![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I have a love/hate relationship with horror. I appreciate the craft it takes to scare someone with words. I even enjoy a good spine-tingler now and again. Unfortunately I lack a sufficient distancing mechanic to really indulge in it, especially when it comes to images and film. I get tired of rebooting my brain from nasty places so in the end I don't partake of horror very often. I tend to regard it as something fascinating but best studied from a distance, rather like train wrecks or Republicans.
That doesn't mean, though, that I don't have an appreciation of the craft. I actually spend a decent amount of time now and then studying the craft of storytelling, of which horror is a valuable part. After all, the fight-or-flight instinct is powerful and close to the fore in people. If I can figure out how to scare you, how to involve you and trigger that, then I'm halfway to getting you to buy off on much subtler responses such as sorrow, or joy, or vague misgivings. Given that I'd actually like to be a published author one day, it's an important field of study and one I'm still plugging away at, generally more slowly than I'd like.
When I was a kid, my dad was the cable TV guy and system owner for 4 towns, systems he built largely by hand one at a time. We had a TV in nearly every room, an anomaly in those heady days of yore. My dad would use 13 inch TVs in the truck with him to pick up signal leaks and to tap into the line and look for signal quality... it was his troubleshooting device, basically. When they got older and the picture quality degraded enough so that he couldn't use them to make out fine signal changes any more, my brother and I would inherit them. At the age of 12, I had a color TV AND cable in my room, all but HBO. I could watch HBO, but only in the living room and only with my parents permission. What I could do without permission, though, was pore over the HBO guides we had lying around the house and office. Back then they'd give a couple hundred words to new releases and between 20-30 for old flims. I got to be quite the study of older movies, and there were many I ended up seeing at least part of. One that I saw very little of was The Omen. The whole thing with the little boy being the antichrist... that just scared the beejeebus out of me. Not that I really knew what the antichrist was, mind you, but a little boy who made bad things happen to people? Like, really really bad things? That just tapped into whole realms of scary for me, being little more than a kid myself. Between The Omen and the Boys From Brazil, two movies that have very little actually in common but which struck an odd thematic harmony for me at the time, I had imaginative fodder to suit me for ages -- and a unique pair of mental bookends to that period of TV viewing in my life.
So, yes. The Omen was really incredibly scary back in the day. Now, however, we have the remake -- in many ways a literal word for word use of the original script and shots, and yet the punch it packs is apparently negligible according to multiple reviews.* There is something it lacks, something that made the first one a legitimate exercise in scaring you and made it an actual movie rather than a flash in the pan. For what it's worth, the sequals largely lacked this as well to my understanding, but that's not uncommon for sequals. It's rare enough that someone who makes a subsquent film really gets why the first one worked, but here with this remake, such care was taken to preserve the original that we have a rare chance to look at why it worked back then but doesn't today. If the movie was largely the same (barring the difference in acting quality between Gregory Peck and Lee Remick vs. Julia Stiles and whats-his-name), then where's the disconnect happening. (The Exorcist provides a similar opportunity for reflection, and it's one that I'll come back to later.)
There was an article in the P-I recently that reviewed the film. The excerpt I find fascinating is this:
In college, I took a really great class dealing with horror and sci-fi lit. One of the touchstones of the commentary in that class was that successful horror taps into something that's going on in the public unconscious. There's a reason we have cycles in horror films. We'll have a series of monster movies all dealing with traditional themes, then we'll have a lot of ghost movies, then a lot of slasher films, then a lot of creepy kid movies, then some demonic things. They come out in bunches, striding across various forms of media. It's sometimes a case of just jumping on a bandwagon, but more often it's something to do with tapping into the zeitgeist -- simultaneous inspiration. Put out a general scary movie at the wrong time and no one will remember it in a year. Manage to tap into whatever is really bothering us at the time, and BOOM. Instant classic. If people use horror films as sort of a catharsis to deal with what's really bothering them, then what's really bothering them has to appear in some form, however distantly related, in the work as a whole. In very repressed times, vampires and/or slasher films will probably loom large as all that sexual tension and fear bubble to the surface. We place our real terrors on the screen in effigy, screaming at their likeness before banishing them by the end of the film. If you want to know what's bugging us, look at the horror films and novels we're consuming.
Let's look at when the Omen was made. 1976, the bicentennial, the time at which we were coming out of a particularly disillusioning chapter of history but still held onto a degree of innocence. The world was torn between thinking everything was going down in a huge flaming mess (energy crisis, cold war, Carter's election) and that it would all work out fine. It was, in many ways, a time of national adolescence. Belief was scarce and the culture was very secular, relatively speaking. Doubting ourselves, our work, the government were new yet ever-present issues that people had started talking about, but had not yet fully accepted. At the same time, the sudden assumption (if not yet internalized in the national consciousness) was that nothing was as it seemed and we have only ourselves (or duly appointed leaders) to blame. The trend that began in the late sixties with the Vietnam war had nearly changed the character of the US for good... but not quite yet.
Into that we see a trend of classic horror films, starting with Rosemary's Baby in 1968, The Exorcist in 1973, and continuing into 1976 with The Omen. (There's a lot of versions in novels from the period, too, including the ones these films were based on but by no means limited to them.) Here we have films dealing with children that are possessed or otherwise affiliated with demons, hell, or the end of the world. What should be the characters' future is instead corrupted by an outside force, possibly beyond saving. The only hopes presented are to kill or purge the child somehow and begin anew, if they can. Initially skeptical, the characters are quickly shown proof that what they see and understand are real and that they must act or be doomed. In addition, the presence of otherworldly elements is proven, substantially, although they are rooted in what is initially just strange behavior. It's worth noting that "otherworldly" translates to religious/satanic, given the general lack of faith during that period. The Omen pretty much touches on all these things, but is unusual in that in the end, the demon child is the only one left standing and everyone who knew or could stop him has otherwise been killed. This is suitable given it's place at the end of that cycle and yet also indicative of the time. It is the antithesis of the culture from which it sprung, a dark mirror. Its opposite nature in both the assumed background (provable religious certainty) allowed Damien to act as the foil for the fears of the day without drawing too heavily on the causes of those fears. It was perfect.
So let's take that film and put it up against the current social climate, keeping in mind the quote from the article above. For most people today, either knowing or knowing of people who are very upfront about their literal belief in the bible is commonplace. If nothing else, we have our President and his faith-based politics to look at, along with the Religious Right he has so publically courted for the duration of his stay in office. Belief and faith are very real in America currently, a topic of near constant debate in one form or another. Culturally, we tend not to hold with the idea that the world will collapse under its own weight and end at any given time -- rather, there's more likely to be a battle, and being the reigning superpower, we'll come out on top one way or the other. While there may be some who want to hasten the end of the world because they know they're on the winning side, no one outside their factions really believe they'll pull it off. Apathy is more the touchstone of the day than activism. We don't trust our leaders, our companies, our ourselves to any great degree, and anyone who believes otherwise is largely viewed as willfully blind at this point.
What purpose does Damien serve today? What fears does he represent? The background given is, frankly, pretty close to what many profess as a regular belief -- not Satanism, but a firm belief in angels and demons set to guide and torment us. We are a religious society; representing that society on film does nothing to give us a buffer between ourselves and our real-world concerns, but rather subtly reminds us of them. We can't form a sufficient detatchment to allow those fears closer to the surface, so there's no catharsis available. No scare, in other words, or certainly not one that would go beyond a sheer thrill/gore level. We don't fear for the future in the same way, so Damien has no hold over us. Pfft. Another box office bomb.
Now, let's take an alternate view. Let's assume for a moment that we want to film the Omen from a modern perspective. Picture a movie where the parents have a child. The mother may have been assaulted during their time together and it's unsure who the father is, or perhaps it's a troubled pregnancy but the dad knows the child is his. They love the boy dearly, even though there's always something a bit wrong with him... a lack of empathy, an emotional distance from most people. A street preacher stops the couple and says the child is the antichrist. People involved in their lives, in Damien's life, die in tragic accidents -- but nothing that couldn't be explained away. Damien seems largely unaware or unaffected by these things, but then he usually is. The father begins to question whether the child is responsible, if there isn't something really, terribly wrong with him. He thinks he starts to see signs, but they can't be documented or replicated. No one else sees them or hears them. He begins to doubt his own sanity. He isn't a religious man, and yet he can't shake the feeling that his son, whom he loves, is somehow terribly WRONG. He literally can't tell if he's going crazy or finally seeing the truth -- and the audience doesn't know either. Are there really demons? Can the world actually end? Will he kill his child to potentially save the world or will he kill himself to save his child? If he kills himself, is he then playing into the child's hands? He can only act so long as he can keep the secret, but by keeping the secret he can't find out whether or not he's going crazy. What do you do? What does he do?
In place of certainty, doubt. In place of faith, potential insanity. In place of social fears, personal horror. The child possessed or born of external demonic forces is no longer a corrupted future we created, but a blank slate that we may accidentally kill before it can grow into something worthwhile. It's still not perfect -- translations across social periods rarely are. The horror of The Omen was made for another time and translating it ensures that it won't be a perfect fit. Note how much scarier it would seem, though... how much easier it is to connect to that fear, that terror. When you can distill our fears and provide a mirror for them to scamper around in, you provide the distance we need to feel how scary they really are. And that, I believe, is how you scare people. It's the necessary condition that horror requires -- the exigency.
*Please note that I have not seen the remake, nor have I seen all of the old version still. I just haven't gotten around to it. Plus, see the first paragraph.
Aaaand that's enough rambling for today. Off to dance class.
That doesn't mean, though, that I don't have an appreciation of the craft. I actually spend a decent amount of time now and then studying the craft of storytelling, of which horror is a valuable part. After all, the fight-or-flight instinct is powerful and close to the fore in people. If I can figure out how to scare you, how to involve you and trigger that, then I'm halfway to getting you to buy off on much subtler responses such as sorrow, or joy, or vague misgivings. Given that I'd actually like to be a published author one day, it's an important field of study and one I'm still plugging away at, generally more slowly than I'd like.
When I was a kid, my dad was the cable TV guy and system owner for 4 towns, systems he built largely by hand one at a time. We had a TV in nearly every room, an anomaly in those heady days of yore. My dad would use 13 inch TVs in the truck with him to pick up signal leaks and to tap into the line and look for signal quality... it was his troubleshooting device, basically. When they got older and the picture quality degraded enough so that he couldn't use them to make out fine signal changes any more, my brother and I would inherit them. At the age of 12, I had a color TV AND cable in my room, all but HBO. I could watch HBO, but only in the living room and only with my parents permission. What I could do without permission, though, was pore over the HBO guides we had lying around the house and office. Back then they'd give a couple hundred words to new releases and between 20-30 for old flims. I got to be quite the study of older movies, and there were many I ended up seeing at least part of. One that I saw very little of was The Omen. The whole thing with the little boy being the antichrist... that just scared the beejeebus out of me. Not that I really knew what the antichrist was, mind you, but a little boy who made bad things happen to people? Like, really really bad things? That just tapped into whole realms of scary for me, being little more than a kid myself. Between The Omen and the Boys From Brazil, two movies that have very little actually in common but which struck an odd thematic harmony for me at the time, I had imaginative fodder to suit me for ages -- and a unique pair of mental bookends to that period of TV viewing in my life.
So, yes. The Omen was really incredibly scary back in the day. Now, however, we have the remake -- in many ways a literal word for word use of the original script and shots, and yet the punch it packs is apparently negligible according to multiple reviews.* There is something it lacks, something that made the first one a legitimate exercise in scaring you and made it an actual movie rather than a flash in the pan. For what it's worth, the sequals largely lacked this as well to my understanding, but that's not uncommon for sequals. It's rare enough that someone who makes a subsquent film really gets why the first one worked, but here with this remake, such care was taken to preserve the original that we have a rare chance to look at why it worked back then but doesn't today. If the movie was largely the same (barring the difference in acting quality between Gregory Peck and Lee Remick vs. Julia Stiles and whats-his-name), then where's the disconnect happening. (The Exorcist provides a similar opportunity for reflection, and it's one that I'll come back to later.)
There was an article in the P-I recently that reviewed the film. The excerpt I find fascinating is this:
But the fatal flaw of this new "Omen" is the fact that time has not been kind to its concept. With a straight face, the story line asks us to accept the most backward superstition of Catholic mythology, and to root for a man to kill his own child because God demands it of him.
Now that the world is full of people drunk with religious superstition who are out to kill those that they perceive to be "evil" because God demands it of them, this movie loses its ability to thrill us, and just seems another distasteful part of the problem.
The thing is, he has a point. But rather than being the entire comment, it is rather a jumping-off-point as to why somethings scare us at certain times and others don't.In college, I took a really great class dealing with horror and sci-fi lit. One of the touchstones of the commentary in that class was that successful horror taps into something that's going on in the public unconscious. There's a reason we have cycles in horror films. We'll have a series of monster movies all dealing with traditional themes, then we'll have a lot of ghost movies, then a lot of slasher films, then a lot of creepy kid movies, then some demonic things. They come out in bunches, striding across various forms of media. It's sometimes a case of just jumping on a bandwagon, but more often it's something to do with tapping into the zeitgeist -- simultaneous inspiration. Put out a general scary movie at the wrong time and no one will remember it in a year. Manage to tap into whatever is really bothering us at the time, and BOOM. Instant classic. If people use horror films as sort of a catharsis to deal with what's really bothering them, then what's really bothering them has to appear in some form, however distantly related, in the work as a whole. In very repressed times, vampires and/or slasher films will probably loom large as all that sexual tension and fear bubble to the surface. We place our real terrors on the screen in effigy, screaming at their likeness before banishing them by the end of the film. If you want to know what's bugging us, look at the horror films and novels we're consuming.
Let's look at when the Omen was made. 1976, the bicentennial, the time at which we were coming out of a particularly disillusioning chapter of history but still held onto a degree of innocence. The world was torn between thinking everything was going down in a huge flaming mess (energy crisis, cold war, Carter's election) and that it would all work out fine. It was, in many ways, a time of national adolescence. Belief was scarce and the culture was very secular, relatively speaking. Doubting ourselves, our work, the government were new yet ever-present issues that people had started talking about, but had not yet fully accepted. At the same time, the sudden assumption (if not yet internalized in the national consciousness) was that nothing was as it seemed and we have only ourselves (or duly appointed leaders) to blame. The trend that began in the late sixties with the Vietnam war had nearly changed the character of the US for good... but not quite yet.
Into that we see a trend of classic horror films, starting with Rosemary's Baby in 1968, The Exorcist in 1973, and continuing into 1976 with The Omen. (There's a lot of versions in novels from the period, too, including the ones these films were based on but by no means limited to them.) Here we have films dealing with children that are possessed or otherwise affiliated with demons, hell, or the end of the world. What should be the characters' future is instead corrupted by an outside force, possibly beyond saving. The only hopes presented are to kill or purge the child somehow and begin anew, if they can. Initially skeptical, the characters are quickly shown proof that what they see and understand are real and that they must act or be doomed. In addition, the presence of otherworldly elements is proven, substantially, although they are rooted in what is initially just strange behavior. It's worth noting that "otherworldly" translates to religious/satanic, given the general lack of faith during that period. The Omen pretty much touches on all these things, but is unusual in that in the end, the demon child is the only one left standing and everyone who knew or could stop him has otherwise been killed. This is suitable given it's place at the end of that cycle and yet also indicative of the time. It is the antithesis of the culture from which it sprung, a dark mirror. Its opposite nature in both the assumed background (provable religious certainty) allowed Damien to act as the foil for the fears of the day without drawing too heavily on the causes of those fears. It was perfect.
So let's take that film and put it up against the current social climate, keeping in mind the quote from the article above. For most people today, either knowing or knowing of people who are very upfront about their literal belief in the bible is commonplace. If nothing else, we have our President and his faith-based politics to look at, along with the Religious Right he has so publically courted for the duration of his stay in office. Belief and faith are very real in America currently, a topic of near constant debate in one form or another. Culturally, we tend not to hold with the idea that the world will collapse under its own weight and end at any given time -- rather, there's more likely to be a battle, and being the reigning superpower, we'll come out on top one way or the other. While there may be some who want to hasten the end of the world because they know they're on the winning side, no one outside their factions really believe they'll pull it off. Apathy is more the touchstone of the day than activism. We don't trust our leaders, our companies, our ourselves to any great degree, and anyone who believes otherwise is largely viewed as willfully blind at this point.
What purpose does Damien serve today? What fears does he represent? The background given is, frankly, pretty close to what many profess as a regular belief -- not Satanism, but a firm belief in angels and demons set to guide and torment us. We are a religious society; representing that society on film does nothing to give us a buffer between ourselves and our real-world concerns, but rather subtly reminds us of them. We can't form a sufficient detatchment to allow those fears closer to the surface, so there's no catharsis available. No scare, in other words, or certainly not one that would go beyond a sheer thrill/gore level. We don't fear for the future in the same way, so Damien has no hold over us. Pfft. Another box office bomb.
Now, let's take an alternate view. Let's assume for a moment that we want to film the Omen from a modern perspective. Picture a movie where the parents have a child. The mother may have been assaulted during their time together and it's unsure who the father is, or perhaps it's a troubled pregnancy but the dad knows the child is his. They love the boy dearly, even though there's always something a bit wrong with him... a lack of empathy, an emotional distance from most people. A street preacher stops the couple and says the child is the antichrist. People involved in their lives, in Damien's life, die in tragic accidents -- but nothing that couldn't be explained away. Damien seems largely unaware or unaffected by these things, but then he usually is. The father begins to question whether the child is responsible, if there isn't something really, terribly wrong with him. He thinks he starts to see signs, but they can't be documented or replicated. No one else sees them or hears them. He begins to doubt his own sanity. He isn't a religious man, and yet he can't shake the feeling that his son, whom he loves, is somehow terribly WRONG. He literally can't tell if he's going crazy or finally seeing the truth -- and the audience doesn't know either. Are there really demons? Can the world actually end? Will he kill his child to potentially save the world or will he kill himself to save his child? If he kills himself, is he then playing into the child's hands? He can only act so long as he can keep the secret, but by keeping the secret he can't find out whether or not he's going crazy. What do you do? What does he do?
In place of certainty, doubt. In place of faith, potential insanity. In place of social fears, personal horror. The child possessed or born of external demonic forces is no longer a corrupted future we created, but a blank slate that we may accidentally kill before it can grow into something worthwhile. It's still not perfect -- translations across social periods rarely are. The horror of The Omen was made for another time and translating it ensures that it won't be a perfect fit. Note how much scarier it would seem, though... how much easier it is to connect to that fear, that terror. When you can distill our fears and provide a mirror for them to scamper around in, you provide the distance we need to feel how scary they really are. And that, I believe, is how you scare people. It's the necessary condition that horror requires -- the exigency.
*Please note that I have not seen the remake, nor have I seen all of the old version still. I just haven't gotten around to it. Plus, see the first paragraph.
Aaaand that's enough rambling for today. Off to dance class.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-08 08:02 am (UTC)From:However, I also have become something of a student of horror themes. I remember lots of time spent in some suburbanite's station wagon with a bunch of other girls in my Girl Scout troop, listening to someone describe the latest horror movie they saw in detail. I also did a lot of reading the movie descriptions in the back of the TV Guide.
It's interesting, then, that since then I've learned to spot the foreshadowing, figure out what the big reveal is going to be even without ever seeing the movie. I still do a lot of reading horror movie spoilers online, just to see if my guesses are correct.
Anyway, I think you're really onto something there. I mean, at its core it's something we've probably all heard before, but I think it's one of those things that's easy to forget, and so we need regular reminding.
Oh, and this bit?
Here we have films dealing with children that are possessed or otherwise affiliated with demons, hell, or the end of the world. What should be the characters' future is instead corrupted by an outside force, possibly beyond saving. The only hopes presented are to kill or purge the child somehow and begin anew, if they can.
This made me think of the whole cold war nuclear arms race thing. I have this weird memory of how, in the '70s, people kept going on about how we were the first generation to grow up under the threat of nuclear war - that what to our parents was unspeakable terror was, to us, the status quo. And I also seem to recall lots of people talking about finding ways to stuff the genie back into its bottle, as it were. (Hence all those post-apocalyptic themes that emerged in the late '70s/early '80s, I think.) I wonder if some of these "corrupted child" themes didn't have something to do with that as well.
Just a theory. grin.
Anyway, a very interesting read, m'lady. Thanks.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-08 03:40 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2006-06-08 01:10 pm (UTC)From: