As part of our on-going attempt to re-publish some great feature articles from yesteryear for the enjoyment of new readers who may not have visited OWF the first time around, here's a 2009 article by Tom Fallows originally written for the release of Drag Me To Hell.
THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS IMAGES THAT SOME READERS MAY FIND DISTURBING
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"The sun began to set - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an endless scream passing through nature. " - Edvard Munch
Sam Raimis new horror movie Drag Me to Hell is perhaps one of the first movies to fully reflect our current economic crisis/catastrophe. With its story of a bank worker (Alison Lohman) who refuses an old Hungarian woman further time to pay her mortgage and is then subjected to a demonic curse, the film does indeed parallel our new recession; raising, as it does, questions of moral culpability versus personal gain. Raimis film is an attempt (all be it a cursory one) to hold up a dark mirror to social trauma and to force an audience to reflect on the world outside of their friendly neighbourhood multiplex. But then whats new? This is something the horror genre has done almost since the dawn of cinema more successfully than any worthy drama or political grandstanding. From the devastation of the First World War to Cold War paranoia to the war in Vietnam and beyond, the horror film has been unflinching it its assimilation of these collective nightmares. It has watched wide eyed as atrocity followed atrocity and then replayed the events time and again like a traumatised mind trying to make sense of the horrors it has seen. It has always been so. While Edison shorts such as Frankenstein in 1910 showed the genre in embryo form, it was during and immediately following World War I that the horror movie came of age. The first movement rose in Germany where, following defeat to the Allies, the country was left in a deep sense of crisis. Their, imperial dream had vanished, the Treaty of Versailles was a humiliation, they were badly in debt and the newly founded Weimar Republic battled constant revolt (in 1920 the Kapp Putsch sowed the early seeds of fascism).In this chaos Caligari was born. In 1919 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (wrongly considered the first horror film, but surely one of the most influential) mirrored this distressed view of German society. Characters exist in angular streets and twisted buildings and the world is unforgiving and dangerous - it is Weimar Germany through a looking glass. A deep chiaroscuro shadow drapes everything and allows madmen like the Somnambulist to take a knife between his white fingers and commit murder. Indeed, death was a key motif in German cinema of this time. Society was haunted by the loss of their young in a meaningless war and films that followed Caligari shared its nihilistic outlook. Expressionist classics such as The Golem, Nosferatu and Metropolis were equally distraught. Nosferatu in particular was in tune with the mood of the German people, and predicted a coming, plague-like evil that would destroy everything it its path. Hitlers Germany was on the black horizon. Overseas the Americans shared this melancholy. Aside from their own huge losses, medical advances were seeing soldiers who in previous wars would have died return severely disfigured or paralysed.
These men, says film historian David J. Skal, where a guilty reminder that wouldnt go away.
Skal draws parallel with these images and the work of Lon Chaney the man of a thousand faces. In films like The Penalty (1920), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) Chaney appeared mangled, limbless and in the throws of deep physical pain. Though never explicitly linked to the war, Chaney became these returned Soldiers; the awfulness of everything theyd lived through echoed in the Phantoms skeletal face. In the early 1930s, following the Wall Street crash, horror films such as Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) were box office smashes. But rather than reflect social trauma, these films avoided it and offered momentary respite. These gothic fairytales moved the horror elsewhere and offered bogeymen that could easily be defeated with a stake through the heart or a silver bullet. But what of the films that refuse to look away? Perhaps at some point, the question should be raised as to why. Why must the horror movie take on this social burden and what value can it have to the audience that watches them? One potential answer lies behind the black eyes of a monster from Japan. 1954s Gojira (aka Godzilla) wasnt just a representation of collective suffering, it was a warning. The films premise concerned the dangers of the atomic bomb, a common thematic preoccupation in 1950s horror/sci-fi. Japan had of course been the recipients of two nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These strikes laid waste to cities and left people dead or dying from radiation poisoning. Gojira director Ishiro Honda was a veteran of the Second World War and had passed through Hiroshima in 1945 on his way home. The devastation left a lasting impression on him. In his movie, Gojira is brought to life as a result of nuclear testing. The films stand out sequence sees the monster rise from the ocean to devastate Tokyo. His atomic breath scorches rows of houses and incinerates people where they stand. The entire horizon becomes a sea of fire.
It menaces all of us, proclaims one character. Just like the H-Bomb!
The following scene is one of human suffering, with an overcrowded hospital filled with orphaned children and people sick with radiation poisoning. The film was released only nine years after the nuclear air strikes (and a cataclysmic US air strike over Tokyo), and these images couldnt have been lost on a suffering Japan. Honda was using his monster as a thinly disguised metaphor warning against the build up of such weapons. Indeed, the final line is one of caution:
If they keep experimenting with deadly weapons another Gojira will appear somewhere in the world.
In the US horror took a similar approach, using the genre to warn of surrounding dangers. While big budget extravaganzas like Ben-Hur(1959) and Around the World in 80 Days (1956) ignored the presence of the Cold War and the nuclear build up, the B-Movies and low budget horrors looked the mayhem right in the eye. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) warned of McCarthy era communist paranoia (Is there a red under your bed?) while the giant ant movie Them! (1954) followed Gojira in its questioning of the atomic age. Through the veil of fantasy these films begged audience to look at the world around them. What was happening in the world was horrific, so it stood to reason that the horror genre should be the medium to fully deal with it. But the warnings were ignored and the coming decades saw an eruption of more violence and unrest. The horror movie reacted in kind. George A. Romeros Night of the Living Dead (1968) was a brutal and politically motivated diatribe that explored an America fractured by the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. The film takes a young black American and throws him not only at the mercy of a horde of monsters, but also the surrounding society that is meant to protect him. The film ends bleakly, with a shot through the head and a burning pyre. Our hero is just;
Another one for the fire.
But then this was the America that surrounded Romero. This was the America that had seen the assassinations of John F Kennedy, his brother Bobby and Martin Luther King. There were riots on the streets, there was Kent State where peaceful protestors were shot dead by police and later the Watergate Scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon. To quote Wes Craven quoting Allen Ginsburg:
All that bad karma had to go somewhere.
Cravens own Last House on the Left (1972) is a nasty little film with scenes on unflinching torture. But Craven is also an intelligent filmmaker (he was a former English professor) and his film became an allegory of the abuse heaped onto the Vietnamese by American soldiers.
This pain , explains Adam Lowenstein in the excellent American Nightmare documentary has everything to do with the world in which we live in.
Scenes such as our female protagonist being raped and executed are meant to remind you of Mi Li or the notorious photograph of a Vietcong suspect being shot in the head outside a Buddhist Temple. Craven is telling us that the cinema is no long a safe heaven from suffering. Look, his films seem to be saying. This is whats happening outside your door. Do something! Other horror filmmakers were less politicised, but this unending nightmare seeped into their work. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is in itself not a film about Vietnam but it is the story of American youth in a strange environment being slaughtered by the rural community. Perhaps these films offered a way to work out these events; like a psychiatrists couch for the masses. They take our worst fears and place them in a manageable environment. They become an outlet for social ordeal. As R.H.W Dillard suggests: the natural order of thingsand to cope and even prevail over the evil in life. Even further, Dead & Buried (1981) director Gary Sherman claims the genre is the only place where can you reach a wide audience of disparate people.
Everywhere else is kind of like preaching to the choir, he says. If you do it directly the only people who want to listen are the people that already share your beliefs. But anyone will go and see a horror film. And maybe the message will get through to them.
People who adored the films of Michael Moore, such as Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), were people who agreed with him before theyd even entered the cinema. But the horror film talks to everyone, particularly teenagers and young adults. These films speak on their level, without being preachy or condescending. The horror film is for everyone and can reach people when theyre least suspecting it. But of course like anything there is a dark side to this argument. What if these films were to use real tragedy as an exploitive tool? What if they used true life horror as simply a means to draw audiences in with cheap shock tactics? Maybe this is what is happening now. The torture film today is more prevalent than ever, with films like Hostel (2005), Captivity (2007) and Saw (2004) lingering on human suffering. One could argue that like in the early 70s, todays filmmakers are simply feeding of what is in the air and reacting to a surrounding pain. There is truth here. Today we are faced with the war in Iraq where torture is an everyday occurrence. The media is filled with images from Abu Ghraib, where soldiers pose for pictures while men are physically degraded behind them. Then theres Guantanamo Bay, where torture is/was deemed a reasonable tool for safeguarding the Capitalist way of life. These atrocities can not be ignored and it is only natural that they would be responded to in art. As David J. Skal put it:
Cataclysmic junctures in history usually stir up strong images in the collective mind.
But the worry is that the people responding lack the intelligence to properly explore these crises. Eli Roths Hostel revels in scenes of torture and one feels that Roth does too. It seems hes not looking to examine these events psychologically; hes just looking for fun ways to mess people up. He is often seen gurning for the press and posing dripping in fake blood. The worry is that for the new generation of horror filmmakers, splatter is the only thing that means anything. But despite this, at their best the horror film has a value to society and is the medium that can best respond to social trauma. It can offer a warning, an outlet for pain, a way of dealing with suffering or simply a valve to allow a safe and responsible relief from the nightmares that constantly surround us. Indeed the horrors of the world will never go away. There is an endless scream running through nature and thankfully, the horror movie screams back.