The Highs of The “Not Horror” Horror Movies (Patreon)

I spend every October feeling like I’m getting in the way.

That may sound odd, but it’s just that I have a lot of friends who are both massive Halloween fans and even more massive horror fans. And I’m not just talking about your average aficionados, but folks who have a seeming encyclopedic knowledge of it. Folks whose ranks include famous authors, horror programers, hardened collectors, and even scores of devoted newbies who have already completely lapped my own awareness of the genre. And this is the reason I always feel a little sheepish while writing about it. Don’t get me wrong, I freaking love horror movies, especially that buzzing energy in a theater as a great scene happens and I cackle along with a screaming crowd. Yes, my reaction is always laughter. Not because I find it funny, but because I’m delighted by how GOOD it’s doing its job and it’s my way of reacting to the tension. So this is why when it comes to any discussion of horror, I know there are so many people who can educate you better on the history, films, and sentiments, but the thing I personally love writing about is how they actually function.

So let’s do a bit of that, shall we?

The great thing about horror is there is nowhere to hide. The film either knows how to manufacture tension in the writing and composition, or it completely falls flat. And as you may have noticed, I spent a lot of time talking about tension. I do this not just because it’s a feeling I enjoy while watching movies, but because it is the baseline mechanic of basically how ALL genre films work. You create a situation of conflict. You make the audience think X bad thing is going to happen as a set-up. And then you do various punchlines that create different emotional responses to that tension, all depending on the intention and genre. In an action movie, you create the expectation of X bad thing, but then the hero punches the bad guy and it’s like, yay, you win! But in comedy, you expect X bad thing to happen, but then there’s a left field response that makes you laugh. Even in lovely melodramas, they take the tension and turn further into the emotions that make you swoon or despair. And finally, in horror movies, they go for the ecstatic moment of release with a well-crafted scare. It doesn’t matter if it’s a little jump, or a gnarly gory kill. It’s all about that creation of a moment. And the set-up / punchline mechanics drive everything… Even when it seems most unlikely.

Because there are some movies that tap into horror even though they might not count as “pure horror movies.” No, I’m not films about films about realistically gruesome subject matter, whether historical atrocities, war, assault, or the perils of addiction (think films like Come and See, other Holocaust films, Requiem for a Dream, or even Irreversible). Nor am I’m not talking about the dreaded term “elevated horror,” which I feel that some people use to try and separate their work from their own trashy associations with the genre (and only seems to give way to some middling, muddled results). It’s an unnecessary term because great horror movies are just great movies. For there’s nothing that stops a horror movie from being beautifully directed, acted, staged, and thematically relevant. Heck, that’s the very intention of the form itself. So no, I’m talking about something a little different.

I’m talking about movies that wouldn’t be advertised as horror movies. I’m talking about movies that are often dramas (but not exclusively) where some of the mechanics and, more likely, the feelings of horror seep in. The kinds of films that often feel like emotional horror movies. That somehow illicit feelings of dread, anxiety, ugliness, and repulsion in a way that goes beyond traditional dramas. And to best explain these kinds of movies, I am going to write a kind of column I only sometimes use ,which is a “categorization” column, AKA one that briefly touches on the way many classic movies tap into what I’m talking about, all a way of showing off all the colors of the proverbial rainbow.

And I’m going to start with…

The Monster In The Midst - When I think of the most perfect examples of what is described above, I can’t help but first think of David Lynch. Because there’s something deeply unnerving about the nature of his work. However, any discussion of him inherently taps into that pesky word “Lynchian,” which people often use wrongly to describe “anything that feels weird.” But what does it ACTUALLY mean? On one level, it’s tricky because anything he does is technically Lynchian. But on another level, it’s incredibly specific. Because most of David Lynch’s work is about the juxtaposition of two worlds with two different tonal elements. The first is a bright, shiny, happy world of “light” with its 50’s doo wap leanings and mundane everyday environments (enter a love of diner coffee and pie). But through some moody acid jazz and these quasi noir stories, the work uses dream logic to go into the “underworld” and discover some of the most unnerving nightmare shit you’ve ever seen in your damn life. And thus being “Lynchian” is the juxtaposition of the two elements to create that third and final feeling of unease within all the environments.

Sometimes that emotional horror is as light as a general feeling of unease when an old couple smiles for just a bit too long. And sometimes the horror goes so far as… well… if you’ve seen Mulholland Drive we all know the moment with The Dumpster. The point is that as nice as things can seem, there’s always this monster or horror lurking in the midst, thus fully embodying the feeling of trying to live in a “nice” world full of so many deeper disturbances, especially the ones in our selves. And notice all the audio horror mechanics the Lynch uses to let this seep and bleed into each other, whether its high pitched whines on the audio, or the dull rumble of the bass that hits our stomachs - even if he’s showing a happy dialogue scene in the bright sun. Because THAT’S what creates the juxtaposition.

Sterile Art Horror - Let’s face it, Lynch’s seismic work has created both a lot of inspiration and imitation... some of which leaves a lot to be desired. The big thing most filmmakers forget is that there is a genuine warmth and humor in Lynch’s work; a kind of essential humanity and abject willingness to be dorky and funny. And most filmmakers? Well, they want to be a little bit cooler than that. The result is this entire brand of art film that isn’t juxtaposing unnerving horror with the light world, but merely juxtaposing it with the mundane and indifferent. And the result feels so specifically “sterile.” If you go to a film festival, you just film after film of these cold, carefully composed surfaces with punctuations of violence. They’ll likely claim their work is therefore more Kubrickian, but it’s missing that particular filmmaker’s puckish sense of humor.

But this is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater! There’s plenty of good examples of this inclination, too. I think the work of Antonio Campos is probably the best version of it (I still haven’t seen The Sinner or any of his latest though). And Catherine Breillat was a film school fave with movies like Romance and Fat Girl, which laser focused on thematic elements to such a degree that the “staged” feeling of the work is a crucial part of how the films operate. You need that distance from the subjects to consume the brazen and deeply unnerving nature of the events within the work, which gets at the main crux: essentially, the sterile-ness has to be an ADVANTAGE in being able to get the audience to consume the horrific elements. Unlike traditional horror, it’s not done in the name of rooting mechanics, but examination of the horrible things and their deeper meanings.

Paranoia Park - Anytime we bring up the “is it all in their mind!??!” trope of storytelling, a lot of people tend to roll their eyes. There’s a good reason for this. And it has to do with the fact that we often see it get used in a cheap manner, often as a cop out, mostly because the storytellers simply don’t know how to find their ending otherwise. They often do it because they believe that making this choice increases the film’s metaphorical depth by dumping the text in the audience's lap and is like “you decide!” when the truth is they never really committed to a clear idea to even begin with. And as an audience, we instinctively KNOW all stories aren’t real and thus it serves us no extra benefit to remind us. And if we know it’s a metaphor, we simply want to live the metaphor. But again, this is just why we are sensitive to filmmaker’s carelessly playing with the reality of the film, or any unreliable narration. But when a filmmaker properly sets the audiences’ expectations and does it surgically? There are so many great films that play with the paranoid feeling within the character’s mind.

There are, of course, all the great 70s paranoid thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. But one of my favorite examples is Martha Marcy May Marlene (by the way, I had no idea Sean Durkin did the latest Dead Ringers), which does such an incredible job characterizing the paranoid mind scape of young girl who just escaped a hippy living “situation” that we soon realize was a cult (and there’s a reason it put Elizabeth Olsen on the map). The film isn’t necessarily trying to hide information from you or play games. Instead, it’s putting you right in the headspace of a traumatized person who doesn’t know what to think or trust (as it also shows her story at the cult). Likewise, Aronofsky plays a delirious game with Natalie Portman’s breakdown in Black Swan. But it’s not paranoia for paranoia’s sake, instead it zeros in on the manipulations of the authority figures around her and the way it slowly helps her unravel. And many of these films owe so much to Catherine Deneuve’s incredible performance in Repulsion, the “trapped in your apartment and going crazy movie,” which was probably the single worst choice of what to watch during lockdown. The thing that is most compelling about these films is that it’s less about the puzzle game of “what is and isn’t true” and how much these moments are just clear metaphors for the very real fears and feelings going on within the mental landscape of the character. Few films characterize this better than Ari Astor’s recent behemoth work, Beau Is Afraid. I understand why so many people are shut off by the film, but as a work driven by semiotics it is unabashed in its clarity, along with the direct nature of its expressions of the character’s fears. But for a filmmaker whose previous works were much closer to “pure horror,” you’ll note that this film was also, at times, tremendously funny. Which pointedly brings us to the next section…

Comedy Horror - Where so much horror is about popping the tension with a scare or a sudden bit of provoking gore, you can just as easily take that tension and cause a laugh. The degree to which a filmmaker does that determines A LOT about the response. There are straight horror movies with a few good laughs. There are horror comedies, like Shaun of the Dead or Raimi’s early work that seems to split that impossible difference so seamlessly. But then there are films that go full tilt into the comedy direction. No, I’m not talking about the Scary Movie films (though I respect parts of them). I’m talking about a whole different kind of tension. The core engine of which might be better labeled as “cringe comedy” or “awkward comedy” that powered a lot of early seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where a painful social situation would get dragged out and make it feel like the most anxiety inducing scenario (Steve Coogan and The Trip movies are also good at this). But a recent film that did this really well was Shiva Baby, which was the “trapped while sitting shiva” comedy where the various relationship tensions could cut glass. You could even see elements of this in Uncut Gems, though I’d argue that film has more thriller and action elements that are about riding gambling highs and so much more. Another filmmaker who rides the comedy high-wire act is so much of the 90’s work of Todd Solandz, whose takes on the subjects of depraved teenage life and family horrors and uses them to paint an absurdist, satirical extreme that it can’t help but come of funny (though some people are simply aghast).

But honestly I think an even clearer example of the ways to tweak this dynamic is to look at the Coen Brothers. You see them go full looney toons in films like Raising Arizona and you see the depths of tension in films like No Country For Old Men. But what’s fascinating is the way they play with the tension in the two films that come just afterwards. Both Burn After Reading and A Serious Man have moments of tension that play like straight up horror (all before being undercut or over-cut by a weird zig or zag). They are incredibly strange and seemingly bewildering movies when it comes to “overall tone,” but mostly because there is no good comparison. They are singularly “Coen-esque” precisely because of the way they play with tension in every scene, fishing for the most unexpected results from every corner.

The Boiling Pot - Gaspar Noe is no stranger to the horrific. He’s made some films I have trouble even talking about, but my favorite of his is actually a film called Climax; a work whose opening dance number is one of the greatest examples of unbridled joy and excitement, something you would never think in a million years would come from him. But don’t worry, the filmmaker who brought you Into The Void will absolutely find a way to make it all unravel! And does so in sometimes skin crawling fashion! But it’s such a great example of a film whose horror can slowly sneak up on you. It’s like you’re realizing you were like a toad hopping into a pot with cold water, but it’s now starting to boil. There are such specific films that have also given me that unique and unnerving feeling. Films like Speak No Evil, Black Narcissus, Seconds, and Perfect Blue, all of which set a few seeds of doubt, but seem comfortable enough, but then leave you cooked (I also KNOW there’s even better examples of this I can’t think of, happy to take suggestions below).

The Cronenbergian Singularity - It is impossible to talk about this subject without talking about the man who seemingly defines it, David Cronenberg. Now I understand that it may be seen as a cheat because he cut his teeth on horror and made some of the best films of the genre (The Fly, Scanners, The Brood, etc). But his post “pure horror” work starting with Dead Ringers is where things start to get fascinating. Because he’s so steeped in the cinematic language of horror that he starts applying into to subjects that feel more “on the line.” Where usually there is the descent into paranoia and disconnect, along with the obsession and fixation with hypnotic body horror. Perhaps no film represents this better than Crash (no, not that one) a movie about symphorophiliacs AKA people who are aroused by car crashes. Yes, the film has absolutely gory imagery, but the CORE of the film is psychological. So much of the emotional horror is in the dialogue and allure, all brought to the screen with that fundamental tension. It’s as if coming out of horror, Cronenberg had this deep sense of understanding about “our willingness to look.” Which is why so many films are about the way people get drawn into the macabre, the horrid, and the taboo. When you already have control of “a scare,” it means that even in a bizarre drama, you often have the ability to play the audience like a damn fiddle.

Cronenberg then spent a few years in that novelistic space with Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, and eXistenZ, which are all films you could write long semiotics-driven essays about - but all of them are about transfixing on the seemingly surreal. Then he took those not-horror horror skills and started applying them to “traditional” action. Both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. use familiar action storytelling about mobs and wanted figures, but the moments of “normally cathartic action” are punctured with OH GOD levels of body horror that revolt equally as much as they enthrall. Resulting in work that toes this fine line of what we find to be cathartic about action, especially when other movies dull the proverbial blade. It’s as if it’s asking, “what if the violence was more honest?” How would you actually feel then? Then in the later stage of his work, Cronenberg is almost purely psychological (A Dangerous Method, which tackles Freud and Jung literally) and then satirical (A Map To The Stars). Lastly, I wrote about how much I like Crimes of The Future, but it’s a near-brechtian treatise on artifice and our garbage-eating future. It’s incredible, but so utterly devoid of that trademark tension in a kind of fascinating way. It’s as if he hit the furthest possible endpoint for his journey: showing some of the grossest things you can imagine, but in such a disconnected and sterile way, all to make a seemingly final thematic point: you can feel any way about this. Because horror is an intrinsic part of life that comes in all the places you might least suspect.

But if Cronenberg represents the best of “not horror” horror’s mind - is there any figure that could represent its face?

The King of “Not Horror” Horror - As I was compiling my list of movies for this column, I suddenly realized there was one singular actor who kept overlapping with so many entries. And that is none other than Jake Gyllenhaal, who has made A LOT of these kinds of emotional horror movies. It all started with the fact I was thinking about the anti-cinematic nature of violence in Zodiac. Because in its utter commitment to realism it characterizes something we don’t often see, whether it be dull thud of stabbings, accompanied by screams and slowly leaking blood, or the way that people often don’t die quickly from gunshots, and slowly can crawl about as they bleed out. And you realize the reason movies do this is 1. narrative economy 2. scare effect and 3. because it is so damn genuinely unnerving (read: not fun) to see the realistic alternative. What makes Gyllenhaal fascinating in this regard is the way the film first captures his wide-eyed fascination with this, along with the cypher puzzles of the case, before getting trapped into the puzzle of the case itself. You see the way that wide-eyed kid with a boyish grin soon starts to come undone with the obsession and emotional numbness to so much of what’s in front of him.

Gyllenhaal is so damn good at channeling this dichotomy. Which is why I often talk about how he’s ended up in this unique space in his career. Early on, he was so handsome that there were lots of stabs at this squeaky clean conventional heartthrob, but he never really quite fit, did he? Because you have to go back to the film that helped make him famous, Donnie Darko, which tapped into the fact that he has these big doe eyes, that somehow equally convey this haunted oddness, even implied tragically dark things locked within. You can see the way that Denis Villeneuve likes to tap into this in their collaborations. First in Prisoners, where you see the way his “straight laced” cop is also filled with inner-tension and feelings of repulsion. And Enemy plays with the lines of paranoia right into the most sudden what the fuck ending (one that would be possible without the exacting nature of his performance). But it’s really Nightcrawler that captures the emotional horror of his intense, unblinking energy. That neon-soaked noir about a journalistic psychopath captures a far grander horror about the fact he is continually rewarded for being that way. That inner-horror energy gets tapped into again and again, whether he's a cop in End of Watch, an aggrieved soldier in Ambulance, or an angry ex-husband in Nocturnal Animals. But even the wildly comedic performances like Okja captures the tension of his weird manic energy. Every time I look at that handsome face, it betrays the simple realization that, like the work of David Lynch, the horror is within.

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The thing about cinematic language is there is a specificity to how it works and what feelings it creates in the viewer - but the way it adds up, the way it tells you how to feel about subjects, and the way it tells a complete story - is where all the unique results come from. And to go back to the conceit, the idea of a column like this is not just about identifying the range of what’s possible, but zeroing in on the methods of execution. All these films have endless lessons about how to incorporate the elements of Spooky season’s favorite genre into so many other kinds of films. So ask yourself, what kind of horror are you bringing to your story? Because it doesn’t just help answer the question of what is most engaging, but also gives your work a visceral soul.

Happy Halloween!

<3HULK