Oh, the Horror!

I have a sickly repulsion/attraction to horror movies. I'm a terrible coward so they scare the crap out of me, but of the many, many movies out there horror films seem to live longer and deeper, way down in the murky muck of my unconscious mind.

Unfortunately, too many filmmakers seem to think it's easy to make a scary movie. Toss in an ax-wielding maniac, a few dead bodies, and a great many screaming women and hey, presto! You got a horror film.

But when environmental catastrophe looms from every newspaper and television screen, scary movies are stretched to compete with the real world. In fact, environmental horror films have re-emerged, not having been seen since the mid-50s when giant ants attacked in THEM! and Godzilla, awakened from his seabed slumbers by an atomic bomb, took out his aggro on Tokyo.

Witness Larry Fessenden's film The Last Winter and its predecessor Wendigo. The Last Winter has seen limited release in the U.S., and played at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but it hasn't made it to Vancouver yet. Fessenden is an interesting guy, a thinking man's (or woman's) horror director as a recent interview in Cinemascope Magazine reveals. The real issues behind Fessenden's films are readily apparent, but the films themselves are still frightening in a deep and haunting fashion.

Wendigo is good example. It's a small film, full of revealing moments about human nature and a giant killer deer spirit that packs a surprising punch. But of course, if you want to be really frightened then simply buy a copy of the documentary Everything's Cool. In terms of dealing with the incipient natural disasters unleashed by planetary breakdown, it is hard to rival the bunch of recent environmental documentaries that range from The Planet, the VIFF's inaugural Kyoto Planet Climate for Change Award winner, to Al Gore's ever-increasing giant head.

Dying to feel something

It's fitting perhaps that Brian De Palma, Joe Dante, and other American directors who started out as schlock-meisters and gore hounds, have found their political sea legs. There are many fine political horror films around from Romero's Land of the Dead to Abel Ferrara's version of Invasion of The Body Snatchers (don't bother with the tepid atrocity The Invasion, peopled by the body-snatched Nicole Kidman, who looks barely human anyway).

And yet, really, how can you compete with George W. Bush and his sheer banality of evil? When real horror is everywhere, is it even right to seek it out in film as a form of simple silly entertainment? Especially in the case where real events are transmuted into film for the delectation of audiences? Consider Wolf Creek, Karla among others. The genuine atrocity of something like the Robert Pickton case makes the idea of a film version of the story seem more than exploitation, but morally wrong.

Here's what really scares me. The death of empathy. When you're inundated with real horror all the time, it's difficult to feel much of anything after a while. Thus the Saw series that celebrates torture must continually push boundaries to have some type of impact. Nowhere is this trend more repellant than in Eli Roth's Hostel series. Roth's grotesque vapidity, outsized sense of entitlement and bludgeoning lack of compassion make me feel depressed about the future of humanity. While the debate, such as it is, over torture porn movies continues, it is difficult to make the case that such films represent the need for free speech and artistic intent, since there is very little art at issue. It's simple commerce -- blunt, dumb and enormously successful. Blood and circuses, anyone?

'Celluloid Horror'

That said, perhaps a distinction ought to be made between films that act like a version of a roller coaster -- a quick, fast ride, with a few scary moments -- and films that sear themselves on the inside of your eyeballs and refuse to budge.

A lot of those kinds of films were played at the CineMuerte Film Festival in Vancouver. Although CineMuerte is now deceased, if you'd like to revisit Vancouver's premiere horror film festival, and witness the hellish price to be paid for organizing such an event, get yourself a copy of Ashley Fester's documentary Celluloid Horror, coming soon to DVD. In addition to being an excellent documentary, Celluloid Horror has the added benefit of acting as something of a survey course on some of the most disturbing films ever made including Nikos Nikolaidis's Singapore Sling, Jean Rollin's Le Frisson des Vampires, Jorg Buttgereit's Nekromantik, Jeff Lieberman's Squirm and Andrzej Zulawski's Possession.

As the founder/programmer/organizer of CineMuerte Kier-La Janisse says, quite rightly, "The problem is that people don't really want to be horrified when they go to a horror movie, they want this five second jump, like 'Oh! The cat came out of the closet and scared me.'"

Deeper issues like the dissolution of a marriage examined in Possession are almost too terrible for contemplation, much less entertainment. After showing Possession at CineMuerte's first year, the reaction was so grim Kier-La said she was certain she'd lost her entire audience. She recounts how the audience filed out of the screening in dead silence. "One guy actually when he left Possession did say something. He was angry with me, he was angry that I showed the movie, he was angry at the movie, he was completely angry."

Celluloid Horror is as much about the personal costs incurred by the CineMuerte's founder who battled censors, a lack of funding, and the perverse demands of festival guests and patrons. After running for six years, the festival died an unquiet death.

Luckily, Kier-La is back. Now she is the brains and the drive behind Bloodshots Canada 2007, the 48-Hour Horror Filmmaking Challenge. The challenge offers a platform for films, made over two days with the help of a lot of blood and guts and coffee, that exhibit ingenuity as much as they strain the boundaries of taste. Last year's Canadian winner can be seen here. Many of the previous Bloodshot films can also be seen on YouTube.

Related Tyee stories:

• How Horror Sparks Our Brains
  'Mirror neurons' drive the biology of empathy.
• You Go Ghoul!
  Inside Vancouver's booming indy horror film industry.
• When Horror Flicks Rebel
  'The Host' screams with politics, family and the monster within.