All language subtitles for S01E05 - Horror

This programme
contains some strong language

and some scenes which some viewers
may find upsetting.

Mummy!

I heard you call me, Aunt Lucy.
Yes, dear.

# We're gonna get you
We're gonna get you. #

In this series, we have delved into
a range of cinematic genres,

from the rom-com to the heist
movie,

unpacking what makes them tick and

why they continue to draw directors
and

audiences alike. For our final show,

we turn to the genre that has always
been closest to my heart - horror.

In the next hour, I will examine
some of the key conventions and

techniques used devilishly well by

directors over the years to exploit
our

deepest, darkest, and most elemental
fears.

No other kind of film deploys images
and sound to such powerful,

primal effect as the horror movie.

And horror is as strong today as it
has ever been.

Take Jordan Peele's brilliant Get
Out,

which delves deep into the broiling
undercurrents

of so-called
post-racial America.

Get out.

Sorry, man.

Get out! Yo! Get out. Yo, chill,
man! Get out! Chill, chill, man!

Let go. Get the fuck out of here!

Like so many great horror movies,

Get Out struck a nerve because it
tapped into contemporary anxieties,

lending fantastical form to fears
which had perhaps been suppressed,

turning them from a whisper to a
scream.

Peele uses the horror narrative to
look beneath the beatific smile of

21st-century liberalism,

finding the grinning skull of
exploitation and entrapment,

all unveiled during a roller-coaster
ride into a very American nightmare.

How do you feel now?

I can't move. You can't move.

I cannot move.

You're paralysed.

Now.

Sink into the floor.

Wait, wait, wait... Sink.

A commercial hit, the film was also
nominated for several Oscars,

including Best Picture,

with Peele becoming the first
African-American

to win the award for Best Original
Screenplay.

As is so often the case, horror is a
genre of firsts.

I first fell in love with horror
films as a child,

watching Hammer movies on late-night
TV with the sound turned down so my

parents couldn't hear. As a
teenager, I saw films like Shivers,

The Exorcist and Dawn Of The Dead in
my local cinemas.

At college, I wrote my thesis on

horror fiction and came across an
essay by

HP Lovecraft, who said,

"The oldest and strongest emotion of
mankind is fear and the oldest and

"strongest kind of fear is fear of
the unknown."

Now, all of this made perfect sense
to me,

since I have always loved the

experience of being terrified by
films.

But what is a horror movie?

Is it an essential rites of passage

for generations of filmgoers to
prove

their nerves of steel?

A contemporary evolution of the

great Gothic tradition in
literature?

A reprehensible, exploitative

spectacle cashing in on the most
depraved

instincts of humanity for quick
profit?

Or the most challenging and creative
field of movie-making,

where the lowliest auteur with a
scary idea can have a break-out hit,

while the best-backed big studio

production is not guaranteed a box
office return?

The truth is that horror movies are
all of the above,

and they will always thrive.

I'm scared to close my eyes.

I'm scared to open them.

In many ways, horror is a genre
defined not by its subject matter,

but by its style.

If you watch a clip from a horror
film,

even if it's a scene without
violent action

or a rampaging monster,

you know what you are seeing because
of the way the films are shot, lit,

art directed, acted, edited and
scored.

A horror film is a horror film

because of the way it makes us feel,

and according to Stephen King,

those feelings can range from being
terrified

to being horrified to being just
grossed out.

Either way, it's not the subject
matter that makes a horror film -

it's the treatment of the subject
and our reaction to it.

Michael Mann's Manhunter,

based on Thomas Harris' novel Red
Dragon,

and Jonathan Demme's The Silence
Of The Lambs,

based on Harris' sequel novel, tell
very similar stories and

even share some characters.

Did you get my card?

I got it. Thank you.

But these are two very different
types of film.

Let's look at the scenes in which
the investigative heroes are granted

interviews with the serial killer,
Hannibal Lecter.

In Manhunter, the cell is painted
white, strip lit,

an everyday institution, and the
antagonists

play a psychological game while
understating.

This version of Lecter, played by
Brian Cox,

feigns concern, but is palpably a
creep, locked up for good reason.

You think you're smarter than me,
since you caught me. No.

I know that I'm not smarter than
you.

Then how did you catch me, Will?

You had disadvantages. What
disadvantages? You're insane.

In The Silence Of The Lambs,

Lecter is incarcerated in what might
as well be

the dungeon of Castle Dracula.

Stone walls, scary lighting, an
unsettled heroine.

And for the final flourish,

Hopkins famously does a weird nasal
slobber

he says he copied from Bela Lugosi.

As scripted, the scenes could be in
the same movie,

but it's very clear that Manhunter

is being directed as a hi-tech
psycho thriller...

Would you like to leave me your home
phone number?

..while Silence Of The Lambs is a
suspense horror film.

We'll explore more of the cinematic
techniques directors have in their

arsenal later, but for now,

we must take the first step into the
key conventions and characters you

will see in most horror films.

A Harris Street property...

In order for a horror film to work,

we have to believe in it, and one

way of doing this is to evoke a
world

that is recognisable or sympathetic,
before the weird, nasty,

uncanny stuff starts.

Think of the opening scenes from
Psycho,

which don't seem to be from a horror
film at all,

but something altogether more
mundane.

Any calls?

Teddy called me, my mother called to
see if Teddy called.

Oh, your sister called to say she's

going to Tucson to do some buying
and

she'll be gone the whole weekend.

One of the key tropes of horror

movies is a juxtaposition of two
worlds -

the old and the new, light and dark,

good and bad, and a journey from one
to the other.

We usually start in the familiar
world,

the world in which we can easily
believe.

Give me that again?

How do you spell that?

Cyphre.

OK. What is it, foreign?

Then the monster, the threat, the
menace, the terror,

must come from beyond, either from
an older world,

unnaturally preserved, or from the

depths of a broken mind, or from
beyond a

veil, separating this world from
another dimension.

PHONE RINGS

Harry!

So, for example, Angel Heart

begins in the schlubby, familiar
metropolitan world of New York.

But Harry Angel's journey takes him
to exotic New Orleans,

where voodoo rituals and magic

incantations and potions lurk at
every corner.

Intriguingly, in William
Hjortsberg's

Chandler-esque source novel Falling
Angel,

the action stays in New York.

It was writer-director Alan Parker
who decided to add the Deep South

locations, creating a geographical
journey from one world to the next,

altogether more cinematic than the
novel.

A huge number of horror films
feature just such a journey.

The unsuspecting occupants of a
coach trundling to Castle Dracula.

Hey, driver!

Marion's fateful journey to the
Bates Motel.

Sergeant Howie arriving on the

remote island of Summerisle in The
Wicker Man.

The Torrance family driving to
the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.

You mean nobody has seen this place
yet?

Or the bumbling, naive teenagers of
so many a gore film.

Actually, it might be kind of nice.
Yeah.

Sometimes the journey can be
reversed, with the threat travelling

from the dark place, coming to meet
us.

But remember,

just as Regan from The Exorcist

seems to unlock the key to another
world

by playing with a Ouija board,

so the monster usually has to be
invited

into your home or your community.

That vampire can't get into your
bedroom

unless somehow you ask them in.

Either way, we're transported from
a safe world,

one with which we're familiar,

to another realm that's both
unsettling and unnerving.

And along the way, we will be given
signals

that something wicked this way
comes.

Hello, Danny.

traditionally littered with warning
signs that tell us, clearly,

that something's just not right.

Now, these prophecies of doom are
often delivered by a wise peasant

character, who's more in the know
than the sophisticated city slicker

or dismissive local townsfolk.

Here's Crazy Ralph in Friday The
13th

doing his best to warn the newly
arrived camp staff.

I'm a messenger of God.

You're doomed if you stay here.

This place is cursed. Cursed.

This is a type who goes back

beyond horror cinema and can be
found

in Shakespeare and classic tragedy.

They are both comic relief and a
signpost of what is up ahead in the

Twilight Zone.

Oh, no. No.

No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Aren't you something?

Good luck, Mary.

Stop by and see us the next time
you're in.

Thank you. But I'm never coming
back.

But beyond such warnings, horror
requires a slow build-up of dread,

with the style of the film-making

itself telling us that something is
amiss.

Whether it's the performances, the
lighting or the soundtrack,

which hints at madness.

In the 1962 cult classic
Carnival Of Souls,

we're made aware on a number of
occasions

that the world of the heroine
is out of sorts,

following a car accident.

Everything about the film screams,
"This is not right."

So when we get to the final,
horrifying pay-off,

we don't feel like we've been
cheated or tricked.

Rather, we've been mesmerised.

This is the artier end of horror,

owing much to the silent German
school of The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari

and Nosferatu, where every single
thing

in the frame is distorted and weird
for maximum cumulative disturbance.

Compare the visual style of Dr
Caligari

with this short film, Monster,

by Jennifer Kent, which laid the
groundwork for her brilliant debut

feature, The Babadook.

The setting is mundane,

a domestic home where a noisy kid is
driving his mother insane.

HE YELLS

The film is full of shadowy low
angles,

as if the characters are being

watched by a lurking, malevolent
force.

Mummy!

Monster is like a potted history of
horror.

This shot, as the mother reaches out
to the door knob in her bedroom,

terrified of what's on the other
side,

could have come straight out of The
Haunting.

SQUEAKING

Is the door locked?

Now look at this opening from
Dario Argento's Suspiria.

In this apparently innocuous
sequence,

a woman leaves an airport and takes
a taxi in the rain.

In the script, it's a nothing
sequence,

but Argento films it as if it were a
horror set piece,

with creepy lighting and score and
sound effects,

which set the audience on edge.

Note the operatic synthesis of every
single element,

just to be terrifying.

So by the time the taxi arrives at
its destination,

we know that something very bad
awaits.

If you are

thinking of going

into this house...

..don't.

Horror movies are full of people

going into places they really
shouldn't,

and this superb spoof trailer by

Shaun of the Dead director Edgar
Wright

demonstrates just how familiar we
are with this convention.

Don't.

Is anybody home?

Hello?

But if people didn't go into the
scary place,

horror movies would be a lot less
frightening.

And a lot shorter.

And the fact is that from our
childhood we're inexorably drawn to

dangerous environments.

It's one of the reasons we watch
horror movies.

GROWLING

Hello?

I am the spirit of dark and lonely
water.

Ready to trap the unwary, the show
off, the fool. And this...

Take a look at this public

information film from the early
'70s.

The film was designed to teach
kids to stay away from dangerous

waters, waters in which they could
be trapped and drown.

This branch is weak.

Rotten. It will never take his
weight.

The film is meant to be educational,
but it's shot like a horror movie.

Why? Well, because we all basically

understand the rules of horror
movies.

We understand that in these stories
people do things they shouldn't do.

They go places they shouldn't go,
with terrifying results.

Like Jaws. If you saw Spirit Of Dark
And Lonely Water as a child,

you could be forgiven if you never
swam anywhere ever again.

Sensible. Oi, mate, that was a
stupid place to swim.

The best horrors seem to imitate the
fragile,

visceral quality of our worst
nightmares,

some of which were spawned in
childhood,

transcending reality and making us
feel like no other genre does.

And the scary place plays into that
fear brilliantly.

In the opening paragraphs of The
Haunting Of Hill House,

author Shirley Jackson beautifully
laid out

the blueprint of that horror
archetype.

"No live organism can continue for
long to exist

"sanely under conditions of
absolute reality," she wrote.

Hill House, not sane, stood by

itself against the hills holding
darkness within.

An evil old house,
the kind some people call haunted,

is like an undiscovered country
waiting to be explored.

Hill House had stood for 90 years,
and might stand for 90 more.

Silence lay steadily against the
wood and stone of Hill House.

And whatever walked there,

walked alone.

In the Robert Wise film, the house
has a Gothic quality,

echoed by Stanley Kubrick in the
exteriors of the Overlook Hotel,

but what's important is how the
lighting and camera angles

add a cracked dimension to these
scenes.

Notice how the cinematography brings
a touch of chaos to the orderly

interiors of this house.

And note how in this sequence,

mirrors and lenses are used to bend
the world slightly,

suggesting that the house is somehow
changing,

along with our heroine's
deteriorating mental state.

Wise and his cinematographer Davis
Boulton

used shadows and tilting angles

to imprison the characters within
this not-sane building.

Just as the cameras lurking through
the corridors imply the presence of

otherworldly spirits, so the house
itself seems to come to life,

engulfing our heroine in her worst
nightmares.

CRACKING AND SMASHING

The house is coming down around me.

Well, it's very, uh...

..homey. Yeah.

This is a recurrent feature of
horror cinema.

Locations in which evil itself seems
to seep

from the walls, the cellars, the
attic.

The location can be utterly mundane.

Think of the house on Prospect
Street from The Exorcist.

There's nothing about it that tells
us to stay away.

Or is there?

Look at this sequence in which Ellen
Burstyn's Chris ventures into the

attic in search of rats.

Dammit!

Jesus!

She has a candle, as if she's
stepped back into the past,

into an old Gothic castle.

Director William Friedkin makes
brilliant use of silence here.

There's no music, just some
unsettling ambient noises.

CRASH

It's as if the house is taking
Chris to another world,

a world of darkness.

Catch the mice?

Oh, Karl!

Jesus Christ, Karl, don't
do that!

GROWL
THEY SCREAM

Most horror films would be vastly
diminished without their troubling

score, creepy hints of looming
danger or,

at times, ominous silences.

The picture dominates our
impression,

but the sound is where much of the
effect is achieved.

When David Lynch made Eraserhead,

he attributed a huge part of its
success to the weird,

industrial soundscapes conjured up
by Alan Splet.

Lynch would continue to work with
Splet until his death in 1994.

And, indeed, after it.

When I visited David Lynch's sound
studio in LA, he showed me that

buried in the floor beneath the

console on which he mixes all his
movies,

he kept a small portion of Alan
Splet's ashes.

It meant that when Lynch sat at the
desk,

he could feel Splet's spirit or aura
guiding him through the sound mix.

Simon?

Simon?

Take Oriol Tarrago.

Does that name ring a bell?

Well, maybe not, but if you like
horror films,

the chances are you have encountered
Tarrago's brilliant work,

conjuring up the sound of terror.

Simon?

I first noticed Oriol Tarrago's name

in the credits of The Devil's
Backbone

on which he served as sound editor.

But it was while watching The
Orphanage,

on which Tarrago was sound designer,

that I really started to be aware of
his work.

HIGH-PITCHED BEEPING

Describing the house in which the
ghostly action unfolds as one more

character in the movie,

Tarrago went out of his way to make
it sound right.

He travelled to a remote house in

the mountains where he recorded
natural

sounds from both inside and outside,
steps from different floors,

bangs on wooden beams, the creaks of
an old staircase.

RUMBLING AND SLAM

For the seance scenes,

he gathered the children of friends
and relatives and spent days playing

scary games with them, just to
capture the right screams.

DISTORTED SCREAMS

GROWLING

For the sound of Tomas' breathing,
Oriol Tarrago wanted two textures,

a high-pitched choking sound and a
low, threatening, animal tone.

He remembered that screenwriter
Sergio G Sanchez

had told him that he suffered
from asthma as a child.

So Tarrago took him into a studio
and recorded his breathing,

which he then mixed with strange
sounds

he made himself by holding
water in his mouth and gasping.

Simon, you are...

Perhaps more than in any other
genre,

sound design is crucial to horror.

SHE SCREAMS

SHE MOANS

One of the great joys of horror
movies is the therapeutic release of

tension and anxiety.

Wes Craven once told me, "Horror
movies do not create fear -

"they release fear."

Why can't I get any sleep?

What the hell do you want?

I'm sorry.

I'm very sorry.

And one of the ways they do this is
through the jump scare -

the gradual accumulation of tension

which leads up to a moment of
fright,

and hopefully the release of a
really good scream.

We can find a classic example of the
jump scare in this sequence from

Jacques Tourneur's 1942 movie, Cat
People.

A woman walks through a park,
pursued by another,

who might turn into a were-panther.

Nothing is really happening except
the stalking,

but the rhythm of the footsteps,

the anxious performance of the
possible victim,

all build an almost unbearable
tension.

Note how precise is the choreography
of the camerawork, the pacing and,

in particular, the editing.

We're primed for something terrible
to happen.

HISSING

Instead, a bus appears in the frame,

and its doors open with a loud,
cat-like hiss.

Climb on, sister. Are you riding
with me or ain't you?

This sequence became so iconic that
the bus became industry parlance for

any moment in which the audience is
made to hold its breath and then to

jump, often at something utterly
innocuous.

Now look at this sequence from
Exorcist III, which,

for my money, contains one of the

greatest jump scares in modern
cinema.

The scene is set in a hospital,

where a nurse on duty hears strange
noises.

She's already disturbed someone
sleeping, giving us a scare.

Now she's trying to put her fears
out of her mind,

but the audience is on the edge of
their seats.

When I asked William Peter Blatty,
who wrote and directed Exorcist III,

where he got the inspiration for
this scene,

he told me that he'd taken it from
this classic moment from Psycho.

As Arbogast climbs the stairs,

we're looking around to see where
the threat will come from.

And when it appears, it comes from
an area

to which he wasn't paying
attention.

HIGH-PITCHED JOLTS OF MUSIC

Hear how the shrieking stabs of the
music are echoed in Exorcist III.

SCREECHING MUSIC

Not just confined to the world we
live in,

jumps also work in dream sequences.

Perhaps most memorably as the punch
line of Carrie,

with the terrifying hand from the
grave.

Or the double jump in American
Werewolf with its Nazi demons.

All right, already!

Stop!

Hello.

Have you been up long? I've just had
a nightmare.

Not to worry, I've just the thing.

Alex!

Holy shit!

But beyond the jump scares of those
dream sequences,

there's a technique which is even
more terrifying.

A scare so fleeting you might
almost miss it.

The subliminal cut.

For me, this dream sequence from The
Exorcist is one of the greatest,

strangest, and eeriest sequences of
horror cinema.

It uses a montage of disconnected
images

and a fleeting subliminal cut,

to put the fear of God into an
audience.

In the novel of The Exorcist,

William Peter Blatty writes that
Father Karras dreamed of his mother,

emerging from a subway kiosk across
the street.

He calls out to her, but she cannot
hear him.

If we slow the sequence down, we see
this, the face of Karras's mother,

obliterated for a single frame.

Now keep watching.

As Karras calls out and his mother
cries out to him, we see this,

the face of the demon.

It appears so briefly,

amid a stroboscopic display of
alternating black and white frames,

that we're not even sure that we
saw it.

It's as if the face was lurking

between the frames of the film
itself.

Subliminals had been used before in
horror films,

but nothing else has ever sent a
shiver down its audience's spine as

effectively as this short sequence
from The Exorcist.

Thanks. It looks very inviting.

Ouch.

Horror movies need their monsters,

whether it's Dracula or Freddy
Krueger.

Henry the serial killer, a roaming
demon,

a stalking wraith or a ravenous
beast.

And inspiration for these monsters
can often come from real life.

One actor who paved the way for many
of the scariest monster incarnations

to follow was Lon Chaney.

He was known as the man of a
thousand faces

because of his acting skills and

because of transformations achieved
by

what has become a staple of horror
movies, monstrous make-up.

One of Chaney's most famous roles

was that of the scarred composer in
the

1925 Phantom Of The Opera,

a film still best known for Chaney's
own make-up design,

revealed for the first time at the
film's sensational premiere.

During the scene where Christine
pulls the mask away to reveal the

Phantom's horrifying features,

audiences were reported to have
screamed and fainted,

not unlike those at the first

screenings of Psycho and The
Exorcist.

Chaney painted his eye sockets black
to lend his face the impression of a

skull. He pulled the tip of his nose
up,

pinning it in place with a wire and
further enlarged his nostrils with

black paint.

For the final touches, he added
jagged false teeth,

lending bite to the spectre of the
Phantom.

While Chaney may have done his own
make-up,

the job usually fell to specialists.

Jack Pierce became something of a
star in his own right,

designing most of the iconic
Universal monsters,

from Frankenstein and The Bride...

..to the Wolf Man, played by Lon
Chaney Junior.

As make-up effects advanced,

so artists like Rick Baker and Rob
Bottin were able to create ever more

impressive body transformations,
mutating before our very eyes.

Such transformations are a key
element of horror,

blurring the line between human and
the inhuman.

Canadian director David Cronenberg
pioneered the so-called body horror

genre through movies like The Brood
and Videodrome,

in which metaphors about the human
condition were given physical form.

In Japanese director Shinya
Tsukamoto's Tetsuo, The Ironman,

metal and flesh are intertwined to
eye-popping effect

as the film slips into Fantasia.

But many of the most alarming
monster effects

sit on the cusp of the human
and the inhuman.

When Dick Smith transformed Linda
Blair into the demonically

possessed Regan, he began by
experimenting

with witchy effects which sat

very much in the tradition of Jack
Pierce.

But in the end, William Friedkin
opted for something more organic,

with Regan's face mutated through
gangrenous sores

which appeared to have been
self-inflicted.

She may look monstrous, but it's
her humanity

that makes her terrifying.

But what about the monsters that
don't look monstrous?

That look like us?
When John McNaughton's

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
was released in

the late '80s, it was advertised
with the slogan, "He's not Freddy,

"he's not Jason, he's real."

The writer, Robert Bloch, had a
similar sense

about the central character of his
novel Psycho,

inspired by news stories of the
so-called Wisconsin ghoul, Ed Gein.

Gein was a killer and a grave-robber

whose crimes came to light when he
was arrested in 1957,

but what proved shocking was that
Gein looked like a normal person.

When Alfred Hitchcock cast Anthony
Perkins as Norman Bates in his film

of Psycho, he was looking for a lead
who didn't look like a monster,

thereby amplifying the surprise and
the terror.

Whereas in Bloch's novel, Norman is
a repulsive figure,

Hitchcock chose the handsome,
sensitive Perkins.

Well, the mattress is soft and
there's hangers in the closet and

stationery with Bates Motel
printed on it,

in case you want to make your
friends back home feel envious.

And the...

..over there.

The bathroom. Yeah.

But if I untie you, you'll...

..try something. No, I won't.

Since then, Ed Gein has gone on to
inspire an entire canon of horror

icons, ranging from the drooling
necrophiliac

Ezra Cobb in Deranged...

..to the transformational Buffalo
Bill in Silence Of The Lambs.

Most famously, Gein inspired the
cannibal family

from Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw
Massacre,

each member of which, Hooper said,

represented a different aspect of
Gein's fractured character.

The most memorable of these is
Leatherface,

the murderous figure whose
monstrously masked visage

would become an icon of modern
horror.

Like so many figures in horror,

from Chaney's Phantom to Edith
Scob's

Christiane in Eyes Without A Face,
to Michael Myers in Halloween,

Leatherface hides his face behind a
mask.

And in Kaneto Shindo's 1964 Japanese
horror, Onibaba,

one of the scariest films ever made,

the Samurai's mask becomes an emblem
of demonic evil which would inspire

film-makers in the West for decades
to come.

In many of these cases, it's the
sheer blankness of these masks

that makes them scary, the fact that
we can't

see or read the expressions beneath
them.

I don't think it will be too amusing
for the youngsters

if I conjured up a demon from hell
for them.

So, what about the face of that

other recurrent horror icon, the
clown?

Well, clowns are meant to be funny,

but in horror movies, as in real
life,

they have more of a tendency to be
creepy.

Fear of clowns even has a name,
coulrophobia,

and that's a fear into which movies
have regularly tapped.

Lon Chaney played a memorably
miserable clown

in the 1924 silent He Who Gets
Slapped, a weird tragicomic drama.

In Jacques Tourneur's Night Of The
Demon from 1957, Dana Andrews is

threatened by Niall MacGinnis'
Doctor Bobo,

a clown-faced children's entertainer
who is also a Satanic magician.

Hiya, Georgie.

What a nice boat.

All of which brings us to the
grinning figure

of Pennywise the clown from It, the
Stephen King novel

which spawned a memorable '80s TV
miniseries,

and a 21st-century blockbuster
which, in 2017,

became one of the biggest grossing
horror movies of all time.

Take it, Georgie.

An evil, shape-shifting entity,

It preys on children's deepest fears
by becoming the monsters of which

they are most terrified.

And what are kids most scared of?

Clowns.

HE SCREAMS

Indeed, throughout the history of
horror, we can find childhood

entertainments and toys,
particularly dolls and dummies,

refashioned as figures of fear.

Why do childhood toys feature so
heavily in horror?

Well, personally, I think it's
because most of our primal fears are

cemented when we are children.

As kids we dream of monsters under
the bed,

and of sharing our bedroom with toys
which have a secret life.

Later on, we pack those toys away,

but horror cinema can bring them
back

from that creepy attic into which we
stashed them.

And in doing so, it brings back the
pure terror

that we all experienced as
children.

Many horror movies work like that

old children's game in which we're
shown

an apparently innocuous image and
asked,

"What's wrong with this picture?"

Just as horror cinema can bring back
childhood fears,

it can also confront more grown-up

anxieties which often have a
political

and social dimension.

Horror movies frequently address the
very specific concerns of the time

in which they're made.

This is especially apparent in the
generation gap Vietnam-influenced

horrors of the 1970s.

Films like Wes Craven's notorious
Last House On The Left,

made in response to the obscene
images of violence

which poured onto US TV screens from
battlefields abroad.

Fast forward to the 21st-century and
It Comes At Night seems like the

perfect embodiment of America's
descent into collective paranoia.

A clever riff on the old school home
invasion movie,

this is a vision of the near future
in which there are no bad guys or

bogeymen, just suspicion, isolation
and contagion.

What's going on? There's somebody
in the house. What?

There's somebody in the house!

It's a terrifying portrait
of a world which has lost track of

objective facts,

in which chaos and disinformation
causes people to turn upon their

neighbours, driven by the spectre of
fake news.

Sound familiar?

And recently we've started to see
a spate of horror movies

that explore the contemporary fear
of the online world.

A great example is Unfriended, which
uses a simple

but effective technique to tell its
story.

Just about the whole movie plays out
on a computer screen.

The format may not be unique,

but this micro-budget hit

makes the most of its self-imposed
restrictions.

Shot with screen-mounted GoPro
cameras and brilliantly edited,

this is the closest exploitation
cinema has come

to capturing the hive-like buzz of
online life,

in all its invasive intimacy.

And of course the real horror here
is our antiheroes' inability to pull

themselves away from their laptops.

Despite repeatedly telling each
other to just log off,

they're compelled to stay online,

to open links that can only work
their destructive magic

if empowered to do so.

Don't watch it, OK, don't watch!

Baby, it didn't
mean anything. I love you.

Stop watching.

Look at me, Mitch. Mitch, look at
me.

Whatever your fears, when it comes
to horror movies,

you're going to need someone to
help you, an expert.

Who ya gonna call? A savant.

Believe me, there is no other way.

The victims consciously detest being
dominated by vampirism,

but are unable to relinquish the
practice.

Similar to addiction to drugs.

Ultimately, death results from loss
of blood,

but unlike normal death, no peace
manifests itself.

For they enter into the fearful
state of the undead.

The savant is a stock horror
character who knows the enemy,

someone upon him the hero or heroine

may call in order to aid their
battle

against evil, and who may well be
sacrificed.

These characters are usually older
and wiser than the protagonist.

They can also be weirder.

Think of Zelda Rubinstein's
spiritual medium in Poltergeist,

a character who initially seems
ridiculous...

Do y'all mind hanging back? You're
jamming my frequencies.

..but whose knowledge of the next
world proves invaluable.

Where was the last incident of
bilocation?

I get my strongest feeling,
the point of origin

is in the child's closet upstairs.

Yes, I believe that.

Thank you for coming. Thank you for
having me.

Can we get you anything?

Or what about Lin Shaye's paranormal
investigator in Insidious?

An incidental character who became
so central

she was the star of the sequels.

That's fine, gentlemen.

I don't think bad wiring is the
problem here.

Troll!

And then there's Otto Jespersen's

monster killer, Hans, in
Trollhunter,

the 2010 Norwegian hit which found
something inventive to do with the

world-weary found footage
mockumentary format.

Each one of these characters holds
an in-depth knowledge

of the threat and the world it
inhabits,

which makes it possible not only to
access but also to slay the monster.

But for the savant, that's an
understanding

which can be as much of a burden as
a gift.

Peter Cushing may be a horror icon,

but he was also one of the few

horror stars who specialised in
playing the

classic savant, Van Helsing, rather
than the title role of Dracula.

Cushing played Van Helsing in five
films,

most famously in the Hammer
classics, Dracula,

from 1958, and Brides of Dracula in
1960.

In many ways, Cushing became the
archetypal savant,

setting a template that would be

followed by a string of respected
British

thespians moonlighting in horror,

such as Donald Pleasence in
Halloween.

I met this six-year-old child with
this blank, pale,

emotionless face and the blackest
eyes.

The Devil's eyes.

For the audience, these characters
deliver

crucial information about the
monster, while also, perhaps,

bringing a level of respectability
to an otherwise disreputable genre.

The savant figure can also become
corrupted and monstrous,

as unhinged as the evil they profess
to fight.

Think of Vincent Price as Matthew
Hopkins in the supremely disturbing

Witchfinder General.

You are, all of you, confessed
idolaters.

However, these proceedings shall be
carried out

through due process of law.

What law demands, we shall satisfy.

You will each be tied in a
prescribed fashion

and cast into the moat.

There's a touch of that derangement
in Robert Shaw's performance in

Steven Spielberg's monster shocker,
Jaws,

in which he plays seasoned shark
hunter and textbook twisted savant,

Quint. Quint is haunted by the
spectre of hungry sharks,

a spectre conjured up in the film's
best known monologue.

You know the thing about a shark,
he's got

lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a
doll's eyes.

When he comes at you, he doesn't
seem to be living,

until he bites you and those black
eyes roll over white and then...

..then you hear that terrible
high-pitched screaming.

SCREAMING

Many horror films crank up the
tension and excitement with a chase

sequence, in which the monster

pursues its prey and us, the
audience.

Speed is often a key factor.

In Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead,

our heroes are pursued by demons
which lurk in the woods.

With very limited resources,

Raimi and his team fashioned a

home-made Steadicam, which they
called the

shaky cam. By mounting their camera
on a plank of wood,

they were able to get cheap but

effective low angle shots, giving
the POV

of evil forces rushing through the
forest.

Danny!

Raimi took inspiration from the
Steadicam shots

in Stanley Kubrick's The
Shining,

which were themselves predated by
the Panaglide opening

of John Carpenter's Halloween.

In each of these cases,

we get to see the chase or the stalk

from the point of view of the
killer.

But those chases don't have to be
fast.

In fact, they can be just the
opposite.

Zombie movies such as George
Romero's

Living Dead series have long played

on the fear of the slow but
relentless chase,

a tide of evil moving inexorably
towards us.

Horror movies are full of
slow-moving monsters

and psychos who only catch
up with their victims

because they fall over or back
themselves into a corner.

There's zombies everywhere.

Yeah, but they ain't spotted him
yet.

'Amish?

Wake up!

Wake up, you silly old fucker!

This convention is so well
established

that it was parodied to hilarious
effect

in the British comedy horror
Cockneys Vs Zombies

in a low speed chase between the
walking dead

and an OAP in a Zimmer frame.

Run!

Why are they going so fast? Get off!

Fuck.

And in the recent horror movie,
It Follows,

fear returns at a walking pace,

slow, but unstoppable.

Hello?

Hello?

A peculiar feature of many horror

films is the way they can jump
between

the points of view of the monster
and their victim.

This cross identification is a
slippery hallmark of horror,

something you don't tend to find in
other more formulaic genres.

It tells us something very important
about the way horror films confound

our expectations,

and it leads us to the figure of the
final girl.

It's often been assumed that
horror movies

have a misogynist edge.

Andy? That they represent a male
gaze terrorising women.

But one of the most interesting
things

about horror is that viewers don't

identify with the people you
expect.

In fact, as a lifelong horror fan,

I've always felt that the genre
wasn't sadistic, but masochistic,

in an entirely healthy way.

Think about it - if you watch a
horror film

and you find yourself being scared
by a monster or a killer,

then you're identifying

not with the pursuer, but with the
pursued.

And it doesn't matter whether they

are the same gender or race or age
as you,

what matters is that the movie

allows you to share their
perspective.

To understand this,

look no further than the recurrent
figure of the final girl.

That term was first coined by Carol
J Clover

in her brilliant book, Men, Women
and Chainsaws.

Clover noted that despite the

genre's reputation for terrorising
women,

the most enduring horror films

returned time and again to the
figure of a

female avenger who outwits and
outlasts everyone else.

Please don't.

This shouldn't come as a surprise.

One of the urtexts of horror is Red
Riding Hood,

a story recently retold in the

fantasy horror genre by Twilight
director

Catherine Hardwicke.

The final girl is not only the last
one left alive,

but also the only one who can defeat
the monster or evil.

She is the woman who, by her
innocence or faith

or strength of character, prevails.

We can find a forerunner of the
final girl in the 1922 silent film

Nosferatu, in which it is the
heroine, rather than any of the men,

who destroys the monster,

although she has to sacrifice
herself in the process.

By the 1940s,

Dorothy McGuire was triumphing over
her assailant

in The Spiral Staircase,

one of the very first slasher
movies.

Since then, we have had a string of
final girls,

such as Jamie Lee Curtis in
Halloween,

Heather Langenkamp in A Nightmare on
Elm Street and Sigourney Weaver in

Alien, all of whom have outlived
their enemy.

Beyond the figure of the final girl,

horror films are also full of
powerful mothers, who are stronger,

and sometimes more scary than any
movie monsters.

Look at Essie Davis in The Babadook.

Here we have a character who is
fighting monsters on several fronts.

She plays a traumatised single mum
who is haunted by memories of her

husband's death in a car crash en
route to the maternity ward.

Six years after the accident, her
troubled young son, Samuel,

is struggling with demons of his
own,

and it is suggested that the
Babadook

may be a projection of his mother's
own anxieties.

The Babadook did it, mum.

But it's still down to her to
defeat the demon, and that's

something she does through a mixture
of strength, invention and,

most importantly, love.

You're nothing!

This is my house!

You can see a similar twist on the
final girl

in Under The Shadow, Babak Anvari's

brilliant, Tehran-set frightener in
which an

independently spirited woman finds

herself torn between the demonic
forces

tormenting her daughter, and the
random rockets falling from the sky.

While cinematographer Kit Fraser
shoots early domestic scenes

in neo-realist, hand-held style,

the visual aesthetic becomes more
angular and expressionist as Shideh

descends into a sleepwalking
nightmare,

replete with skin-crawling flashes
of a wraithlike figure.

A disorientated shot of Shideh lying
in a bed

with a camera tilted at 90 degrees

seems to provide a literal tipping
point.

A moment when waking life becomes a
dream.

SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

SQUEAKY VOICE: Get under the net.

I'm doing it. I can't go any faster.

Maternity is also central to one of
the best horror movies of recent

years, Alice Lowe's Prevenge.

I'm sorry, Anna, I've had to make
some really harsh cuts.

A satirical shocker about an
expectant mother

who hears her unborn child telling
her to embark

on a vengeful killing spree.

Ruth, you missed your scan.

I don't want to know what's in
there.

I'm scared of her. I mean, I'm not
even in control.

It's like I'm some crap, banged out
car, and she's driving.

I'm just the vehicle.

Honestly, it's like a hostile
takeover.

SQUEAKY VOICE: He's coming.

Do it. Do it now.

Most remarkably, Alice Lowe wrote
and shot Prevenge whilst heavily

pregnant, lending a uniquely
personal edge

to the film's powerfully female
perspective.

And like so many other women who
have found their home in horror,

Lowe uses the genre to talk
about complex issues...

Fuck. ..in a manner that's
engaging, entertaining,

and utterly surprising.

SQUEAKY VOICE: You're getting better
at this.

Do you think so?

Oh, yes.

I do, too.

There is a ritual element to all
genres,

especially the genre that most often
features Satanic or sacrificial

rituals.

SCREAMING

Traditionally, you would have a
monster

and then have it defeated by the

crucifix, a stake through the heart,

or men with torches or silver
bullets.

And Van Helsing gets a few words at
the

end to reassure us that everything
is right now.

Or at least that's how it was until
the late 1960s,

when less comforting endings became
de rigeur.

Everything appears to be under
control.

Look at George Romero's 1968
classic, Night Of The Living Dead,

one of the most powerful and

politically pointed horror movies of
any generation.

Dealing with themes of
racism and civil unrest,

Night Of The Living Dead ends with a
message that the monsters are

actually less dangerous to the hero

than the forces of normality.

To an African-American,

a torch-wielding white posse poses
more of a threat

than the dead coming back to life.

Hit him
in the head, right between the eyes.

Good shot.

OK, he's dead. Let's go get him.
That's another one for the fire.

This kind of shock ending in which
evil is not defeated

quickly became a convention as rigid
as the happy endings of earlier

horror films.

The trait soon mutated into the
sequel hook,

the prototype for which is the
disappearance of Michael's body

at the end of Halloween.

Mother! Help us!

By the time Wes Craven made A
Nightmare On Elm Street

in the '80s, he was adding a hook at

the specific insistence of the
studio, so that the

film could found a franchise if it
was a hit.

# Three, four, better... #

Today, we've grown used to the
idea that the monster will return if

a sequel seems viable.

Almost all the Friday The 13th

movies end with Jason showing signs
of returning.

Andy. Yeah? Are you still out there?

I can't hear you.

And even though Carrie is in her
grave,

she can still reach the last
surviving classmate in her dreams.

It's hard to think of any other
genre

in which the unresolved open ending
has become such a staple.

As we noted at the beginning,
horror movies will endure.

Whenever anyone thinks they're dead
and buried,

they rise again from the grave.

The horror novelist Clive Barker

once told me that he thought there
was something

fundamentally reassuring about
horror's capacity to keep coming

back for more. As he said,

"OK, zombies may crash in through
the French windows, but hey,

"at least there's life after
death."

But perhaps that's even worse.

The idea that even the grave cannot
stop the horror.

As we learned in the 1931 Dracula,

there are worse things awaiting man
than death.

Now that IS scary.

Sweet dreams.