Halloween Hangover

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With Halloween (and my marathon) over for this year, I just have a few quick reflections.

Doctor Who

The first episode of the six-part ‘Flux’ series started on Halloween Sunday. Is it me, or was it rather good?

I was hopeful for Jodie Whittaker, but she’s been completely undermined by Chris Chibnall’s scripts for most of her run. The announcement that he’s leaving, while sad for him, is surely good for the series. I think RTD coming back is the best we could have hoped for, to be honest, but I have heard rumours that Sony is now trying to buy his Bad Wolf production company. That could be make or break.

In the meantime, I hope Chibnall manages to “kill it with a phat one,” as virtually no one said at clubs in the Nineties.

Donnie Darko: Director’s Cut

I mentioned this (non-horror) was our Halloween night watch. I adore Donnie Darko. It’s one of my all-time favourite films, but this was the first time I’ve seen the Director’s Cut and I found it disappointing. With an additional 20 minutes, it adds nothing but handholding for the audience, effectively ‘dumbing down’ a classic film. Still, kudos to Arrow for a beautifully presented anniversary 4K, which I might return to with a post.

Gore, extreme cinema, and censorship

I had a chat with my two oldest friends on the night before Halloween, which was great. Inevitably, given the season and my recent blog output, talk turned to horror. During that conversation, I said that ‘there are certain films I’ll never watch,’ which both the guys seemed surprised by. They apparently have a higher tolerance than me.

Now, I was specifically thinking about gore, intensity, and disturbing images. Empire magazine has just published its list of 50 best horror films of the 20^th Century (warning: the list contains a lot of spoilers), most of which I’ve seen and several of which were on my own list last year. There is one film on Empire’s list (at number 23) that I’ve been seriously considering, but I don’t think I can bring myself to sit through it. My Wife feels the same way. 2008’s Martyrs by Pascal Laugier is widely considered one of the hardest films to stomach. It includes graphic images of violence and culminates, in explicit detail, with a woman being skinned alive with a pair of scissors. Overall, not very nice. And yet, it appears on Empire’s and several other lists by respected critics and publications.

I’ve watched some hard stuff, but that feels like a step too far for me, even if it means I’m missing out on a classic. I don’t know if the friends I mentioned would consider watching this. Frankly, the thought of watching something that extreme collides with concern for my mental wellbeing. There are images you can’t unsee, things I’ve seen in real life that I can’t shake. The odd horror film has made its mark, I suppose, but with filmed images, it tends to be documentaries or pictures of real-life suffering that I struggle with the most.

And yet, this need for self-protection must wrestle with an intimate love of fear. That itself is, of course, a factor of feeling alive. Plunging out of a plane, diving, climbing, pushing yourself beyond your perceived limits in a sport, a scary theme park ride, or a genuinely frightening experience: these are the moments as an adult when I am most in touch with the child who used to find wonder in everything.

Fear, the search for fear, the confrontation of fright… it runs through literature, art, and storytelling. It’s a fundamental part of human nature, part of you and part of me. It can be a unifying concept, a genetic memory of tribal campfires realised with a group of strangers in the flickering glow of a cinema screen, a humanist spiritual experience.

And disturbance is the bedfellow of fear, being upset, disgusted or repulsed. Shakespeare revelled in it. Politicians use it, so do charity campaigns and activists. Religious texts aren’t exactly shy about using horror to make a point.

I’m probably overthinking this, God knows, it wouldn’t be the first time. We all have our limits, our triggers. I’m similarly unlikely to watch Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible because I have a problem with rape being used as a plot device – the gore in that film is immaterial, notorious as it is.

I will watch the few remaining films on that Empire list I haven’t seen, including at least one other where it feels like the images may disturb me. But Martyrs? Doubt it.

At least Martyrs and Irreversible are respected. There has always been extreme cinema. It had barely been invented before people were slicing eyeballs open (Un Chien Anadlou, 1929). But the other films in that category of “I’ll never watch them” are things like The Human Centipede and A Serbian Film, neither of which have any merit as far as I’m concerned. They’re surely the very definition of ‘exploitation film,’ capitalising on the torture porn fad and going to extremes to make money.

I grew up in the “video nasties” era of the Eighties and have since enjoyed some of the films that were caught up under it. At the emotional and political level, I’m anti-censorship, but I struggle sometimes. Philosophically, that’s a good thing; as cliché ridden as it is to say it, you can only be anti-censorship when you allow a platform to those you find most offensive. It is horror as a genre again showing its relevance. We currently have the Left censoring people while the Far-Right bleat about their freedom of speech. The world has its head on backwards.

When Mark Kermode reviewed A Serbian Film, he said that as a critic he had no choice, it was his job to sit through things he found revolting, to never look away. Otherwise, he said, you were just playing. Well, I’ll take that on the chin. I am just playing. I’m doing two things I love, watching films and writing, and I hope someone somewhere enjoys it.

I feel grotty even mentioning those exploitation (exploitative) films on here, in case it means someone goes and watches them, whether that’s because of the viewer being potentially scarred by what they see, or the filmmakers involved profiting as a result. But worse, by loving horror films, am I contributing to these extremities? Am I fuelling the market for them?

It’s hard to defend an industry built on images of death, trauma, and fear, very often towards women. Knowing people who have gone to war or suffered awful personal circumstances can sometimes make this derisory poor taste at best, particularly when YouTube videos about slasher franchises often list the ‘best kills.’

The same could be said for crime fiction, I suppose. And the morality of a lot of non-horror films is murky at best and sometimes embraces pornographic violence. There’s a darkness in all of us, like it or not, and there are healthy and unhealthy outlets for that.

Sometimes it can feel like a race to the bottom. Years ago, I knew a TV correspondent who talked about censorship of war reports. Films were carefully edited for broadcast because some of the images were so awful. Now, in a few clicks people can find beheadings and atrocities on the web. It used to be that nothing you could see on a screen could hurt you or be as bad as what life itself could do to you. Not sure that’s completely true anymore, and those screens are now in every hand.

I’m struggling to conclude this, and I’m interested by what you think. Are there things you won’t watch? Lines you won’t cross? Or is it all just a movie?

For now, I guess I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. Horror writers and directors are happy to dance along the lines we fear to cross, to dare us to look away or make us think we might have to. There are those that just want to turn peer pressure, revulsion, and fear into bigger bank balances. But thankfully, there are also many like Mike Flanagan, or Guillermo del Toro, or Hideo Nakata, who can turn our nightmares into art, and use fear to find deeper meaning in this strange condition of being human.

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I’m hoping to see and review Dune this week, then I’ll be doing some work on physical media. There might be a delay on posts though, as I still have work to do on site subscriptions.

Thanks for reading, and please share, comment and subscribe!

Laters, GG.