Jonas Ferry’s blog

What makes a good horror film? A what is horror in the first place?

Wikipedia says:

Films from the horror genre are designed to elicit fright, fear, terror, disgust or horror from viewers. In horror film plots, evil forces, events, or characters, sometimes of supernatural origin, intrude into the everyday world. Horror film characters include vampires, zombies, monsters, serial killers, and a range of other fear-inspiring characters.

My first three horrifying experiences with films and television series were the worm-infested piece of chicken in Poltergeist, the fate of the shark fisherman in Jaws and Diana from V eating rats and batheing in spiders. Hmm, I haven’t thought about it before, but they all have one thing in common: they all feature animals, eating and death.

Anyway, even though monsters, or animals to my young self, can be horrifying, there’s lots more that can be. I won’t really differentiate between horror, slasher, ghost films, and so on in my top 5 list. I’ll just give them to you.

1. The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). Apparently Stephen King hated the film, and preferred the remake. I haven’t read the book, so I can’t compare Kubrick’s film to it, but the film itself is a piece of perfection. Shelley Duvall as the submissive wife, Jack Nicholson as the abusive husband, and their weird kid that wanders around the Overlook Hotel. The typewriter scene has been spoofed so many times because it’s really good.
2. The Others (Alejandro Amenábar, 2001). A ghost story with a twist. Oh, I guess I shouldn’t tell you that if you haven’t seen it, but that’s how it was described to me before I saw it. A single mother has problems with her kids seeing ghosts, but soon she does too.
3. The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). This film really freaked people out in 1973 and has inspired many since (page in Swedish). Max von Sydow battles the devil, who have possessed a young girl. I wouldn’t say that the special effects are scary in themselves, the horror comes more from the ambiance in small closed-up room, the battle between acting moral or doing what you want and the sacrifices required in the name of religion.
4. Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987). If Kubrick stands for intellectual horror, Amenábar for supernatural, Friedkin for moral, then Clive Barker represents the horror of the mutilated flesh. A disturbed man finds a portal to a world inhabited by monsters hidden in a small metal box, and is twisted beyond recognition from the meeting. When he infiltrates a middle-class home, the fun starts. Of the six films in the series, this is the best.
5. Audition (original title:Ôdishon) (Takashi Miike, 1999). A serial-killer psychological-horror-thriller film that starts innocently enough, but later surprises with very graphic violence. If you know Miike you won’t be surprised, of course since violence and mutilations are his trademarks. The horror comes from not ever really being able to know people. “He seemed so normal” is a standard reaction when neighbors are found to be serial-killers, and this is a film that explores that sentiment.

I still enjoy films that attempt to scare me, and where characters have to face their own fears, but I can’t remember the last time I was scared when watching a film. Maybe it’s something you grow out of.

Something about time travel has always fascinated me. I’ve read books, both fact and fiction, articles, played roleplaying games and even written a small game about it in Swedish called Tempora.

I enjoy the mental excercise of spotting paradoxes, even if paradoxes increase my enjoyment rather than detract from it. I suppose there’s some wishful thinking about changing the past, and a certain sense of exploration. Our three dimensions are mapped out, at least around Earth. Exploration of parallel dimensions can be fun, but are usually too removed from our reality too really have an impact on normal life. You always experience time, so it’s fun to think about what would happen if you could alter it.

There are a lot of films about people manipulating time. I’m going to list my five favorites. I’ll have to exclude a lot of great films. Anyway, the list:

1. Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001). Donnie is a disturbed young man who meets a giant bunny that announces the end of the world. The film doesn’t say if Donnie has schizophrenic hallucinations, if the whole film is a near-death experience of if he’s actually in a timestream broken off from the normal. Watch the director’s cut, as it explains a lot more. One thing is that you get to see pages from Grandma Death’s book The Philosophy of Time Travel.
2. Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). This Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell comedy is an excellent take on time loops. A news anchor gets stuck reliving the same day over and over. At first he’s excited, later annoyed and finally tries to break the loop. For romantic comedies, this is about as good as they get.
3. Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004). A down-to-earth take on time travel, if that’s possible, where two friends build a time machine almost by mistake. When they carefully try it out things spiral out of control. The viewer follows one time stream, which is visited by multiple versions of the time travellers, so you could spend some time trying to map exactly what happens when, and why. People have, of course.
4. The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984). A killer robot is sent back to stop the birth of a future resistance leader by killing his mother. A neat cause-and-effect loop is created when the man sent back to protect the resistance leader’s mother becomes his father.
5. Returner (original title: Ritana) (Takashi Yamazaki, 2002). A woman comes to the present from the future to stop the start of a devastating war between humans and aliens. She brings a neat time-manipulating toy that can slow down time, creating stunning matrixesque action scenes. The most sci-fi of the films on my list.

Do you have a favorite time travel film I didn’t include?