For anyone whose ever wondered how someone can be a "horror movie fan," John Carpenter, director of some great movies in the genre such as In The Mouth of Madness, The Thing, The Fog and especially Halloween, summed up a wonderful answer.
"Everyone's afraid of something and we're all afraid of something together. It binds us as people," he said.
While I was attending the horror movie convention, Crypticon, in St. Joseph, Mo., back in 2018, I asked the head of the Kansas City Horror Club the same question. His response was that horror movies act as a "how-to" guide as we face our fears.
I can buy that. Maybe we won't ever be chased down by a machete wielding, hockey mask wearing killer. But in the off chance we ever are, and we've seen the Friday the 13th movies, we'll know what to do and what not to do.
It's true that through the decades, horror movies generally reflect the fears and anxieties of society. This is why I find it curious that paranormal content is very popular now-a-days in horror films and TV.
The social climate of the times also plays a role in a movie's storyline, and the its significance within the corridors of film titles. It's easily overlooked with general audiences. After all, people are people, and Friday and Saturday nights are a time to turn the lights low and give the mind a break.
But what's with all the ghosts? In movies, there's a long list of movies surrounding haunted people and haunted places - An American Haunting (2006), Paranormal Activity (2007), A Haunting in Connecticut (2009), The Haunting of Molly Hartley (2008), A Haunting in Georgia (2002), The Haunting of Hill House (2018), The Haunting of Whaley House (2012), The Haunting of Fox Hollow Farm (2011), The Haunting of Ellie Rose (2015), The Conjuring (2013), The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019), The Haunting of Borley Rectory (2019), The Haunting of La Llorona (2019).
On the Travel Channel alone, there's an even longer list of reality ghost shows (that is, paranormal investigators) along with documentary programs showcasing "real ghostly encounters" - Ghost Adventures, Ghost Asylum, Ghost Nation, Ghost Stories, Ghosts of Morgan City, Ghost Bait, Ghost Brothers, Paranormal 911, Paranormal Caught on Camera, Paranormal Survivor, Paranormal Emergency, Scariest Night of My Life, My Ghost Story, Most Haunted, Most Terrifying Places, My Haunted House, My Paranormal Nightmare, Haunted Hospitals, Haunted Case Files, Haunted Live, Haunted Things, Haunted Towns, Haunted USA, Haunting in the Heartland, Hotel Paranormal, and my personal favorite Fear the Woods.
Again, this is just on the Travel Channel. With a list like this, who or what isn't haunted these days?
I've been intrigued about this ghost trend in horror for several years as, like I said, horror generally reflects the fears and anxiety's of their respective time.
During the tumultuous era of World War I, and the aftermath felt in Germany in the 1920s, what's referred to as Weimar expressionism - a new way of looking at the world - grew popular and landed heavily into German horror films.
With meager budgets compared to that of Hollywood, German film makers looked to more simplistic ways to convey emotion, distinct and surreal atmospheres, and uniquely haunting stories in their movies. No lavish costumes, or towering sets, or mind blowing special effects.
Gothic horror quickly sprung from this new portrayal of reality, looking into darker, sinister characteristics of human behavior and the human mind.
From this concept, films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Phantom (1922), and The Last Laugh (1922) were produced and continue influencing modern horror movie makers today.
The styles of movies like these use a lot of light and dark contrast, embrace surreal imagery, and show a great deal of eye shots - close-ups of a character's eyes to arouse fear and suspense in an audience who'll feel what a character is feeling simply by the terror or evil seen through their eyes.
This is the foundation of horror movies.
As Americans were working to return to normalcy after the first World War, and enjoying the roaring 1920s, they were met with the stock market crash and a great depression. Meanwhile, the world was also facing another world war. The good times of the roaring 1920s roared themselves out, and America found itself facing a dark era the likes of which hadn't been seen since the Civil War.
This was also the period of Universal's monster movies. Now considered iconic, these monsters matched our looming fears in that they were out of our control - Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Wolfman, and my personal favorite, the Invisible Man. They're either monstrosities of man's own creation, like Frankenstein's monster. Or they're creatures of darkness whose origins are foreign to us, who will get us when we least expect it, such as Count Dracula. How do we stop them?
Americans felt vulnerable just like their victims on screen. These Universal monsters preyed on that vulnerability. But we managed to find a way to defeat them and haven't forgotten how to since.
Monsters like these were the audience's face-off with their own sense of powerlessness. We couldn't get enough of them. Sequels upon sequels were made, with monsters facing off with other monsters on screen. Revenge of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (1955), Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman (1943), The Mummy's Tomb (1942), The Invisible Man's Revenge (1944), Dracula's Daughter (1936), and House of Frankenstein (1944) to name a few titles.
And when America dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, the "king of the monsters" arouse from the fallout, and brought the atomic age into horror. Godzilla!
This was the nuclear age in horror/ SciFi. Giant creatures, often radioactive, began devouring our cities on screen. This was also the time when America started looking to space exploration, the final frontier. Who knew what was out there? Aliens from outer space, most of them unfriendly, began to visit us in the movies. It became a mix of radioactive creatures and aliens from space.
These fears and uncertainties - the unknown of space and the fear of nuclear threats thanks in part to the Cuban missal crisis - nagged at us through the 1950s and 60s. While that was going on, a counter culture was developing in America which changed horror for the 1970s.
People began noticing how ugly some of our fellow Americans are via racism, and bigotry. Revolutions against traditions and family, and new ways of life were popping up.
Movies like Night of the Living Dead (1968) brought the zombie genre to the forefront. Old versus new. The dead walk among the living.
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Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson as
famed ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren in
The Conjuring, released in 2013. |
The movie
Dawn of the Dead (1978) has an underlying tone of American consumerism. And that counter culture shifting the American family is evident in the movie
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
Good versus evil. Godliness, faith and religion versus materialism and atheism became much more real in society. Many saw it as a threat to the American way of life.
The perfect family, and Americana in general, common in 1950s media, wasn't as prominent now. It was challenged. The time was ripe for unholy films like Rosemary's Baby (1968), The Omen (1976) and The Exorcist (1973) to emerge. Religion was at a cusp not seen in the lifetime of anyone living in this decade. Satan versus God was a serious thought on the forefront of many discussions, especially when major changes in the Catholic Church were being established. I'll include the well done, yet underrated 1976 movie Alice, Sweet Alice here. It's a movie that certainly reflects the religious social climate of the time.
It was also in the late 1950s through the 1970s that Universal monsters began to reemerge thanks to the U.K's Hammer Film Production's remakes - The Mummy, The Brides of Dracula, The Curse of the Werewolf, Dracula: Prince of Darkness, Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed. Classic Hammer Horror films still have a following.
Through the sixties and seventies, free love and the so-call "sexual revolution" blew up. By the dawn of the 1980s, more people looked on it with disdain. A war on drugs ensued - the same drugs young people indulged in, in the seventies. The decade - the Reagan years - more or less ushered in a conservative confidence in the political system (and society in general) severely tarnished by drugs, "sexual liberation" and the Nixon era.
The sins of not-so-innocent baby boomer parents needed to be punished. And their children inherited their sins. So horror movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Friday the 13th (1980), and Halloween (1978) depicted teenagers often freely indulging in premarital sex come face to face with unstoppable serial killers with an other-worldly nature. And Freddy Krueger killed the children of Elm Street in their dreams to get back at their parents.
It was blood, guts, and gore. It's thanks to John Carpenter's Halloween movie that the term "slasher" became part of horror lingo.
Horror in the 90s saw some revisions of past classics, along with some new fears with a more psychological feel to them for audiences to contend with such as Silence of the Lambs (1991). Jacob's Ladder (1990) is a look back at the post-traumatic horror of the Vietnam War. And the movie Misery (1990), based on Stephen King's novel, depicts deranged fandom.
America had pulled itself through a lot of darkness with horror movies to help them face their fears. The long awaited period of normalcy, as best as could be expected, came about in the 1990s. Sure we still tackled drugs, and crime needed to be cleaned up in a lot of places. Horror revitalized a lot of the old classic tropes.
And once the 90's were over, and a new millennium was upon us, America was thrown back into darkness and despair on Sept. 11, 2001. We found ourselves face to face with a new enemy - a serious, seemingly crafty, dangerous, and unsympathetic one. Foreign terrorists.
If these terrorists could take down two monumental buildings with two airplanes, strike the Pentagon, and attempt to crash another plane into, maybe, the White House or the Capital Building right under our noses, what else could they do?
The thought of a virus attack loomed over the nation, and we saw movies like 28 Days Later (2002), and Quarantine (2008) came to be.
Americans feared that evil was hidden in places we'd never expect to find it. No one was safe. This panic was mirrored in movies such as Wrong Turn (2003), The Devil's Rejects (2005). Turistas (2006), and Hostel (2007).
Now, we come to today.
Aside from all the paranormal content out there, the current trend includea what I dub "family horror" - It Follows (2014), Hereditary (2018), Us (2019), A Quiet Place (2018), and The Babadook (2014). Watching these movies, they clearly depict a break down in the once tight bonds of the American family.
Families aren't portrayed as strong or close knit in most modern horror movies. Maybe it's because we spend so much time as a society online. Parents are distant. Children are disinterested. We have a lot of ways to talk to each other today, but we really don't have anything say.
Get Out (2017) and The Witch (2015) specifically convey this scenario. The former deals more with the aspect of white society attempting to form black individuals into what they deem as socially normal.
Aside from that, modern horror/ thriller is saturated with paranormal films.
I don't think you can discuss the existence of spirits without going into religion because religious institutions are the front runners in any discussion of an afterlife. So, pardon me if I sound preachy.
It's no revelation that our modern society is a skeptical one, to say the least, when it comes to religion in general, the existence of the human soul, and where a soul goes when it leaves the body. If space is the great unknown, life after death is much more so.
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A scene from 1999's The Sixth Sense depicts spirits appearing as they died.
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I personally think the success of 1999's The Sixth Sense has something to do with the current trend in paranormal entertainment. And The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) resurrected the exorcism trend also prevalent in today's horror. The two subgenres (hauntings and exorcisms) go hand in hand. Still, there's something deeper.
There's an extensive amount of animosity when it comes to religion these days. There's also a lot of doubt. I mean, there has always been animosity and doubt. But today, it's written into many laws and spoken of like it's an animosity understood by all.
Matthew 16:4 says a "wicked and adulterous generation seeketh a sign."
A sign is what all these self-proclaimed "paranormal research experts" ask for on TV. To be fair, who doesn't want to know the absolute truth about whether ghosts exist or not? And if somehow their existence was suddenly confirmed without a shadow of a doubt, there'd be so many more questions.
Society is largely skeptical, or unbelieving, when it comes to the spiritual. Still, there's something underneath the surface that's plaguing a lot of consciences. What if the soul does exist? What if there is a heaven and a hell? What if there is an eternity? What if?
In our society, where science is deemed unquestionable, paranormal investigators on television attempt to present supposed scientific proof of ghosts using a ton of gadgetry. Meanwhile, other TV programs offer alleged personal encounters. What makes these ghost hunters "experts" is beyond me considering nothing is more mysterious than what happens after we die. It's a concept science cannot answer because science doesn't deal in the spiritual. Regardless, many of these ghost hunters on TV will tell you otherwise as they show off their ghost finding gadgets and recorders. Who decided they're experts is unclear. My guess is these TV ghost hosts declared themselves as such. They offer resolutions and answers as fact though it's all based on their own speculations and opinions. And it seems like every
Spirits are as old as time. Ghost stories, especially those handed down from generation to generation, demand at least some reverence. They come from the aisles of history - our family history, our society's history, our country's history.
Places we revere are often said to be inhabited by ghosts. And many spirits we've heard about are often people we honor and respect whether we knew them or not. Or, they were people who deserve our sympathy - the bride who died on her wedding day, the child who lost his mother for all eternity, the soldier who never made it home.
Their memory can turn into tales, and then into legend. They can be accounts of President Lincoln haunting his old bedroom in the White House, inmates still wandering the cells of Alcatraz Island, or the ghost of a faceless woman that a friend of mine said haunted his old house somewhere in the hills of Oakland, California. It's all intriguing whether we believe it or not. When it comes to ghosts, as John Carpenter said, we're afraid together. Whether we believe in them and in an afterlife or not, this trend in today's horror movies leaves us facing the question, "what if?"
