by Paul Bullock
PART I: THE FINEST EMOTION
"Terror is the finest emotion, so I will try to terrorise the reader."
Stephen King, Danse Macabre
For as long as there have been movies, there have been monsters.
Cinema's first, and arguably most effective, monster didn't have the sharp claws and pointed fangs we've come to associate with its most well-known terrors, but it did manage to elicit a greater response. The Lumiere Brothers' L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) was the first film ever produced, and it consists of nothing more than a train pulling into a station. When it was first exhibited to unwitting members of the public in January 1896 though, it proved a sensation. Unaware of the limits of this new technology, the audience recoiled in terror, believing the train would continue its path, pass straight through the screen and plunge into the exhibition hall itself. Cinema was born - and the horror movie along with it.
Film fans have become more sophisticated since then, but no less fascinated by the capacity of cinema to scare. Horror films routinely top the box office and home video charts and the most successful ones spawn a multitude of sequels and spin-offs. A select few capture the zeitgeist so fully that they transcend their genre (Scream (1996) spawning the Scary Movie parody series (2000-13)) and sometimes cinema altogether (The Exorcist (1973) being parodied in a 2012 advert for Dirt Devil). But how? The horror genre shows us violence, terror and graphic bodily mutilation. These are things that would scare and revolt us in real life, so why do we find them so attractive at the cinema?
Writing in Horrality - The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films, Philip Brophy argued that our enjoyment of horror is simple biology: "The pleasure of the text is, in fact, getting the shit scared out of you - and loving it; an exchange mediated by adrenalin." But the human body becomes accustomed to physical sensations after a period of time; the adrenalin rush becomes just another chemical impulse and we eventually become bored by it. The monster, therefore, loses its impact.
So the power of the genre must lie elsewhere; not in the body, but the mind. A uniquely psychological genre, horror and the monster movie's relationship with the audience centres around something rooted in the way we view the world. For media psychologist Stuart Fischoff, it's something regressive, the ability for adults to return to the imaginative states of their youth. Writing for Psychology Today, he argues:
"On a general level, movie monsters, horror movies, spine tingling thrillers, provide food for our imagination's nourishment. We consciously, deliberately put away the rich fears of childhood as we acquire knowledge, and temper irrational fears with rational self-talk. We also fulfill the adultified expectations of our adult peers. In so doing, we relinquish many of our superstitions with more science-based explanations. There is a cost, however: Our world of imagination is diminished, tamed into blandness. Life in Technicolor slowly fades to Black and White.
"Speaking analytically for the moment, childhood fears of monsters and the supernatural are never truly banished from our adult minds; they linger like archetypes in our subconscious. Horror movies and movie monsters allow us to revisit those fears from a safe remove. If it all gets too much, too real, too close, we can just shut our eyes, stop up our ears and mutter to ourselves 'na, na, na, na, na.' If that doesn't work we can grab hold of our date, even slump in our seat. Or we can admit defeat, get up, and go get some popcorn."
These thoughts are inverted by psychologist Glenn Walters, who writes in his 2004 paper Understanding the Popular Appeal of Horror Cinema: An Integrated-Interactive Model about the resonance horror films have with teenagers. Rather than allowing adults to return to their youths, Walters argues that horror films help teenagers mediate the difficult passage from childhood to adulthood.
"Of the three early life tasks that help shape existential fear, control/predictability appears to be the task that relates best to people’s fear of darkness, danger, and death. Control lost under the cover of darkness is rediscovered in the light of day; danger posed by things unknown is reduced by increased knowledge and predictability; and death is conquered by the promise of symbolic immortality...
"Horror movies aid teenagers in differentiating between fact and fiction and in so doing help shape the perceptual function of a teenager’s self-view. The executive function is no less affected by exposure to the horror genre. Watching a horror film presents adolescents and young adults with frightening stimuli to which they can either succumb, or learn to manage. Basic decision-making and coping skills derive from a person’s interactions with the environment; one small yet vital aspect of this environment is exposure to horror films. By learning to suppress feelings and display mastery or cling to others in a dependent ploy for protection, a person learns to cope with another aspect of his or her environment, a skill that may be useful in dealing with more than just horror pictures. Therefore, before writing horror films off as mindless entertainment or dangerous escapism, we would do well to consider the possibility that they assist in the development and elaboration of a person’s present-view."
In both cases, the pleasures of horror lie in catharsis and vicarious joy; horror stories, as Andrew Gordon notes, are "like roller-coaster rides: they give you a safe, controlled scare, a series of carefully programmed shocks and surprises" (Gordon, 31). The cinema screen offers us the perfect medium through which to enjoy these shocks and surprises. We are presented with images of horror that look and sound real, like waking dreams projected so big they completely consume our line of vision. But the screen also separates us from that horror. No matter how real Leatherface may seem, his chainsaw can't hack through the canvas its being projected onto. So we're safe to enjoy the vicarious thrills his rampages deliver in the comfort of our seats.
Though Steven Spielberg has never directed a horror film as viscerally brutal as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), he has possessed an enduring fascination with monsters throughout his career. So far, he's directed five monster movies (Duel (1971), Jaws, Jurassic Park, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds (2005)), written one (1982's Poltergeist) and produced many more (Gremlins, Arachnophobia (1990) and Super 8 (2011) among them). Even his non-monster movies trade heavily on the fear of strange and scary creatures, be they the ultimately benevolent, though initially threatening, aliens of Close Encounters and E.T. or the snakes, spiders and rats of the Indiana Jones series. "I love this kind of nightmare," he said while promoting Arachnophobia. "I like to feel my skin get up to my jugular vein. I'm diabolical in that sense. I get perverse pleasure in making people sweat in their underwear." (Taylor, 22)
This 'perverse pleasure' began in a youth dominated by fear. "I was afraid of small spaces and I was afraid of the tree outside my window; I had all these phobias," Spielberg told CNN in 2001. "I think many kids have those phobias, but I probably had more than most." The youngster refused to let these fears defeat him though. Describing them as "very stimulating," Spielberg used his imagination to master the things that scared him, taking control of them and yet, conversely, making them even more terrifying. "There was a crack in the wall by my bed that I stared at all the time imagining little friendly people living in the crack and coming out to talk to me," he has said. "One day while I was staring at the crack it suddenly widened. It opened about five inches and little pieces fell out of it. I screamed a silent scream. I couldn't get anything out. I was frozen." (Baxter, 21)
This enjoyment of fear is perhaps why Spielberg fed his nightmares with those created by others through film and TV. Obsessed by the emerging television medium as a child, Spielberg spent hours in front of his family's set taking in a range of shows, from tame child-friendly fare such as Howdy Doody (1947-60) to more adventurous, adult-oriented programing like The Twilight Zone. (1959-64) Spielberg's parents, Arnold and Leah, tried to restrict their son's intake by taping a strategically placed hair to the set so it would break if Steven tried to watch, but there was no stopping the boy. "I was, and still am, a TV junkie," he has said. "I've just
grown up with TV, as all of us have, and there is a lot of television inside my head that I wish I could get rid of. You can't help it - once it's there, it's like a tattoo." (McBride, 62)
Television's hugely significant influence can be seen in the medium's repeat appearances in his films. Television helps Roy Neary make the final connection between the shape he sees in his head and Devil's Tower in Close Encounters; it inspires the psychic link between Elliott and his new friend in E.T., and it is the filter through which we witness the terrorist atrocities at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (2005). With Poltergeist, a film he's dubbed "my revenge on TV," he based an entire film around the television, and starting with 1985's ill-fated Twilight Zone homage Amazing Stories (1985-87), he'd dip in and out of television projects with varied success. The medium was, as Joseph McBride notes, "undoubtedly the single most pervasive cultural influence in [Spielberg's] early childhood years." (McBride, 62)
Cinema's absence from Spielberg's everyday routine meant it had a more infrequent, but no less significant, impact on the director's imagination and his appreciation of fear. The first film Spielberg ever saw was Cecil B. DeMille's circus spectacular The Greatest Show On Earth (1952), which he watched with his father at The Kiva cinema in then-hometown Arizona. Aware of his son's active imagination, Arnold tried to calm the boy's nerves before the screening began, reminding him that: "It's going to be bigger than you, but that's alright. They are going to be up on the screen and they can't get out at you." (Baxter, 22-23). It worked, and Spielberg emerged from The Greatest Show On Earth unscathed. However, he would fare less well with a staple of every child's cinematic education: Disney.
Arnold and Leah took their son to see the likes of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937), Fantasia (1940), and Bambi (1941), but the boy was more disturbed than enchanted. He burst into tears at the sight of the Evil Queen's transformation in Snow White and has dubbed the Night on Bald Mountain sequence in Fantasia one of the most frightening in film history. "I came screaming home from Snow White and tried to hide under the covers," he has remembered. "My parents didn't understand it because Walt Disney movies are not supposed to scare, but to delight and enthrall. Between Snow White, Fantasia and Bambi, I was a basket case of neurosis." (Baxter, 23)
The neurosis would fade, but the influence of cinema would not. Just as the fear generated by real life proved "very stimulating" for Spielberg's young mind, so too did that created by the movies. One science-fiction film enjoyed by Spielberg and his sisters Anne, Sue and Nancy proved particularly influential. "I remember a movie on television with a Martian who kept a severed head in his fish bowl," Spielberg recalled. "It scared them so much, they couldn't watch. So... I locked them in a closet with a fish bowl. I can still hear the terror breaking in their voices." (Crawley, 12)
It was by no means the only time Spielberg would take such fiendish glee from tormenting his siblings. "I used to do anything in my imagination to terrify them," he has explained. "I was terrible. From seven to thirty-three, I was really awful to them." (McBride, 72). On one occasion, Steven hid outside Anne's window after bed-time and chanted in an eerie voice, 'I am the Moon! I am the Moooooon!', while another time, he cut the head off one of Nancy's dolls and served it to her on a platter with a bed of lettuce and a garnish of parsley and tomatoes. "At this point," Leah remembers, "Nancy didn't even freak out." (McBride, 89). The pranks weren't just aimed at family members though. Friends and neighbours also fell foul of Spielberg's imaginative tricks and, as Leah explains, he became so notorious that "babysitters would not come into the house. They'd say, 'We'll take care of the girls if you take him with you.'" (McBride, 89)
Spielberg had mastered his fears by playing them out on other people, and as he got older, he discovered a new way of doing this on an even grander scale - by filming them. One of his first movies was a non-narrative film shot while he and his family were on holiday. It was, he has explained, "about an experience in unseen horror, a walk through the forest." (Baxter, 30). Simplistic though it may have been, this early cinematic effort showed Spielberg how cathartic reconstructing fear as art could be, and he made several films, in varying genres and of growing scale, during the rest of his childhood. One - a war movie called Escape to Nowhere (1959) - showed him another aspect of films power.
Needing a male lead who possessed the devil-may-care bravado and rugged good looks of John Wayne, Spielberg found himself turning to a school bully who bore a striking resemblance to the actor. It wasn't easy, but Spielberg convinced the boy to take the role, and slowly the dynamics of their relationship changed. "He was my nemesis; I had dreams about him," Spielberg has remembered. "Even when he was in one of my movies, I was afraid of him. But I was able to bring him over to a place where I felt safer; in front of my camera. I didn't use words. I used a camera, and I discovered what a tool and a weapon, what an instrument of self-inspection and self-expression it is... I had learned that film was power." (McBride, 101).
Spielberg still has "pretty much the same fears I had growing up... I've carried them with me right through my life," (CNN) and he continues to acknowledge the influence of fear on the films he produces and the power of film to help him deal with it. "[I'm a nervous wreck]," he told 60 Minutes in 2012. "It's not really fear. It's just much more of an anticipation of the unknown.... It's just the anxiety of not being able to write my life as well as I can write my movies... There's no better way [to deal with this] than to tell a story about [your fears] and infect everybody else."
And that's exactly what he's done throughout his career. Whether it's the fear of losing control (Duel and Jurassic Park), a terror of unknown deeps (Jaws) or an anxiety about the uncertain position of the world (War of the Worlds), Spielberg has repeatedly dealt with his fears by turning the tables on the moving image and not feeding his fears with film and TV, but using those medium to exorcise them, playing them out on the big screen for the world to witness. In doing so, he's mastered his fear, helped the audience confront theirs, and evolved the boyish pranks of his youth. As Anne wryly noted after the release of Jaws: "For years he just scared us. Now he gets to scare the masses" (Reilly, 1981).
