Vol.
2, Issue 10
February 1, 2000
Sometimes
we cannot believe that what is happening is real...pinch yourself
and you may find out that it is" - Texas Chainsaw Massacre
ne
of the major obsessions of horror cinema is its placement of individuals
within the collapsing roar of a landscape gone mad. The once familiar
world is rendered alien and unknowable, a dark universe rearing
its head late in the day to cast everything into a twilight chaos.
Characters are left running through the ruins of what they originally
perceived as an ordered existence. Horror cinema destabilizes
the boundaries between what can and cannot happen and, as a result,
the world is pushed out of joint.
Those
who survive can never be the same.
The transformation
is a savagely swift one. The finest horror films move with a kind
of red velocity, a terrible and bloody speed at which space is
rapidly complicated. This environmental unraveling, however, tends
to fall into two basic categories: expressionistic and realistic.
Expressionist horror cinema, beginning in Germany with works like
Robert Weine's Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and Paul
Wagner's The Golem (1920) and continuing on into the early
sound period in such films as Dreyer's Vampyre (1932),
created landscapes based on the principle that the exterior world
was a reflection of the tortured interior of the individuals populating
it.
Realist
horror cinema, however, builds its terrible momentum from an eruption
of nightmares into the daylight.
In this
context, realist refers to the treatment of the landscape as something
existing independent of the individuals who dwell within it, an
objective space which is infected by the darkness rather than
being directly shaped by it. Films as wildly different as Seven,
Night of the Living Dead and Let's Scare Jessica to
Death are brought together by their depiction of the universe's
sudden decision to pull back the curtain, turning itself upside
down and inside out, only to embrace the individuals caught up
in its revolution with a glacial indifference. There is an implicit
statement being made that the darkness has always been present,
waiting in the angles and hidden folds. Psycho took the
first significant steps towards giving a nasty bite to this realist
bent. George Romero's late sixties zombie plague reached even
further than Hitchcock's tale of a lonely, psychotic boy in trying
to pierce the "real" with the nightmarish. Both Psycho
and Night of the Living Dead could be seen as the first
steps in a new evolution of horror cinema, a terrible realism
which would result in the creation of a film so ahead of its time,
so profound in its implications, that it still stands as a cinematic
landmark.
The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre may be one of the most beautiful realist
horror works ever made. Tobe Hooper's film is an apocalyptic masterpiece,
a dark fairy tale about the ultimate impossibility of understanding
the universe. Chainsaw's greatest effect is found in its
depiction of the most terrible violations taking place in the
most seemingly ordinary of worlds.
Hooper's
direction emphasizes both odd angles and distorted perspectives
as well as unusually smooth camera movement for such a low budget
feature. Frantic cuts and sudden zooms struggle alongside graceful
tracking movement and still long shots as if he's trying to find
a way to portray the interlocking levels of this dying, schizophrenic
reality.