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During the matricide scene in Night of the Living Dead (which, like the shower scene in Psycho , seems almost endless to our shocked eyes the first time we see it), the little girl's arm strikes a hanging lightbulb, and the cellar becomes a nightmare dreamscape of shifting, swinging shadows-revealing, concealing, revealing again. During the attack of the birds in the attic, it is the big flashlight Ms. Hedren carries which provides this strobe effect (also mentioned in co
I'll not belabor the point by analyzing the "darkness quotient" in all these films, but will close this aspect of the discussion by pointing out that even in those few movies that achieve that feeling of "sunlit horror," there are often feary moments in the dark-Genevieve Bujold's climb up the service ladder and over the operating room in Coma takes place in the dark, as does Ed's (Jon Voight) climb up the bluff near the end of Deliverance . . . not to mention digging up the grave containing the jackal bones in The Omen , and Luana Anders's creepy discovery of the underwater "memorial" to the long-dead little sister in Francis Coppola's first feature film (made for AIP), Dementia-13 .
Still, before leaving the subject entirely, here's a further sampling: Night Must Fall, Night of the Lepus, Dracula, Prince of Darkness, The Black Pit of Dr. M., The Black Sleep, Black Sunday, The Black Room, Black Sabbath, Dark Eyes of London, The Dark, Dead of Night, Night of Terror, Night of the Demon, Nightwing, Night of the Eagle . . . Well, you get it. If there had been no such thing as darkness, the makers of horror movies would have needed to invent it.
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I have held out mention of one of the films from the quiz, partially because it's the antithesis of many of those we've already discussed-it depends for its horror not upon darkness but upon light-and also because it leads naturally into a brief discussion of something else that the mythic, or "fairy-tale" horror movie will do to us if it can. We all understand about the "gross-out," which is fairly easy to achieve,* but it is only in the horror movies that the gross-out-that most childish of emotional impulses-sometimes achieves the level of art. Now, I can hear some of you say that there is nothing artistic about grossing somebody out-all you really have to do is chew your food and then hang your open mouth in your table-mate's face- but what about the works of Goya? Or Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes and soup cans, for that matter?
Even the very worst horror movies sometimes achieve a moment or two of success on this level. De
*I can remember, as a kid, one of my fellow kids asking me to imagine sliding down a long, polished ba
As noted previously, good horror movies often operate most powerfully on this "wa
But the gross-out is art, and it is important that we have an understanding of this. Blood can fly everywhere and the audience will remain largely unimpressed. If, on the other hand, the audience has come to like and understand-or even just to appreciate-the characters they are watching as real people, if some artistic link has been formed there, blood can fly everywhere and the audience ca
That's all fine, and there is little argument about the virtues of Bo
Having said all that, let's turn to X-The Man with the X-Ray Eyes , one of the most interesting and offbeat little horror movies ever made, and one that ends with one of the most shuddery gross-out scenes ever filmed.
This 1963 movie was produced and directed by Roger Corman, who at that time was in the process of metamorphosing from the dull caterpillar who had produced such meatloaf movies as Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Little Shop of Horror (not even notable for what may have been Jack Nicholson's screen debut) and into the butterfly who was responsible for such interesting and rather beautiful horror films as The Masque of the Red Death and The Terror .
The Man with the X-Ray Eyes marks the point where this strange two-step creature came out of its cocoon, I think. The screenplay was written by Ray Russell, the author of Sardonicus and a number of other novelsamong them the rather overripe Incubus and the much more successful Princess Pamela .
In The Man with the X-Ray Eyes , Ray Milland plays a scientist who develops eyedrops which enable him to see through walls, clothing, playing-cards, you name it; a kind of super-Murine, if you will. But once the process begins, there is no slowing it down. Milland's eyes begin to undergo a physical change, first becoming thickly bloodshot and then taking on a queer yellow cast. It is at this point that we begin to feel rather nervous-perhaps we sense the gross-out coming, and in a very real sense it's already arrived. Our eyes are one of those vulnerable chinks in the armor, one of those places where we can be had. Imagine, for instance, jamming your thumb into someone's wide-open eye, feeling the squish, seeing it sorta squirt out at you. Nasty, right? Immoral to even consider such a thing. But surely you remember that time-honored Halloween party game Dead Man, where peeled grapes are passed from hand to hand to hand in the dark, to the solemn intonation of "These are the dead man's eyes"? Ulp, right? Yuck, right? Or as my kids say, Guh-ROSS!
*Now, don't get me wrong or misinterpret what I'm saying. Kids can be mean and unlovely, and when you see them at their worst, they can make you think black thoughts about the future of the human race. But mea
**This might lead to the accusation that my definition of the horror movie as art is much too wide-that I just let in everything. That is not true at all-movies like Massacre at Central High and Bloody Mutilators work on no level. And if my ideas concerning the boundaries of art seem rather lenient, that's too bad. I'm no snob. and if you are, that's your problem. In my business, if you lose your taste for good baloney, it's time you got into some other line of work.