Now that you’ve been sufficiently scared all week, it’s time to party. Rarely has there been a better celebration of the spirit of Halloween than the magnificently unsettling “Night on Bald Mountain” segment from Walt Disney’s 1940 labor of love, Fantasia. Putting aside obvious narratives of how this terrified many a tot (coming after nearly two hours of plotless, dialogue-free, near abstract animated sequences, this piece de résistance sent kids over the edge, often from boredom into manic freak-out mode), this perfectly petrifying short film, based on Modest Mussorgsky’s 1860 composition, is simply the most effective hand-drawn spookshow of all time.
As with so many cinematic experiences in my misspent youth, Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (aka Conqueror Worm) was well-prepared for by copious before-the-fact study (thank you, Danny Peary); the film itself eventually functioned as confirmation of what had been read beforehand—thus no dark and unexpected encounter with primal fears here, I’m afraid. Yet that quality of remove almost seems appropriate for the quite astonishingly jaundiced eye which Reeves casts upon his horrors. Witchfinder General exists apart from the genre imperatives of shock, suspense, disgust, or prurience; rather, its ferocity and sometimes unbearable intensity is in the service of a vision of the world so willfully and unrepentantly corrupt that not even despair can penetrate.
Looking back through Reverse Shot’s “Great Pumpkins” series, I was especially struck by those pieces that dealt with horror films experienced via television viewing. “How,” wondered robbiefreeling, in his appreciation of Salem’s Lot, “could something so emotionally disruptive come packaged with something so mundane as toothpaste and car ads?”
Reading that essay a year ago prompted me to scour the Internet for evidence of a television film I’d watched sometime in my tweenage years and thought back on many times since. Circa 1993/94, I was mainlining horror flicks at a rate of about five per week (mostly procured from the family-run video store around the corner from my parents’ house, whose owners had little compunction about renting R-rated titles to polite kids with exact change), but my cinephilia was still subordinate to my hockey fandom. And so those Saturday nights spent at home or babysitting for family friends followed a set pattern: hockey game first, movies later.
One evening, after watching the Maple Leafs lose to somebody or other, cruising past the local Latino channel, I stopped on what seemed to be a diverting image: a red, glass paneled booth containing a man, stowed on the back of a truck, stopped on the side of a rural highway, being stared at by a troupe of face-painted circus folk. I’d seen a few interesting “art” films on TLN in the past, so I stuck with it, wondering if I had fortuitously stumbled upon on some essential world-cinema thing.
I watched the presentation to the end, which came just 15 minutes (and two commercial breaks) later. What bothered me at the time was not the revelation of the truck’s ultimate destination, but the lack of attendant context. What had I missed? Who was the guy in the booth? Had I seen the ending of a feature film or an episode of a television series? I remember trying to mentally construct a first act for a story that ended with an ordinary-looking fellow being literally driven to the end of his existence, and thoroughly creeping myself out in the process.
Brother and sister Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) while on vacation in Cornwall, decide to purchase a large cliffside house. The place is lovely, eminently classy and full of light. Better yet, its owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp) is willing to part with the place for a song. All seems fine, great even. Except for one room on the second floor. It’s oddly cold in there, even when the sun’s shining in. It gets more frigid, perhaps even…menacing, when local girl Stella Meredith (a luminous Gail Russell) stops by for a little flirtation. An old village hag lurks around glaring ominously, and it’s clear Commander Beech knows more about the house than he’s letting on. It isn’t long before even stranger things start happening…
No surprises here: Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity, currently terrorizing people across North America, is genuinely scary. It’s also clunky, half-realized, and frustratingly compromised—none of which reduce its central, primal experiential heft. As far as inevitable comparisons are concerned, Paranormal Activity is no Blair Witch Project, as it misses out on that inadvertent masterpiece’s allegorical elegance (the film was downright Hawthornian in its portrait of mythical Americana seeking vengeance against interlopers) and technical coherence, not to mention its unwillingness to give up its ambiguities right to the final devastating image. One leaves Blair Witch with more questions than answers; Paranormal Activity has a more predictable shape, even if that shape also plays into elemental fears of nighttime. Day Night Day Night might have made for a more appropriate title in some ways: the former providing catharsis and relief, the latter bringing on irrationality and doubt—emotions mimicked in the experiences of the viewers. For all its damning quiet and general lack of razzle dazzle, Paranormal Activity lives or dies on the level of audience interaction; it plays off that immensely satisfying suck-in-your-breath-and-wait-and-exhale emotion that few artistic mediums can induce.
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