Why, Yes, I Do Want to See Something Really Scary

By Sutton R. Stokes, 6-16-08

One of the great things about Missoula is how you can be sitting in Sean Kelly’s at 9:13 p.m. on a Friday evening, decide to catch a 9:30 movie, walk 10 blocks home to get the car, and still be settling into your luxurious stadium seat at the Carmike 10 before the previews have finished playing.

The movie was The Strangers, which my neighbors Vin and Casey decided would be just the thing to see before they set off on Saturday morning for a weekend in remote back country somewhere up around Lolo Pass, and which I just had to see on general principles, being a fan of scary movies going way back.

Any other scary-movie fans out there know that to be a scary-movie fan is to endure disappointment after disappointment. Another way of putting this is that the vast majority of movies advertised as being scary actually aren’t. In general, it seems that the best Hollywood can do on the scary-movie front is to produce some chills for about 45 minutes before devolving into implausibility and/or an over-reliance on special effects. Someone please hold the hands of any computer animators out there while I explain this once and for all: CGI IS NOT AND NEVER WILL BE SCARY. (This is different from saying that it can’t ever be fun.)

Neither are rubber suits, for that matter, the fatal flaw with one of the otherwise more promising (and, at least initially, terrifying) mainstream horror movies I’ve seen recently, The Descent. The first stroke of brilliance in the making of this film was the decision to have the action play out in an environment that many of us would find terrifying even without the addition of a tribe of albino fang-toothed bogey men, i.e., deep underground in a trackless maze of narrow caves and passageways. Someone’s forgotten the map, the batteries in the headlamps are running low, and is it our imagination or is there someone else — something else — down here with us?

The second stroke of brilliance in the making of The Descent is the light touch the filmmakers use in introducing this other presence, although on second thought I’m loathe to call it brilliance as compared to, say, paying attention to basic storytelling principles that have been well-known to humankind since the days of the ancient Greek playwrights. That is, use basic human psychology and the power of suggestion to let the audience scare themselves: fleeting glimpses of something in the distance, flashes of sickly white way off at the edge of a flashlight beam, that kind of thing.

It really does work. When the first Descent beast is finally ready for his closeup, looming up behind one of the women in the dark for a full beat or two before any of the spelunkers notices him, my fear and apprehension had been ratcheted up to such a high point that I actually sort of half-screamed out loud, pretty much the only time I’ve ever done that watching a horror movie.

But it’s all downhill from there, as if the director worked only from the beginning of the film up to that scene and then turned the making of the rest of the movie over to a committee of people less interested in good old-fashioned scary storytelling than they were interested in (1) displaying the craft of the costume makers and (2) showing the female main characters kicking monster ass in the virtuosic manner of Lara Croft.

True to the Hollywood formula, The Strangers turns out to be passably frightening only for the first half of the film, until the number of stupid mistakes made by the boneheaded main characters — Kristen and James — mounts high enough that it no longer feels ethical to root for them, out of concern for the gene pool.

Before production companies invest in mainstream releases like this — particularly releases timed for the summer “blockbuster” season — they have to convince themselves they will be making some money, and for that to happen the movie has to resonate with elements in the general zeitgeist. It’s a mistake to psychoanalyze a whole culture based on one movie, and of course the filmmakers and funders could have guessed wrong. But there seems to be a warning here about the danger of relying so much on other people for your safety that you lose all sound instincts on this front yourself, for instance when James mentions waiting for the police to come even though neither he nor Kristen ever called 911 and all the phones are dead.

On the other hand, maybe a horror movie wouldn’t be a horror movie if the main characters did everything realistically and right. Maybe the essence of the horror form is the misstep that has the audience thinking don’t go in there! Maybe the point of the form is to let us imagine I would have survived that as we walk back to our cars.

As Vin, Casey and I filed out of the theater, we were discussing the movie in these terms, and Vin held up No Country for Old Men as an example of the anti-horror film. In the early scenes of that movie, you might find yourself thinking don’t take the briefcase. But Llewelyn immediately comes off as so competent and good at this kind of thing that it is easy to imagine he will come out on top. Indeed, speaking of Hollywood formulas, the basic action-movie template leads you to assume he will.

Which is why I found what some people called the “unsatisfying” ending of No Country so satisfying and why I was so surprised and gratified when it won the Academy Award. To paraphrase Michelle Obama, for the first time in my adult life, I was proud of the Academy.

So we drove home. Given that the film revolves around a couple of hapless and effete city kids being menaced in a lonely house out in the woods, you might be thinking that I would identify and find myself unnerved about returning, alone, to my own dark empty dwelling after the movie was over.

True, I was apprehensive as I turned the key in the lock and watched the front door swing sloooowly open, but I was actually less afraid of the possibility of encountering some hulking mouth-breather wearing a potato sack on his head than I was worried that there would be a fresh pile of cat turds waiting for me on the living room floor.

But that’s a whole different story.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.