Happily in the Dark: Reviews of Two Horror Movies, and Some Notes on the Genre

During the extended hurricane weekend, I found myself watching two horror movies with family and friends, one of them old — 1954’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon — and one of them relatively new—2015’s The Babadook. I’d seen Creature many times (it was a childhood favorite), but had been avoiding The Babadook because, despite its critical acclaim, the film seemed like a dreadful experience waiting to happen. That fear of dread sums up my current apathy for the horror genre, a genre in which I took great pleasure as a child, and which in many ways formed the foundation for my love of movies. It’s also the reason I feel particularly excited when a really fine offering emerges, such as this year’s The Wailing, or 2015’s The Visit (by far the most entertaining M. Night Shyamalan film). 

It’s virtually impossible to nail down the reason that some horror movies are delightful and others are hard to watch. (Aside from the horror movies—and there are plenty of them—that are just terribly made, and thus unwatchable except as fodder for ridicule.) The moment we apply some set of conventions, a movie comes along that breaks them and flaunts our silly rules. Not to mention the fact that sometimes we soften toward movies we didn’t like before. (I’ve gradually grown to appreciate and even enjoy the first two Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, both of which I initially hated.) In the end, horror movies, like all movies, must possess that living, vital, heartbeat that makes some movies magical rather than mechanical. But even this rule doesn’t always stand up, because one could certainly argue that a movie like Creature from the Black Lagoon is mechanical: it has the makings of a studio assembly line product, from a director who made a number of other B sci-fi pictures, Jack Arnold.  

As hokey as Creature from the Black Lagoon is, the film still works. The setup is the ideal one for any horror film: a small group of people cut off from the rest of civilization, pursued by some kind of monster, in this case, The Gill-Man (who looks like a rubber man with collard greens glued all over his body), one of the transitional life forms during the process of human evolution. Creature begins with a banal, self-righteous narrator preaching to us about God and the first explosion of life as it transformed from oozy single celled organisms to more complex creatures, then sets us in the Amazon, where this Gill-Man attacks some unsuspecting natives who’ve been working for an American research team. Not long after, we cut to the next expedition, which includes several scientists, among them the beautiful Julia Adams, who becomes bait for the monster. 

Everything about Creature from the Black Lagoon is preserved in a 1950s brine: the cheesy dialogue and the bad soap-opera love triangle between Adams and her two colleagues, Richard Carlson and Richard Denning, the long speeches about the importance of science, the half-hearted repression of sexual innuendo (like when Adams, in her skin-tight one-piece bathing suit, does breast strokes in the lagoon and the Gill-Man swims right under her, simulating a sexual encounter). 

But despite Creature’s corny elements, it’s still a fun movie to watch, especially in a large group. And what’s more, the Gill-Man emerges as a tragic figure: He’s taunted by the scientists who see him as nothing more than an opportunity to make their own careers shinier; their complete disregard for the world around them, which they see as theirs for the taking, becomes a fitting commentary on U.S. politics during the age of the bomb and the space race: Achievement trumps environment. 

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In Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a single mother named Amelia (Essie Davis) begins to suspect that a creepy character from a children’s book, called Mister Babadook, has possessed her seven-year-old son Samuel (Noah Wiseman). The idea of a character from some sinister children’s story coming to life is enticing enough, and when we see Amelia flipping through this particular book, which appears in their house out of nowhere, it’s quite an effect: Mr. Babadook has the long arms of Count Orlok in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and the pale, ghastly face of Cesare from Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Also, it's a pop-up book, so freakish houses and creatures and eerie threats emerge from inside the pages, like secret warnings. The book troubles Amelia, but at first, as in every horror movie set-up, she thinks little of it. Then Sam begins acting out, making weapons to fight the Babadook (and taking one to school, which gets him in hot water with the administration). 

As the movie progresses, we wonder if Kent hasn’t placed us in a Turn of the Screw-like situation: Has Mom just gone completely bonkers, perhaps a grief-induced madness? (Sam’s dad died on the day he was born, and this tragedy haunts them both.) The Babadook, whatever it is, has either gotten loose and started playing with reality, or both mother and son are turning into variations of Jack Nicholson’s character from The Shining. Watching all this unfold is less than enjoyable. 

As a director, Jennifer Kent does impressive work in The Babadook, her first feature. She values subtle creepy things, she values the accumulation of subtle creepy things, and she cares deeply about Essie and Sam. (So many directors seem to hate their characters.) We feel great sadness for the plight of Amelia and her son: not just the horrific series of events chronicled in the movie, but the grief they’ve been living with for seven years. Sam’s bratty cousin taunts him at her birthday party: “Your dad left because of you!” and Sam screams the truth at her, but cannot contain the anger and the fear her words engender. He bloodies her nose, and becomes the "bad kid" at her birthday party. 

As well-made as it is, The Babadook cannot recover from its essentially grim, unpleasant tone. We feel weighed down by the horribleness of the story, particularly because Kent humanizes the mom and the boy so effectively. Surely this is the whole point of the movie (Kent herself said she was addressing grief, and the fact that people tend to bury their grief rather than work through it); and apparently enough people were drawn into the film, as it received high praise from critics after premiering at Sundance, and has since become a sleeper hit.

But this general unpleasantness—the same unpleasantness I remember feeling in other recent horror movies like Don’t Breathe and Green Room and It Follows and The Conjuring—ruins the movie for me. At the screenings of Don’t Breathe and Green Room, I remember feeling a desire to simply get up and leave the theater. But aren’t we supposed to experience dread in horror movies? Yes, but somehow, some horror movies get dread right, or perhaps they get the right level of dread mixed with a number of other varying ingredients like humor, satire, irony, and of course, all the various artistic qualities that make a movie more interesting. The Babadook is a grey and murky movie, except for the scene in which Essie looks through the book, and the film becomes something starkly, surreally beautiful, like a scene out of Night of the Hunter. 

[spoilers for The Babadook below]

And, perhaps, The Babadook fails because we know pretty well what’s happening. We’ve seen it all before, and nothing in The Babadook comes as a surprise. Contrast that to The Wailing, a movie that unspools multiple mysteries simultaneously, while constantly switching our allegiance to its opposing characters, and which, in the final act, resolves certain plot elements without giving everything away. In its defense, The Babadook wisely chooses not to explain the monster, instead turning Essie and Sam into its caretakers: They must feed the thing worms while it lurks in the cellar, engaged in a prickly neutrality. Horror movies deal in the terrifying mysteries of life, like a shaky old gypsy at her tarot cards, and the most effective ones do not explicate those mysteries too much. They lead us deep enough into the cave to lose us, and then they leave us happily in the dark. 

Sabrina

Audrey Hepburn’s fame is so divorced from the actual movies she made that it’s likely many people who think they adore her haven’t even taken the time to watch Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s, to see for themselves just how boring they all are. Of those four, the one I can tolerate is Sabrina, but after re-watching it this weekend, I felt strongly that the nearly two-hour film was twenty minutes too long. Sabrina showcases Hepburn’s natural charm and her unusual, captivating screen presence, as well as her striking fashion choices, via French fashion designer Givenchy. But the movie lumbers along at a much too contented pace as Sabrina woos—and is wooed by—two brothers, played by Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. (Bogart was thirty years her senior, while Holden was just eleven years older.) Sabrina is the daughter of their chauffeur, so the movie gets to “examine” the class structure. (It’s not all that convincing.) By the time Sabrina made up her mind, I was frankly bored and not too thrilled with her choice. But the first half of the film has a lot of lovely moments. The director, Billy Wilder, knows how to create a mood. Sabrina is lit beautifully, capturing the enchanting quality of studio films of the 1950s. It’s also kind of a somber reflection on unrequited love up to a point, a sort of 1950s take on what it was like to be Juliet, only Sabrina doesn’t commit suicide (she tries), and she eventually does get what she wants. She’s so obsessed with William Holden’s character that when she returns from a two-year stay in Paris (for culinary school) all dolled up and all grown up, she wants to recreate his romances with other girls, the ones she would spy on from a tree-top when she was a girl. Maybe there’s a little of Fatal Attraction in there, somewhere. There’s also a distressing kind of cultural and economic prophesying in this movie: The corporation the two brothers work for (which is owned by their father) is developing all kinds of plastics, which are indestructible even to fire, and Bogart mutters with a perverse sense of pleasure that some day soon they’ll probably be able to eat the plastic. How naïve we were then to think we weren’t hurting ourselves—and our planet—with our inventions of convenience. Come to think of it, many romantic comedies of the 1950s were about mildly-career-driven women (like Doris Day) dating men who worked for big corporations making strange new inventions that are strangely normal to us now.

On the Waterfront

Given that the Academy shafted Marlon Brando and his brilliant performance in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), his Oscar win for On the Waterfront (1954) might seem like a peace offering. And although it probably was an apology Oscar to some degree, there's no denying the power of his performance as Terry Malloy. Brando made being a thick-skulled bum endearing, courageous, dignified, and ultimately transcendent.

In On the Waterfont, he plays an ex-prizefighter whose brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) is an accountant for Johnny Friendly, the union boss who runs the New York harbor with an iron fist and doesn't care if he has to skirt around the law to do business. The corrupt union heads pick and choose who will work, and that means picking and choosing people they know won't rat on them. But when one of them agrees to testify against them, Terry is enlisted to help "lean on him," never suspecting that they intend to throw the would-be canary off the roof of a building.

Terry experiences, perhaps for the first time in his life, a moral conflict he cannot dismiss. He's faced with protecting vice over virtue, and battles not just Johnny Friendly (played with an appropriate level of nastiness by the excellent Lee J. Cobb) but himself in the process.

On the Waterfront has its overly dramatic moments, but it's still a hell of a movie, full of Brando's little touches, and bolstered even more by Elia Kazan's capable directing. Kazan manages to turn something a bit stagey into an often electric drama fraught with tragedy. Karl Malden plays the do-gooder priest who's eager to bring about justice for the murdered man, Joey, and Eva Marie Saint plays Edie, Joey's sister and Terry's love interest. Written by Budd Schulberg. Memorable music score by Leonard Bernstein. With Pat Henning, Martin Balsam, Pat Hingle, and Fred Gwynne. 108 min. ★★★★

Rear Window

I'm going to take a moment to plug the beautiful Florida Theatre, a landmark of downtown Jacksonville. Every summer they show a handful of classic movies, giving many of us a rare opportunity to see films that were decades old by the time we were born. Even if you've already seen a movie at home, nothing compares to experiencing it in a theater with an audience, especially a theater as elegant (and historical) as this one. Seeing Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train there several years ago got me fired up about about going to as many of these retrospective showings as possible, and this year I got to see my second Hitchcock film on the big screen, Rear Window, from 1954.

Rear Window has been reviewed too many times for me to go deeply into familiar territory, but I will briefly synopsize its plot and its critical reaction: it's about a photographer (James Stewart) who, when confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, begins spying on his neighbors from his conveniently-located rear window, which overlooks a large courtyard. Soon enough he begins to suspect that one of his neighbors (Raymond Burr) has committed a murder. Stewart's chic fashionista girlfriend (Grace Kelly) and no-nonsense rehab therapist (Thelma Ritter) become his Girls Friday in an attempt to prove a murder without a body or any real physical evidence.

As you may be able to imagine, critics have long focused on how Rear Window mirrors the act of watching a movie: Jimmy Stewart uses a telescope to anonymously spy on his neighbors the way we slip into dark theaters and stare at the characters on the screen. The drama that happens between the people in the movies is typically the stuff of closed doors, but to us, the door has been opened, all unbeknownst to the characters in the movie. This is what some critics and philosophers (such as Jacques Lacan) have characterized as scopophilia, the act of looking, and deriving pleasure from it. Rear Window pokes fun at our own voyeuristic curiosity, but it also indicts us in the process.

What struck me about seeing Rear Window with an audience was how much of its wittiness still survives. The humorous aspects of the neighbors--who have very little dialogue and must restrict themselves almost to pantomiming their roles--come through gloriously, and you begin to develop odd little attachments to them. They become endearing or bothersome, the way neighbors do in real life, and Jimmy Stewart, the Everyman of the classic movie days, becomes us...and we him. Hitchcock employs the reaction shot exhaustively in this film (something happens, we see Stewart react, something happens, Stewart reacts, and so forth). That rhythm of shooting was perhaps never more apropos than in Rear Window, which is purely the cinema of reaction (often reaction based on no real knowledge, merely assumption). The visual becomes the hyper-real, rendering communication unnecessary and frankly undesirable.  

Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter deserve mention in this. Kelly of course never looked better, but she also turns in a marvelous performance. She's head-over-heels in love with Stewart. He loves her too, but he thinks their social and vocational differences are insurmountable. Yet she pursues him with reckless tenacity, and becomes a willing pawn in his sleuthing--often risking her own safety--in order to enter into his world. She's trying to prove that she's not just frivolous, that she's game, and I think her performance works because Kelly possessed both qualities: she was glamorous but also tough, and smart. Thelma Ritter is a character actress who I don't think ever got her due. She spices up just about any movie she's in with her dry wit. These three form some kind of bizarrely funny mystery-solving trio. Without them Rear Window would have been a lesser entertainment.