Two singular visions of horror
Criticised
for decades of increasing mindlessness, paper-thin characters,
cheap-loud-noise-scares, lazy writing, and gratuitous use of violence, horror
movies had to get smart. Specifically,
they had to get meta. Again. Cue last year's The Cabin in the Woods: a gloriously extravagant send-up to the
creatures that haunt our dreams - most of which were granted an exhilarating
frame or two in the bombastic finale.
That the closing spectacle is so effective is, I argue, due to its
embodying the apotheosis of the realisation of horror: by showing, literally, everything (demons, giant reptiles,
pale-faced young girls and myriad other horror clichés), Cabin neutralises the aspect of fear and elides the comedic – even
farcical – despite its inclusion of frequent, very bloody scenes. Simply put: horror dissipates when dragged,
un-obscured, into the field of vision.
The movie ends with the
'destruction' of the world by the Dark God: a cataclysm suggesting the
(artistic) death of the genre and the concomitant punishment of an audience
reduced to a baying, bloodthirsty horde that would put the Aztecs to shame
(fittingly, Cabin's deity bursts
forth from the depths of an ancient temple).
Given horror's symbolic 'death', then, we must ask ourselves, again,
that most primal of questions: what is it that makes us afraid? And how can the visual medium of cinema work
to relay these anxieties? It is time to
restore the horror genre to its full potency, to reorient it in the territory
of the frightening; for that, we turn to the past. Audiences, as Cabin satirises, have been reduced to spectators of the suffering
body - and we must ask why, and for
what purpose horror cinema mediates and produces such intoxicating
effects. Put simply, there is something
troubling at work in the psyche, and reflected in the psychic affect of cinema.
Les Yeux
Sans Visage and Onibaba are two
films that, literally, restore the mask of the repressed unknown and present
deeply unsettling cinematic explorations of the horrifying. It is not surprising that both incorporate
beautiful – mostly, female – aesthetic forms in often jarring juxtaposition
with scenes of realistic violence.
However, in contrast to the contemporary taste for hyper-realistic
depictions of prolonged human suffering that repulses as much as frightens the
viewer, the films bring beauty closer
to the frame – as in the blurred view of Christiane’s mutilated face, the
heroine of Georges Franju’s Les Yeux Sans
Visage – and places it in jeopardy, revealing it as a veneer for the
horrors beneath: horrors held in the psyche, the libido, and, cinematically,
the visage. Both dramatise the strain of
suppressing the yearnings of the soul – and the often murderous need for
self-expression, for self-realisation, at all costs: see my face.
Georges
Franju, Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes
Without a Face), 1960.
Dr. Génessier returns to his opulent
estate, having 'identified' the mutilated corpse of his daughter at a local
morgue. He passes through endless
doorways, ascends two flights of stairs, pauses before a door, and enters. A woman is lying face down on a bed, her face
concealed; a bird swings madly against the bars of its cage. Thus the film's 'monster' is revealed.
The masterful transition between physical space builds character in its
own right, and mirrors the equally winding moral and thematic turns of the
narrative. The juxtaposition of the
opening nocturnal scene, in which a young girl dressed in a man's coat is
brutally hurled into a canal, with a lecture by Dr. Génessier that immediately
follows, at once demarcates and blurs the boundaries of the beautiful and the
horrifying. For Dr. Génessier is attempting
nothing less than the 'recapturing of youth' - and his sombre lecture, exposing
the dangers of his 'heterograft' procedure in which bodily tissues are
transplanted from one host to another, thrills the elegant, and mostly female,
audience. Génessier's procedure
culminates in the exsanguination of the transplant host; this somewhat furtive
admission is greeted with rapturous applause.
But in reality he experiments to restore the face of his daughter
Christiane, who he has incarcerated within his mansion: a daughter whose face
he caused to be destroyed in a car accident.
She is the dark heart of the film.
Christiane: the masked, wraith-like figure, the woman on the bed, the
'eyes without a face.'
But what eyes!
Actress Édith Scob beautifully
balances innocence with murderous intent; her hands flutter to her chest, her
cherubic head tilts as she surveys the latest victims of her father's ghastly
operations: girls whose faces will be cut from their bodies and grafted onto
her own. We feel there is danger in
every scene inhabited by the character, despite - perhaps, because of? - her
unnerving beauty. Franju's frequent
close-ups of Scob's face let her eyes speak their depths of grief: they seem
oceanic, light curving over the glassy depths of gigantic pupils, but just as
easily glaciate in chilling deadpan.
Franju utilises powerful, if
slightly overt, symbolism to hint at, and finally realise, Christiane's
emancipation. In an early scene, one of
Génessier's victims, having just arrived at his residence, looks away from the
imposing building; Franju reveals the dark, mist-shrouded forest beyond the
gates in a rare shot that teases the possibility of freedom beyond the infinite
doorways and corridors and stairwells of 'Vila de Génessier'. Christiane, wandering through the deserted
mansion, pauses before a painting of a beautiful woman holding a white
dove. Every detail is painstakingly
presented with a true auteur's eye.
There is violence, too, as well as
beauty. The surgery scenes are shot in a
lingering and surprisingly realistic manner that is excruciating to watch. Faces are cut from their hosts, blood pooling
about elegant necks. The dogs imprisoned
by Génessier - and that we learn serve as test-subjects for his transplant
experiments - are released by Christiane at the film's climax and devour the
doctor in another disturbing and realistic sequence.
But the film chooses beauty as its
ultimate triumph. Christiane, circled by
doves, ghosts past her father's corpse and out into the darkened forest. The operations have failed. Her mask is still in place - but she is
finally free. "What interests me is
not the macabre," admits Franju, in Labarthe's documentary on the
director, "but the lyricism that follows." This interest evokes the familiar power of
the sublime: the flawless surface of
the mask, the achingly elegant lines of Christiane’s garments (designed by
Givenchy, no less), the circling of doves and the final view of the
mist-wreathed forest work in powerful asymmetry with the horrors of the
narrative, increasing the cathectic effect of the carefully-orchestrated scenes
of graphic violence when they occur. The
strong fantasy and symbolic element is shared by Onibaba, with the mask motif holding together the paradox of a
friable and murderous and beautiful human subject that will not be contained: a human presence far more terrifying than
any spectre, on its journey to self-actualisation.
It is a
journey that, in Franju’s hands, is rendered truly breath-taking.
- - -
Kaneto Shindo, Onibaba, 1964.
Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba is a compelling psychodrama that centres on a woman and her
daughter-in-law eking out a perilous existence in feudal Japan. They live within a vast field of grass,
preying on travelling soldiers and selling their goods to a local
merchant. All seems to be well, in a
bloodthirsty sort of fashion, until the arrival of Hachi: a muscled, coarse,
but nevertheless seductive deserter who informs them that the woman's son (and
her daughter-in-law's husband) has been killed in the war. Settling into a nearby habitation, Hachi
proves a catalyst for the ensuing mayhem to come, disrupting the precarious
stability of the women.
Jealousy, sexuality, and violence
combine in a heady mélange. The older
woman, 'Baba', is tormented by the proximity of sex and the very real exposure
of her own impotence. Sensing the danger
of her daughter-in-law's seduction she confronts Hachi and presents herself to
him in exchange; the ruse fails. Salvation
comes in the form of a masked samurai, whose fellows have been killed in conflict. He has lost his way. Leading him through the grasses, Baba begs
him to show her his face, which he claims to be 'the most handsome' in Kyoto. In an interesting, revision of masculinity,
he has kept his mask on for fear of marring his features in combat. 'I've never seen anything really beautiful
since the day I was born', spits Baba, poignantly. Refusing her, the samurai is led to his
death, falling into the 'hole': an ancient feature of the landscape in which
the women dump the remains of their victims.
Shindo exploits the human need to witness
in this sequence; the samurai pauses and torments Baba with the possibility of
unmasking himself, before ultimately refusing.
The climactic unveiling of his corpse yields horror in the place of
beauty: a face buried beneath hideous sores.
The very landscape, too, serves a
similarly obscuring function. Shindo
very rarely presents shots above the
level of the endlessly rippling fronds, with glimpses of sky, and birds in
flight, providing welcome and desperate relief at key, usually post-coital
moments in the narrative. Baba ambushes
the daughter three times, waiting out in the grasses with the demon mask stolen
from the samurai's corpse to bar her from running to the tent of Hachi.
Interestingly, the three
'apparition' scenes are treated somewhat impressionistically, with the onibaba rising mechanically upwards or
gliding towards the camera, lit in flickering spotlight. However, the inevitable confrontation with
the younger woman leaves her unable to remove the mask. In this especially brutal sequence, all
whirling camera and frightening close ups of the young woman's contorted face
as she takes revenge on her tormentor, the latter has to break the mask from
Baba's face using a hammer, having made her promise that she can see Hachi
'every day and night'. Blood oozes from
the mask's bottom.
The film finishes where it begins,
with a freed Baba pursuing her appalled daughter-in-law through the grass in a
climax as moving as it is unsettling. Baba's face, too, is now wracked with
sores from where the mask has been torn, a sign of the 'samurai's curse'. The chase leads them to the hole... The young
woman leaps... As does Baba. Shindo
leaves her there, suspended, her last cry echoing across the grasslands: 'I'm a
human being!'
- - -
This final admission of human
frailty is, perhaps, the strongest vindication of all for the horror
genre. In a Nietzschean flourish, Baba’s
donning the demon mask and ‘performing’ her desire to stem the sexuality of her
daughter-in-law pays testament to the power of the mask – of the actor – to ‘safely’ channel negative
emotions; the mask of Apollo, god of music and merriment, supposedly manages
the dark Dionysian impulses that rise from the depths of the unconscious. The effectiveness of these two films lies in
their showing that this mask, too, is itself horrifying: the effort to suppress
or conceal the true self is strenuous, murderous, and inflicts violence in its
own right. ‘My face frightens me, my
mask terrifies me more!’ cries Christiane, significantly. Make no mistake: this is not to advocate a
return to that most well-known of horror clichés: ‘what is most frightening is
that which is unseen.’ Onibaba and Les Yeux Sans Visage, eliding beauty, drawing upon the poetic
symbolism of the sublime, remind us that the failings of the repressive effort can be just as, if not more,
frightening than a relentless cinematic bombardment of suffering bodies.
Try to contain me, hide my ugliness, lock me
away, wreath me in beauty they seem to say... Like any ghoul, I will not be contained.
Phoenix Alexander is an MA English Student at Queen Mary, University of London, and a doctoral scholar at Yale University as of August 2013.
Phoenix Alexander is an MA English Student at Queen Mary, University of London, and a doctoral scholar at Yale University as of August 2013.
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