Up All Night

Remember the first time you saw Stanley Kubrick's The Shining? You had trouble sleeping for a week, didn't you? Kubrick (with lots of help from Jack Nicholson) scared the living piss out of me, and I loved it. I pretty much judge the effectiveness of a horror movie by how much trouble I have sleeping afterwards.

Going to sleep is an interesting process. You lie there trying to cause your body to let your consciousness die for a little while. Horror movies work by engaging a basic defense mechanism; if there's something out there to get you, you don't let your guard down, and you certainly don't shut off your brain for a few hours. Sure, you know that it was just a movie, but some part of your brain (perhaps the part that keeps up with the fight or flight reflex, which a good horror movie provokes at least a little bit) keeps saying "No. We're not going to sleep yet. It ain't safe. And what the heck's that in the corner?" You know it's just your coat, but those rogue neurons keep pushing, "I don't remember it being there last night. When did you put it there? Do you remember it there last night?" Eventually you end up turning on the lights, seeing that it's just a coat, and putting the damn thing in the closet. Of course those pesky paranoid brain cells find something else that needs further investigation before you can be sure it's safe to sleep.

There are three main ingredients to a really good horror movie. These are the things that provoke those rogue neurons and keep you from getting the sleep you deserve. You can do a movie with just one or two, but the best horror flicks have all three. These things are stunning visual images, identification, and a sense of mythology.

The first thing you need for a good horror movie are a few really shocking visual images. I'm not talking about gore and special effects. I'm talking about the things that pop into your mind right as you're going to sleep and cause you to start thinking about the movie and scaring yourself all over again. One of the best examples of this is the final scene of The Shining - Nicholson's frozen body the next morning. Something about it stays with you - you can't get the image out of your mind. Another good one, though it's lost some of its power through time and sketch comedy, is the silhouette of a knife-wielding Norman Bates behind a shower curtain.

Gore alone usually doesn't do it. There's plenty of gore in video games, but playing Quake rarely causes anyone to lose sleep. Remember again that scene from The Shining - Jack's frozen blue-tinted face. No blood, no dismemberment, not even any real sign of a struggle. Just a hint of that famous maniac grin. Icicles clinging to his hair. The image is only on the screen for a few seconds, but it stays in your mind for hours, maybe even days.

The second thing a good horror flick needs is something to make the viewer identify with the victims. This is why so many slasher movies can scare us. We live in a time of Manson, OJ, and school shootings, so it's not really hard to imagine ourselves in the position of the victims. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the best movie of the splatter genre, and still holds its scare power after more than 30 years. The first few Friday the 13th movies are scary, but have lost something over the years. I think the thing that killed the franchise was lack of audience identification. As new movies came out, it was harder and harder for us to put ourselves in the place of the victims. The first was the story of a grieving mother killing out of misplaced revenge - frighteningly believable and therefore scary. As we move on, Jason becomes an unkillable elemental force. Even if I believed in vengeful elemental forces, I couldn't buy that they wear hockey masks. Sorry, you've lost me. It just ain't scary any more.

The best horror movies make us identify with the killer as well. Again, I'll bring up The Shining. As we watch Jack slowly lose his mind, we can't help but wonder what would happen to us in a similar situation. Would we get homicidal cabin fever as well? At the same time, we also wonder what we would do if dear old dad went nutzo and started chasing us around the house with an axe. The identification with both the killer and the victims makes the movie much more frightening. The basic horror of being hunted is scary enough, but the idea of becoming the hunter is even more frightening to our modern, civilized minds.

Finally, a sense of mythology can really cause a movie to work. This is why campfire tricks like those used in Blair Witch can work. (The lack of such mythology is why Blair Witch itself didn't cut it.) Leaving an axe in front of someone's tent isn't inherently scary. However, when you add the previous night's story about the axe-wielding maniac who stalks "these very woods," you can scare them. Even though the victim realizes it's just his friends screwing around, those rogue neurons are activated.

The Shining probably could have been fine without mythology, but Kubrick and King aren't ones to leave things half finished. The story of the previous caretaker freaking out gives us more questions to ask ourselves late at night. Would what happened to Jack have happened to anyone because of the inherent "evil" or psychic scars on the hotel? Or did his past troubles cause him to lose it? Add in the "You've always been the caretaker" line and your mind can chase ghosts for hours. And if you're busy chasing ghosts, you won't be sleeping

Mythology can often make or break a movie. Nightmare on Elm Street (even the first) is primarily a teenage splatter film that doesn't even have a real reason for us to identify with the victims -- until you add the mythology. Dreams. People have some pretty weird notions about dreams. The old rumor that if you die in a dream you don't wake up is the most relevant in this case, of course. Using these notions made the razor fingered dream killer work. Wes Craven also added another element to make the movie scare us - repetition. How many times did Nancy say, "Whatever you do, don't go to sleep?" That lingers in the back of your mind at bedtime and combines with all the other stuff to make those paranoid brain cells work overtime.

Keep these things in mind the next time you watch a horror movie. They won't help you keep from getting scared, but at least you'll understand how they're playing with your mind. And whatever you do, don't go to sleep.