Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 28, 1993 TAG: 9310270016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ART DURBANO NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Marion has put in for the night at the out-of-the-way Bates Motel, situated down the hill from the creaky old house occupied by the motel manager, childlike Norman Bates, and his mother.
Tired from her travels - and unaware that Norman is able to spy on her - Marion decides to take a shower ...
Everyone knows what happens next. It's one of the scariest moments in the history of the cinema. No one who has seen it is likely to forget it.
That's the effect the classic chillers have on us - they scare the daylights out of us and then have us coming back for more.
How do they do it? Why are scary movies able to raise the hair on the backs of our necks screening after screening?
First and foremost, makers of horror films know what scares us. The best chillers begin with our fears and phobias, our suspicions and fantasies - the stuff that spooks us.
Hollywood takes our most morbid imaginings and then follows them relentlessly - to their obvious, if oh-so-twisted conclusions. Here are some examples:
\ Real-life fears
Does that young woman - the one living alone down the hall from you - seem a bit strange?
In Roman Polanski's classic 1965 shocker "Repulsion," she is absolutely creepy.
Polanski cleverly manipulates our deep-rooted fear of the unknown neighbor, the loner, and pushes us to the edge of our seats.
Ever see an unlikely-looking guy thumbing a ride and wonder if he's dangerous?
As played by Rutger Hauer in "The Hitcher" (1986), he is definitely dangerous. This movie redefines the word violent, and anyone who sees it will think twice before stopping for a stranger.
\ Fear of nature
Mother Nature running amok definitely scares us.
Snakes and spiders, bats and worms, not to mention giant gorillas from Skull Island, are not the kinds of things we want to bump into while walking to the corner mailbox. Nobody likes the idea of something chomping on him.
If Steven Spielberg had never made "Jaws" (1975), people would still be plunging into the ocean without a care.
But Spielberg did make "Jaws," and there are plenty of people who have confined their swimming to pools ever since.
This past summer's "Jurassic Park" is just Spielberg up to his old tricks - preying on our fears that something will go wrong with the creatures at a new high-tech theme park.
\ Fear of the bogyman
Whether it's the Creature from the Black Lagoon doing the 400-meter backstroke or King Kong lugging Fay Wray to his appointment with destiny atop the Empire State Building, there's an indisputable chill that goes through us when a real monster is on the loose.
The sandworms in "Tremors" (1990), the title beast in "Alien" (1979) and the cyborg in "The Terminator" (1984) are all figures out of a nightmare. They won't stop until we're dead, just like the nightmares won't stop until we wake up.
Monsters scare us most effectively when they are flesh-and-blood people (if not exactly human beings). The Wolf Man, the Mummy and Frankenstein's monster are good examples.
In the hands of Hollywood's more imaginative filmmakers, their descendants have the power to scare us even more. That latter-day Mummy, Jason, the maniac in the hockey mask (from the "Friday the 13th" movies) and the mordant Freddy Krueger (from "The Nightmare on Elm Street" films) are the stuff of nightmares too.
Vampires also do a good job of scaring us. Some of the best horror movies ever made have been vampire movies.
Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 retelling of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" pulled out all the stops, giving us all the sexual tension - and sexual terror - of the original novel.
The story of Dracula, of course, has its roots in the 19th century, as does the genre of horror.
If today's chillers can be said to have ancestors, they are the Gothic horror tales of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Stoker himself.
That tradition is alive and well in Hollywood in films that are overloaded with gory special effects, leaving no mutilation or dismemberment to the imagination.
In the hands of a director like John Carpenter ("Halloween," 1978), a horror film can be delectably spine-chilling.
\ A mirror of our times
Another major factor in great horror is the way the films parallel their times.
It's no coincidence that the shattering effects of the stock-market crash combined to provide the first boomlet in horror movies.
The Zeitgeist of the 1930s was anxiety, and movies such as "Dracula" (1931), "Frankenstein" (1931) and "The Invisible Man" (1933) are set in worlds that are clearly out of whack.
In the 1950s, people lived in genuine fear of nuclear holocaust and men from Mars.
The A-bomb kept on killing long after the initial explosion and nuclear fallout became one of the decade's great all-purpose villains.
Fallout created both "The Amazing Colossal Man" (1957) and the "Incredible Shrinking Man" (1957), turned common ants into "Them!" (1954) and unleashed Godzilla.
Meanwhile, the irrational fear of UFOs was exploited to the hilt in movies such as Howard Hawks' "The Thing" (1951) and Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956).
\ Suspending disbelief
Before taking this too seriously, keep in mind that there is always a broad swath of irrationality in horror movies.
For instance, "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991) makes a poor manual for how to catch a serial killer. Asking Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) to help nab "Buffalo Bill" would be like asking David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz to help catch Ted Bundy.
Still, "Lambs" is classic horror. It has fabulous performances and it hits close to the bone: retelling the classic damsel-in-distress story with a modern ending.
The scenes are claustrophobic (something else many of us find frightening) and shot with a brilliant use of close-ups.
Lecter is, of course, a madman. He's presented as one from the start.
In Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980), however, we get to watch a man go mad.
"The Shining" works because it touches on a real fear many of us have: Could that weird man be my father? My husband?
Add the plot device of isolating Jack Torrance and his family in an empty snowbound resort hotel, throw in Jack Nicholson's superb performance, and "The Shining" doesn't even need its rooms full of blood and weird apparitions to be scary.
\ Don't take that shower
Finally, there's the acknowledged masterpiece, Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" (1960).
Up until its halfway point, "Psycho" is conventional Hitchcockian drama, with the usual icy blonde in the lead. Then Marion decides to take that shower.
The shower scene is the most-described and -debated few seconds of film in Hollywood history.
Do we really see nudity? Yes, if you stop and view the scene frame-by-frame. But we never see the knife go in; instead, we're manipulated by the quick cuts and Bernard Herrmann's screeching violins so that the net effect is so real that we're sure we have seen a murder.
Unmasking the murderer takes up the second half of the film.
But here, too, Hitchcock has saved a kicker - a last shot of Mother sitting in her chair viewed from behind. The chair is turned and we suddenly know all too well the relationship between Norman and "Mother."
Psychologists say that this kind of cinematic make-believe is good for us; it convinces us that we're mastering our real fears.
But the truth is that horror classics don't soothe at all. Their most chilling images stay stuck in the nooks and crannies of our collective unconscious like peanut butter on the roof of our mouths.
Indeed, find a horror flick that keeps on scaring you and you'll know you've got a good one.
\ HALLOWEEN HORROR FILM SCHEDULE
The following films are scheduled to air on cable television on or before Sunday:
"The Black Cat," Sunday on Sci-Fi Channel.
"Candyman," Sunday on Showtime.
"Damien: The Omen II," Sunday on Sci-Fi Channel.
"The Evil Dead," Sunday on Sci-Fi Channel.
"Fright Night," Sunday on Sci-Fi Channel.
"The Guardian," Saturday on USA.
"Halloween II," Saturday on USA.
"The Howling," Sunday on Sci-Fi Channel.
"Island of Lost Souls," Saturday on AMC.
"976-EVIL," Friday on USA.
"The Omen," Sunday on Sci-Fi Channel.
"Omen III: The Final Conflict," Saturday on USA.
"Phantasm," Sunday on Sci-Fi Channel.
"Psycho IV," Friday on Showtime.
"Raising Cain," Friday on Showtime.
by CNB