Friday, October 31, 2003
Horror Story #1Blood Dripping on Your VCRSOMETIMES, in the middle of the night, I’d wake up with a muted scream, convinced—in the nether world of half-sleep—that the bed was shaking. Shaking, with a malevolent force that I do not really understand except that it forces me to switch on my bedside lamp to doze through the rest of the night blanketed under the comfort of light. I swear by the monsters of dreams. They come out of hiding, too, at the eve of each November—a celebration of the spectral.
Hallow’s Eve.There are still bogeymen in my closet, and under my bed, there are infestations of demons.
That I love horror movies may be another matter altogether, but therein may lie the source of my fervent imaginations. Sam Raimi’s
Evil Dead was an early childhood favorite—right up there with Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining (a horror movie that makes your spine tingle just by watching a kid ride a bike through the hallways of an empty hotel), John Carpenter’s
Halloween, Steven Spielberg’s
Jaws, Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho, Roman Polanski’s
Rosemary’s Baby, and William Friedkin’s
The Exorcist—the latter of which features a possessed girl with a rotating head, green vomit, and, of course, a shaking bed.
Noted film analyst Edward Behr once said that our favorite films were our unlived lives unfolding in a magic mirror. “Films have the authority of our dreams,” he wrote—and in my case, they also have a hold on my nightmares.
I remember my first movie. I was a child watching
The Swarm with my brother in a small Bayawan movie theater. What I remember most was this: the scene of a swarm of ravenous bees going for the kill, they actually toppled over a trainload of people. The horror was inexplicable—
and fascinating. It is the same feeling one gets cringing over the opening sequence of Wes Craven’s
Scream. Drew Barrymore made horror almost look sexy.
What is the fascination?
Adrenaline. Nothing excites more than the rush of adrenaline at the sight of a bloodied knife, or a decaying corpse, or a malevolent spirit. The alien bursting through John Hurt’s chest in
Alien. Freddy Kruger’s bladed hand breaking through soapsuds in the bathtub in
Nightmare on Elm Street. The Grim Reaper in Peter Jackson’s
The Frighteners. Jason on the rampage in
Friday the 13th. The dread of ghosts in M. Night Shyamalan’s
The Sixth Sense. The strippers dancing naked in Paul Verhoevens’s
Showgirls. (Ehem.)
Horror movies have always been popular, as long as hot-blooded teenagers exist to patronize the box-office. Hollywood had been trotting out cadres of scary films they actually form a long-term trend, starting with the original Dracula movie,
Nosferatu near the turn of the last century. Time Magazine once noted that “Hollywood is pursuing subtler demons, deeper themes: matters of life and death, life after death, and life just before death.”
The trend was so much worse when the last millenium was just ending, and the unknown promised by the 2000 was getting on everyone’s nerves—relentlessly mined, of course, by such pop cultural hits like The X-Files with its evocations of the unexplained and the subtly horrifying monsters in our everyday existences. To scare ourselves silly may have been everyone’s popular reaction to a four-digit number: 2000 indeed promised to be more than an attraction for the possibly unknown havoc of the Y2K bug, or a harbinger to Armageddon—the end of the world as we know it. To wit: there was just nothing like the end of the millenium to scare the jeepers out of us. And rather than panic in the streets, we transmitted the fear inside us through the medium of the movie screen. Even that both didn’t happen when the clocks struck the New Year of the new millenium was beside the point. We’ve already celebrated our most favorite neuroses of all—and even now, we have not quite finished celebrating. There are newer monsters that lurk in our everyday lives—widespread terrorism, worldwide unemployment, the 2004 elections, George W. Bush—that we still go to our favorite horror movies to alleviate, or mitigate, the darkness within.
My favorite horror movie, however, has become my favorite because it made use of what I always think as the very idea of suspense: a meticulous use of the unseen, also put to great use by Shyamalan in
Signs. My favorite horror movie is also something I do not want to see again, if only to spare myself a night of migraines. It was famously a cheapie production (made from a $30,000 budget—it has since earned more than $100 million) that had critics and Sundance Film Festival audiences calling the greatest horror movie ever made ever since the 1970s’ The Exorcist. In a way, the independent film made by the creative team of Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick deserved the hoopla it got. While
The Blair Witch Project is
not a perfect film (grainy shots, unfocused and unlighted cinematography…), it succeeds in two ways:
One, it subscribed to the basic tenet of the true horror film:
that what we do not see scares us the most. We fear the bogeyman, yes, but what we fear most is the fact that he is
hiding in our closet. In the film, we do not see the horrors plaguing the trio, only haphazard video footage of a camera running through the pitch dark (as they are “chased” by an unseen specter), the camera lights setting off an eerie glow off the deadened trees and shrubs. We hear noises and eerie screams—and the fact that we do not really know what is going on scares us the most.
Two, that the film had the audacity to purport it is real. I still have a friend who is convinced the whole thing is real, and another friend, Kristyn, still gets the jitters every time she thinks about it (I had dragged her to watch the film---and she still hasn’t forgiven me). All its hype, starting from the trailer and its Internet website, banked on that incredulity. The trailer ominously explained that, “On October 21, 1994, Heather Donahue, Joshua Leonard, and Michael Williams hiked into the Black Hills Forest to shoot a documentary film on a local legend called ‘The Blair Witch,’ and were never seen again. One year later, their footage was found.”
To drive home the effectiveness of its purported reality, the filmmakers took Method Acting to its farthest extreme. Sanchez and Myrick instructed their actors to videotape whatever happened to them in the woods, gave them individual notes and instructions (not to be shared with the others) on what to do and react in lieu of a script, hid from the actors, and scared the bogeyman out of them while they were sleeping. The result of that experiment was that footage that was supposed to have been found in an abandoned house in the forest, edited together from the 16mm and video formats the “lost” trio used to shoot it on. The “finished” product comes off with a documentary feel, chronicling the story of three young filmmakers slowly descending into blossoming terror—a perfect model for the deterioration of group dynamics. (The fact that the “actors” used their real names for the film also added to the realism.)
In the beginning, we see them as a brash and self-assured trio getting into town of Burkitsville, Maryland interviewing people (some coached actors and some real personages) about the legendary Blair Witch who is accused of murdering a string of children in the 1940’s. The headstrong Heather, with a Hi-8 video camera in her hand and armed with a map and compass, leads Joshua (who is filming with a grainy black-and-white 16mm camera) and Michael (who is there to pick up the sound) deep into the woods for what is supposed to be a simple two-day excursion. It doesn’t turn out that way, however.
Little by little, they notice they are just going in circles, lost, beaten, and hungry. Forced to set up camp for another night, they hear faint footsteps, and discovers, the next day, voodoo dolls and eerie symbols hanging over the trees. More days pass by and their food begins to dwindle, their map gets lost, and the freezing October nights grow more and more intense.
Somebody seems to be following them, and loud cackling noises and screams haunt their nights. They become hysterical, forced to confront what raw, unadulterated horror really is. In one sequence that will make the film history books as one of the most intense scenes ever filmed, Heather breaks down in front of her camera and makes one last tearful apology.
When the finale comes, it is abrupt. But the chill stays a little longer.
Is the film real? No, it is not. Then again, I may be lying.
Welcome to Halloween. Your deepest terrors may lie in the whirrings of your VCR.
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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