I sometimes feel that I’m impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race. I know this sounds sick, but I love it. – Vincent Price
Pumpkin spice abounds at the local Starbucks. My allergies are acting up. The cat has decided to start hibernating. The local cider mill is reopening their doors. The nights grow cooler, the days shorter, and even the sunlight seems tinged by a red-orange hue. The black bound cover of my Edgar Allan Poe anthology calls to me from the far corner of my shelf. Something is happening. It’s time. Time for horror.
I do not adore Halloween itself, but I adore the lead up to it. I love the shortening of the days and the sudden rush of blood in my veins when I consider with shivering anticipation the opportunities of the scary season. Halloween itself has always seemed weird and a little sick to me – people seem to go just a bit mad, and I prefer to remain safely indoors with my scary movies than out in the leaf-turning streets with the ghosts and goblins. But as September turns to October, I feel that familiar urge to fill my Netflix queue with long-forgotten titles of blood and murder; to flip through my DVD collection in search of films I really only watch once a year, and mourn at the realization that I do not own a cop of Suspiria or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
Every year at this time, I try to include some new films in my viewing, as well as some of my old favorites. Thus far I have seen House of Wax, starring my darling Mr. Price; I hope also to watch The Amityville Horror, Bird with the Crystal Plumage, The Man Who Laughs and Arachnophobia. I try, as best I can, to expand my horror watching across genres and time periods – although I will not subject myself to so-called ‘torture porn,’ nor the expansive genre of barely concealed misogynistic genres. Slasher films, with the exceptions of the original Halloween and Friday the 13th , hold no fascination for me, but I’m always willing to be convinced.
I have an abiding love for Roger Corman, though, and Tod Browning; for James Whale, and Terence Fisher. I will gladly dream of Christopher Lee’s red-washed eyes, and Peter Cushing’s solid gentility. I will quiver in fear of Argento, stare wide-eyed at Carpenter. Give me Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone in glorious Cinemascope; treat me to Hazel Court and Coral Browne, to Joyce Jameson and Debra Paget. Give me, in short, the classics, the horrible Bs, the terrifying and macabre, based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and covered in white cobwebs, blood red as paint, fangs digging into arteries.
These films have a gleeful adoration of the macabre that far exceeds the mere ‘scariness’ of their subject matters. While they might not give us the thrills and chills they once did, they still give us wide-eyed wonder. To watch Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein or Lugosi in Dracula is to watch the creation of an icon; no one can come after them because they made the movies that we know in our very bones. These are the marrow of our cinema, the foundations of our terrors; if they don’t scare us any more, it is because they are so familiar, so a part of us, that the terror they once represented has been fully internalized. We become the monsters we create, and so perhaps we have become the Monster and the Wolfman, Dracula and the Mummy. Perhaps they no longer frighten us because we can see ourselves so perfectly in them. Or perhaps they truly are of a bygone age, good only to recall past glories, and mean little to the horror world of today.
When Vincent Price said that he was impersonating the dark unconscious of the human race, he did not go wrong. Horror is the love of those terrors beneath the surface, the dark underbelly of small town America, the repressed monster dwelling within us all. I don’t know why I love certain types of horror – the Gothic, the macabre, the big empty houses, the family secrets and hovering ghosts – while feeling either disgusted or bored by others. Horror is about enjoyment, it seems to me, and as individual as the experience of comedy. I have no doubt that in the coming weeks you will be favored with further ruminations on the nature of this finest of genres, the kind that divides friendships and has us arguing into the small hours that The Exorcist was not really scary, but Deep Red most certainly is. These are the times when I love cinema, because I can stop thinking and enjoy it, allow the screams to echo from the screen, watch the blood flow, and smile knowing that it’s all just paint, that this is but a stage, and that the terror, what terror there is, is not real. Times also when I will not question, analyze, explain or explore, but for a few brief moments enjoy the darkness.
Author: Lauren "I was a rust repairer. A rust repairer and full time survivor. I survived all the major earthquakes, and the Titanic, and several air crashes."
Source:
http://manilovefilms.com/everything-else/2013/10/the-dark-unconscious/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-dark-unconscious
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