Scared Stiff: Horror Films in Movie History

David Begelman

            Why does the horror flick have such a bad track record in movie history? There is certainly an abundance of the genre, yet the ratio of worthwhile to trashy products is one of tremendous imbalance.

Nor is box office success a yardstick of quality. For decades now, making sequels to financially successful ventures like Nightmare On Elm Street, Halloween, Alien, Friday the 13^th, or Predator is often the rule rather than the exception, and it may be a law of nature that quality deteriorates when a conceit is recycled again and again. Of course, the same might be said for great literature. Paradise Regained (Milton), Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), or Paradiso (Dante) live on, but only in the shadow of their worthier predecessors: Paradise Lost, Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Rex, and Inferno.  

Of the movies mentioned, only the ice-breaking Alien, Halloween, and Predator, not their anemic sequels, have something to be said for them. (Predator has the distinction of being the only film in history that cast two future governors in featured roles: Arnold Schwartzenegger and Jesse Ventura.)

            Horror films come in largish categories: the gory, the gruesome, the ghastly, the ghostly, the creature feature—and there may be more. No need to spell it all out, except to say the ghostly involves entries like The Uninvited, The Innocents, The Haunting, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, The Entity, or Poltergeist, whereas creature features package monster themes—with or without the sci-fi trappings: Frankenstein, Dracula, Alien, Predator, Nosferatu, Signs, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Them, The War of the Worlds,  or Underworld.

Movie monsters are a varied lot of contrived horrors: vampires, werewolves, mummies, robotic things, ghosts, demons, corpses stitched together, and nightmares visited upon us as if out of our wildest dreams. But even the most outlandish of them won’t a horror flick make. (A kinkier assortment of malformed creatures schmoozing in the bar scene in the first Star Wars would be hard to imagine; yet George Lucas’s initial worthy effort was hardly a horror film in the sense we are discussing.)

            Second, there is change across decades in what scares us. The flicks that gave us nightmares in the thirties and forties: Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, The Uninvited, or Dracula are by today’s standards tame, if not downright laughable. The German masterpieces Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari survive as exercises in nostalgia for cinema scholars, not works that make us cower under the covers or raise the hair on the back of our necks. Max Schreck, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, and Conrad Veidt seem to us today more campy than scary.

            Age-related preferences likewise differ. Adolescents are less discriminating than adult movie-goers: Freddie Krueger, Jason Vorhees, and Michael Myers produce squeals of delight from kids who savor their slashings without chasers. Their parents tend to pooh-pooh these trashy diversions, preferring instead high-end violence masquerading as art in such vehicles as The Silence of the Lambs, its gory sequel, Hannibal, or more recently, No Country for Old Men and Batman: The Dark Knight.

Kids no longer quiver with fear at the most horrific filmdom has to offer, and scaring the dickens out of the younger set has morphed into ritual expressions of glee, as if every horror flick were an opportunity for a cult saturnalia, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In movie houses, it’s no longer easy to scare kids—as good an indication as any of how much things have changed.

            Of course, kids themselves can be the scariest of creatures, witness The Exorcist, a film bursting with allusions to the difficulties parents have with children. This cinematic theme is exploited in spades elsewhere, and William Peter Blatty’s film adaptation only embellishes the trend. Who, after all, understands children? They are the torment of their parents, like Regan MacNeil, the possessed child without a father; like the priest Damien Karras, the “father” without a child whose mother cannot understand him; like Elvira Engstrom, a drug addict who makes her parents’ lives a living hell. Do the college officials dealing with a campus insurrection understand the student body in the film within a film being shot on location at the outset of The Exorcist? Even a detective’s (Lee J. Cobb) name is Kinderman, German for “children.”

The name “Regan,” in The Exorcist is already a red flag, filched as it was from King Lear, Shakespeare’s horror story about two daughters, Regan and Goneril, who turn rotten on a parent. Chris MacNeil cannot explain the behavior of a head-twisting and mouthy daughter given to what one critic described as puking in decorator colors and undergoing disturbing personality changes (I hear a generation of parents in the background sighing “Tell me about it!”). Yet the child who also pays a price for aggressing against a parent is not only not new in the history of horror; it is the oldest theme of theatrical history, rumbling as it did in plays at the birth of drama—when it included at least two characters.. Aeschylus’s towering tragedy The Orestia was the Attic rendition of how a son presumptuous enough to defy natural law by dispatching a parent summarily goes crazy. In the Grecian mode, this means being pursued by the Furies.

Freudian scenarios are like-minded. Children who aggress against parents (or fantasize doing so) are in for payback. Psychoanalysts theorize that sexual desire for the mother leads to fear of castration in boys, a Victorian tall-tale a generation of playwrights, humanities scholars, shrinks, and movie kingpins still refuse to relegate to the annals of science-fiction—where it probably belongs. At least producers of horror films know their creations are make believe.  

            America’s concern over children has been strongest in eras of domination by a youth culture, like the sixties. Far from being unrepresentative, The Exorcist is but one entry in an endless parade of flicks about horrific children. The theme of the demonic seed is as hoary as they come. Aside from The Exorcist, apprehensions about youth gone amok are taken up and allegorized in such horror films as Lord of the Flies, Children of the Corn, Village of the Damned, Panic in the Streets, The Innocents, Audrey Rose, Rosemary’s Baby, The Omen, It’s Alive, The Children’s Hour, The Bad Seed, The Demon Seed, and countless other movies.

All of which goes to show that the horror flick may often be a barometer of pervasive social concerns, which brings us to a recent entry in the genre. Cloverfield begins inauspiciously enough at a going-away party thrown for Rob (Michael Stahl-David). The goings on at the preppy shindig are photographed by a friend, Hud (T. J. Miller) with a hand-held camera, so that the cinematic effect is an impossibly jittery one. The technique is aimed at capturing action in an off-handed or incidental way, as was innovated in The Blair Witch Project. Cut to the chase. A gigantic behemoth is destroying Manhattan, while Rob and his friends rush through streets and skyscrapers in their attempts to elude its devastation. The ambience of horrific threat is all the more magnified because of its resonance with 9/11, the actual Manhattan catastrophe that altered a sense of national vulnerability forever. Horror on a huge scale no longer pursues us only in film. And coming to terms with it has ushered in a new era of scariness scarcely hinted at in horror flicks.