Wednesday, April 4, 2007
So where do we put movies like Hitchcock’s Psycho, John Carpenter’s The Thing, movies like Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte? Horror? All of the above are considered horror films. Is this a legitimate taxonomy? Well, yes. And no. For the most part, no. It depends on how you look at it. If you look at it my way, no. If you look at it the other way, you’re an idiot.
I went to a showing of The Wasp Woman, one of Roger Corman’s many ridiculous spawn of hell films. His movies are so bad, they are almost immoral in their offense to art. (My apologies to the Corman fans, but I can prove this mathematically). This particular abomination featured a former model who ran a cosmetics company. She was far from being ‘old’ but was past her modeling years, and of course, longed for that elusive fountain of youth. And she found it–in royal jelly…you know, bee royal jelly? Well, in this case, wasp royal jelly. Somehow, in the film, wasps learned how to make royal jelly like bees do. I suppose the bees taught them, who knows? I guess it was easier to have wasps making royal jelly than it was to change the name of the film to ‘The Bee Woman.’ I think it was really because they made the posters for the film before they made the film. And hey, after all, ‘The Bee Woman’ sounds a bit too nice for a horror film, when you think about it.
So someone experiments with royal jelly and comes up with this formula to make a - are you ready, a“Serum,” that will bring youth and beauty to the user. How many 1950’s monster movies use a “Serum” as the vehicle for some metamorphosis? Anyway, naturally, this wasp royal jelly serum turns her, or rather her head, into a three-dollar Halloween mask that, if you really stretch your imagination, could somewhat resembles a gorilla with goggles on. Apparently there was a costume miscommunication, and someone didn’t put the wasp woman mask back after they’d used it, and one thing led to another and…
Clearly, it was an absolutely terrible movie. It was showing at The Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, (Maybe to celebrate the early Mesozoic period when women use to be wasps) and I’d never seen it, so I went.
After the movie, they had an entomologist, a bee specialist, a film historian, and a former Roger Corman film crewmember. They were all answering questions about the movie, Corman, and a number of other things that related in some way to what we’d just seen. So, when I had the chance, I asked, “How do you classify and distinguish horror from science fiction and other genre?” This is something that I’ve always wondered about, so I figured these guys, especially the film historian, would be able to give me a cogent answer. They all seemed to be struck dumb, suddenly. Finally, the film historian said, “Well, if it’s horrifying to you, then it’s a horror film.”
You’ve got to be kidding me. This is an actual film historian at The Museum of Natural History, and he gives me some wishy-washy politically safe answer like that? I said right back to him, “Well, The English Patient horrified me.” He laughed, and then said that it’s hard to categorize and separate what is horror and what is sci-fi, thriller or other genres. I didn’t say it then, but I disagree. I think you can separate, and quite accurately, films into horror, sci-fi, thriller, and other genres that we have today, with some crossovers, of course.
For instance. We put Psycho into the horror genre when it’s really a thriller. Why is it a thriller and not a horror? Because of the lack of supernatural content. There is no monster, no otherworldly creature is this film. There is only Norman Bates. A mild, sweet, affable kind of guy who likes to cross dress in his dead mothers clothes and stab women to death in the shower. He didn’t have fangs, he didn’t crawl up out of the swamp, he wasn’t the result of an experiment gone bad. Poor little Norman Bates was a murderer. A deranged one, sure, but just a killer, nothing more. So why is it considered a horror film? I think it’s because of Hitchcock, really. He did such a masterful job of scaring the hell out of people, that it has gained the status of–Horror Film.
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. This is about a woman who keeps seeing things and hearing voices and music from an incident out of her past. Now the incident is horrifying, but the movie is thriller. No monsters, no creatures. Again, just murders and mentally unbalanced humans. That’s all.
How about The Thing? If you’re talking straight out horror, it is truly one of the greatest ‘horror’ films ever made. But again, technically speaking, it’s not a horror film either. It’s and outer space film. It should be put into the sci-fi category. The creature is an alien from space that landed on earth and was buried in ice for thousands of years. That’s sci-fi, folks. Not horror. Sure, this has a creature, and yes, we consider it a monster, but, a monster only because it does monstrous things. On another planet, it very likely would be a citizen. The only real difference between this and The Day The Earth Stood Still is that Michael Rennie wanted to help us, and the creature in The Thing wanted to kill us. Both acquired human form, both came to earth from another planet, both had powers and capabilities that were foreign to us. It’s just that one used those powers for our good and the other used those powers for its own good. Yet The Day The Earth Stood Still is sci-fi and The Thing is horror.
Sorry, won’t work.
You can’t say that just because one is scary and the other is meaningful then one is horror and the other sci-fi. Don’t even try it. I won’t let you get away with it. I’ll call the movie police and have you thrown in genre jail.
Frankenstein, sci-fi.
Silence of The Lambs, thriller.
Dracula, horror.
The Fly, sci-fi.
Saw, thriller.
A Nightmare On Elm Street, stupid.
Halloween, horror (because of the ending).
Believe me, we need this kind of taxonomy. It is of the utmost importance.
Just think of the havoc that would befall us were we to ignore this sacred and holy ground of human understanding. Bodies would be everywhere and the streets would run red with blood.
And worst of all, people the world over would be saying what a great horror film The Titanic was.
Wait a minute…Leonardo DiCaprio as the romantic lead to Kate Winslett?
Okay, I guess I’ll have to give you that one.
