Extra Credit-Dawn of the Dead

            For as long as I can remember (which may not be that long—my memory is not that great), I have had a HUGE fear of zombies.

            I do not know what it is about them—potentially it is the body horror that is the most terrifying aspect. With modern zombie films, as well as the immensely popular Walking Dead, there is always the inclusion of zombies ripping into someone’s leg or arm or neck, pulling arteries out like strings. The idea of hoards of the undead surrounding and eating people is terrifying and grotesque, which my adolescent brain always brought into personalized, dream-morphed graphics. All of these personal influences are why watching Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978) was incredibly important for both film analysis and personal catharsis.

            Comparing nightmare to story, the personal to what is depicted on the screen, there is a tension there about the lack of unity within the groups of survivors, at least within Dawn of the Dead. When you are in a nightmare, the presence of family, concern for your parents, pets, friends, and belongings is a priority; uncertainty about your world is the main source of fear. I would say in Dawn of the Dead, though it is the second installment of George Romero’s zombie series, there is already an acceptance of these losses. The characters come on to the screens without backgrounds. Yeah, we know Francine is pregnant, which is initially a huge tension and then later just a character aspect, but these characters pop up without a background.

            In many ways, there is a development of sympathy for the living dead, especially in the moment where Francine is looking through the store-front window, making a connection, whether or not real or imagined, to the zombie on the other side who sits down and looks back at her. We get as much background for the zombies than we do for Francine, Stephen, Peter, or Roger, all characterized by what they wear: Peter and Roger wearing military outfits—are part of the military; Stephen wears his aviation outfit—helicopter pilot, zombies in basketball uniforms, garbage men jumpsuits. Everyone is his or her job; everyone ends up in the mall because, “It’s what they know”.

            Besides the main characters, a sense of community can be found in shots elsewhere. In the very beginning with the SWAT raid of the housing tenement, we have people who are protecting their deceased-reanimated loved ones. This one scene is one of the more emotionally charged, not only because of the idea of families eating one another, the obvious social inequality that leaves these individuals stranded, or prejudiced onslaught, but the attempts to protect family members is shown to be problematic. Evidence of this can be found in the scene where a man eats his wife while she tries to embrace him.

          

Further on, we have the military and those living in the country finding fun in their survival, transferring the usual types of hunting of non-human animals to hunting the “slow” and “dumb” zombies. There is a community here, somehow found through the creative sport. I can not tell if this is an argument for finding creativity in darker times, or that those who are well-prepared are going to be able to withstand anything, but whatever reason, people have found an acceptable community.

            Even though Dawn of the Dead is obviously a commentary on consumerism (everyone is in a mall, for Pete’s sake), the real threat posed by a “zombie apocalypse” or apocalypse of any kind is the rearrangement of values regarding friends and family. Those who cannot get over the undead being their loved ones end up being food, those who can find it a game can survive, and those who are in the middle somewhere, like the protagonists, are more like the zombies.

            I am still really afraid of zombies, but I think I understand it a bit more now. This is incredibly obvious, but horror films are not only ways of communicating anxieties but also allow you to observe how they manifest in yourself (at least for me in the case of zombies, but you probably wont catch me watching the next big zombie film for a long, long time).

                   

Sources: 

 Chaw, Walter. "Dawn of the Dead." Film Freak Central. 18 Mar. 2004. Web. (Image)

Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Perf. David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, and Gaylen Ross. United Film Distribution Company, 1978. DVD. 

Extra Credit - True Stories and Dumb Teens

The 1974 Texas Chainsaw Massacre was probably my least favorite movie growing up. Any time a movie says it’s based on a true story I have to do a mile of digging to see exactly what they mean by that. The fact the horror movies love to use this line is a real bother. The true story aspect always seems to make everything a little more real and a lot scarier. Who is to say that people didn’t actually get massacred by a guy wearing a human flesh mask and wielding a chainsaw? Well that would be history. What about this horror movies makes this scenario so plausible though? Why do we believe as a society in general that a groups of teens can be so easily killed by a single masked man, or an old forest dwelling woman, or a mask wearing mother? Teens are just nature’s scapegoat.

            Slasher flicks are obsessed with killing of droves of young people. To the point where it is actually considered comedy by most. Take the movie Tucker and Dale vs Evil where a couple of country bumpkins are confused for serial killers by teens in the woods, and the country boys are confused as to why the teens keep killing themselves. It is a hilarious motion picture and definitely not the first or the last horror movie spoof out there. When these movies were first coming out the motion picture audience probably had no way to discern if the teens were bad or good at getting killed they were probably just as scared as the rest of us are the first time we see a horror film. After we grow accustomed to seeing these types of films we become more accustomed to the plot devices that have been used in horror films forever.

            The issue then lies when we watch decades of horror films and then go back to the originals and laugh at them because of their predictability and goofiness. That used to be cutting edge horror man. Those older films created the person walking up the stairs to check it out. Or the nosy trespassing teenagers who wander into houses only to be slaughtered like docile little cows. We can call these things out and giggle about them. Then we can make spoof movies where all these old suspense ploys can really be diced apart with a knife.

            Back to the original thought on true stories, is that really something that makes films scarier? It is possible that a real life Chainsaw massacre may have happened but does it bother us more if someone is making a movie based on the true story which just means something we all know, that there is evil out there. Or is it that knowing people could come up with these scary movies all in their own heads and then walk around with the rest of us. Just plotting. 

Extra Credit Response

Lesson Not Learned: Quit It With the Re-Animating, Already

            The re-animation of a corpse is an idea of something likely stemming from the very human fear of death. The concept that we can come back in some way is appealing, and also stands as a great image of horror. If someone goes down, are they going to be the same when they get back up? Though Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985, Empire) draws heavy parallels with Frankenstein (Whale, Universal, 1931) through its mad-scientist Henry | Herbert comparisons and their objective of death back to life, the film also heavily relates to zombie films—particularly Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978).

            One aspect of the various re-animations that these two films share is the marked quality of these various peoples’ returns to movement after death. In both movies, nobody really is who they were when they went down. In Dawn of the Dead, the people that die after being bit by other re-animated souls come back to bite others, themselves. This allows for some poignant remarks concerning what humans do to each other, both in life and in death. They damage both emotionally and physically—they eat each other. If you come back, you’re a husk of what you were. Meanwhile, in Re-Animator, when you come back, you’re pissed. Cats will claw at your back and try to eat your face; people will come back and try to strangle you to death. In this, it almost seems more to suggest that it’s death itself that comes back to life, trying to drag more life down into its depths.

            Where further comparisons between the films come into play is particularly with the faults of the characters in not really seeing the danger they’re facing. In Dawn of the Dead, often after barely escaping certain death, its characters would run around, hooting and hollering, refusing to check the area for more threats, only finding out where they were once it was too late. It’s this distinction between recognizing a threat and then ignoring it in the next scene that is a simple source for frustration from its viewers. Where Re-Animator draws some clear parallels here is through Herbert (and Dan) seeming to learn, time and time again, just how dangerous anything is when it’s brought back to life. Herbert, without Dan’s help, likely could have died from the attack by Dan’s cat after he brought him back. From there, the pair decided to bring back a grown man, failing completely to restrain him in any capacity whatsoever. What follows is Dan’s girlfriend’s father is killed, and Herbert and Dan nearly die themselves. And even this seemed to fail to teach Herbert, in particular, the lesson he needed to. Perhaps thinking that the separation of Dr. Hill’s head from the rest of his body would leave him too disabled to do anything similar to the previous experiments gone wrong, but his failure to make any sort of defensive preparation against unpredictable results makes his ultimate demise his own fault. Perhaps it’s commentary on the guaranteed havoc caused by playing god, or perhaps it’s shedding light on simple human disregard for death and an egotistical failure of inevitable human error. However it’s interpreted, human ignorance is an easy thing to see in the world, and mistakes come from that in life as much as it does in cinema.

          The comparisons between Re-Animator and Dawn of the Dead through their different methods of handling the return to life from death are interesting ones to note in discussions on death and the repercussions that follow. The idea of reversing the process of death, particularly in these two films, seems to be given a rather pessimistic view on the outcomes. People get bitten and die, only to return and eat more of the living. People die of natural causes and return to rabidly murder anyone nearby. The living characters don’t learn from their mistakes, and don’t learn more about the danger of the dead who have come back. Maybe they’re telling us just how unavoidable death is, even under the prospect of the potential for that end to be turned back. 

Bloody Extra: The Thing

The End? The Thing (Universal, Carpenter, 1982)

To start, I have to make the expected comparison to 1958’s The Blob (Paramount, Yeaworth) in the way both films involve one-ness, consumption, absorption, and ruddy-jellied-everything in each of their narratives. They are readily alike in titular twinning: the indiscriminate blob and thing. The monsters themselves are formless in different ways: one morphs, takes on different appendages, different presences altogether; the other grows, takes in bodies and makes those bodies to become as it is and appear as it does. 

To the question of inspiration/homage, the films are loosely connected, at least in premise. Each extraterrestrial terror arrives at earth by falling/flying in from outer space. And at its end, the Blob is flown and thrown into remote arctic ice, supposedly contained, although the film ends with a question mark. This is not to suggest they are the same monster, only to note that with the amount of remakes/sequels/prequels amassed by each we might be able to assume that they were feeding off each other in some way.

While the parallel (and the punning) is likely overdone, the comparison does benefit the conversation of infection v. absorption. Is the experience of fear different in each case? How does being taken over compare to being taken in? The concept of contagion, as it appears in The Thing, is more menacing because it is inner. Secret interiority seems a threat to commonality because it can’t be readily known and subsequently protected against. The point made about our being inhuman and not even knowing it— flesh-persons, flesh-monsters, where is the difference?—makes even that commonality suspicious. It suddenly more urgent that we try to know who’s who, and equally disturbing that we can’t know completely.

With respect to the scene mentioned in class of Doc in his isolated bunker, the unavoidable focus was on the noose, hanging clean and unused in the center of the frame. There is something else to note here: when he comes to the window, light from the flare washes his face in the red we would expect to see were he to be writhing and drenched in blood like any other metamorphosis we’d seen up to this point. Visually, he looks the same aside from this hint. Behaviorally, though, his unusually composed demeanor and repetition of please-just-let-me-out (human parroting or almost like following alien code?) lead us to suspect that he has already been changed. I think that thin film of color is a further indication that something isn’t right.

There is a discussion to be had here about audience intuition as well—how attention is captured, fed, exploited; how the film hands us certain clues as well as false starts, and where our participation exists in that. Even when confused about characters, blood types, and so on, there are points where we have a better inclination, I think, to what happens unseen. We think we know, we often think we’re onto something... it’s interesting to consider how we sense certain things, how we can be wrong, and whether the alternative is worse.

Response 5: Rosemary's Baby

“How she grows her own things”: Possession and Entrapment in Rosemary’s Baby

Growth, germination, gestation, and waiting are all obvious themes in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Also mentioned in class was the idea of woman as container, as gestation machine, which raises questions of agency on all parts of the spectrum, starting specifically with impregnation. Near the beginning of the film, after Terry’s suicide, she is described in the following way: “she seemed so happy, and full of ——” but the dialogue is cut off. We know she was not full of life, and now we see that she’s been disposed of. We can later hear Minnie and Roman shouting through the walls about “starting from scratch,” that is, starting the process of life all over. The pun here should point straight to the scene where we see Rosemary’s skin drug raw by the devil’s fingernails. It should also bring to mind abrasion as a method of germination, taking the case off the seed to speed up what nature would do anyway—since, as Rosemary says, “we’re fertile alright.”

Womb imagery is everywhere in this film, particularly in the scene where Terry’s charm is shed from pink fetal tissue (paper), and later kept in a rosy metal box in a drawer out of sight (where the mold can grow, since it flourishes in the dark). Womb-commentary abounds as well, especially in relation to this object. On receiving the charm, we hear the lines “I can’t accept,” “you already have,” “if you took it you ought to wear it,” and so on. All imply a certain responsibility, despite a certain lack of agency. They can be read with an anti-abortion sentiment (also discussed in class) as in you-did-it-so-you-better-keep-it.

This same insistence is repeated later regarding the role Rosemary is expected to play: “aren’t you his mother?” “just be a mother to your baby,” “...supposing you had the baby and lost it, wouldn’t that be the same?” She is encouraged to look at the child as something that can be mass- and re-produced, just as Rosemary herself has been looked at as a replaceable/disposable host. She is an object, and tossed around as such. That “pretty holder or charm or whatever it is” acts as a microcosm of the woman herself: pretty mother or host or whatever she is (whatever, not even whoever).

In her compromised identity, Rosemary is even pseudo-fetal herself when in the phone booth (another container) outside the doctor’s office. In calling to the outside world she’s been cut off from, the phone cord acts umbilical lifeline in trying to reach some kind of help. As she’s become more infantile throughout the film, her entrapment is especially significant here in it being the scene just before the delivery.

Whichever body she is, at whatever time, it is always filled and always attended to. Rosemary is nearly never alone, and always with life inside her. As an audience we are always immediately next to her (no depth of field), and our being tethered to her says something about our own entrapment in the film. Do we belong to anyone specifically? Are we “delivered” out some cinematic canal at the end of the film? We are certainly cut off from her as she decides to care for her baby—and we never see the demon child, it is in no way ours.

Response 3: Cat People

“I am a little world made cunningly”: Animation of the Nerves in Cat People

In response to the question of the role Irena’s art, by falling in line with the film’s psychoanalytic focus, we can explain Irena’s creation as related to repressed impulses. As in any creative act, Irena’s sketching is an exercise in constraint, in release, and control. We see that clearly in the ripped drawings and crumpled paper (a typical painting of the frustrated creator),  

and her navigating how to take hold of her craft. She often makes a point of framing her art as something professional, as would have been encouraged by her economic environment.

Irena’s outward insistence on not being an artist exists literally (i.e. when she says it) and subterraneously (e.g. in the ways that she retracts her own control). In human form, when pawing at a caged bird and accidentally killing it, she later explains that “it died of fright when I tried to take it into my hand.” This is easily a metaphor for repression and control, and a free-floating anxiety in relation to her own agency. Throughout the film, Irena grapples with what she can and cannot touch, what she can create, and how she can exercise control—this regarding permission, and not capacity. Even while specific power dynamics are offered in every scene, it can be argued that Irena censors herself as much as anyone else tries to. Her dance between mastery and surrender is internal.

To play on those grossly reduced gender types, the female presence and struggle are often internal, they are inner, they are void. This is played up in the film between the main co-stars: we have drawing for her and drafting for him. Oliver plays the engineer, the level-headed breadwinner. His is a business that is technical, measured, and careful. And despite her protests that she is simply a designer, not an artist, Irena’s art is a venture that is contrastingly impractical, fantastic, and unrestrained. Both characters’ professions meddle in prediction and creation, though one seems involved in some darker magic (noting here, too, the woman ever being the proverbial “dark continent”).

This same dark spread is seen specifically during the dream scene in which Irena’s head (the locus of the mind) is lit up in a sea of black. As we move into another level of consciousness with(in) her, the scene becomes wholly animated; it is the only fully illustrated part of the film itself. Cats are seen clawing toward the camera and out to the edges of the frame, a nod perhaps to a Rorschach inkblot in its movement and shape. We can also assume the illustration is hers, if only present in some psychical/suppressed dream. (And yet we’re there to see it.)

The display and diagnosis of nervousness in this film is a precarious one. There is honesty in the portrayal of psychological trauma, and of its dismissal, but the way that it’s brushed off throughout the film—excuse the awful pun—gets on my nerves. Irena’s amplified role of the romantic woman, as a keeper of a curse, her constant anxiety about her part/position in her population makes her a fractured and fractal person—none of which is acknowledged nor cared for until the very end of the narrative. The last-ditch redemption in the final scene, that “she never lied to us,”—that she was all these parts, at some point, truthfully—what is that line supposed to do? Is this an assurance? an entreaty? an absolution? It’s further complicated, I think, by John Donne’s postscript, in that Irena has been all these parts in her own world, “—and now both parts must die.”

Extra Credit: Hitchcock and Pisanthanakun & Wongpoom

Alfred Hitchcock is known for his twisted stories and shocking endings. Banjong Pisanthanankun and Parkpoom Wongpoom are two thai movie directors that also hold equally famous titles. Hitchcocks’s 1960 Psycho was a visually thrilling with its play on vertical and horizontals pacing and reveals. This play on camera panning and dimensional movement is also very clearly seen throughout Pisanthanankun and Wongpoom 2004 film Shutter. There are obvious differences in directing styles and voyeurism capturing because of the western and eastern influences, but the last revealing shots are both equally impactful and wicked.

Throughout the film many of Hitchock’s shots are mostly horizontal panning of the camera or bodies moving across the screen in a restively horizontal fashion. In the reveling scene of Psycho, there was a quick pan from a close-up shot of the lightbulb swinging from the ceiling to Lila’s reacting face to a wide shot of Norman dresses running into the cellar dressed as his mother. The swinging light emphasizes the vertical shot: Norman’s full height is accentuated with his raised arm while clutching the big kitchen knife, as his body takes up the entirety of the center of the shot. The vertical shots usually followed the gaze of the characters’ and this shot expertly shows Lila feeling terror and the sharpness of the violin screeching raises the hairs of the audience. The sudden change of close-up to full-body shots also are jarring and highlight the twisted ending.

In Pisanthanankun and Wongpoom’s Shutter, the last reveiling scene is unraveled in a similar way: a horizontal shots circle Tong as he is shouting out to our ghost-protagonist Natre. These are up-close and fully show Tong’s facial expressions, like Lila’s in Psycho. After a few of mid-shots of Tong pacing around his apartment and snapping Polaroid’s, we see a series of close-up shots of faces as a flashbacks before the reveal, ending on a close-up of his face. Then there is a sudden shift to a close-up of a full body polaroid picture of Tong with Natri sitting on his shoulders. This ending is a lot more built-up and elaborate than that of Psycho’s but similar fashion in which the two films used vertical and horizontals to build suspense are both great and shudder-worthy.