The above-titled episode of The Twilight Zone was the one that scared my then-young mother away from horror forever. Since then, she has walked out of Rosemary’s Baby and Jaws, and the only scary movies she’s agreed to see have been Kwaidan (which was her idea), and The Devil’s Backbone. “The Eye of the Beholder” is one of the most famous episodes too, because the perspective-trick and ending shock was so effective, and did not rely on particularly great costume design. Imagine the episode if it had begun with the hideous doctors discussing what this woman would look like after plastic surgery. Yes, the initial ugliness would probably repulse viewers, but there would be no shock, no horror.
My roommate and I watched two back-to-back horror movies last night that happened to be playing on channel 7: Darkness and Pitch Black. Darkness is a standard vaguely Lovecraftian spook movie, following The Others in formula: insane adults, creepy ghost children, lots of candles and rain in an old gothic house. Pitch Black is more Alien – science fiction, set on a planet that a people-carrier craft has crashed on, with miniature bat-like monsters on the surface and large xenomorph monsters below. A few nights before we watched Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows. Book of Shadows follows teens that turn on each other on a tour of the original movie’s haunted woods, but here the cinematography is standard instead of make-believe-amateur. All use CG. None of them are very scary.
We ended up talking about how a reliance on computers has ruined horror (others have talked about this too – just the other day, Wendell Jamieson did in the NY Times). I could not help comparing Pitch Black to Alien, which was unbelievably made in 1979. 1979. 1979. I still can’t get over it. It, along with its 1986 sequel, are the most effective science fiction horror I’ve ever seen. How did they achieve this with the paltry special effects they had back then? Filmmaking. Craftsmanship. And a lot of investment in one sculpted, tangible “alien”. The xenomorph was never really shown, but when it did make an appearance, sleek black shine against the duller metal of the ship, always ensconced in shadow and its own steam, jaws opening… just looking up information on Alien makes me shiver. H.R. Giger, the xenomorph’s designer, is a fantastic mad-genius and an actual artist. Here’s the trailer, which perfectly encapsulates the horror and terror of Alien – by never showing the xenomorph itself. Even the trailer scares me to hell and back. Contrast that with Pitch Black, where weightless pseudo-xenomorphs – so many of them that they look like a flock of birds – sail through an underground cave, their intangible computerization so evident that it’s impossible to fear them at all. Here’s the Pitch Black trailer – despite the metal music and blinking expository text, it is a clear and inferior rip of the Alien trailer.
Spook movies have an easier time incorporating CG, because they can add textured layers of fuzzy dream-space that muffle the incongruencies of the CG and make everything look a little bit awkward, disjointed, fantastical, like you’re watching it through a filter of smoke – that’s why Darkness didn’t seem as awful, and it’s also the reason that Silent Hill‘s creepies, like Pyramid Head (who rather resembles the aliens in Pitch Black) are creepy even though they are clearly computer-generated. Spook movies that don’t slather on texture and insist on realism usually just end up showing their flaws – as in Book of Shadows, where the audience becomes very aware that they are watching something that is in no way real, and the suspension of disbelief is broken – unless they do not show anything, as was the original Blair Witch Project‘s method, or they are following the J-Horror shock-and-awe, uber-real method of bludgeoning the audience with disturbing imagery.
Science fiction, on the other hand, has to be realistic unless it wants to devolve into fantasy. That is an essential of futuristic fiction: the glaring red light of H.A.L. in 2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps the ultimate symbol of this. The future, as both Hollywood and “Soviet” Russia imagined it, is cold, barren, steely, empty, and unabashedly industrial. Books may or may not have been burned. True, there are some sci-fi movies that deviate from this: the happy types, like Independence Day, which belong more to action-adventure than to science fiction. Otherwise, our fate has been sealed, and it is a world of gritty, heavy realism, monsters you can feel and smell. Ironic, I suppose, that there is really no room in science fiction-horror for computer generation.
Doubly ironic is the insistence that Darkness and Pitch Black have on the light vs. dark tired theme – “stay in the light”, Vin Diesel says in Pitch Black; “the darkness eats my pencils,” the little boy complains in Darkness. Of course, as a narrative theme, this is the ultimate cliche – absolutist codes, with no room for error or deviation, but yet not enough time or not enough respect for the intelligence of the audience to even expand on what “light” and “dark” really mean. It sort of reminds me of the terror alerts we have in the U.S. that base their colors on traffic signals – Red = Fear, and that’s all we need to know. It’s a very authoritarian style of filmmaking, the light vs. dark thing. It’s ironic because the very emphasis on darkness actually necessitates light and destroys the fear-illusion that cannot be supported by their subpar computer graphics.
The evil things are afraid of the light, meaning the main characters go around carrying flashlights or radioactive glow tubes. My roommate’s reaction to this was: “Good – draw more attention to yourself”. That is a plot functionality problem, and it implies that the monsters do not need light to see. Regarding the ghosts of Darkness, I can believe it; regarding the biological aliens in Pitch Black, who do not seem to have any method of generating their own light, I don’t. There’s another consequence of this light vs. dark dilemma, though – by hoisting glaring bright torches all the time, for the monsters to be seen at all, they must be up-close and personal, in a swath of unforgiving light that lays bare how very, very unreal and computerized they are. This kind of lighting eliminates shadows as a tool, which is probably why there are no torchlight-against-pitch-black scenes in Alien. The proper realm of horror is in the shadows, in the space between worlds. That’s where the monsters become real.
p. s. the fact that there are some members of our generation who enjoy Pitch Black is something that makes my roommate and I quite sad. I could write a whole ‘nother entry on the sexual implications of this – that Pitch Black is ultimately a very macho movie, where maximum security prisoner Vin Diesel struts around, actually wrestling the aliens in his ripped physique (my roommate and I were playing the “search for the phallic symbol” game, and decided that Vin Diesel is a phallic symbol, in and of himself) and the waif-ish captain of the ship, Radha Mitchell (a primly named Caroline), demonstrates her leadership qualities by self-sacrifice. And that Alien features the classic sci-fi no-bullshit heroine, Ellen Ripley, one of my favorite film characters ever. And I could speculate on what this says about my generation, that it produced Pitch Black. But like I said – that’s a whole ‘nother entry.
Life Out Of Balance 