Celluloid Confetti

There can be no doubt about it: I am a colossal coward.

So I have only gradually come to appreciate the unconventional beauty of a well-made horror film.

Growing up, I studiously avoided the video nasties of the 80s. In my childish innocence, I took the lurid artwork on the videocassette as an accurate reflection of the film itself, little realising how quaint and hand-made the effects of the day actually were.

(despite recent advances in cinema trickery, I think it will be a few years yet before special effects will be able to bring 80s VHS horror sleeves to life. I think we have only just caught up with 70s heavy metal album covers)

Since then, I have rediscovered classics such as Basket Case (1982), It’s Alive (1974) and Brain Damage (1988), and enjoyed them enormously. They are sweet, witty, and intelligent in ways that I found totally unexpected. And apart from occasional moments of lurid bloodshed, they are really not all that unpleasant.

So far, Brain Damage is my personal favourite. Featuring a singing blue parasite that feeds on brains, it’s a cautionary tale about drug addiction, which I suppose was the filmmaker’s way of atoning for all the drugs they must have taken while making it.

It’s odd though, despite my innate squeamishness, the dismembering violence seen in films such as Verhoeven’s sublime Starship Troopers (1997) never bothered me in the slightest.

(Interestingly, Starship Troopers’ seemingly over-the-top effects, which saw soldiers blown apart, decollated and otherwise maimed, has since become de rigeur in ’serious’ war films, notably Saving Private Ryan (1998). Only in Saving Private Ryan it was Nazis doing the maiming, not giant insects).

Similarly, I have always adored zombie movies. And I really liked György Pálfi’s Taxidermia (2006), which contained moments of fantastic bodily deconstruction that outstrip any horror film, and yet did so without being remotely horrific.

So does this tolerance for bloodletting mean there is something wrong with me?

I mean, I don’t find it upsetting when I see a wildebeest being brought down by a lion in a wildlife documentary (though perhaps if it was mine own personal wildebeest, I would feel differently).

I think the real reason is this: giant insects, zombies and lions are largely, devoid of malice; they are products of nature, rather than the sadism that lurks within the dark recesses of human nature.

By contrast, I remember going to see a Dario Argento double bill at Bradford’s Pictureville Cinema. Lord knows how I got in; presumably the theatre’s management assumed that anyone in Bradford who knew about Dario Argento had to be at least in their mid-thirties, and therefore decided that my callowness could not be of the youthful variety.

Anyway, I was just about to survive The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, a splendid Hitchcockian thriller which featured a couple of nasty moments with a razor blade.

But when it came to Tenebrae - perhaps Argento’s nastiest film to date - I found my stomach actually contorting with the onscreen mad-axery.

When I revisited Tenebrae years later, I found it still had the power to shock, but I was better able to appreciate the psychological intrigue that lay beneath the bloodletting, not to mention the funky prog-rock soundtrack.

So having becomed inured of video nasties, mutant bug holocausts, and psycho axe-misogynists, the only category of screen violence I continued to avoid was the stuff involving good old fashioned torture.

Well, I am pleased to say that in the last few months, I have been desensitised even further!

I grudgingly sat through Saw I. I raised my eyebrows in pleasant surprise at Saw II. I eagerly awaited Saw III. You may have heard that Saw IV is out in cinemas; suffice it to say I will be eagerly in line to see it.

And I know I won’t be alone - I’m not sure if it was the scene with the basket chair in Casino Royale (2006), but torture seems to have become mainstream.

And I think I understand the appeal. Unlike the vast majority of modern horror movies which rely solely on shock-scares for their effect, films like Hostel (2005) or Saw (2004) show that the filmmakers have spent time and effort creating something horrible.

But the real reason I prefer the Saw movies to even the most mundane run-of-the-mill frightener is due to cowardice, not bravado. I can watch somebody getting their head twisted off in a clockwork vice, but I don’t like it when something jumps out from behind a corner and goes “boo!”.

Hitchcock understood it up perfectly: it’s the difference between suspense and surprise.

The best horror films go for the former. Cowards like me can’t stand the latter. It’s the difference between something happening to someone else, and something happening to you.

To paraphrase Zero Mostel’s character in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)

“I am immune to pain!”
[jab]
“Argh! You fool! Not my own!”