2000s: the decade in horror

What is horror? Something that invokes unease? Repulsion? What does it require? Surely not the supernatural, since so many horror films are grounded in realism and concern real-life horrors, and so many of the best ones are drenched in ambiguity. Is it something to do with how the past clings to us as we try to move forward in life? Something to do with death perhaps—though there are things worse than death. Let’s agree that horror films trade in some form of violence, though psychological or spiritual violence frequently trumps physical violence, which has the potential to just leave us numb or queasy, like a roller coaster ride.

Session 9

The genre seems to shift with every generation. What do the 2000s say about the way we fear and tremble today? Do we need graphic torture to keep us awake through the night? I confess that I can’t get too worked up over novel approaches to bodily desecration for its own sake. Torture cinema is certainly horrifying, but it’s also fundamentally boring. Like a dose of dysentery. The more I look over this list of my favourite horror films of our dwindling decade, the more I see how many endure for pretty much the same reasons the great horror films of the 30s and 40s or of the 60s and 70s endure. They strike a balance between unnerving mystery and a guttural, creeping certainty about something repellant. Something waits for us in the shadows. Something irrational, yet possibly real. Some shard of nightmare that lingers with us when we wake. Something common sense urges us to avoid. Yet we go to the movie anyway.

The Others

The Others (2001) leaned heavily on a hundred-year-old template, yet where the film finally lands is a brilliant twist on The Turn of the Screw. It was also the film that convinced me of Nicole Kidman’s talents. I’d found her too icy to be the sensual leading lady previous roles pitched her as, but playing this stern mother charged with protecting her two weirdly-diseased children in an enormous, apparently haunted house, she was both convincing and transfixing. The film found a strong companion piece in The Orphanage (07), also from a Spanish director, also featuring a woman, a house, and a past demanding to be acknowledged. And Belén Rueda carried that film just as boldly as Kidman did hers. It was a little cornier as I recall, yet there are things in it I haven’t stopped thinking about.

Birth

Speaking of Kidman, I’d propose that one of the most haunting horror films of the 2000s may have suffered critically, and maybe commercially, for not being regarded as horror at all. It’s only in the final moments of Birth (04), when Kidman’s heroine, shattered by her uncertainty over the case of the little boy who claimed to be her dead husband, that its generic status is confirmed. I missed it when it first appeared and only caught up with it later on DVD—and only after I’d devoured Warner’s Val Lewton box set, which greatly informed my reading of the film, which deserves to be considered among the finest works of Luis Buñuel’s old collaborator, the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

The Descent

Speaking of birth, the birthing/cavern imagery in The Descent (05) made for some of the most potent meta-body horror of the decade. As it became more fantastical, aspects of the film were perhaps a little too conventional, and too silly, to maintain suspension of disbelief, but this story about an all-girl spelunking trip was at the same time too effective an exploitation of claustrophobia, both external and internal, to be written off.

The Ring

I’m tempted to include the deeply creepy, if, again, sometimes very silly The Ring (02) on this list. I only hesitate because I can’t quite call Gore Verbinski’s US remake any sort of significant revision of the Japanese original (1998)—except perhaps for whatever fresh resonance it generates from Naomi Watts’ central performance, which offers some vivid emotional variation we just don’t get from Nakano Matsushima. But I’d rather champion something else from Japan altogether. Séance (00), Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s fresh, inventive adaptation of Mark McShane’s novel Séance on a Wet Afternoon, is perhaps the finest example of the director’s unique, hushed horror aesthetic, drizzled with guilt.

The Devil's Backbone

The Devil’s Backbone (01) or Pan’s Labyrinth (06)? Both films involve children, both concern the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and both were made by the immensely talented Guillermo Del Toro, who hails from Mexico but makes most of his best films, these two included, in Spain. I’ll choose the former, a ghost story, if only because it’s a purer example of the genre, and because the conceit of the unexploded bomb in the courtyard is one of the most inspired pregnant objects in recent film.

Spider

Session 9 (01), featuring a riveting central performance from Scottish actor Peter Mullan, gets my vote for best haunted house of the decade. Okay, it’s actually an asylum, not a house, but this is the movie’s bravura premise, which finds a small group of labourers pulling the asbestos out of the Danvers State Mental Hospital, a decrepit old shell of a building, and combines two of the best foundations for horror: the phantasmagoric and the looming threat of mental illness. The film is nearly as good as David Cronenberg’s Spider (02), adapted from Patrick McGrath. It’s also about the vaporous frontiers between lucidity and madness, between victim and predator, and also a bloody good showcase for a tremendous British acting talent, in this case Ralph Fiennes.

Let the Right One In

Equating the discomforts of lycanthropy with those of puberty, Canada’s own Ginger Snaps (00) was undoubtedly a superb, inventive application of a familiar monster mythology into an adolescent context. But I have to say I was even more impressed by Let the Right One In (08), which took a similar tack with vampires but accentuated its tale with greater specificity of location, period, mood and art direction. It’s just a weirder movie in all the right ways, less generic yet still hugely entertaining, going even deeper into questions about gender, development, and the vertiginous sexual confusion of childhood.

Pontypool

Can I make it up to Canada by declaring Bruce McDonald’s Pontypool (08) as easily the smartest, most deliriously bizarre spin on the zombie movie of the decade? It takes William Burroughs’ notion of the word as virus and runs with it like a screaming, foaming at the mouth maniac. Admittedly, it finally struggles hard to make complete sense, but it generates so many interesting questions along the way that coherence seems of secondary importance. It also the confines of a small town radio station and the deep, dark Ontario winter into a cocktail of serious chills.

Drag Me to Hell

I had a lot of fun with Drag Me to Hell (09), Sam Raimi’s return to horror after a long season of super hero hi-jinx—though like Raimi’s Spiderman movies this feels very much the product of comic books, specifically of the EC variety. A pretty, somewhat conceited girl just wants to manage a bank, but she gets stuck with a witch’s curse she can’t shake off, while Raimi sticks us with a surprise finale that left everyone in the theatre where I saw it reeling. Nothing, however, freaked the shit out of any big crowd I sat among like Paranormal Activity (07/09). Orin Peli’s demonic home movie horror is crude as all hell—it’s supposed to be—but its this very sense of the real, which it firmly held onto until its very stupid final moment, that imbued it with a feeling of campfire tale terror that’s so difficult to work over modern audiences with. Utterly reliant on contemporary technology, the movie is arguably designed for our age, yet more than anything else I’ve written about here it utilizes the most old-fashioned, if not primordial tricks in the book. It also hit number one at the box office last weekend. Go figure.

Talking ourselves to death: a precarious conversation with Bruce McDonald about a movie called Pontypool

In the beginning there was the word. In the end, perhaps the word will be all that’s left. At the start of Pontypool we hear the disembodied voice of radio broadcaster Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) filling the theatre. He wonders aloud about disquieting undercurrents in coincidence and connectivity in names and events, and we can already hear how easily his words might begin to collapse in their meaning. Words collide and words confuse. Language is robust and infinitely prolific, but human understanding is fragile. Pontypool images the world ending precisely where language and comprehension intersect, not with a bang or whimper but something rather like a bark.

On the way to work one abominable, very early February morning, Grant sees a woman approach his car, her words obscure. She slaps his window before receding back into the darkness. Shaken, he arrives at the studio, tucks into his stash of whiskey, and begins his highly enjoyable on-air shtick, the very masculine talk radio provocateur who “takes no prisoners.” But soon he and his colleagues will become prisoners themselves. Reports start coming in regarding crowds huddling around a clinic, riots without any apparent purpose, and murder. Something is infecting the citizens of Pontypool, Ontario, and it is spreading fast. Like gossip.

Adapted by Tony Burgess from his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, Canadian maverick Bruce McDonald’s latest feature is apocalyptic horror for the age of babble, a tension-riddled genre mind-fuck that does for the word what Videodrome did for the image. It has certain foundations in the bold proposals of William S. Burroughs and Marshall MacLuhan, in the claustrophobic scenarios of George Romero, in the irresolvable differences between English and French Canada—a theme it treats with pleasing irreverence. It harkens way back to the undead hi-jinx of McDonald’s very first foray into moviemaking, a high school horror flick called Our Glorious Dead. Just don’t call the rabid victims roaming the streets of Pontypool zombies. McDonald’s preferred term is “conversationalists.”

I met the always enthusiastic yet always relaxed McDonald on behalf of Vue Weekly one recent Friday morning in a Toronto bar. In signature cowboy hat—an accoutrement also worn by McHattie as Mazzy—he discussed Pontypool’s complex and prolonged genesis, his collaboration with cinematographer Miroslaw Baszak, with whom he previously worked on Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside and Picture Claire, screenwriters Burgess and Noel Baker, who scripted McDonald’s cult favourite Hard Core Logo, the challenges of making a movie in such a stripped down setting, and the pleasures of persuasion in the world of independent cinema.

JB: Tony Burgess’ novel sprawls with locations, characters, layers of metaphor and even shards of autobiography. It slides from one impression to another along very tenuous points of connection. It would surely strike most filmmakers as uncontainable. I wonder how you all arrived at this point where you could just boil the premise down to its purest essence, to a chamber drama of sorts.

Bruce McDonald: It was a very long process. But what that attracted to me to it all the while was just that basic, crazy premise of the language virus. The funny thing about the dizzying amount of material in the novel is how in a weird way its unruliness was precisely what liberated us to just cherry-pick the few items we wanted and make up the rest. The only obligation was to stay true to the spirit of the book, which is the best way to approach an adaptation, really. Great books with lots of incident and ideas often seem like goldmines yet turn out to be traps. In any case it also took a long time because while Tony wrote the screenplay he was also learning how to write a screenplay. You know, a novel is closer to a garden, where a screenplay is more like a machine.

JB: Noel Baker told me that years ago he’d worked on a version of Pontypool with you guys that was actually much closer to the novel, but would have been a much more expensive project.

BM: Oh, yeah. And we haven’t thrown away that first script! In fact, the plan has been that if this one takes off we might do a little trilogy. Anyway, Noel was kind of Tony’s teacher. He’s a really great writer and a great pal. He introduced a sense of structural rigour that was foreign to Tony up to that point, a regime of tightening. Restrictions above all were tremendously useful for us in the process.

JB: Speaking of restrictions, I understand Pontypool began as a radio play for the CBC?

BM: They’d asked me if I had any material and after racking my brains for a while I thought maybe there was something in this language virus idea. Which got me to thinking about Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and that thing about only hearing terrifying things happening and not really understanding what’s going on. So we got rolling on this idea when it suddenly occurred to me that the radio play might actually make a pretty interesting movie, and the simplicity of the demands on location and personnel made it seem possible. Everyone got excited with the idea that we wouldn’t have to wait four years to make this movie—we could do it in three months. We considered opening it up to the outside world as we developed it, getting out of the one location, but it was Tony who insisted on just keeping it locked indoors, keeping it a sort of theatre of the mind.


JB: You think about how much of, say, Night of the Living Dead takes place within the house. The claustrophobia of the siege drama can really work for a horror film.

BM: Yeah. Every once in a while a hand will bust through. There’s that constant terror of knowing what going on right outside. And the noises. You think too about Repulsion or Assault on Precinct 13, these kinds of things, and you see how nicely Tony’s book weds itself to a certain B-movie-like energy.

JB: By enclosing the film almost entirely within the studio you not only ramp up the claustrophobia but also attune your audience to the smallest details and motifs. I’m thinking of the way you incorporate the simplest little things, like the boiling of a kettle to prickle the tension. And of course that kettle whistle pays off quite nicely later on when it becomes a prompt for an infected victim searching for a sound to imitate.


BM: People’s first instincts are so often about the big canvas. We tend to want to be able to go anywhere, shoot anything. It was actually kind of scary to think about shooting something in just one room. I was accustomed to these sprawling road movies where if you get bored you just go to the next town. Suddenly I was dealing with minutia, that little Joey Ramone doll that might say something about Grant Mazzy’s character, Lisa’s bracelet that was obviously made by a kid, the bottle of booze, the pills the doctor takes. All these little details become more important, more loaded. There are no costume changes, so you pick the one outfit and, bam, that’s the character. There are sections where we’d shoot everything in profile, some where the camera moves and others where it’s still, ones where we shoot through the glass, others where we stay inside. It just makes you reconsider what it really means for you when you use this lens, when you use this angle. It was fun to have fewer things to think about but to think about those few things in a much bigger way. It’s primal. It felt like we were making a film for the first time again. Miroslaw and I shot our first film together. 20 years later it felt like we were making our second first film together.

JB: Pontypool initially seems a significant departure from your movies so far, yet it strikes me as being interestingly linked to The Tracey Fragments, which immediately preceded it. Both films operate around the principle of fragmentation, of image in one and language in the other. Have recent years found you feeling especially eager to mess with these fundamental elements of movies?

BM: There’s something to this idea of collage. My life feels like a fucking collage. Sometimes I just wish I could focus on one thing, you know? I’m always developing different projects at once. My brain’s always filled with too much stuff. So maybe it’s a reflection of my own sort of scattered, voracious interests in disparate things.

JB: There’s also that element in your work sometimes where it seems like you’re just wondering what you can get away with.

BM: Sure. Both of these last movies were like that. The fact that I could convince people to get on board with them delighted me. I mean, I’m as fond of big dumb popcorn movies as the next guy, but there’s no lack of people working in that department. I work in independent movies. We’re like pirates. It’s not so much that I want to be intentionally obscure, but I like to sniff out something fresh, something that’ll wake up the neighbours a little bit. Pontypool was financed by this private guy and I think he was seduced by the genre nature of it and the containment. For him felt like a perfect first step into the film world. Yet the fact is that we’re making a movie about a language virus, which is pretty damned abstract and cerebral for a genre film. So we managed to convince this guy, we convinced the CBC, we convinced Maple Pictures, and hopefully we can convince an audience that’s there’s something pretty wild and interesting going on here.