Our heroine tiptoes down the (obviously darkened) hallway, grasping the chandelier/lifeless torch/vaguely phallic coffee-table ornament tightly to her chest. She gives a single fleeting glance behind her, before ever-so-slowly stepping into the room.
(Beat for effect)
Our heroine gives out a sigh and relaxes her guard. Aaand… bang bad guy shows up music suddenly starts thumping meaningless bass notes in time with her frantic footfalls she’s screaming the killer/alien/zombie/mutant is chasing after her she drops her only weapon (of course) apparently out of sheer terror then she falls over the inevitable puddle of water etc. etc. etc.
You scared? This is what the ‘horror’ genre has come to. Cheap scares, coupled with cheap tricks. A pretty girl apparently means defenseless. Erratic, deep bass music invades our ears and confuses us for a second. The visuals fly by so fast our eyes are simply overwhelmed.
That. Is not. Horror.
Horror is a creeping foreboding. It’s a tickling sensation in your tummy that tells you something is just not right. Horror is a dawning realisation that everything you know is wrong. The scenario above may seem like horror, but take out the clichés and the tired film techniques, and it’s really quite boring.
Who were the truly great horror writers? Lovecraft, Poe, Matheson (among others). These people didn’t have cheap tricks to rely upon. They had words on a page. But they made it work. They found a way to twist your gut with fear, make you curl up under the covers and tuck your feet up to your chest.
So how did they achieve this feat? How did they do it, when all of Hollywood’s flashy effects, brilliant actors and amazing writing talent couldn’t?
They use a technique called a ‘malign paradigm shift’. A malign paradigm shift is a moment where our hero comes to realise that what he thought was perfectly normal or safe is, in fact, malign. The obvious example of this can be found in M. Night Shayamalan’s The Sixth Sense. Sorry for those of you living on the moon the past ten years, but honestly even you should know the twist by now. There is a moment where Malcolm Crowe realises that he has been dead all along*. The build up and release of this moment is a simple example of a malign paradigm shift.
Malign paradigm shifts differ from shock scares in that they don’t inherently involve immediate danger. There is nothing as crude as a gun or knife threatening our hero, but it puts us on edge. It cuts to the core of us, and forces us to question our own world. Are we truly safe? Or are we like that hapless character, and will we suddenly find ourselves coming to realise that we were in mortal peril all along?
*note: I’m not saying The Sixth Sense was a terrifying movie, it’s just a simple example of the technique.
What, dear Ok, To Begin With… readers, my friend and colleague Drew seems to not be addressing, is the original use of horror “clichés”. Remember, clichés are not ALWAYS clichés. There are times when they are something new, something great.
Which brings me to the obvious case in point: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And please, if you are reading this and think “o, that Jessica Biel movie”, please please shoot yourself in the head. I mean the original film. It is truly terrifying. It gains my personal vote as the scariest film of all time.
And how does it achieve this terror? By using both the malign paradigm shift, and long extended scenes of scantily glad girls running from a hideous creature swinging a chainsaw.
Thanks to that film, it became the cliché. But many filmmakers seem to have only taken half of what The Texas Chainsaw Massacre offered.
What modern “horror” films are missing is indeed the malign paradigm shift. But what must not be forgotten is that the majority of people that tend to be targeted by serial killers and sex criminals are…
…young and female. They’re seen as an easy target.
So while I agree with Drew, there is also nothing wrong with modern horror films using scantily-clad, ditzy females, so long as the malign paradigm shift exists as well. More recently, Wolf Creek managed to do it as well, let’s hope more filmmakers re-discover the idea.
Tom.