The horror ... the horror ...

It is the middle of October as I write this, and so naturally I am at my happiest, which shall culminate in a haze of corn syrup blood on the night of Samhain -- that's Halloween for you non-Celts. Though I'm well aware that Halloween has devolved from towering bonfires, animal sacrifice and maybe a few phallic symbols to an excuse for people to shed their inner-shame and guilt for one night and reveal whole-heartedly the true wretched nature of their souls, I hold onto the simple pleasures that a contemporary citizen of a Judeo-Christian society can attain on so salacious a holiday, that being horror cinema and literature. As my father does with his daily filling of crossword puzzles, it is with horror films and stories that I maintain my sanity and set aside any tasks of the moment that bare undues stress upon me with, say, a work by M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft; or a film like John Carpenter's version The Thing, with its intense, claustrophobic plot and brilliant special effects, or even something campier such as an MST3K "experiment." Though I engage in this type of thing year-round, October, the only month out of the year in which overcast skies are as pleasant as any blue one, provides an ideal atmosphere. It's good fun, but of of course there are always naysayers.

I suppose that it, too, was in the spirit of the holiday that Catholic culture jounral First Things decided to run a piece in its most recent issue by one David P. Goldman who is none too pleased to see a rise in the prominance of horror films in America. As he tells it:

Among all the film genres, horror began as the most alien to America. The iconic examples of the genre in the 1930s required European actors and exotic locales—vampires from central Europe, for example, and zombies from Haiti. The films were noteworthy precisely because they were so unlike the cinematic mainstream: In 1931, the year that Frankenstein and Dracula first appeared, the worldwide film industry managed to make and release 1054 features, of which only seven could be called supernatural thrillers.

Horror, Goldman argues, is rooted in Europe's lingering attachment to its pagan past, in which nature was believed to be intentionally cruel, and which the various monsters -- Dracula, the Werewolf, the Golem, whatever -- of early horror cinema were embodiments of that, and the rise of the Nazi's only intensified that. But America being the land of sunshine, lolipops and vaginal intercourse, these creatures were comic fodder, and after America had defeated evil, interest in horror had, according to Goldman, all but disappeared until the 1960s. Vietnam, the JFK assasination, student riots, racial tension, etc., etc. all seemed to contribute to Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary's Baby, Last House on the Left, and so forth.

He is, of course, not far off the mark. Indeed, these are the films of creative people who, aside from being able to tolerate/create demented mayhem, have concerns as to the American crises; Wes Craven's were with Vietnam, George A. Romero's were with racial tension (see last scene in Living Dead) and later consumerism, and Roman Polanski's were with Roman Polanksi's reputation. I never saw this as detrimental to America since these excessive films were, in a sense, critiques of excess, rather than evidence of America losing its soul to European faggotry. Though his argument could hold up against the plethora of remakes and sequals of varying -- but mostly low -- quality, even here it is weak.

In China Miéville's introduction to the Modern Library edition of At the Mountains of Madness, he summarizes the most consistent convention of modern horror:

Traditionally, genre horror is concerned with the irruption of dreadful forces into a comforting status quo -- one which the protagonists frantically scrabble to preserve.

It's strange how Goldman, clearly not unlearned in the basics of the genre, has not picked up on this. Even the most base and grotesque horror films are based around the good v. evil dynamic, or even anti-European sentiments that are more than agreeable with Goldman's own views (i.e. Hostel). It just so happens that crass individuals like Eric Roth have more fun making exaggerated violence rather than Pixar fluff. So with horror cinema's morals hardly deviating from Goldman's own, his real target, who he doesn't mention, is H.P. Lovecraft, the literary figure whose best work has been nothing short of impossible to adapt to mainstream cinema's standards. Miéville again:

... Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but realization. The horror has alway been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact. It is the sheer truth of this universe, concretized in this existence of its monstrous inhabitants [in this case the Old Ones], which explains why Lovecraft's protagonists are so unheroic; there is no muscular intervention that can save the day. All we can do ... is turn and run.

There, in the nuttiest of nutshells, is Goldman's real nemesis, in more ways than one. In addition to being a monster-mashing, Spengler-loving nihilist, he was also an unrepentant, even proud racist and fan of Hitler ("I know he's a clown but by God I like the boy!"). But he was also one of the most creative writers of the genre, who boggled the minds of friends and readers alike -- in addition to his bleak worldview, his monsters were indescribably weird. To think that America's viewing public would enjoy, or even notice, what Lovecraft was writing -- in print or on film -- is unlikely. So Goldman is advised to chill and treat this issue as he likely does trick-or-treaters: ignore it.

For those who are interested in Lovecraft films that actually work, here's a teaser for the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness: