about the mystery of female desire in Sophie Fiennes’s documentary The Pervert's Guide to Cinema. Despite this over-familiarity with its the tools and methodologies, Lynch’s film retains its impact. Certain scenes still singe the hair out of your nose with their near-sulfurous power. The Mystery Man character, played by Robert Blake, who went on to murder his wife in the real world, becomes a perverse echo of the film’s original inspiration. Reality and fiction melt together, until they resemble a polymorphous mass of image, story, and something stickier and darker that defies easy analysis. It is the deep water where David Lynch likes to go fishing, but occasionally, some leviathan thing takes the bait, and swallows you whole.

This intermingling of fantasy and reality also pervades Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968). Actress Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s partner and star of the film, was pregnant during the film’s making, and like her character also living on a remote island with a tormented man beset by demons. The narrative begins with the sound of the director prepping the production and ends with Ullmann directly addressing the camera. In between these two points, all holy hell breaks loose, including demonic entities, necrophilia and little light child murder. It is not a pleasant experience by any stretch.

Bergman described his work thusly: "I think it's terribly important that art exposes humiliation, that art shows how human beings humiliate each other, because humiliation is one of the most dreadful companions of humanity, and our whole social system is based to an enormous extent on humiliation..."

Humiliation also plays an equally central role in Lynch’s film, according to Mr. Žižek.

Watching all of these films, I found myself thinking of Gabor Mate’s book In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, and the mind’s ability to defend itself from a reality that is too painful to bear.

Maté begins his book with an explanation of the mandala, or the Buddhist wheel of life, that consists of six different realms, then goes on to describe the inhabitants of the Hungry Ghost Realm, folk who bear an uncanny resemblance to the poorest and most disenfranchised communities in Vancouver.

Living in Vancouver at the moment, can test your ability to hold two incontrovertibly opposite narratives in your head, one that says, things are really wrong, and the other that says shop at Uniqlo and Fight for Beauty.

And, here is where real horror rears its ugly head. There is a lot of awful stuff around at the moment. It is almost everywhere you look. The act of going about your daily life, all the while ignoring the schism in your own brain that is screaming that things don’t feel right, occasionally feels unbearable. Like our little lost Mary in Carnival of Souls, wandering the streets, unseen and unheard, suffering a sense of disconnect that feels almost like drowning.

One of the things that horror films can do is pull the masks away, and allow one to go deeper, past the gatekeepers, and into the darker places, where truth lies coiled like a serpent. As Maté rightfully points out in his book, “No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.” And that is where these films lead us, and, occasionally force us to do battle with the monsters below. It is a necessary thing, and critical thing. So, gird up your loins, buy some popcorn and prepare to face your demons at the Cinematheque.

If you would like a respite from all this darkness, and I certainly feel the need of it, then get a ticket to the Spark Animation Festival, and in particular, Big Bad Fox & Other Tales. It is sweet, and funny, and a breath of fresh air. After such a long submergence, that may be precisely what you may need.