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Welcome to October, dear readers, and to yet another installment of CraveOnline’s Free Film School hosted by me, your sometimes-humble online professor, Witney Seibold. In light of last week’s lesson (wherein I examined genre theory, and pointed out that most films are melodramas, and realism is less a style than a genre in itself), I will spend the entirety of the month postulating on various genre films, and, seeing as it’s the appropriate season, I will focus entirely on horror movies of one stripe or another. And why not start off with the scariest movie ever made, and the genre to which it belongs? I’ll get to it in a second.
October is often my favorite time of the year. The air in Los Angeles mutates from a horrifying miasma of heated summer smog and unidentifiable blackened impurities into a pleasing and snippid weatherby cloak of comforting childhood memories. It also means that Halloween is fast approaching, and all the repertory movies houses in the area are programming nothing but horror movies; if you live in Los Angeles, I implore that you look up the all-night horror-thon hosted by The American Cinematheque on the 26th. October is also a time when horror nuts like me crack open our videos of our favorite horror movies, and revel in the fear, the cheap gore effects, and the cheesy plotting. We love the celebration of fear.
Horror movies tend to serve a very vital function in the cultural landscape. If they’re intelligent, and actually have something on their minds, they can help us exorcize our fears. When we view a monster rending a living human body to shreds, it’s actually tapping into our own primal fears of being rended ourselves. We may react with shock, cynicism, or delight, but the scene is showing us something very vital. The film is, in a way, using our own imaginations to make explicit what this horrifying experience would be like. If we can see the horror, we can imagine it, and if we can imagine it, we can learn to live with it, to face it, and to overcome it. And while the better horror films deal with our more sophisticated fears (loss of family, guilt, disease, the shift of the familiar into the unfamiliar), even the cheesiest gore-fest is going to be tapping into our very basic fears of pain.
Indeed, most of fiction tends to serve this function: the need to see something we can relate to. When it comes to relating, however, film tends to stand a few feet ahead of other media. By employing simultaneous images, sounds, and chronology, film seems to be expressing something very vital and relatable. What it’s doing is, essentially, reenacting human dreams.
Which brings me, in a roundabout fashion, to surrealism (and don’t worry. I’ll come back to horror in a sec). Surrealism, the famed art movement marked by pointedly unrealistic imagery, was, according to its founders Tristan Tzara and André Breton, a form of artistic purity previously unseen in the world. Surrealism tried to capture, earnestly and immediately, the very essence of the human mind. By shedding recognizable images, any semblance of structure, and any sort of immediate interpretation from the artist, surrealism was giving us, wholesale, a peek into the human mind without any filters. Elements like character, plot, theme, tone, and story were all considered distractions from the pure inspiration that lay beneath them. Breton believed in what he called “automatic writing,” which is writing without thought. Just write what random words first come into your head, and you’ll have a fantastic look as to what humans are really about. A story is a stumbling block. An image is the only pure thing. Dream logic is the only pure logic.
In Spain and in France in the 1930s, a filmmaker named Luis Buñuel took this doctrine of surrealism, fused it with his own fascination with dreams, and created surrealist films that, it could be argued, are the purest form of cinema. If films resemble dreams, and are the closest possible art form to a human mind, and surrealism is attempting to reach into a pure human mind, then cinema and surrealism are the ideal mix. Buñuel seemed to intuit this, and made some of the most striking, strangest and powerful films ever made, all with a distinctly surreal bent. His most famous film is probably his first, a 20-minute long short film, penned and filmed in 1929 with the cooperation of notorious surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, called Un Chien Andalou. The film has no plot, no real characters, and is just a string of baffling and sometimes violent images presented without context. The opening scene is probably the most famous: a man sharpens a straight-razor on a strop, and calmly slices open the eyeball of an unprotesting woman. From there we have a man who sprouts ants from his hands, a person who seems to pass through doors, and a pair of priests being dragged by a donkey. Un Chien Andalou is one of the single most notorious, striking, and scary films ever made, and I implore that you see it.
Buñuel would go on to direct some equally bizarre, and much more politically bent surrealist films in his career. He followed up Un Chien Andalou with the powerful L’Age D’Or, a much more personal short film, also featuring a string of largely unrelated images (a woman sucks on the toes of a statue, while a fellow blissfully eats a human hand). By the 1960s, he was in full-blown political mode, using his surreal dream imagery to critique his country’s upper classes. 1961 saw The Exterminating Angel, about a group of wealthy, callow blowhards gathering for a ritzy dinner party, only to discover that they can’t leave. They aren’t trapped by any outside force, they just… can’t leave. They are compelled to stay. As the days begin to stretch on, the rich people are seen as the animals they are. This is some pretty damning symbolism. My favorite film of Buñuel’s was probably his 1972 classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, wherein he seamlessly blends his political interests, his surrealist mastery, and his interest in dreams into a perfectly enjoyable, perfectly damning, and oddly terrifying look at a group of upper-class a**holes, and their inability to gather without the world crumbling underneath them in some fashion (they sit to have a dinner party at one point, only to learn they are dining on a stage, and people are staring at them).
Buñuel once said that he would gladly live to be 100 years old, provided he could remain in a dream state. Dreams were Buñuel’s primary inspiration, and, he felt, the key to understanding the human mind. When we dream, all our emotions are intensified, purified, and seem to stand without context. How many times have you had a horrifying nightmare that was based not on immediate animal danger, but more on a vague sense of free-floating dread? Indeed, that’s how most nightmares seem to function: We’re not necessarily running for our lives, but we do feel that we’re powerless and guilty and horrified.
Which brings me back to horror. Horror films, at least the great ones, tap directly into our nightmares. And the single film that taps more directly into our nightmares than any other is David Lynch’s 1977 classic Eraserhead, one of the most bizarre movies ever made, easily one of the more notorious, and, in my mind, easily the scariest. It’s also one of my favorites.
Eraserhead follows the adventures of a man named Henry Spencer (John Nance) who seems to live in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The skies are grey, the sun is rarely seen, and the city seems to be comprised of nothing but noisy industrial machines. Henry’s face seems to imply that he is in a constant state of mild fear and weary defeat. He has been beaten down by this oppressive city. He lives in a tiny, tiny apartment with a bricked-up window, and a noisy radiator. He does have a girlfriend named Mary (Charlotte Stewart), but there is no affection. Henry goes to have dinner at Mary’s family’s house (which seems to exist in a tunnel), and the Cornish game hens they’re eating spring to life, and bleed on their plates. It’s then that Mary reveals she’s pregnant. When the baby comes (bizarrely, in the next scene) it is a horrible mutated monstrosity. It looks like a calf fetus. It cries, catches illnesses, and interrupts Henry’s sleep. Henry’s only escape is into a fantasy world inside his radiator, where a cancerous-slash-angelic woman sings to him of Heaven, and stomps on the gigantic worms that infest his apartment. The film ends in an act of violence.
Eraserhead feels, I admit, like an extended dream sequence, and this can be frustrating to many viewers. There are dreams within dreams… Perhaps. Reality is never solidly defined, and we’re never sure what the baseline reading is, so to speak. We’re always left to conjecture that what we’re looking at may be a dream, a hallucination, or some fantasy universe. It’s our instinct to attach some sort of interpretive meaning to what we’re seeing, and Eraserhead seems to, at every turn, defy that instinct. Just when you think you have some sort of symbolism in place, the film will twist in a way to undo your system. It’s a film that is constantly squirming in your mind, wrestling out of the intellectual chokeholds you’re trying to put it in.
David Lynch himself has said that his surrealist classic is actually complete in itself, and any sort of systematic interpretation is off-base. What we see is what we get. And, in my mind, what we’re getting is one of the purest forms of fright available in any film. Eraserhead doesn’t rely on “Boo!” moments, or physical peril to depict fear. It uses its oppressive mechanical sounds, dreary (yet gorgeous) black-and-white photography, and vaguely fearful performances, to depict a very natural, dream-like state of free-floating guilt that seems to lurk in the deeper recesses of the human imagination. It’s like a Kafka story; the main character is pronounced guilty, and he feels guilty, even though there is no specified crime. Fear, David Lynch seems to be saying, is something that lives constantly within us, and can only be truly explored through our nightmares.
Lynch, then, uses surrealist imagery (and its subsequent connection to human dreams) to unleash that pure fear, and leave us feeling sick, guilty and afraid. Eraserhead will likely baffle you, and may even alienate you, but do consider that it touches you deeply, and makes you feel more fearful than any slasher would. What’s more, it’s one of the best looking films I’ve seen (the black-and-white photography is unique) and it sounds amazing (Lynch spent months devising and recording the odd machine-like hums you hear throughout the film). Now if you’re hosting a Halloween party, and you’re looking for a film to throw on and enjoy with friends, there are hundreds of excellent slashers in the world that would fit such criteria, and Eraserhead may not have its intended impact. But if you’re at home alone, late at night, looking for something to leave an oily black residue of fear on your brain, go with Eraserhead. It is the most terrifying film you will see.
HOMEWORK FOR THE WEEK: See Eraserhead, of course. What did you think? Did it scare you? Did it make you uncomfortable? Let me know in the comments below: What’s your favorite horror film? Does it scare you? Why does it scare you? If it doesn’t scare you, what films do? What about them makes you fearful? Are you more afraid of supernatural horror, the cruelty of humans, or free-floating anxiety? Be honest. Watch some surrealist films. Start with Un Chien Andalou, and move along the career of Luis Buñuel. How did those ones make you feel? Merely confused, or somehow moved? Have you ever seen a film that resembled a dream you had? What qualities made it dreamlike? Here’s an important question for you: What value do dreams have in your everyday life? Is it valuable that filmmakers and surrealists explore dreams?
