I want to make horror films for animals. I want to investigate an animal's world—how it appraises the visual field for predators, reacts to ominous noise, heights, bright lights, and optical illusion.
I want to direct a film integrating my research into a virtual horizon that will accelerate the heart beat of a jungle pig.
This proposal is one of many that explore the wider potential of a woefully neglected genre. The 21st century horror film is grossly ineffective.
Precipitating embryos, toothed vaginas, human torsos squirming in abandoned footlockers: visualizations of the fantastic and absurd adhere to the stultifying calculus of the 'gross-out'—a calculus that transformed the market into a competition of spectacle not nerves.
Brain-sucking, eye-gouging, navel-raping, Ed Gein-ian flourishes of interior design... the horror film (that is, its most popular sub-genres) exploits only a narrow range of fears.
Connoisseurs scour Amazon for inventive prop masters and stylistic banality, for movies which neither horrify nor disgust but brim with comedic overtones and indulge our clinical desire to see, and not to cringe.
Horror films are evolving into thinly disguised light-hearted comedies or heavy metal action—or substitute porno. So many women we chop into bits for an excuse to see their faces contort, for them to howl and shudder in an ecstatic experience not unlike orgiastic self-abandon.
Enough with the butcher blocks and the buckets of blood unless you have less than a twenty-thousand dollar budget! We need new avenues of fear!
The most successful projects in recent years include experiments in unconventional editing and pace (Michael Haneke's "Funny Games") and atmospheric paranoia (pseudo-documentaries that don't show the monster at all). But so much more awaits.
We must cater to a market of exotic phobias. Spiders, needles, pathogens are all dried up! Let us now explore the devastating anomie lurking in the stacks of old libraries and in an ocean of moldering newspapers!
Let us develop the logic underlying the fear of bicycles, the fear of flowers, the fear of empty rooms, marketplaces, ducks, road-travel, feet, falling backwards in a chair, or choking on a ham-sandwich. Get the shark out of the bathtub and put it in a ham sandwich! I imagine a new cinema that—in the hands of a visionary director—will awaken us to a variety of mesmerizing fears. Fear that is the uncontrollable alternation between suspension and agitation of thought! Fear that is sublime!
We must exploit the cruelties of cartoons in real time. The grotesque exaggerations of emotion, the creepy reconstitution of decapitated and exploded animals, the endless cycles of predator and prey unfurling in a seamless eternity of illogical mad-cap action!
Samuel Beckett brilliantly distilled the horror he found in Keaton and Chaplin and became the slapstick poet of the post-nuclear age.
With the special effects now at our disposal, we must do the same with the insanity of the woodpecker! Imagine a 10 hour film edited by an amphetamine junky in which human bodies are subject to Warner Brothers' physics and Bugs Bunny tirelessly expounds a life philosophy.
We must incorporate the stylistic elements of those eerie science documentaries that terrified us in lower school. Exeunt Vincent Price and hello Carl Sagan! In a poorly transferred static-monotone, a faceless voice laments the destruction of nature and estimates (with an esoteric optimism) the soul-crushing size of the universe. Halogen lamps, star-clusters, sea-monsters—under the voice each exhibit becomes a metaphor for the cosmos' pitilessness. If the subject matter wasn't intrinsically terrifying, by the voice it would be. And if not terrifying, then claustrophobic and dusty. We need this in our films!
The possibilities abound: travelogues of virtual realities generated by outdated computers, spliced-together 'home-movies' of the lower-middle class, footage from the world's creepiest security cameras... I have barely scratched the surface of what horror might become.
Dear reader—if you come up with a few, please add to the collection! Send your genre benders to bljohnso@bowdoin.edu and build the New Horror Cinema!