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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 June 1999 Issue No. 432
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Interview Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Thank you Mr Bates
By Nur Elmessiri
Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock's Psycho, 1960In the United States thousands reserved their seats six weeks ahead of the release of the Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace. Most of them were disappointed. In Cairo, meanwhile, and for the third time in two weeks, I found myself almost alone in a brand new cinema staring at a man in disguise, armed with something sharp, chasing a woman. So much for déjà vu. And is it any coincidence that all three films carry rather more than echoes of earlier classics of the horror genre -- namely Psycho (1960), Halloween (1978) and Scream (1996).
After 80 years, it seems, horror films are still going strong, along with the sub-genre they spawned, the slasher-horror picture. And thanks to its reliance on what Hitchcock terms 'pure cinema', the horror genre looks set to outlive its spoilt younger sibling, big-budget sci-fi, whose glory days may well have passed already.
Although the elderly may dismiss horror films with a sneer, younger audiences worldwide have secured their box-office clout. And besides those classified as horror filmmakers, many major directors have paid homages to the genre, making one or two films in this vein: Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Wells, Roman Polanski, Don Seigal, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma, Alan Parker, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Speilberg, Neil Jordan, Kenneth Branagh, Werner Hertzog, and Lars von Ternier, Fedrico Fellini to name but some.
Horror movies appeal to directors for several practical reasons -- they can be produced with a low budget and on a tight schedule, they require minimal locations and lighting facilities and can easily dispense with superstars. Masterpieces like Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942), George Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) were all made under such production restrictions.
For the public they readily fall into the category of pure entertainment and are not expected to deliver any moral message beyond providing a blatant contrast between extremes of good and evil. Highly predictable plots allow directors to concentrate on the formal aspects, while at the same time enabling spectators to enjoy the thrills without exerting much mental effort.
The earliest threatening figures were the somnambulist, Nosferatu, the vampire, Dr Frankenstein's monster and Dracula, later joined by the wolfman and a gaggle of diverse monsters, ghosts and aliens. It was only in 1960, with Hitchcock's Psycho, that the single man who, initially at least, appears friendly and likable, was introduced as the horrifying element. Although psychologically disturbed characters have been screen fixtures since Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Calighari (1919), the growing interest in psychoanalysis resulted in more defined characterisations in which psychotic behaviour was represented. Fetishism, compulsive-obsessive behaviour, schizophrenia, paranoia, guilt, persecution and Oedipal complexes, confused on screen even in films by Hitchcock himself, came to be treated with ever greater clinical precision.
Psycho spawned three sequels staring Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, none of which managed to replicate Hitchcock's masterpiece. Its latest offspring, Gus Vant Sant's almost shot-for-shot duplication, a gesture of homage to Hitchcock, was coldly received both locally and worldwide. Indeed, the only merit of Van Sant's version is in achieving some of Hitchcock's original, unfulfilled ideas.
John Carpenter's Halloween, released in 1978, also spawned its imitators. Influenced by Howard Hawks and by Hitchcock, the film skillfully exploited darkness to create its terrifying atmosphere, exemplifying Tourneur's remark that the most scary thing is what we do not see. The face of Michael Meyers, the serial killer in Halloween, is never seen; the actor playing his part is virtually an extra, while Jamie Lee Curtis was the star in the original and its sequel. Four sequels were made without her, all lacking the thrilling suspense of Carpenter's original. Now, though, two decades after the original, Curtis returns in Steven Miner's H20. Yet although it resuscitates Curtis, and stars Psycho's Janet Leigh -- the first slasher-horror victim, who meets her end in the most famous shower scene in history -- H2O does not come close to replicating the thrills of its erstwhile model.
Wes Craven's Scream (1996), a witty take on the sub-genre from the maker of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), was a thoroughly post-modern exercise in self-parody. In Scream 2 (1997), which is still showing in Cairo, the project is taken one step further. The original film -- which on some levels might act as a primer for the genre and its leading practitioners -- is suitably cannibalised, and then regurgitated as a reference point. Audience expectations are challenged by remarkable twists mimicking Scream (1996): the suspense, chases, murders and suspects are planted in almost exactly the same places as the first film. Audience and characters alike wonder whether the serial killers will conform with or deviate from the patterns established in Scream (1996).
In the Scream series, the basic question -- which movie the filmmakers will borrow from -- is complicated by another: will the serial killer follow the steps of Norman Bates, Michael Meyers, Jason or Freddy Kreuger, or their imitators, the serial killers in Scream (1996), or will they take their lead from the imitators of the imitators, featured in Stab, the film which enacted the murders of Scream (1996), parts of which we see in Scream 2 (1997).
An endlessly hermetic self-referential system, as fragmentingly refractive as that essential location of suspense movies, the hall of mirrors -- such is the way of horror. A sign of the times?
Scream 2 is showing at Odeon and Normandy
