Metaphorically Terrifying

OoOOooOOoOoOOOOoo

When we were small, we were afraid of the dark.  The past tense, there, is misleading.  We’re still afraid of the dark, but now it rarely gets quite as dark as it did when we were small.  Back then, we were so afraid of the dark that on some mornings, when the sun was already up, we’d ask a parent to turn the lights on in the dim (but hardly dark) basement - where the television was - before we went down there.  We can’t remember feeling ashamed of this fear.  It seemed entirely reasonable to be scared of places where absolutely anything (you never know) might be, so we stayed (and still stay) scared. 

Somehow, though, - despite this very real and pressing fear - we decided one night, after everyone in the house was asleep, to sneak downstairs into the basement to watch TV.  

We couldn’t have been more than seven or so.  Maybe eight.  It’s unclear where or why we got the idea to sneak downstairs or how we summoned up the courage or (more likely) gave way to the compulsion to act on it, but we did.  We snuck downstairs, in the dark, and down the long hallway, darted past the door that led to the abyssal and unfinished part of the basement, and into the area with the TV. 

Once there, our tiny heart no doubt hammering hard against our little ribcage, we turned on the TV, turned down the volume to a barely audible level, and watched.  The TV would somehow, we felt, protect us from the dark because, well, it would cancel it out.  The screen would light the room and keep us safe.  The TV on, then, we maybe clicked through the channels to find something appealing or maybe just watched whatever came on.  We can’t recall how we found what we found, but we do remember exactly and vividly what it was.  Sometime after midnight, we - small, in the dark, alone - watched Night of the Living Dead.

Memory is unreliable and self-mythologizing irresistible, so these next few sentences aren’t trustworthy.  Regardless, we remember this night as a series of unlikely firsts.  It was the first time we’d knowingly and unnecessarily transgressed against a household rule.  (This is almost surely not the case, but prior transgressions were, we guess, not very memorable in comparison.)  It was the first time we’d seen a black-and-white movie.  (This, too, is almost certainly not the case - but there’s no film prior to this one that we can point to to invalidate the claim.)  It was the first time we saw a horror movie.  (This is probably right, but we definitely did not, then, understand that we were watching a thing called a “horror” movie.  We couldn’t, had you forced us, distinguish between a movie that happened to be scary and a movie that was designed to be so.)  We weren’t, though, preoccupied with all the firsts as we were (possibly) experiencing them.  Instead, we were transfixed by the movie.  We sat - scrunched fetally - in the corner of the couch and may not have blinked for 98 minutes.  (We probably blinked.)  

If it seems odd that a kid afraid of the dark would, on their first night testing or teasing that fear, opt to watch a movie that means to make everyone afraid, we don’t blame you.  It seems odd to us, too.  We couldn’t tell you why we watched and kept watching this movie even as it made us feel a similar kind of panic that we felt in the dark.  It would be wrong to say that we liked or were pleased by the eerie score, shambling ghouls, panicked innocents, social chaos, claustrophobic spaces, and concluding tragedy.  We were scared and, for reasons beyond our ken, couldn’t resist continuing to be scared in just this way.  There was something about this fear - as opposed to all the other so-called real ones we held - that felt right.  It was similar to how we would, irresistibly, tongue a loose tooth and find something like solace in that self-hurt.  

So - since then - we’ve sought to be made scared and uncomfortable by movies.  Not exclusively, of course.  We don’t only or even mostly watch horror movies nor do we only seek to be jump-scared, unsettled, or perturbed - but we are more inclined towards horror as a genre and the experiences that horror tends to inspire than we are towards any other genre.  While other folks are smitten with all the singing and dancing in musicals or all the flirting and kissing in romcoms, we’re enamored with all the lurking and menacing in horror movies.  We have never - yet - met a ghost, demon, murderer, mutant, zombie, or maniac that we weren’t intrigued by or interested in.  Even the most outrageously awful and not-at-all-scary horror movies - Jason X stands alone - are, for some reason or another, something we usually like to watch.

We could say that we like horror because it allows us to substitute our persistent, nebulous fears - of being alone, of being lost - with temporary, specific objects - The Shape in Halloween, the everything in Hereditary - so, in a sense, subjecting ourselves to the latter fear is a reprieve from the former.  We could also say that the fear inspired by horror movies is, likewise, more palatable because it arrives from outside our head and seems to obey rules or some kind.  Freddy Kreuger is beyond our psychology and can only get us if we fall asleep on Elm Street whereas LONELINESS lives in our head and can creep up under all conditions everywhere.  These are decent - if kinda rote and lazy - explanations for why horror might be appealing to a person (us) otherwise terrorized by anxieties and neuroses of all kinds, but they aren’t entirely apt.

The thing - and we’ve been thinking about this a terrible amount over the last three weeks as we’ve watched a terrible amount of horror movies at Fantasia Film Fest - that we think we like best about horror movies is that, in the best cases, it feels like we’re watching someone testing or tempting an indescribable, unexplainable, and inescapable terror.  At their best, horror movies succeed in that they make vivid the indescribably, unexplainable, and inescapable aspect of that terror.   They show you not just that something (anything) is frightening, but show you that understanding that something does little to assuage the fear it inspires in you.  They each, in their own way, remind us that our feelings or emotions aren’t neutralized by knowledge.  They aren’t, in many cases, even affected by it.  They revel in the fact that you (whoever you are) are mostly a sensate body guided by feeling rather than an abstracted mind powered by reason.

Whereas most movies (or stories generally) offer some form of catharsis, horror seem to strive for the opposite.  A cathartic experience  is one in which you come to see and identify a feeling (say, a resentment or desire of a certain kind) then prompts you to feel that feeling fully (by dramatizing how the consequences of that resentment or desire), then offers you a new or different way of both understanding and accepting it.  Catharsis helps you externalize some internal, often forsaken or ignored, part of yourself and as a result make sense of how it works and affects your life and the lives of others.  It’s a cognitive affair. It brings the body and its feeling under the yoke of the mind.

Whatever is going on in the best horror movies has the opposite effect - you laugh, you scream, and you walk away heavier somehow.  You don’t watch Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and, at the end, understand and feel better about motherhood, domesticity, society, morality, etc. etc.  You watch Rosemary’s Baby and feel like all of those big, baggy concepts are newly weighed down with significance and complexity.  Your heart is heavier, your nerves frayed. You might even get a little sweaty at the sight of certain cribs. Whereas most films tell a story in order to work through a problem, horror films tell a story in order to remind you that a problem exists and will not be thought away.  Horror, when done well, disturbs and unsettles our unearned intellectual comfort with all the common stuff of life by enlivening it with unnamed feeling.    

Horror movies, at their best, do not allow you to release unacknowledged feeling by first understanding and then experiencing that feeling, but rather amplify a feeling that you can hardly name (let alone acknowledge) and force you to stay with it.  Regardless of how a horror movie concludes - ambiguously, resolutely, whatever - you get to or, rather, have to walk away on shakier ground than you walked in on. And why might you want this? All sorts of reasons. Horror movies can affirm suspicions, validate feelings, offer you something to point at when you feel an unnamed type of way, or merely give weird voice to some inchoate and unarticulable sense you have about the world or something in it.

While the above might hold true for the best horror movies, most horror movies aren’t the best.  Most horror movies, rather than probing some terror in such a way that it permeates everything, focus in on some very specific monster and/or metaphor.  The Nun (2018), to name a random example, is about a scary nun.  It is just and only about this. Sissy (2022), to name a different random example, is about social media.  It is just and only about this.

It isn’t that these films are bad exactly - but rather that the specificity of their concern render their effects short-lived and limited.  The Nun is scary insofar as that nun is around.  Sissy is unsettling insofar as you buy wholesale into faux wellness culture or make the pathological mistake of thinking that social media is a verisimilar reflection of reality more broadly.  Once these films (both fun and interesting in their own way) have delivered their scares or thinly veiled social commentary, they vanish.  They are flat, simple things that have no seeming interest in speaking to or affecting life as it is lived outside of movie theaters.  

Imagine???!!!! TECHNOLOGY NUN??? Sorry if this made you piss yourself.

Based on our experience at Fantasia, filmmakers and audiences seem to really like and/or want flat, simple things.  Moreover, they’d rather their flat, simple things came in the guise of metaphors rather than monsters.  The majority of the horror films we’ve seen over the last three weeks have taken the basic horror formula - take a human experience (like childhood, puberty, sexuality, grief, class conflict) and represent that experience somehow monstrously - and reduced it down into something so cloyingly straightforward and unimaginative that we not only learned nothing, but felt nothing as a result.  

These films - and we won’t name names because there’s no reason to - may as well all be called “IT’S A METAPHOR” save that what they’re up to can only barely be called metaphor.  Metaphors are typically dynamic.  They’re comprised of a vehicle and tenor (e.g. “The soldier (tenor) was a lion (vehicle) on the battlefield”) with the aim of both clarifying and complicating both terms.  Metaphors are effective or useful only insofar as they add or reveal additional meaning to something.  A metaphor, moreover, needs to be contextualized or situated in such a way that it unlocks or reworks the surrounding stuff.  A good, worthwhile metaphor ought to render the stuff surrounding it (e.g. characters, plot, whatever) more complicated and, more importantly, ramify outwards beyond the artistic work itself.   The reason one uses a metaphor is because just saying the thing isn’t enough or even possible.   

The “IT’S A METAPHOR” movies we’ve seen lately seem to believe that merely staging a metaphor is more than enough.  The substitute one thing for a different thing. (What if the bourgeoisie - but instead of social/cultural/finance capital it is CANNIBALISM?????  What if trans - but MONSTERR??>????!!!)  They make a simple, one-to-one switch and leave it at that.  They make Black Mirror (canonically described as “What if phones but too much”) seem like a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of contemporary issues.  The films we’ve seen don’t even seem to pose a question.  It isn’t “What if gay - but VAMPIRE>??<>?” but merely “GAY=VAMPIRE” stated in such a way that both terms appear as settled and self-evident as small numbers.

In trying to disguise their evident lack of insight or even interest in a given issue by hiding behind a poorly conceived and often shabbily executed metaphor, these movies do a disservice both the the tenor of their story (puberty, sexuality, whatever) but also the vehicle (monsters, murderers, whatever).  Rather than complicating matters, emphasizing and underlining the emotional difficulties of some idea or experience, they instead render them and everything associated with them staggeringly simple and inert.  Not only do these genre exercises fail to make you think or feel differently, but fail to make you think or feel at all.  At their best, these films offer the cultural/artistic equivalent of celery (you expend as many calories as you consume).  At their worst, these films offer the cultural/artistic equivalent of Tide pods (you mistake poison for a tasty treat).

You could accuse us of being unfair in all sorts of ways here.  We’re expecting too much or our standards are too high.  We’re citing exceptions - Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby - as though they were the rule.  We’re leveling particular criticisms against genre films that also hold true for all films.  We’re failing to consider how the movie industry (especially the financial aspect of it) is presently much different than it was in the past.  This all might be true enough, but none of the possible explanations for why all these movies are hollow, ineffective, and dull does much to temper our disappointment that they are hollow, ineffective, and dull.

Understanding that the financial, artistic, or cultural conditions of the present are such that the average cultural object is (more often than not) a rushed product made under inordinate pressure by underpaid, overworked, and inexperienced people does almost nothing to lessen our dismay that those objects are, in almost every respect, mostly vacuous if not low-key harmful.

While we have often felt (lately) like we are watching pro forma technical exercises engineered according to some undisclosed and utterly uninteresting set of industry specifications, there are (probably) still good (or great) horror movies being made somewhere out there right now.  We just haven’t had the luck of seeing any of them in the last several weeks.  Maybe though we just weren’t in the right mood, maybe the real darkness of the world hampered our ability to find solace in scary screen shit.  We’re not sure what exactly is going on - whether the issue is inside or outside our head - but we’re also not sure that knowing what’s going on would help all that much. 

We’d normally, when feeling this kind of way, seek out a movie that represents something close to what we’re feeling, we’d seek the opposite of catharsis, we’d throw ourselves into an imaginary world that rearranges all the too-close stuff we’re feeling, but that doesn’t - right now - seem to be possible.  We feel like we’re in the dark and wanting, very much, to turn on the TV for some kind of  complex protection, but the only thing that’s on are a bunch of infomercials or the representational equivalent of the color test pattern.  Which, we guess, is pretty fucking scary in its own sort of way.