Welcome, class, to another weekly edition of CraveOnline’s Free Film School, the only film school that encourages you to attend in the nude.
October is in full swing at this point, and we’re all thinking about our Halloween costumes (well, at least I am, but then I’m something of a Halloween fanatic). If your local repertory house is worth its weight in mortar, then they’re likely planning some sort of Halloween multi-feature for the end of the month. Here in Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque is planning an all-night horror-thon, which lasts from 7:30pm to 5am. It’ll be an orgy of blood, violence, desperation and horror the likes of which the big screen rarely sees.
I saw my first legitimate horror film at about age 8, and it scared the bejeezus out of me. The film was Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist, which was also, as I have discovered through discussion, the first horror film of many of my peers. And while the film did indeed give me nightmares for weeks (that effing clown is enough to ruin even the sturdiest of childhoods), I was not turned off of horror films, being drawn morbidly back to the monsters, bloody and mayhem that always kind of unsettled me. It’s fun to be scared. Since age 8, I have seen hundreds and hundreds of horror films, which means I have bared witness to literally thousands of deaths. Decapitations, stabbings, shootings, stranglings, defenestrations, lapidations, meltings, immolations, bleedings, and even one where a woman had her face frozen off.
And it’s not just horror movies. In the vast bulk of films, death is a central theme. In historical dramas, we can look at the vast piles of dead bodies produced by wars, and ponder the philosophy of real-life mass killing. In crime dramas, we’ve seen cops investigate murders. Heck, even in bland soap opera movies, we often see someone die of cancer, or die in a car wreck, sometimes just to cheaply take them out of the story.
Our mortality is largely what defines us. Questions about how to live, or what philosophy is truly the best one, would stand fallow in the face of immortality. We are obsessed with our own deaths, and, hence, in our films, we tend to depict death with an alarming frequency. I have never actually seen anyone die in front of me, but, thanks to movies, I have seen simulated pain and suffering of untold thousands. So have you. So have your kids. So have your grandparents. Indeed, there are groups out there devoted to accumulating such statistics, and they often point out that the average six-year-old has, thanks to casual television consumption, seen dozens of deaths. Some of the world’s most famous children’s movies feature at least one death. Heck, The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz ends up melting into a puddle. Many Disney feature films have a scene near the end where the villain plummets off of a cliff, or sometimes even when the hero dies. Two words: Old Yeller. Two more: Bambi’s Mom. Two more: Simba’s Dad.
As a lesson this week, I will ask the following question of you: How should death be filmed?
That, of course, depends entirely on the context. There are just as many ways of filming death as there are of filming people. The death of a loved one is a sad and wrenching experience. The mass death of human beings during wartime is a tragedy. But would those two examples be filmed in the same way? Can we, for instance, in a war film, pause to mourn the passing of each fallen soldier? Can we, in a family drama, gloss over the consequences of a fallen child? For every death, we need a different light. Compare, for instance, two films, both about World War II, and both made by the same director; Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. Both of these films deal with wartime death on a massive scale, and both are about the same war. But note how Spielberg films the scenes. There is a scene in Schindler’s List where a Jewish girl, wearing a vividly colored red coat (in an otherwise black-and-white film), is seen wandering, aimlessly and dazed, through a violent malaise of Nazi soldiers and civilian slaughter. Her presence seems to indicate the last lost, child-like humanity of an otherwise brutal and inhuman incident. We see the same girl later, already dead, piled on the back of a wheelbarrow full of bodies, still in the red coat, lost forever. Spielberg did not depict the moment of her death on screen, and yet seeing her dead was a wrenching symbol of the horrors of the war. Saving Private Ryan has an equally wrenching moment when a solider, already shot, seems to know that he is dying, and asks for morphine. This soldier is his unit’s medic, and giving him morphine is essentially allowing him to die without pain. The scene is indeed tragic, but by placing the camera close to a character we know, Spielberg is allowing us to feel the visceral and violent life of a soldier. This is not abstract tragedy, but a personal one.
Indeed, when the camera is close to a death, it seems to have more meaning for us. We can watch the Earth get obliterated from space, but that’s too big an incident for us to be shocked by. Indeed, when we see destruction on a large scale, it tends to slip away from any humanity we have, and tap into our anarchic and adolescent destruction fantasies, becoming something fun. I recall, back in 1996, when the trailer for Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day was running in theaters, audiences would loudly and enthusiastically cheer the explosive crumbling of The White House at the hands of an alien laser beam. In a case such as that, the level of destruction is so high, and the means of death so wickedly absurd, that we can’t help but clap our hands, and totally disregard the hundreds that perished inside. An example like this illustrates, I think, why so many teens like to see death as a game. Me? I still cheer when I see a creative death in a horror film. If those same aliens, however, were to drag Will Smith into a small wooden shack, punch him a few times, and then strangle him to death while he cried for mercy… well, we may be tempted to feel something.
I guess the demarcating line between whether a death is a horrifying or tragic affair, and whether it’s a wickedly fun affair depends on how much we care about the person getting killed, or, conversely, the killer. Most films of the infamous slasher genre (which I’ll talk about in future Film School articles) feature kind of bland lead characters who are, the screenwriters know, included just to be killed. So when our immortal stab-happy zombie finds a new, creative way to kill someone, the audience is, presumably, in a bloodthirsty mindset, and cheer the creativity of the killer rather than mourn the passing of the victim. The people are such non-entities that we applaud their deaths and root for the murderer. This is a technique that, when the slasher genre first really began in 1978 (with John Carpenter’s Halloween), was not intended – there’s a reason why the older ones are scarier – but as the genre became increasingly predictable it was exploited to energetic effect. Watch Wes Craven’s original 1984 classic A Nightmare on Elm Street, and then watch Stephen Hopkins’ 1989 sequel A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child. How is the killer different? How are the deaths treated? You’ll find that in the original, the deaths were scary and shocking and kind of horrific. By the fifth, when Freddy Krueger is making jokes as he feeds souls to an unborn infant, you’ll feel less fright, and more a calm acceptance of the bland horror mechanics. Less, as is so often the case, is more.
Sometimes, however, the close-up approach to violence and death can be overdone, as evidenced by extreme films like the recent The Human Centipede II. This is a film that was so maddeningly focused on its childish ass-to-mouth premise that it jettisoned any relatable characterization, and had, instead, a mere litany of horrible torture acts. The victims were all held in fetishistic close-up, and we saw their faces wince, and the blood pour down their face, but in the case of this film the close-ups did nothing to help us to relate to them as people. It was more a dry, clinical examination of their body parts than it was a real depiction of the real-life consequences of violence and horror.
The power of death in film, as I indicated above, has to do with how much we relate to the victim (or, in certain cases, the tragic moral fall of the killer, as in The Godfather). By looking at a fictional friend die, we become saddened, outraged, hurt, and eventually at peace, but able to deal with it, as we know the person is not a real friend of ours, and can be resurrected by watching the film a second time. It’s a way of dealing with real-life death through a fictional depiction. Well, in the best of circumstances. The filmmaker has to be savvy enough to elicit our sympathy. It’s when they don’t manage to gain the audience’s trust that death becomes a cheap gimmick. You’ll often hear film critics talk about a film’s ending as being “unearned.” That means the filmmaker didn’t earn the right to pull off some grand deathly gesture, as they didn’t yet allow the audience to feel the appropriate level of sympathy.
Indeed, some deaths are depicted as noble martyrdoms. Some deaths are only reported to us through dialogue, because they happened off screen (although often, in this medium of “Show Don’t Tell,” it means they’re actually still alive). Some of my favorite movie deaths are more about the immediate action beforehand. In recent memory, I like to think of the final shot of Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, wherein the main character, in a final example of his favorite showboating wrestling move, was clearly sacrificing his body to the masculine myth he liked to live. We see him fly past the camera, clearly at peace with his inevitable dying, and exit the frame. Cut to black. In a case such as that, we don’t need to see the gory mechanics of his actual bodily death. In such a case, the death has been made metaphorical, and, hence, has actually gained more power. Or, heck, if we’re talking about off-screen deaths, let me cite the cinema world’s most notorious; that of Charles Foster Kane. His last word, “Rosebud,” and dropped snow-globe, is enough to spark off the central mystery of Citizen Kane. If we saw Kane thrashing about and sweating in his final illness, it would make the character a little less mythic, and too relatable; the film would have lost much of its power.
So as you begin, as I will, your yearly month-long trudge through your allotted pile of horror films, start to ask yourself how you feel about the death depicted in each. Why is one death fun and another tragic? How has your consumption of hundreds of fun, meaningless deaths shaped your view of the real thing?
HOMEWORK FOR THE WEEK: What’s your favorite movie death? Is it fun? Is it sad? Is it noble? How was it filmed? Was there a lot of character build-up? Camera close-ups? Was it more about the way it was filmed, or the context in which it was presented? How would changing a camera angle change the way an audience member would feel about that death? If you saw someone’s face in pain as they died, would it be powerful? Would it be different than if they died off-camera? Begin counting the deaths in the movies you see. How often is death depicted? What kind of deaths are okay for kids, and what kind of deaths should be saved for when they’re older? Watch the 1978 Halloween. Then watch Halloween: Resurrection. Which is a better film? How does the killer behave in these films? How are the deaths depicted? Which are more brutal, and which are sillier? How do villains die? How do heroes?
