Boo.
Three weeks are nowhere near enough to get a good look at the vastness of classic horror. During our First Scare series at Nerds of a Feather, we've made our best effort to use the available time to fill some important gaps in our personal horror libraries. I'm going to need even more time to digest what I've learned; I still don't have fully formed thoughts about what makes horror so popular, or how the successive trends in horror have come and gone, or where the line is between the horror I can tolerate and the one I can't force myself to watch. Nevertheless, this brief round of exploration has been fruitful.
I had originally planned to include more monster movies (i.e. Attack of the Giant [Insert Species]), but the bulk of my watching activity ended up centering on the evolution of cinematic Dracula (1931, 1958, 1974 and 1979). Much like the experiment I did years ago with the different versions of Carrie, this repetitive journey through the beats of the same basic story has shown me the shifting worries of their respective societies. Most notably, inasmuch as any adaptation of Dracula allows, I could notice the female roles evolving over the decades from highly prized models of chastity to more autonomous agents in possession of their own desires. This transformation is fully ripe by the time Coppola tries his hand at making a Dracula movie in the '90s.
It's important to be aware of this history, because much of contemporary horror has to do with foregrounding women's fears. There are two parallel consequences of this trend: on one hand, it exposes the uncomfortable fact that daily life for women under patriarchy is a 24/7 horror story; on the other hand, it demands of male moviegoers the development of an added meta level of empathy. In horror there's an important difference between the aesthetic experience of being personally scared and the aesthetic experience of watching someone else be scared, and it all comes down to which character you identify with, an outcome that isn't always open to the viewer's conscious choice. In the standard horror dynamic of the chaser chasing the chased, whose perspective do you automatically adopt?
For these reasons I count myself fortunate to have been joined by two women in reviewing movies for First Scare. I found it interesting to read, in Haley's review of the movie Phantasm, about the mental jump of identifying with a boy protagonist in the '70s while writing as a woman in the 21st century. At the same time, when Ann Michelle writes about Interview with the Vampire, she opts for taking the side of the women that are mistreated all through the movie.
The unsurprising lesson here is that different stories evoke different modes of empathy. Haley finds a sense of recognition in the shared experience of a girls' sleepover in House, while Ann Michelle feels drawn to the deep interiority of the boy protagonist of The Sixth Sense. But the real merit of horror is in forcing us to understand the nonhuman perspective, as in the case of a ghost in Kill, Baby Kill or a carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
And then there's just the plainly bonkers.
Keep these ideas in mind when you dress up tonight. Putting on a mask is more than a cosmetic choice. It's another form of empathy, one that brings the Other's perspective not only into your mind, but into your speech and movements, and furthermore invites those watching you to participate in the same game when they interact with you.
If you'll allow me to borrow a trope from another genre for a moment, in many martial arts movies you'll hear the deepity-sounding lesson, "be the sword." Well, dear reader: tonight, when you put on your witch hats and your werewolf fangs and your fairy wings and your hero capes, I invite you to wield that uniquely human superpower of putting yourself in the Other's shoes. When you dress up to be spooky, open yourself to the gift of being spooked. Be the mask.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
