I think that we’re all mentally ill; those of us outside the
asylums only hide it a little better – and maybe not all that much better,
after all. We’ve all known people who talk to themselves, people who sometimes
squinch their faces into horrible grimaces when they believe no one is
watching, people who have some hysterical fear – of snakes, the dark, the tight
place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs that are
waiting so patiently underground.
When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at
tenth-row center in a theater showing a
horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.
Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show
that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster.
Which is not to say that a really good horror movie may not surprise a scream
out of us at some point, the way we may scream when the roller coaster twists
through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the bottom of the drop. And
horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special province of
the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one’s appetite for double twists or
360-degree loops may be considerably depleted.
We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential
normality; the horror movie is innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda
Jackson as the horrible melting woman in Die, Monster, Die! confirms for
us that no matter how far we may be removed from the beauty of a Robert Redford
or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.
And we go to have fun.
Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn’t
it? Because this is a very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from
seeing others menaced – sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro
football has become the voyeur’s version of combat, then the horror film has
become the modern version of the public lynching.
It is true that the mythic “fairy-tale” horror film intends
to take away the shades of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more
civilized and adult penchant for analysis and to become children again, seeing
things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that horror movies provide psychic
relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into simplicity,
irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we
may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all.
If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of
degree. If your insanity leads you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or
the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap you away in the funny farm (but neither
of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the
other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to yourself when you’re under
stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you are left alone to go
about your business . . . though it is doubtful that you will ever be invited
to the best parties.
The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding
saints, past and present; but then, most saints have been crazy in their own
ways), and every now and then, he has to be let loose to scream and roll around
in the grass. Our emotions and our fears form their own body, and we recognize
that it demands its own exercise to maintain proper muscle tone. Certain of
these emotional muscles are accepted – even exalted – in civilized society;
they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of
civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness -- these are all the
emotions that we applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets
of Hallmark cards and in the verses (I don’t dare call it poetry) of Leonard
Nimoy.
When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with
positive reinforcement; we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When,
as children, we hug our rotten little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all
the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry, “Isn’t he the sweetest little
thing?” Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham crackers often follow.
But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister’s fingers in the
door, sanctions follow – angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and uncles;
instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking.
But anticivilization emotions don’t go away, and they demand
periodic exercise. We have such “sick” jokes as, “What’s the difference between
a truckload of bowling balls and a truckload of dead babies?” (You can’t unload
a truckload of bowling balls with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the way, that I heard
originally from a ten-year-old.) Such a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out
of us even as we recoil, a possibility that confirms the thesis: If we share a
brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of man. None of which is
intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but merely as an
explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to
be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.
The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job
to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity
unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized .
. . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. For those reasons, good
liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to see the most
aggressive of them – Dawn of the Dead, for instance – as lifting a trap
door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry
alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.
Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It
keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that
all you need is love, and I would agree with that.
As long as you keep the gators fed.
