Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman
Often,
the titles and captions of horror movie posters are suggestive.
They're enticing. They invite their viewers' minds to wander, to
speculate, to imagine—and, of course, we imagine much worse things,
much worse monsters, than those even the most talented special
effects wizards and screenwriters are apt to show us. There's no
substitute, when it comes to fear, for the human imagination itself,
as H. G. Wells implies in his masterful short story “The Red Room.”
But
this post isn't about short stories or novels or horror movies. It's
about the suggestiveness of words combined with images, which
together explain nothing, state little, and evoke much.
The
poster for Dark Was the Night
evokes terror, the fear of the unknown, both with its title (notice
the use of the past tense), which refers to “dark” and “night,”
which can be understood both literally and figuratively, suggesting
both nocturnal hours and evil, and the poster's caption, “Evil's
Roots Run Deep. . . .”
The
text is accompanied by an image of a man wearing a uniform, probably
that of a local police department, alone in a forest. Alone, he holds
a flashlight in one hand, a rifle in the other, the tool parallel to
the weapon. Technology and nature are thus symbolically juxtaposed.
But
there is another juxtaposition, too: that of man and beast. Despite
his flashlight and his rifle—despite his technological
advantages—the hunter has become the hunted, his prey, a gigantic
creature that looks simultaneously both fleshly and earthborn, has
become the hunter. The creature, which may or may not have a head (if
it does, it is low, below chest level, as if the creature crouches,
although its body appears to be erect), is behind
the human. In the wilderness, technology has its limits; in the
forest primeval, engineering and its effects count but little, if at
all.
The
poster suggests that, in hunting the creature of the woods, the human
may, in fact, be hunting himself, or the beast within himself, for
its placement suggests that it could be rising from the man, a
shadowy figure as much flesh and blood as leaf and dirt. It is the
beast within, his on bestial nature, perhaps, that the man hunts, and
it is this bestial element of himself which hunts him.
The poster recalls Friedrich Nietzsche's warning, “Beware that, when
fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster... for when
you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” This idea of the beast within is reinforced
by the letter “i” in “Night,” which is an image of a stunted
tree, its branches superimposed upon the limbs of the forest's trees,
its roots forming a clawed hand reaching down, into the portrait of
man and beast.
By
explaining nothing, but evoking much, the poster invites viewers to
form their own explanations, to make the text and image mean whatever
they think or want them to mean. In this sense, movie posters become
Rorschach inkblots or a sort, by which, in projecting one's own
thoughts and feelings upon the poster, viewers identify the monster
in themselves (just as I myself have done, no doubt, in explaining
such posters as Rorschach tests).
A
review
of the movie shows a few of my interpretations of the poster's
significance are false in terms of what actually happens in the film.
However, there is
a lawman—two in fact: Deputy Donny Saunders and Sheriff Paul
Shields, and technology is
represented by the tools the victims, a group of loggers, use, who do
encounter a monster. The movie makes plain some of the monster's
characteristics
and behaviors: it snatches the local townspeople's cattle, so,
presumably, it's a carnivore, and it “leaves hoof prints in the
dirt” and “scratch marks on metals,” suggesting it has
powerful, sharp claws.
What
about my supposition that the monster arises from the lawman (or from
human beings in general)? A couple of the characters suffer from chronic guilt concerning a child for whose lose they blame themselves, but the film doesn't play on their guilt as a symbolic “root” of the monster and the evil it does; instead, New York Times critic Andy Webster points out, it's a sort of “ecologically minded demon that’s some kind of godless instrument of the Devil,” as is suggested by the “tree dweller['s] . . . fighting encroaching overdevelopment on its habitat
(attacking those who don’t 'respect the land,' says a part-Shawnee
bartender)” and its subsequent attack upon “huddled citizens seeking refuge in a
church, as if to assault their faith.”
For Webster, this implicit explanation of the creature's motives, if not its nature, doesn't work well: Even in a horror movie, that’s hard to believe. ” My own idea, that the lawman's own character is the source in which the monster is rooted, seems a better explanation. It worked well for Robert Louis Stevenson, after all.
The creature seems to remain mysterious,
although some suggest it might be the devil or a demon, and one
reviewer sees it as a contemporary version of Spring-heeled
Jack, “as similar creature” that terrorized the population of
Devon, England, in the mid 1800s. This same creature, “or something
similar,” apparently “made its way to America,” where it became
“known as the Jersey Devil.”
Both
creatures have interesting (and varied) histories, but neither seems
to have arisen, Mr. Hyde fashion, out of their human, Dr. Jekyll,
counterparts, so, here, my imagination doesn't dovetail with the
movie's plot, but, then, the imagination often doesn't, which is one
reason, perhaps, that we often say the imagination provides images
not only different from, but superior to, many a movie and, for that
matter, many a monster.