Halloween and The Shining
http://www.stevewlb.zen.co.uk/College/Genre/halloweenshining.
htm
An analysis of the films Halloween, The Shining and Aliens can illustrate
some of the trends in recent horror cinema.
Halloween directed by John Carpenter in 1978 seems today to be a very
clichéd example of the genre, although at the time it was made it was very
original and hugely influential. The protagonist is a masked psychopath
called Michael Myers. He is presented throughout the film as being barely
human, having killed as a child and never speaking. His movements are
slightly reminiscent of Frankenstein's monster- slow and robotic and he is
also a sexual killer and voyeur, something that is most strongly set up for
the audience in the early scenes of the film when we see him watching the
teenagers in their bedrooms or as they undress. The camera shots fit with
this as constant distant shots give a sense that people are being watched
and as the teenagers walk along, early in the film, the camera tracks along
behind them smoothly. At other times as in the opening of the film we
actually see through his eyes as the hand-held camera follows his first
murder. All of this was hugely original in 1978 but has been copied
endlessly since.
The voyeuristic sexual serial killer had been used before in Hitchcock's
Psycho. The new spin that Carpenter puts on it is the mask which has itself
been frequently copied since. The mask along with his lack of speech,
distances us from the killer and de-humanises him. Because we cannot
see his features and more particularly his eyes, we cannot sense his
emotions and therefore we feel no sympathy for him. He becomes more of
a monster than a human. This is also clear when we consider other
features of his presentation, his superhuman strength and ability to rise
from the dead for example. If you take all of this together, you are being
presented with a protagonist who is almost as inhuman as the monster in
Alien.
The mask is heavily played on in the visual language of the film. Because it
is so instantly recognisable it is used as an icon within the film. We just
need to see it for a fraction of a second and we recognise the danger the
characters are in. The mask also seems almost to have a magical power in
that the only time that Michael Myers pauses in his remorseless robotic
attack is when Laurie manages to take it off him- at this point he is shot.
One final monstrous quality of the protagonist is his super-human strength.
He rises three times from the dead after having been stabbed, knitting
needled and shot. Again this aspect of the film seems funny today but was
probably terrifyingly surprising when the film was first brought out.
The stock characters of the film, the teenage victims are if anything even
more predictable. As in many examples of the genre, they are represented
as being universally stupid and sex mad. It is a very odd feature of the
ideology of traditional horror such as this that the on-screen
representatives of the teenage audience are so badly represented. Horror
films come out as being tremendously moralistic with the message that
only good girls like Laurie who do their homework and don't get out much
deserve to survive.
This becomes clearer when we consider how our sympathies are engaged
in the film. The teenagers are generally presented as figures of fun having
ridiculous conversations and ridiculous sex. We are distanced from them
by the use of dramatic irony- we know what is going on while they don't so
we laugh at the blond girls attempts to seduce the monster or at her
boyfriends words "come on out" just before the monster does. The
language of the film also fits with this as we are never allowed to forget the
presence of the killer since the unsubtle synthesiser music reminds us
constantly that he is around and the camera often tricks us into thinking we
are watching through his eyes as it follows the friends along
All of this intensifies the dramatic irony so that we constantly feel that the
characters are behaving stupidly and that we would do things differently.
So we constantly feel like shouting out warnings to the characters about
the danger they are oblivious to. In this, we are just like children at a
pantomime wanting to shout out: "It's behind you!" Just like the children we
feel a mixture of fear and frustration which could be called stock emotions
for a horror audience.
Carpenter works hard to produce these reactions from us. The mise en
scene for the film makes much use of the borders of the screen so that we
frequently catch glimpses of the killer when the victims are oblivious. Their
own lack of understanding is emphasised by the fact that they always
seem to be singing to themselves when they are most in danger- the
ultimate sign of innocent contentment. Most obviously, they do all of the
stupid things that stock characters in horror do: they fall over, fail to open
useful doors and then go through ones where the ominous shaft of light
coming out alerts the whole audience to danger; they interpret real hoax
calls as being dangerous and the sound of a murder over the phone as a
joke. In all these cases, we may feel frustrated but the fact that we feel cut
off from them may make the horror easier to bear. If you think of a
comparison with a film like Seven, you can see how very similar events
can be presented in such a way that you feel much closer to the victims
and therefore much more devastated by the events. In Halloween you
either don't care about these kids or you even secretly side with the killer.
The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick two years later, is a different film
in many ways. Kubrick is seen by many people as an auteur- a director
who takes the same kind of control over a film as a writer would over a
novel. He is also someone who, unlike John Carpenter had never made a
horror film before. With this coupling of a filmmaker with a lot of power over
the final product and a genre he has never tried before, the Shining
frequently surprises us by breaking horror conventions. It is almost
sometimes as if Kubrick had a list of our expectations which he then
decided to turn upside down. This is most obvious in the mise en scene.
Horror films tend to take place in the dark and here Kubrick makes
massive use of lights so you get scenes such as the one where Shelley
Duvall confronts Jack Nicholson which takes place in an amazingly bright
room. Somehow Kubrick manages to make this every bit as frightening as
the more clichéd shadows. Similarly in the legendary scene with the axe
through the door, a lot of the creepiness is emphasised by the contrast
between the different brightnesses and colours of the two rooms- one lurid
yellow, the other an ice cold white.
The music for the film is also very striking. Unlike that for Halloween, it was
not written specially, but instead the eerie pieces of modern classical
music are perfectly synchronised with the action. Often what we hear
seems to be just an ominous rumble with no melody at all, which will build
up to a higher pitch at a moment of crisis.
The most striking way that Kubrick plays with our expectations of the genre
is when he uses the early parts of the film to mess around with our tension
levels -fooling us into thinking something is about to happen and then
letting us down. This is a cliché of the genre. In Halloween, for example,
much of the early part of the film is taken up with scenes where we are led
by ominous camera shots and music to believe that the killer is about to
strike only to be brought back down to earth when we see that nothing is
actually happening. A famous example of this in another film is in Alien
when the crew first go chasing after the monster. We see them slowly
searching through the claustrophobic corridors of the ship, we watch as
their monitor lights up to show the presence of an Alien and we jump a
mile when the creature appears.....the ship's cat.
The idea of all of this is two-fold. First of all it keeps the audience in a
permanently tense state which lasts until the end of the film, but it also lulls
us into a false sense of security- after a few let downs such as this we, like
the characters, are off our guard when the real horror comes in the last half
hour or so of the film.
In the Shining, Kubrick seems on the surface to be playing the same kind
of game with our adrenaline levels. In a number of early bits of the film we
are let down as we expect something awful to happen. An example is the
scene when Shelley Duvall and the child go out to the maze. We watch as
Nicholson walks over to a model of the maze, a close up of his face
emphasises his dishevelled appearance and sinister leer and the shot
lingers longer than is comfortable. Then, as we finally cut down to the
model which dissolves into the maze in reality, the already magicalseeming change of shot is reinforced by a similarly magical change in the
music. The implication is that he has some kind of magical power over the
tiny ant-like figures we see moving around in the shot. Then as the music
raises in pitch and volume and clearly something is going to happen, it all
comes crashing down to earth-"Tuesday"
It's almost as if Kubrick has taken this clichéd idea of fooling the audience
into being frightened of nothing and by reducing it to such a ridiculous
conclusion he is making fun of it (and us?) This kind of post-modern
approach to the conventions of the genre runs the risk of sacrificing the
power of the story-line for a few jokes. Some people feel that the Shining
does not work as horror because it spends too long teasing us in these
ways so that when we finally come to the climactic scenes at the end we
don't really care any more.
On the other hand another of Kubrick's spins on the genre is very effectivehis choice of protagonist. Here again he stands the cliché on its head- the
tradition of the silent, unseen, mysterious monster is reversed so that with
Nicholson the whole strength of his character lies in the fact that we do see
so much. The camera lingers on his face and the full range of his
expressions and the script allows him a huge number of lines. Because of
this he becomes a very different type of horror monster- one whom we like
as well as fear. Witty catch-phrases and amusing expressions are cleverly
mixed with more typical genre features such as his hunch-backed limp at
the end of the film and the shots of him howling at the moon like a
Werewolf as he dies. A similar kind of charismatic horror protagonist has
been created more recently in The Silence of the Lambs.
I have made it seem as if The Shining is a totally original movie, but
obviously there is much about it that is stock- the role of the victim, wide
eyed and stupid Shelley Duvall is hardly novel and there are plenty of
stock situations including two- the blade going through a door and a
woman getting stuck in a window -which could be direct steals from the
earlier Halloween. However, there is plenty that is very original. It is clearly
a cleverer, wittier more post-modern film, but whether that makes it more
effective as horror is another matter.
Steve Baker 12/96
Steve Baker
Back to Genre