Ghost movies: Encountering horror of horrors
Shardul Bhardwaj
Phantasm and science fiction took over the role of fairytales as the visual medium took over the written medium in popular culture. Phantasm has held a special sway over people because of mankind’s will to understand what William James called “the unexplained residues of human experience”. Hollywood, the biggest motion picture industry in the world, produced 43 films alone in the horror genre. This goes on to prove the popularity and viability of this genre but any serious academic discussion on the horror genre would reveal the repetition of one and only one trope: shock and spook (in content and treatment). This year’s Oscar-nominated film The Lighthouse (Jarin Blaschke) is a deviation from this trope and would fall under what is, traditionally but not effectively, called psychological horror.
When one delves deep into the question: Why are we scared of what is around us?, Elias Cannetti’s words from Crowds and Power come to mind “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognise or at least classify it.”
If one were to go by these words, then any deep exploration of that unexplained residue of human imagination and experience cannot be encapsulated by a sound and edit shocking technique commonly found in the horror film genre.
A usual horror film delights in its atmospherics: a spooky isolated house, the night and its quiet, creaky floor boards in some cases, etc. All of these exist in The Lighthouse, except that the spooky isolated house is replaced by an isolated lighthouse on the high seas but this film manages to explore and epitomise man’s inner and external darkness, guilt, pleasure etc. The story involves two lighthouse attendants (brilliantly portrayed by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) descending into insanity while stuck on a little lighthouse island with each other amid severe storms.
The film’s triumph lies in the directorial and script based decision of Robert and Max Eggers (director and scriptwriter) to never definitively reveal what is it that ails the two and what or who is the ghost. The film comes out as an exploration of man’s inner and outer darkness. The descent into insanity of the two characters is not treated as having started after they arrive at the lighthouse. The darkness within the two is catapulted by the extreme situation they have been left in. There are no ghosts waiting on the corner of a house or hiding in the closet. The ghost or the horror lies within and without them.
Similarly in a film like The Shining Jack Nicholson’s darkness lies within and without. Kubrick while commenting upon the apparitions comments that “Jack’s mental state serves only to prepare him for the murder, and temporarily mislead the audience. Kubrick further says that The Shining strikes “an extraordinary balance between the psychological and the supernatural in such a way as to lead you to think that the supernatural would eventually be explained by the psychological”, but it’s a mere misdirection within the plot.
Kubrick’s treatment of The Shining what he describes in terms of the classic opposition present in Kafka’s work: “Kafka’s stories are fantastic and allegorical, but his writing is simple and straightforward and almost journalistic.” While on the other end would be a film like The Lighthouse where the treatment of cinematography is so stylised that the New York Times said: “The stark black and white cinematography deepens the film’s shadows and unease, but it also throws these grizzled faces into relief, sharpening their cheekbones and revealing the death’s hand under each grimace.”
In both the above films, at no point does the filmmaker claim to know or completely understand the darkness being depicted. Hence these become stories strongly rooted in human experience. On the other hand most other popular horror films end up becoming a ‘who dunnit’ story where they cease to be experiences and exploration of that unexplained residue of human experience. These films are a house of horrors kind of experience where a heart beat skip awaits the audience at every corner. Such films unambiguously portray the ‘unknown touch,’ and hence simplify the very quality of phantasm.
