Friday, March 7, 2008
Visualizing Horror: Movie Posters
For writers, horror is primarily a matter of action described in words. For illustrators, horror is primarily a matter of image depicted in color and shape. A writer has a few sentences with which to snare the unwary reader’s attention, plunging him or her into the action of the story, an illustrator a few seconds in which to ambush the wandering eye. To do so, creators of horror posters, in addition to traditional design techniques and artistic principles, rely upon creating both a sense of the bizarre and an air of mystery. Their pictures pose more questions than answers, arousing viewers’ curiosity and, their creators hope, make them want to see the films that the posters advertise.
In the early days of horror movies, posters were more verbose, as wordy as they were pictorial. Mostly, adjectives suggested the traits of the featured creature and, perhaps, how the moviegoer should feel about the monster. A poster for The Blob read “Indescribable. . . Indestructible. . . Nothing Can Stop it. . . THE BLOB!” The picture showed a massive, blood-red gelatinous mass enveloping a passenger train from which horrified travelers seek to escape on foot while one of them, a woman, screams in the foreground.
Another early poster, even more loquacious, shows a young blonde woman, lying supine. Facing the viewer, she reaches out with her right hand while she attempts to fend off a monster with her left, a look of abject horror upon her face. Although the text suggests she is being raped, the monster is depicted only as a demonic head, out of which tentacles grow, Gorgon like, some ending in suckers, others in animal skulls, and still others in the heads of bizarre beasts. The text reads, “A few years ago in Dunwich a half-witted girl bore illegitimate twins. One of them was almost human! THE DUNWICH HORROR.”
For films that are associated with a particular person, place or thing, such as The Amityville Horror, the action of which takes place inside a haunted house of sorts which is of a distinctive design, the poster depicts the house, with its eyelike windows looming in the background while, at the center of the foreground, the silhouette of a male figure approaches the viewer, carrying an object that is difficult to identify clearly but may be a rifle. Clearly, the gunman and the spooky-looking mansion are related in some way, but how? Why is he armed, and what sway does the apparently haunted house hold over him?
A more recent film, The Descent, shows six women, the characters who explore the movie’s uncharted cave, who, by the unlikely postures they’ve adopted, form a human skull. “Scream your last breath,” the text advises. How are the women related, and why, collectively, are they posed to depict a human skull? Will they be the deaths of one another? If so, how? And why? And into what will they descend?
A poster for Friday the 13th is divided in half horizontally. The left side of the upper half shows the close-up of a young woman’s head as she screams. The right side of this same half of the poster shows a cabin, lit from within, at the edge of a deep woods; a full moon glides across a partly cloudy, starlit sky. The upper and lower halves of the poster are divided by paper, perhaps representing a diary. Words, in red, on the folded-down sheet of paper on the right read, “On Friday the 13th they begin to die horribly. One. . . by one.” The left side of the lower half of the poster depicts typical events at Camp Crystal Lake, and, thrusting in from the right edge of the same portion of the poster, a hand holds a sharp-edged hunting knife. The juxtaposition of innocent fun at a summer camp with an image of brutal death creates a sense of dread.
A poster for Hellraiser shows the close-up of a man’s head into which, porcupine-style, many nails have been hammered, all to the same relatively shallow depth so that he resembles a human pincushion, giving literal expression to the term “pinhead.” Between the nails, lines of blood are visible, dividing his face into a grid pattern. Who hammered the nails into the man’s head and cut the gridlines into his face, and why? Who is this mysterious “hell raiser”?
For The Hills Have Eyes 2, a vaguely feminine body, trussed up inside a sheet of canvas, and secured by a rope, is being dragged across the desert by a male figure, dressed somewhat like a mummy, whose back is all the viewer sees. Directly behind the dragged figure, a hand pushes through the soil, clawing at the ground. What the hell is going on here?
A film called simply Horror shows a white-collared priest wearing a cross, except that, in place of a human head, he has the head of a long-horned goat, which is emblematic of the devil. The poster’s text reads, “Expect nothing less than sheer. . . HORROR.” The picture is as humorous as it is horrible, suggesting that the movie may be a bit campy, but it does make the viewer wonder what the satanic priest’s motive is and what plan of action he hopes to execute. Is he merely a deceiver--a wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it were--or is he something much worse?
Jeepers Creepers 2, a film in which a serial killer collects his victims’ eyes, shows what appears to be an orange sky in which a series of crimson lightning bolts flash and out of which emerges the suggestion of a human face, the most distinctive feature of which is its open mouth and teeth. Under the movie’s title, the caption reads, “Feed your fear.” Upon reflection, it becomes obvious that the orange sky and red lightning bolts are really an image such as is produced by a retinal scan--the poster’s viewer is looking at his or her own eyeball and, at the same time, into the face of the serial killer who collects just such trophies. The design for this poster seems to take into consideration the old wives’ tale that the last image that a murder victim sees--that of his or her killer--is imprinted upon his or her retina forever. This poster creates a sense of immediacy, once one sees that the outer world--the sky and lightning--is really the inner world and that, consequently, one might be viewing what will soon become one’s own death
Alfred Hitchcock showed Psycho audiences just how frightening vulnerability can be when he had knife-wielding Norman Bates attack a hotel guest as she was showering in her bathroom. The movie Slither capitalizes upon this same sense of vulnerability. A bather has left her bathroom door ajar, and the viewer--or voyeur--sees her bent knee, rising above the side of the tub in which she bathes, presumably relaxed, unaware of the large, wormlike creature that, poised upon the rim of the tub, is about to plunge into her bathwater while, behind it, others ascend the side of the bathtub--and still more of the loathsome slug-like monstrosities, gathered at the base of the tub, await their turn to join their ilk. The phallic significance of the large worms hardly needs to be mentioned. This poster evokes the fear of both physical and sexual assault.
Sometimes, the movies that such posters advertise actually contain the scenes that the posters depict. For example, the Slither poster suggests that the antagonist--the monster--is going to be a mass of monstrous worms symbolizing, perhaps, the violence of sexual assault, or rape. There is a parasitic worm--a bunch of them, actually--courtesy of a fallen meteorite, which transforms its host--the bathing beauty’s husband, Grant--into a zombie-like monster. There’s sex, too--or a lack thereof--for Grant becomes infected after, refused sex by his wife, Starla, he goes to a local tavern to drown his sorrows, meets a female acquaintance who’s smitten with him, and goes into the woods with her, where, before anything further can happen between them, Grant becomes a host to the alien parasite. At home, he builds a nest for the larvae and, hatching, they possess the townspeople, turning them into zombies as well. Suggesting sexual assault by wormlike creatures, the poster is accurate on a figurative, if not a literal, level.
Of course, it’s not really the task of the poster to provide a faithful and accurate depiction of the movie’s scene; the poster’s task is to sell tickets. To do so, in a few images, digestible by instinct more than reason, within a few seconds, the artwork must create a sense of horror and of fear, and it must also appeal to its viewer’s curiosity by creating an air of mystery that leaves questions unanswered.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Everyday Horrors: Zombies
Suspecting that there might be some truth to the legends of zombies (dead bodies brought back to life through a voodoo spell), Harvard University’s Wade Davis, an ethnobiologist, traveled to Haiti to investigate his theory. Sure enough, he discovered, there is some truth--quite a bit of it, actually--behind the legends of the revenants.
To create a zombie, a voodoo priest, or witch doctor, poisons the victim with a topically applied mixture of frog and puffer fish toxins, which slows both heartbeat and breathing rate to all-but-imperceptible levels. The supposedly deceased person is then buried. Within eight hours, to avoid the “deceased: person’s actual death by suffocation, the body is dug up and the occupant of the grave is administered a Jimson weed paste, which causes a psychotic delirium. The mad revenant is then sold as a slave to a wealthy plantation owner.
The drugs also make the zombies' movements clumsy. They walk in an awkward fashion. They are unable to see well, and they often extend their arms in front of them, feeling their way along to avoid unseen obstacles, just as they are represented as behaving in horror movies.
There's also another type of actual zombie. Known as the philosophical zombie, this version appears in every sense to be just like you and me (well, just like you, anyway), and lives in a world just like yours. There’s only one difference between you and the philosophical zombie. It lacks consciousness, whereas you are a conscious entity (as far as anyone can tell, at least). Its behavior, however, is, or appears to be, just like yours. Philosophical zombies are used in thought experiments concerning the possibility of physicalism and to refine ideas about phenomenalism. As one might suspect with anything pertaining to philosophy, the whole thing become amazingly complicated and rather tedious, but the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains all any sane person (or zombie) wants to know but is afraid to ask, and we direct those with sufficient courage and curiosity to the university’s online reference work (just click the volume’s title; it links to the article), which discusses the “idea of zombies, zombies and physicalism, the conceivability argument,” whether conceivability must involve possibility, and related issues and concerns.
Films which feature zombies, such as Night of the Living Dead (1963), Zombie (1979), Day of the Dead (1985), Re-Animator (1985), Dead Alive (1992), Army of Darkness (1993), Cemetery Man (1994), Bio Zombie (1998), 28 Days Later (2002), and Dawn of the Dead (2004), therefore, are not quite as inane as they might seem otherwise. In fact, you should be careful if you plan to vacation in Haiti any time soon. We hear there’s a labor shortage there, and employers are looking into innovative ways to fill vacancies in the workforce.
Note: A number of zombie movies are in the public domain and may be downloaded free or watched free online. For further information, visit these links:
“Everyday Horrors: Zombies” is part of a series of “everyday horrors” that will be featured on Chillers and Thrillers: The Fiction of Fear. These “everyday horrors” continue, in many cases, to appear in horror fiction, literary, cinematographic, and otherwise.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Unfinished Plots: The Cliffhanger
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer series is famous for its cliffhangers. Charles Dickens invented this literary device, which ends a narrative sequence, such as a chapter in a novel or an episode in a television series, on a note of heart-pounding suspense that virtually guarantees that the reader will read the next installment or that the viewer will tune in again next week to watch the next episode and see how everything turns out. Constant cliffhangers keep readers reading and viewers viewing.
The first season of Buffy ended with the death of the protagonist as The Master, an ancient vampire with hypnotic powers, bit into Buffy’s neck before letting her unconscious body fall into a pond, where she drowned. Was this the end for Buffy? Would The Master gain control of the world, ruling the earth as he’d planned? What would become of the slayer’s friends? If Buffy was to return, how would such a wonder be effected? With an ending like this, viewers were bound to tune in again when the second semester began, several months later--and tune in, they did.
In “What’s My Line, Part I” (episode 21, season 2), a trio of assassins, “some” of which “are human, some. . . not,” are hired by Spike to kill Buffy so that the slayer won’t be able to interfere with Spike’s and Drusilla’s plan to kill Buffy’s vampire boyfriend Angel to restore Drusilla to full strength. Aware that “a very dark power is about to rise in Sunnydale,” Mr. Buto, the Watcher of a second slayer, Kendra, dispatches her to Sunnydale to assist Buffy in thwarting the threatening catastrophe. Buffy is awakened by Kendra, who attacks her as she lies asleep, in Angel’s bed, informing Buffy that she is “Kendra, the Vampire Slayer.” Since the series, several times previously, has made it clear that there is only one slayer in the world at the same time, viewers want to know all they can learn about this young woman who tries to pass herself off as a slayer. Kendra’s appearance and the fight between her and Buffy that ensues is a cliffhanger extraordinaire.
“What's My Line, Part II” (episode 22, season 2) also ends with a powerful cliffhanger. After the audience gets to know Kendra and to care about her, she’s killed by Drusilla who, after hypnotizing her, as The Master had hypnotized Buffy, slits her throat. Informed by Angel, with whom Buffy is fighting, that he has lured Buffy away from her friends as a ruse, Buffy dashes back to the Sunnydale High School library, where she has left her friends, to discover that Xander Harris is unconscious and that her fellow slayer has been killed. As she kneels beside Kendra’s corpse, holding her hand, the sound of a gun being cocked is heard as a voice yells, “Freeze!” Buffy jerks her head around, and the words “To be continued” appear on the screen. Is Kendra really dead? Will she be brought back to life somehow, as Buffy was when she died? Who’s holding a gun on Buffy, and what does he or she want? Will Buffy be able to avenge Kendra’s death? Can she stop Angel and the other vampires? Will Xander be all right? What about Willow, who was knocked out by a bookcase's having fallen on top of her? Cordelia Chase fled for her life. Did she escape? These unanswered questions have but one meaning: to find out what happens next, viewers will have to tune in again, next week.
In “Becoming, Part I” (epidie 33, season 2), Angel seeks to awaken the demon Acathla, whom a virtuous knight has turned into stone by plunging an enchanted sword into his heart. He has invoked the ritual that is supposed to awaken the demon, but it didn’t work. To find out why, he dispatched Drusilla and other vampires to abduct Buffy’s watcher, Rupert Giles. After a fight in which Xander and Willow Rosenberg were injured, Kendra was killed, and Giles was knocked unconscious, the watcher is brought to Angel, who tortures him in an effort to learn the secret of awakening Acathla. Assuming the form of Jenny Calendar, the teacher with whom Giles was in love before Angel killed her, Drusilla persuades Giles to tell her how Angel can awaken the demon. In a confrontation with Buffy, as Willow tries to reverse the spell that removed the curse that had restored Angel’s soul, Angel is stabbed with a sword and sent to hell after Willow succeeds in restoring his soul, because he has already opened a vortex that can be closed only the same way that it was opened--with Angel’s blood--and, if it is not closed, it will suck the world into hell. Horrified, Buffy looks on as her lover, his soul restored, is sucked into hell, where he will spend eternity, suffering unimaginable misery. This event changes everything for her, and the episode ends with Buffy aboard a bus, leaving her hometown. Where will she go, and what will she do? Has she given up her duties as the slayer? What will become of Sunnydale, her mother, and her friends without her? Can anything restore her spiritual health? This episode, like many others in not only this season of the series, but also in many episodes of every other season of the series, ends with a tantalizing cliffhanger.
Season 2 of the series teaches many other lessons about how to write an engrossing (and, sometimes, a gross) horror story (albeit one with comedic moments to leaven the terror), but, in this post, we’ve chosen to focus on the cliffhanger, a powerful narrative technique invented by one of the world’s greatest writers, Charles Dickens, as a means of keeping his readers coming back for more. The technique worked for Dickens. It worked for Joss Whedon. It has worked for countless other writers, and it will work for you. It’s especially effective when a writer employs it with the deliberation that Edgar Allan Poe developed his short stories, plotting backward from the end of the tale, as he explains in “The Philosophy of Composition,” which we will examine in a future post.
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