It’s hard to say what exactly the “legacy” of the oughts in terms of horror films is going to finally shake out to be; we’re still all a little too close to the era to make definitive statements. A few trends did emerge; Asia’s horror boom spread to France and Spain and Northern Europe, with interesting and peculiar films being created in those countries. The back-catalog of film studios was thoroughly raided as the great wave of almost universally unimpressive horror remakes began to be made. And the “teen pop superstars in peril” trend was over-corrected by the rise of gore and torture splatter films. While all these trends are worth commenting on, it’s the more conventional, traditional horror films that I tend to prefer, and Neil Marshall’s 2005 creatures-in-a-cave film The Descent offers a number of interesting angles to view it from.

The film opens with a flash-back to a group of three women on a white-water rafting trip. One of the women, Sarah, is being picked up from the end of the trip by her husband and daughter, though neither he nor Sarah seem particularly happy about it, possibly due to the long looks exchanged by Sarah’s husband and her rafting partner Juno. On the way home, Sarah’s husband and daughter are killed in a traffic accident, and Sarah awakes in the hospital to hallucinations of empty corridors and pursuing darkness. A year later, Sarah, Juno and Beth join three other women in the Appalachian mountains for a spelunking expedition to what turns out to be unexplored caverns. Sarah is still hallucinating from the trauma of the accident and is heavily popping pills. In the caves, Sarah begins to see what she thinks are figures watching them from the caves and while crawling through a particularly narrow tunnel, she has an attack of claustrophobia that triggers a rockslide which not only cuts the women off from the only known exit to the caves but loses them half of their gear. After one of the women breaks her legs in a fall, the group is attacked by subterranean albinos, seemingly the descendants of people who had previously become trapped in the caverns, and one by one the women are picked off by the creatures, save Beth, who is killed by Juno accidentally. Sarah continues to hallucinate while she tries to escape, until she and Juno finally find a possible exist. Sarah cripples Juno in retaliation for Beth’s death and leaves her to the creatures, crawling out of a cluster of tree roots and running back to the car and driving as far as she can from the cave. Where she then has a vision of a bloody Juno in the car with her, before hallucinating that she is back in the caves with her daughter.

Horror as a genre is often concerned with feminine themes or motifs, and The Descent takes full advantage of that. Broadly the film falls within the “tourist horror” genre, with the monstrous savage locals in this case being horribly inbred cannibals of indeterminate origin, and the all female cast calls to mind an inversion of a film like Deliverance. That the cast is female and the setting is something as yonic as caves and caverns also suggests an implied message about female strength and solidarity, though one that is undercut somewhat by the deliberate and accidental betrayals the characters subject each other too. These are ultimately more interesting and rewarding themes to bear in mind while watching the film, as most of the other horror standards it attempts to introduce are less satisfying. Sarah’s frequent hallucinations call the entire reality of the film into question on a number of levels, an old horror gimmick, but one that is slightly over-played here, right down to the ambiguous ending which makes it unclear what has actually happened to Sarah and the other women. And while the the cannibal creatures are unsettling, and the confined nature of their hunting grounds is dramatically satisfying, they also feel somewhat generic; there are no shortage of cannibals, devolved humans, inbred monsters or some combination of all three in horror films and stories already. They work in context, but they’re far less interesting than the humans they attack, and there are moments when this feels like an interesting film about women inexpertly patched together with a splattery monster movie.

The Three Imposters and Other Stories, 2001, Arther Machen, S.T. Joshi ed.
I actually like Machen quite a bit more than Lovecraft. There’s just something about his particular brand of…Welsh dread that resonates with me.

The 90s were a transitional period for horror again. The endless sequels of the 80s slashers were dying out, major directors were doing “not really horror” films with themes and imagery that seemed awfully close to those of horror films, and the first waves of horror renaissances in Asia and Europe were starting up. But mainstream, mass-market horror film didn’t really have a coherent voice. And then Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven made Scream and, for good or ill, a new mainstream horror cycle began.

The plot for Scream is actually quite unremarkable; it’s a bog-standard slasher film, with stupid teens in an isolated area. The film is at its best during it’s opening act, as a young girl is tormented by mysterious phone calls before she and her boyfriend are brutally butchered by masked assailants. This is the movie’s most effective and chilling scenes, and it’s still a high mark for horror films. But, soon after, we’re introduced to Sydney, our ostensible heroine, and her creepy boyfriend and disagreeable friends. These are typical, ironic, snarky 90s teens (and I say that as someone who was one of them at the time), and they take the brutal murder of two of their classmates in stride, Sydney too busy mourning the year-ago murder of her mother and the repeated suggestion that she fingered an innocent man for the crime and her friends making snide and tasteless jokes, with comic relief provided by a comic sheriff Deputy and a conniving, ambitious tabloid reporter. It soon becomes apparent that Sydney is the real target of the killers, but the police show an odd laxness in allowing Sydney and her friends to attend an unsupervised party at an isolated farmhouse. Guests are picked off one by one, and the killers are eventually revealed to be the, yes, obvious suspects with extremely muddled motives.

Much of what Scream gets praised for is its knowing, post-modern winks at the audience, its self-awareness and willingness to acknowledge the tropes and cliches of the genre. The problem is that all it does is wink at the audience, it still follows slavishly the tropes and confuses making jokes about “final girls” and horror movie rules with actually doing something original and transgressive with the genre. It’s still an effective slasher horror film, but much of this is due to Craven’s effective direction. The script is remarkably trite, overly concerned with referential jokes, and the acting is abysmal. One of the more regrettable aspects of Scream‘s success is that it kicked off the “basic cable stars in peril” school of horror films. These are teeny-bopper television stars through and through, and apart from their characters not being likeable, they simply over-act horribly through the entire thing. The obvious suspects are too obvious, mostly because both Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard over-play the “creepy guy” angle. There is absolutely no ambiguity to their villainy, and even the fake-out “death” of Ulrich is unconvincing. While Scream felt remarkable and special at the time, its flaws have only become more apparent with age, and the shadow it cast over horror, spawning countless gimmicky, ironic imitators providing a secondary income source for unremarkable television actors, has been mostly detrimental.

Last year, around this time, I went through a whole spate of 80s horror films. My thesis then was that, for fans of cheap B horror, the 80s were a boom time thanks largely to the home video market and the demand for material. Outside of the schlock arena, though, some interesting and not so interesting things were happening. A big chunk of 80s horror was dominated by sequels and wannabe franchises for slasher films, usually repetitive formula films in which the main draw was a murderer killing teens in inventive ways that, more often than not, the audience was invited to identify as the “hero.” The auteur directors of the 70s were still around, but most of their efforts were mixed at best, as the age of blockbuster and the hunger for exploitable franchises led to increased attention from studio suits to genre films. The results, across the board, were generally films with interesting ideas and problematic executions.

And thus Robert Harmon’s 1986 “tourist horror” film The Hitcher, starring young and pretty C. Thomas Howell and slightly older and prettier Rutger Haur. The prettiness of the leads is key, as The Hitcher has that odd mix of homoerotic tension and vaguely homophobic tone that several other 80s horror film (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and Fright Night come most readily to mind) exploit, mostly unintentionally. But the frustrated homoeroticism of the film is mostly just an interesting minor point with this film; the truly frustrating thing about it is that it occupies a space half-way between a horror film and half-way between a loud, dumb, blustery Reagen-era action movie.

The film opens with Howell as Jim Halsey, driving a sports car through the deserts of Texas at night during a storm. He’s struggling to stay awake, and very nearly misses being killed in a collision with a semi. He then spots Hauer hitch-hiking at the side of the road, and despite the fact that “his mother told (him) never to do this” decides to pick him up. The man introduces himself as Jack Ryder, a man literally walking out of nowhere in a storm, in a Doors reference so shameless that screen-writer Eric Red pretty much had to cop to it. Jim attempts to engage his passenger in conversation, fruitlessly, until Jim sees a car pulled over to the side of the road that had passed him shortly before his near collision. Ryder forces Jim to drive on, before pulling out a knife and telling him how he killed the driver of that car and is going to kill Jim as well unless Jim stops him. Unable to expose Ryder when they are forced to stop at a construction check-point, Jim eventually manages to force Ryder from the car. He is pleased at his escape, only to see a family sedan pull past him with Ryder in the back-seat. And a violent game of cat-and-mouse between Jim and Ryder than plays out across the desert, with Ryder on an inhuman rampage and Jim pursuing him while trying to stay ahead of the police who believe Jim to be guilty of Ryder’s crimes, with aid only coming to Jim from Nash, a waitress who improbably believes his story of a psychopath who comes and goes from the ether.

The first third of the film is unabashedly horror. Hauer plays up the cold menace of Ryder perfectly, while Howell does a convincing job of playing a naive young man horribly out of his depth who is quickly hardened by the events he witnesses. The extent of Ryder’s brutalities is played ambiguously. We never actually see any of his victims on the road, and most of the violence he commits is implied, with only a grisly police station massacre shown in full, and even then only via Jim’s after-the-fact discovery of the bodies. That shying away from violence is a bit curious in the later part of the film, when it morphs into a more conventional action movie, with explosions and car chases and crashes. The ambiguity of the earlier horror portions feel like an important element of deciphering what is going on. Ryder’s ability to come and go without being detected and to perfectly frame Jim for his crimes suggests either a supernatural component to Ryder’s character, or to his being a complete fiction of Jim’s-the theory supported by the police in the film. When the film devolves into action mode it becomes harder to plausibly deny the full reality of Ryder’s existence, though his curious ability to travel and escape from anywhere is still curious.

The film does its best to maintain some of that ambiguity regarding what Ryder is and what he wants. A pivotal scene occurs in yet another diner, where Ryder again comes from nowhere to terrify Jim and escapes unseen by anyone else. Jim asks him, directly, why Ryder is doing this, “this” presumably being toying with Jim and framing him rather than simply kill him. Ryder’s response is to tell Jim to figure it out, while placing coins over his eyes, a distinct classical reference regarding the preparation of the dead. Given Ryder’s seemingly supernatural abilities, what does this mean? Did Jim really survive that near collision, or is he now in some sort of Purgatorial state, with Ryder acting as his personal angel of death? Or, to go back to those oddly homoerotic moments earlier in the film:

Is Ryder simply a lunatic obsessed with Jim for his own reasons? The film never really wants to make it clear. Until, of course, it has to, and Ryder kills Nash in one of the most brutal deaths in horror films; a death that, again, happens off screen-it’s painfully clear to the audience what happens, and it’s horrible, but the restraint that the film displays in not showing it is admirable and more effective than a special effect would have been. Sometimes what isn’t seen is more horrible than what is. Once Nash (tomboyish Nash with her ambiguously gendered name…) is dead, the physical reality of Ryder is obvious and public, which only leaves the inevitable bloody shoot-out between hero and villain to end the film. It’s frustrating to see a film which starts out with a good, strong sense of dread turn into a more cliche film by the end, especially when you continue to see little glimpses of the good film lurking below the surface.

Deals with the Devil, 1959 abridged edition, Basil Davenport ed.
It’s hard to fault a book that opens with LeFanu and Dunsany, but for a book about Satanic pacts there’s a notable lack of Irving, Hawthorne and Benet.
Dig that mod Satan.

The 1970s were a period of great critical and popular success for horror films, possibly even moreso than the first great flowering in the 1930s. Even a short, cursory glance at the films released during the decade is to see just how tremendous an impact the period had on the genre: Duel, Last House on the Left, The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, Black Christmas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Carrie, The Omen, Suspiria, Halloween, Piranha, Alien, The Amityville Horror, Phantasm…and that’s the short list. True, there’s a lot of shlock and exploitation films in that list, and even more produced during the era. But there’s also a number of films that profoundly influenced not only the horror genre but gained widespread, serious critical acclaim and attention, and films that had an impact on film culture as a whole. Not only was horror something that major studios were seriously investing time and money in as well, but horror was bleeding into other genres, such as drama (Straw Dogs), action films (Deliverance), and art films, such as Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.

The film’s plot is remarkably slight, and it’s been referenced and parodied so often it’s not surprising to discover that many people fail to recognize the parodies as parodies. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are a couple, John and Laura Baxter, living in a hotel in Venice while he restores an old church. At some point in the relatively recent past their young daughter drowned in an accident at their home in England, and both are still feeling the trauma of the event. While a subtle background plot of mysterious murders plaguing Venice plays out, Julie befriends a pair of elderly sisters on vacation in the city, one of whom is blind but appears to have psychic abilities and speaks to Julie about her daughter. The repeated message from the afterlife is that Venice is not safe for the Baxter’s, particularly John, and they must leave. John’s skepticism regarding this rises to the point of hostility, but he becomes unnerved when he begins to have flashes of deja-vu, as well as seeing a child in a red raincoat identical to the one his daughter wore when she drowned in the Venetian streets, seemingly following him. Strange events continue to occur, including a near fall from scaffolding, culminating in a sequence where John chases the red-cloaked figure through a deserted church, thinking it to be a child in peril, only to discover the figure behind the killings and the revelation that all of the preceding events were misinterpreted premonitions of his own death.

Don’t Look Now opens itself up to a large number of readings, possibly because it wears its themes rather boldly on its sleeves. Vision, and the interpretation of vision, is central, with Christie declaring in the opening moments that “nothing is as it seems.” Throughout the film we see a number of images in reflections of mirror or water, glass breaks with alarming frequency, and of course certain characters see beyond the physical realms, but importantly almost no one “sees” what is really going on until, of course, it is too late. The subjective nature of visual reality and its constraints keep the characters trapped in realms beyond their understanding. This plays out in other ways, less blatantly symbolic. The red-cloaked figure is always seen either at a difference or out of the center of the shot, and there are numerous compositions in the film in which action is taking place either to the side of the screen’s center or partially obscured. Not only vision, but time is distorted as well. There are frequent flashbacks to prior events, and events now are mirrors of previous events, such as John’s near fall being nearly identical to the death of the bishop’s father. There are also a number of montage shots, breaking up time and space, most notably in the at the time controversial love scene between John and Laura that intercuts their love-making with their post-coital dressing for dinner. And, of course, the various visions and premonitions of the future that various characters have play out as the future bleeding into the present. There’s also, of course, the fairy-tale aspect, with the red cloak evoking the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and the grotesque inversion of that story as it plays out. That the film is still entertaining and sensical, with Roeg packing so much dense symbolism and material into the film, is only one of the reasons why the film works and resonates so well. We can tell it resonates because of the impact it has had on pop culture. This isn’t the first story to make use of a “murderous dwarf” figure, but the specific misdirections and stagings this film brought to the trope have become the stock method, to the point where it has become a very specific part of horror film language, understood even by people unfamiliar with the source.

The 1960s are an interesting time for horror films. It’s primarily a time of transition. You still have Hammer and AIP churning out Gothic melodramas, but you also have a steady rise of more realistic, psychologically orientated horror films, as well as the births of the “slasher” genre of psycho-killer movies. You also have the beginnings of horror’s return to respectability as a genre, notably with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. These various trends combine in interesting ways in Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, which took the mood of the Gothic thriller and transplanted it to modern times to great success, reviews and awards.

Polanski’s film opens with Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband Guy looking for a new apartment. Rosemary falls in love with an older building, the Bramford, where a previous tenant has just died after a long coma. Her friend, Hutch, tells her over dinner that the building has a long and sordid history, involving accusations of witchcraft and cannibalism by the tenants, but Rosemary and Guy move in anyway. At first the apartment seems perfect, despite the odd noises coming from the next apartment, of which Rosemary and Guy’s home was once the back set of servant’s quarters. After the apparent suicide of the only neighbor Rosemary has met, she comes into contact with the elderly couple next door, the Castavets. Rosemary is eager to meet them, while Guy is stand-offish, though their opinions of the couple quickly reverse after a few meetings. Guy, an actor whose career ambitions have stalled, is suddenly cast in a major role after the actor initially cast goes blind, and insists that now is the time for he and Rosemary to have a baby. Rosemary consents, but on “baby making night” she becomes ill and passes out, having a dream of her neighbors and Guy watching as a demon rapes her. She awakes to find scratches all over her body, which Guy explains away by, well, essentially confessing to spousal rape and comparing the experience to necrophilia. Rosemary’s first few months of pregnancy are marked by severe abdominal pains and weight loss, while her doctor, Guy and the Castavets all work to keep her isolated from her old friends and assure her that her experiences are normal and that she should not, under any circumstances, try to determine if this is the case or not for herself. When Hutch visits her, he is both alarmed by Rosemary’s appearance and the revelation that Minnie Castavet is giving her a daily “vitamin drink” containing tanis root, and calls Rosemary to meet him outside the apartment, only to fall into a sudden coma before he can do so. Shortly before Rosemary is due, Hutch dies, and he awakes just long enough to arrange for Rosemary to be given a book on witchcraft which would seem to suggest that Roman Castavet is the descendant of a Satanic cult leader who lived in the Bramford and that Rosemary’s baby is going to be used as a sacrifice. Rosemary tries to escape from those she believes to be conspiring against her and her baby, only to be captured by Guy and the Castavets and the other neighbors, the stress of which leads her to an early labor. Rosemary is told that her baby died after being born, but after a few days she can hear crying from the Castavet apartment. Locating a secret door linking the apartments, Rosemary is horrified to discover that not only is her baby alive, but the deformed creature is being worshipped as the Antichrist by the cult. The film ends with Rosemary, under pressure from the cult, accepting her role as the child’s mother.

A lot has been written about what is going on in Rosemary’s Baby outside of the Satanic cult plot. It’s been argued that the book and the film are about abortion, Catholicism, feminism, insanity…with various levels of convincing arguments for these and other topics. In my mind, it’s more probable that both Levin and Polanski tapped into a number of themes that were of concern to people in the mid and later 60s. The arguments that women’s rights is a central concern of plot are particularly compelling. Rosemary begins the story as an assertive woman who is happy with her role as supportive wife and home-maker (for all of Guy’s ego, it’s Rosemary who boasts of his acting accomplishments, even though his outstanding roles so far have been an understudy and one word in a commercial), but over the course of the story her husband, her doctor and her neighbors (chiefly male authority figures) slowly take away bits of her identity. She is discouraged from seeing her old friends in favor of the Castavets. Her doctor explicitly instructs her not to read up on pregnancy, insisting that he is the authority over her body. Even her books are taken away from her, lest she exercise her mind and endanger her baby. Finally the only role left for Rosemary is that of mother, and specifically mother to a child that was forced on her. But there is also an interesting discourse on materialism and ambition at play here. Both Rosemary and Guy are materialistic; she dreams of yacht voyages with celebrities, he makes a point of buying shirts advertised in classy magazines. Guy’s ambitions are plain, and it is the bait with which the cult ensnares Rosemary through him. Rosemary’s desires are less clear, but her yacht fantasies and exaggerations of Guy’s acting abilities suggest a desire for fame through Guy. Their quest for a new apartment is an expression of a desire to trade up their living quarters, and even the decision to have a baby is suggested to be something of a status symbol for them; a baby being the one accessory they don’t have yet. That their success is only possible through the misfortune of others is telling, as is the utter banality of the face of evil that the film presents. The evil-doers are not great menaces or cold-blooded killers, just slightly annoying neighbors. The pettiness of their evil leads to great horrors.

The Turn of the Screw, and other short novels, 1963 ed., Henry James
I’m always amazed that whether or not the ghosts are real in this story is a matter of contention. It’s not like James didn’t write plenty of other ghost stories. The real question is what, exactly, did those evil brats do?