During last year’s “Great Pumpkin” series, I extolled the virtues of the face in horror cinema. It’s so simple, really: few things are as terrifying as the makeup of a face, whether forthrightly demonic or human but just a little . . . off. The doubling terror effect of the mask, then, is not only the fearful visage of the false face but also the possibility of the human one hidden underneath. Kaneto Shindo’s breathtaking Onibaba (1964) exploits this tension to masterful effect, building a slow rhythm to an unbearably frightening climax predicated on the terror of one mask—what it shows and what it conceals.
This year, Reverse Shot’s annual end-of-October “Great Pumpkins” series can finally get off on the right hobbled foot. We normally like to begin our Halloween recommendations with something of an assessment of the state-of-the-art of horror filmmaking, and since for the past few years the genre has become decidedly moribund, what should be a demonic celebration ends up something of a eulogy. Sounds funereally appropriate, but it’s been disappointing nevertheless. So we can begin with very good Monday box-office news: The latest installment of Gruesome, Poorly Edited Faux-Morality Tales an Incredibly Cynical Mini-Studio Churns Out for Easy Profit Every October (or if you prefer, Saw VI.....I repeat, VI!!!!) has been roundly spanked and sent to bed by Paranormal Activity. Normally these sorts of weekend money assessments come with bogus pronouncements (if, say, Ice Age 17 beats Duplicity, does it really mean that audiences prefer woolly mammoths to Julia Roberts?), but this one seems pretty clear-cut: Audiences seeking horror chose Paranormal over Saw; they craved fear over gore, mind over matter. Not that the former is without its flaws (and more on that later in the series this week), but it’s encouraging that word-of-mouth prevailed over retarded redundancy. Cross your fingers that any future Saw installments will go straight to DVD.
Is seems that the unofficial theme of this week’s Halloween post has been that of the power of the human face to frighten. Whether painted or real, covered in makeup or simply contorted in expression, the face, the key to identity, that which can reassure but which so often alienates, can be exploited and manipulated to brilliant effect. My most fearfully recollected nightmare from childhood was a simple one: a demon, hollow and intense, staring at me through my bedroom window during a rainstorm, his face only illuminated with each bolt of lightning. The stranger never entered my room, but the terror of being watched, of feeling his intent, was forever etched on me. Many other childhood nightmares (of the huge parent-eating monster in the forest; of the writhing, squealing worm buried under my delicious pancake) have fallen away, but that face, immovable, betraying nothing, remains.
This week, we’ve had a particularly nasty gallery of grotesques. But in addition to those we’ve cited (Mr. Barlow, American werewolves, the Gentlemen, Pumpkinhead), many others linger in the memory, from the terrible monstrous aged picture of Dorian Gray in Albert Lewin’s 1945 version to Donald Sutherland’s final, eye-bulging screech in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. To finish off this week’s parade of ghouls, I turn to a piece of classic short horror predicated almost entirely on one horrific expression, frozen in time.
During a short-lived Mario Bava binge some years back, I rented the Italian horror master’s trilogy Black Sabbath. Knowing that most horror anthologies tend to save the best for last (from Spirits of the Dead‘s Toby Dammit to this year’s Fear(s) of the Dark, which concludes with a deliriously inventive bit of animated haunted house expressionism), I soldiered through the first two segments, one a proto-giallo bore about a phone stalker and the next a creaky but minorly effective beast-in-the-snow melodrama. When I finally got to the third, innocuously entitled “The Drop of Water,” it was very late at night, perhaps after 2 or even 3 a.m. The hypnotic, purely visual film to follow crept around me like tendrils, and its money shot (of a terrible face, revealed early and often) ground me to a pulp.
Based loosely upon Poe’s “The Telltale Heart” but also tapping into that oft-trotted out campfire tale chestnut in which the dead comes back to reclaim a stolen property or even body part (“Give me back my toe!”), Bava’s short concerns a fortune teller who steals an expensive ring off of a client’s fresh corpse. The old woman had died, her eyes wide open, her skeletal face withered, her lips peeled back over her gnarled teeth. Of course she comes back to reclaim her possession, looking much like she did at the moment of death. And Bava uses no dialogue to greet her reappearance, only the titular sound of water.
Gorgeously composed reds and blues highlight Bava’s unsurprisingly expert mise-en-scène, but this is, in a sense, a one-woman-show. I have chosen not to show the unsettling face in question here, as I have in recent postings, because it would be unfair to inure viewers to it before seeing it. I urge anyone to rent Black Sabbath tonight. Even if you’re busy at parades or parties. It’s a quick half-hour, it can be squeezed in before bedtime. One last Halloween hurrah before it’s back to the same-old same-old in the less dangerous November.
Happy Holidays, and see you next year.
*Apologies for the seemingly late posting. This was ready and go and published well before the witching hour on Friday night, but due to blog malfunctioning with our host, it wasn’t showing up. The problems have been solved. Thanks for your patience.
As we close in on the big day, a theme emerges: perhaps this is the year of the Television Great Pumpkin. This is fitting, since the original Peanuts special itself was and will always be a television event. I am also inclined to agree with Robbie that there’s something special about the experience of watching a scary movie or TV show while tucked under a blanket in the darkness of one’s living room, something invasively terrifying. But television tends to get dismissed as a writer’s art—to call something televisual normally means it’s bereft of visual imagination or directorial flourishes. The description is hardly commensurate with what we’ve come to expect of great horror.
It is also fitting, then, that today’s Pumpkin largely dispenses with dialogue. “Hush,” the much-heralded “silent” episode from the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has a deliciously macabre premise: a group of bald, floating fairy-tale demons named the Gentlemen steal all the voices of Sunnydale’s inhabitants and begin collecting seven human hearts with a scalpel, one victim at a time. It’s as though writer-director Joss Whedon, who created the series, tapped directly into one of my own recurring nightmares that invariably culminates with an inexplicable inability to scream in a moment of crisis. Stalked by an otherworldly menace, the Gentlemen’s victims open their mouths and then…nothing comes out. In the whole episode, we see only one victim meet his demise, an adorably wholesome college student tucked away in his flannel pajamas, and it’s both desperate and chilling.
As is typical for Buffy, the horror in “Hush” isn’t simply elemental; it’s also existential and metaphoric. Whedon gives us plenty of visceral frights, as the Gentleman float unexpectedly past a window or emerge from a dorm room with a fresh heart in hand. Between the scares, though, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and her friend Willow (Alyson Hannigan) walk through the streets of Sunnydale surrounded by the town’s inhabitants, who are paralyzed and demoralized by the deadening silence. At the same time, Whedon uses the supernatural to comment upon the emotional lives of his characters. As “Hush” opens, Buffy is at the beginning of a serious romance. Hesitant, she self-sabotages, filling pregnant silences and halting his near-kisses with words. The meaning is clear: sometimes talking gets in the way of communication and connection, but if you stop talking and start feeling, you risk getting your heart, well, ripped out. All of Buffy’s principals find themselves in nascent romances that get pushed along by the wordless action in “Hush,” which strikes a clever balance between the sickly and the sweet.
Whedon has earned a reputation as a genre-bender, and at times, “Hush” plays as horror, comedy, and twisted romance. As Whedon shifts from genre to genre, however, he always keeps his feet firmly planted, and in the episode’s horror moments, he demonstrates a complete command of the genre. The Gentlemen, for example, are truly magnificent creations – garish, and insidiously polite, portraits of hideous menace dressed in tidy black suits. Through inspired character design and an expert use of point-of-view and multiple planes of action, the Gentlemen become one of the show’s most enduring creations. At first, they seem an insurmountable set of foes; no sword can kill them, we are told. They can only be vanquished by the sound of a female voice. So “Hush” climaxes, like much horror, with a female scream. But this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show that always turned the horror genre on its head to prove its feminist point. So it is fitting that “Hush” ends, not with the cry of a victim, but with the yelp of a warrior.
Call this one: Tribute to a Face. This veiny blue monstrosity, the icon of Tobe Hooper’s TV adaptation of Stephen King’s best-seller Salem’s Lot, took the Max Schreck template from Murnau’s Nosferatu to its hideous endpoint. Crooked fangs, desiccated features, dead marble eyes. Pushing the boundaries of the term “human,” this horrifying creation, embodied by actor Reggie Nalder, remains the most truly upsetting incarnation of the vampire ever created for the screen. And there he was, in 1978, in everyone’s living room.
Or maybe this entry in the Great Pumpkins series is more a tribute to the power of television to instill fear in the viewer. Is it because we least expect it? Is it because we get caught off guard, while sitting, presumably safely, nestled in our chairs? Nearly all of the terrifying experiences I can recall from childhood were necessarily from network or UHF channels: these came not just from airings of theatrical films (though my first experiences with The Shining and Psycho arrived with commercial interruption, and for some reason that heightened the tension for me. How could something so emotionally disruptive come packaged with something so mundane as toothpaste and car ads?) but also from reruns of old television shows—The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery (see earlier this week), and, perhaps worst of all, that one terrible Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode about the female convict who attempts to break out of prison by stowing away in a casket . . . bad idea.
But Salem’s Lot was maybe worst of all. And it mostly had to do with that face. In my household the story is apocryphal: a year before my birth, my mother was nonchalantly folding laundry while Tobe Hooper’s hyped miniseries was glowing from the television in front of her. The creepy, but rather placid story was about an hour in. Horror visuals had been mostly relegated to some fog-enshrouded floating undead and cobwebby houses. But there had been talk of an absent “Mr. Barlow.” And when he finally arrived, awaking a man in the shadows of a dingy jail cell, he certainly didn’t disappoint. My mother’s reaction, a blood-curdling scream to an empty house and a true momentary fear that a heart-attack might have been induced, followed by an abrupt turning off of the TV, remains as vivid an image in my head as anything in the film itself. (If you feel the sick need to watch this very scene, YouTube has made it handily available. But you really don’t have to…) Even some years later, when I went through my supposedly fearless “horror movie phase,” I would have to cover up the images of Mr. Barlow that graced the front and interior of my “Stephen King Goes to the Movies” fan-book.
Congrats to Mr. Hooper for so consistently decimating my childhood, making it nearly impossible to turn the lights out without thinking twice (between this, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Poltergeist, it’s hard to believe that anyone could proclaim Wes Craven a superior horror craftsman and keep a straight face). As for the rest of Salem’s Lot? Elegant, eerie, sometimes dull, sturdy, an always welcome James Mason. But who remembers any of that, when that face is there, lurking around the corner, waiting to pop out of some thick black shadows?
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