Thank goodness for Joe Sacksteder, writer and burgeoning film maker/actor/goalie, for jumping in and writing the following Halloweenish essay about scary stuff. Woo Hoo!
These are a few of my scariest things
by Joe Sacksteder
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, and indiscernible evils presented at a great distance from the viewer…
I’ve always maintained that the highest form of humor is seeing humans get hit with objects from far away, especially when you can view the object’s entire trajectory. This makes the classic “kid getting hit with a basketball” the funniest thing I’ve ever seen:
Similarly, the farther away you present your horror movie monster, the scarier I will find it. This reactions seems contrary to logic– as the closer a monster is to you the more likely it will be to eat your brains. Maybe seeing the monster from far away allows me as the viewer to paint more horrific details onto the creature than the best special effects possibly can up close? Maybe I’ve seen monsters up close so many times in movies that seeing them from far away lends an uncanniness to the image? Maybe I’m worried that the creature will move towards me, will start to shorten the distance?
Best example: in It when you see the photograph come alive, and Pennywise approaches the foreground from way down the street. Yeah, It… don’t judge.
Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes, snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes, and my favorite cliché of horror films which is the obligatory investigation into the seed or originating locus of a cancerous evil…
The AV Club recently compiled their contributors’ 25 favorite and least favorite film clichés. Hired by the AV Club and asked for my two cents (regarding horror films), I would name my least favorite cliché as mundane sounds made scary merely by their suddenness and amplification (let me add the bathroom mirror sliding back to reveal someone standing behind the subject… ditto with the fridge door).
However, almost without fail – usually about one hour into the horror film – the protagonists sift through history to uncover the germination of whatever evil plagues them. Preferably it is a brisk, cloudy, fall day, and our main characters are dressed like a Land’s End catalogue. They are tired, having been forced to stay up last night making sense of illusive connections, only Dixie cups of fifty cent coffee to keep them awake. Alas – now only period films can use microfiche. 1990s movies are leant a further charm by their attempts to include the burgeoning technology of the intarweb. Frustration is finally relieved by that ghastly Aha! moment when the pieces start to fall together. More than the actual research, I love how this story structure lends to presenting evil as cancerous – with a grotesque locus that the characters must untangle.
Best example: The Ring.
When the dog bites, when the bees sting, when familiar objects are presented in a foreign way, contributing to a feeling of “uncanniness"…
Three illustrative vignettes:
One intoxicated night in college, I participated in the forbidden activity of tunneling. With friends, I climbed over a coal pile at the power plant – this was the only never‑locked entrance into the series of underground tunnels that connected every building on campus. Deep in Minnesota winters, the heat retained in these tunnels melts geometric lines of dead grass in the campus above. We neglected to trail a string behind us, and I began to get worried as chain‑link grates continually caused us to backtrack haphazardly. Deep into our journey – by now hopelessly lost – we came across a plastic chair devoid of function. Even more uncannily, it faced the wall. I guess an amorphous, cannibalistic blob would, in retrospect, have horrified me more at that moment… but since one so seldom encounters such blobs in real life, this lonely chair will have to do.
Minnesota is kind of the granite quarry capital of the world. When an abandoned quarry fills with water, nothing grows in it, and no fish can survive. St. Cloud Penitentiary has the second largest granite wall in the world (behind that one in China), and it was built of the guts from the very quarry its walls delimit. When the workers abandoned it, they left the crane at the bottom.
Going to school at Louisiana State, I encountered a certain chain of fried chicken restaurants. Their mascot – pictured on all their billboards – was a tiger that always unsettled me for a reason I couldn’t pin down. Not that I ever put much thought into it; I was far too busy failing at my course of study. One day I realized what should have been immediately obvious: it wasn’t a tiger, but a dog painted to look like a tiger. For minutes, I couldn’t recall what a tiger actually looked like.
Best example: the empty chairs in Danvers Asylum in Session 9. Okay, maybe it’s just empty chairs that scare me.
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