Today I speak to you of horror.
Apr. 26th, 2006 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
darkelf105I went and saw Silent Hill on Sunday. I am about to critique the state of horror in America, because well, I have been immersed in enough of it lately. Silent Hill the movie was pretty good. It was visceral, eerie and unsettling, but then the last twenty minutes came and the main character sits down and talks with "the demon" of Silent Hill, and what proceeds is a type of psychic power point in which the demon chats very nicely with mom and they decide to take down the cruel, fanatical cult leader and all of the dead souls of Silent Hill. Now, the back story and the explanation, although gruesome and horrible (who burns a child alive?), jar one completely out of the horrifying experience that is the quintessential Silent Hill game.
The games work on a psychic level by isolating the main character, and hence the player and forcing them to wander a terrible, barren wasteland of strange and awful sights. The games shift between the worlds of the living, mall going public and the private, hell-ridden darknesses within each of us. Granted, these are video games, so while they scare the hell out of me, they still do not terrify the way a novel or really well done movie can, because of the interface used. You, the main character, are in essence and reality, a computer character. End of story. Horror, at least the really good horror, relies on empathy with the characters experiencing the horror, to cause terror. That is why little kids and thirteen and fourteen-years-olds don't appear to be affected by certain kinds of horror.
Stories that require one to be empathetic with the main character are hard for those who are not mature to understand. But alone in the dark, away from our friends, many times the horror we did not feel in the theater or friend's living room, comes back to creep with icy fingers along our guts. We do feel, but it is the isolation that makes this happen.
To be truly scared, sick, or horrorified, we must not just be able to worry that what happens to the main character can happen to us, but we must care and be upset that the awful sequence of events that is happening to the character right now, are horrible. We must care about what is happening to the character. We must be terrified and outraged for them, or else the horror is hollow, and when it works on us, it works on a shallow, insufficient level, only when we are alone in the dark.
Truly great horror, gives us situations in which not only do we not wish for what is happening to the characters never to happen to us, but we whisper and pray and scream with the characters because we care. That is why American cinema, horror, in particular is in such a sad state. The movie companies seem incapable of creating broad, meaningful characters. They make them one-dimensional. When I see a horror movie, half the time I do not even know the characters' names. I identify them by one trait, like the chick, the black dude, the funny guy, the asshole. There is not enough dimension in those characters to let me remember their names, let alone care what happens to them. Only in the darkness, when nocturnal vision turns on nightmare dreams do I remember the monster, the blood, the screams. Real horror does not wait. It is with you at the grocery store, the library, school, always lurking just below you conscience thoughts to snag you and make your heart beat faster and your stomach lurch. Unfortunately, not since Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the novel, not the movie), have I been that terrified.
But it is not just characters that pull off truly great horror. Setting is just as important. The Japanese understand that. It is why Silent Hill is so successful. They take the everyday and show you the darkness that lurks underneath it. And creators only hint at an explanation, which makes what is happening all the more real. Cube worked like that. There weren't too many characters I empathized with, but what happened was so cruel, so random, so meaningless, it worked on me for a long, long time. But then again, I care about what happens to strangers. Newspaper articles about genocide, murder, and even children's pets being killed, still make me cry. Many people are so numb; they can't care, and thus cannot be horrified. That's why many of us hear from the young--that wasn't scary, because they lack the imagination and the maturity to be scared.
Novels, unlike movies, have a longer time to work on us. We spend more psychic energy on them. Their settings, characters, and monsters seep into our blood and bones if they are well written, but too often the writer jumps the gun, ruins the visceral horror, and jars us from the terror of his or her story. The novel starts to read like a movie script, and those of us who want to wrench our guts, who want to scream and weep and gasp, are angered. We quit and once again are not satisfied.
That was the problem with Silent Hill the movie. The characters, thought, likable, weren't memorable, and Alessa, the main boogie man, had no depth or bite. It was bad she was burned, but you didn't feel her outrage, her anger, her hate, her evil. And that was because you as an audience member didn't have enough to care. So, instead of having the horror of the film center around Alessa, a little girl you could only care about because she was a little girl, a stereo-type, a two-word character, on a superficial level, the story should have centered more around the random violence and cruelty of Silent Hill. There should have been more wandering, more gruesome tableaus, more of Pyramid Head's vicious, unrelenting cruelty. Then movie goers would have understood the ending, would have understood that Rose had entered the darkness and allowed it to enter her. She had made a deal with the devil so to speak, and that was why the mist did not go away. She lives in darkness now.
True horror makes you live and breathe it. It transforms you, opening a little kernel or the dark inside you. It transforms you; it lives and squirms within you like something alive. Unfortunately most movie writers and novelists forget that and settle for cheap cruelty, wanton viciousness, and too much story. Does genocide need a reason to exist? Not really, it is mindless and stupid. It comes from humanity's infinite penchant for cruelty, from the human urge to crush and control, from human unreason. Terror, real terror, comes from that same desolate, horrible, completely human place. To conquer real terror as with genocide, we must not just vow to conquer it, we have to acknowledge it as part of us, and then utterly and completely ignore it and move on, become more fully human. We must recognize the darkness and then walk away from the void.
When American novelists and screen writers realize that, they will be able to stop giving us cheap, two-bit terrors, and monsters that only come out on lonely nights when we would have struggled with our demons anyway, and give us real terror, the kind of terror that transforms, not just twists our souls, and makes us stronger.
There I've had my bit.
The games work on a psychic level by isolating the main character, and hence the player and forcing them to wander a terrible, barren wasteland of strange and awful sights. The games shift between the worlds of the living, mall going public and the private, hell-ridden darknesses within each of us. Granted, these are video games, so while they scare the hell out of me, they still do not terrify the way a novel or really well done movie can, because of the interface used. You, the main character, are in essence and reality, a computer character. End of story. Horror, at least the really good horror, relies on empathy with the characters experiencing the horror, to cause terror. That is why little kids and thirteen and fourteen-years-olds don't appear to be affected by certain kinds of horror.
Stories that require one to be empathetic with the main character are hard for those who are not mature to understand. But alone in the dark, away from our friends, many times the horror we did not feel in the theater or friend's living room, comes back to creep with icy fingers along our guts. We do feel, but it is the isolation that makes this happen.
To be truly scared, sick, or horrorified, we must not just be able to worry that what happens to the main character can happen to us, but we must care and be upset that the awful sequence of events that is happening to the character right now, are horrible. We must care about what is happening to the character. We must be terrified and outraged for them, or else the horror is hollow, and when it works on us, it works on a shallow, insufficient level, only when we are alone in the dark.
Truly great horror, gives us situations in which not only do we not wish for what is happening to the characters never to happen to us, but we whisper and pray and scream with the characters because we care. That is why American cinema, horror, in particular is in such a sad state. The movie companies seem incapable of creating broad, meaningful characters. They make them one-dimensional. When I see a horror movie, half the time I do not even know the characters' names. I identify them by one trait, like the chick, the black dude, the funny guy, the asshole. There is not enough dimension in those characters to let me remember their names, let alone care what happens to them. Only in the darkness, when nocturnal vision turns on nightmare dreams do I remember the monster, the blood, the screams. Real horror does not wait. It is with you at the grocery store, the library, school, always lurking just below you conscience thoughts to snag you and make your heart beat faster and your stomach lurch. Unfortunately, not since Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the novel, not the movie), have I been that terrified.
But it is not just characters that pull off truly great horror. Setting is just as important. The Japanese understand that. It is why Silent Hill is so successful. They take the everyday and show you the darkness that lurks underneath it. And creators only hint at an explanation, which makes what is happening all the more real. Cube worked like that. There weren't too many characters I empathized with, but what happened was so cruel, so random, so meaningless, it worked on me for a long, long time. But then again, I care about what happens to strangers. Newspaper articles about genocide, murder, and even children's pets being killed, still make me cry. Many people are so numb; they can't care, and thus cannot be horrified. That's why many of us hear from the young--that wasn't scary, because they lack the imagination and the maturity to be scared.
Novels, unlike movies, have a longer time to work on us. We spend more psychic energy on them. Their settings, characters, and monsters seep into our blood and bones if they are well written, but too often the writer jumps the gun, ruins the visceral horror, and jars us from the terror of his or her story. The novel starts to read like a movie script, and those of us who want to wrench our guts, who want to scream and weep and gasp, are angered. We quit and once again are not satisfied.
That was the problem with Silent Hill the movie. The characters, thought, likable, weren't memorable, and Alessa, the main boogie man, had no depth or bite. It was bad she was burned, but you didn't feel her outrage, her anger, her hate, her evil. And that was because you as an audience member didn't have enough to care. So, instead of having the horror of the film center around Alessa, a little girl you could only care about because she was a little girl, a stereo-type, a two-word character, on a superficial level, the story should have centered more around the random violence and cruelty of Silent Hill. There should have been more wandering, more gruesome tableaus, more of Pyramid Head's vicious, unrelenting cruelty. Then movie goers would have understood the ending, would have understood that Rose had entered the darkness and allowed it to enter her. She had made a deal with the devil so to speak, and that was why the mist did not go away. She lives in darkness now.
True horror makes you live and breathe it. It transforms you, opening a little kernel or the dark inside you. It transforms you; it lives and squirms within you like something alive. Unfortunately most movie writers and novelists forget that and settle for cheap cruelty, wanton viciousness, and too much story. Does genocide need a reason to exist? Not really, it is mindless and stupid. It comes from humanity's infinite penchant for cruelty, from the human urge to crush and control, from human unreason. Terror, real terror, comes from that same desolate, horrible, completely human place. To conquer real terror as with genocide, we must not just vow to conquer it, we have to acknowledge it as part of us, and then utterly and completely ignore it and move on, become more fully human. We must recognize the darkness and then walk away from the void.
When American novelists and screen writers realize that, they will be able to stop giving us cheap, two-bit terrors, and monsters that only come out on lonely nights when we would have struggled with our demons anyway, and give us real terror, the kind of terror that transforms, not just twists our souls, and makes us stronger.
There I've had my bit.
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no subject
on 2006-04-26 07:15 pm (UTC)Indeee, tis long
on 2006-04-26 10:33 pm (UTC)Re: Indeee, tis long
on 2006-04-26 11:19 pm (UTC)OT-
I thought of an awesome picture (not D&D) to try and draw. So watch for it. But if I can't draw it I'll tell you later.
Re: Indeee, tis long
on 2006-04-26 11:19 pm (UTC)Ah, Katie
on 2006-04-26 10:33 pm (UTC)-adds Katie to Friends section-
Have the loveliest of days and the good-est of lucks!
Daniel.
Re: Ah, Katie
on 2006-04-26 10:41 pm (UTC)rock lobster! tee hee hee!
on 2006-05-01 10:28 pm (UTC)-Walter Sullivan
Re: rock lobster! tee hee hee!
on 2006-05-02 03:49 pm (UTC)