John Kenneth Muir - Horror Films FAQ: All Thats Left to Know About Slashers, Vampires, Zombies, Aliens and More

Copyright 2013 by John Kenneth Muir

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2013 by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books
An Imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation
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Milwaukee, WI 53213

Trade Book Division Editorial Offices
33 Plymouth St., Montclair, NJ 07042

All photographs in this volume are from the John Kenneth Muir Film Still Archive

The FAQ series was conceived by Robert Rodriguez and developed with Stuart Shea.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Snow Creative Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Muir, John Kenneth, 1969
Horror films FAQ : all thats left to know about slashers, vampires, zombies, aliens, and more / John Kenneth Muir.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55783-950-3 (pbk.)
1. Horror filmsHistory and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.H6M65 2013
791.436164--dc23
2013025888

www.applausebooks.com

This book is dedicated with love to my six-year-old son,
Joel, who loves to listen to a good, scary horror story.
Thank you, Joel, for helping me see all the famous (and not-so-famous) monsters through the eyes of a child once more.

Contents

By Chris Carter

A child of the 1950s, I was born a half century after the birth of the horror movie, in a watershed decade that produced at least three of the best genre films ever: The Blob (1958), The Fly (1958), and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). All three would spawn fine remakes, but the impact of the originals on a kid with an already overactive imagination would never be greater. Those moviesand I would include The Birds (1963), toowere exactly what I innocently wanted then, and they would be touchstones for me when I created The X-Files almost forty years later.

But none of these classics had a bigger effect on my young sensibility than one B-horror movie of the era (and there were lots of them!). Looking back, it might just be the original X-File. That would be Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). I cant remember when I first saw it, but it was a regular feature at the summer playground where I would work and project the movie for kids just like me a decade later. If youve never seen it, the story involves a group of scientists who go to the Amazon to investigate fossilized evidence of an unidentified creature found by another team. Arriving, they find that the group has been mysteriously killed off by something inviting wild speculation. A jaguar?! No, a piscine amphibious humanoid that is no more fossil than the scientists girlfriend who, along for the trip, goes for a swim in the Black Lagoon. This, of course, is a very bad idea. Needless to say, the girlfriend survives but The Creature doesnt, though not without a fight. It didnt win an Oscar.

It did, however, like the best horror movies, prey on my impressionable mind. So moved, I got my parents to buy me the Revell model kit of The Creature that I built and painted and stared at on my shelf on my way to untold nightmares. Creature spawned two sequels but never a remake. Though you might recognize a not-all-too-dissimilar story line in The X-Files second season episode, The Host, this was not intentional; in spite of the frightening similarity of {between rather than of?} the Fluke Man and The Creature.

The Host, though a popular episode, is not perfectly representative of what The X-Files did best. The monster (played by Darin Morgan, who would go on to more glorious fame as a writer on the show) was terrifying enough, but there he was, in the very light of day, or rather the light of the sewers, for all to see. A cheap thrill.

For me, the best horror movies rely on everything but the cheap thrill. On what is imagined and unseen, what exists in the shadows and in the sound design. I had a recent talk with Oren Peli, creator of the Paranormal Activity franchise, who says what you see in a scary movie is never as important as what you hear. Its true, though this rule has been successfully broken a million times. The Exorcist , perhaps the scariest movie ever made, wouldnt have worked had Linda Blairs head not corkscrewed and the pea soup had not landed on Father Merrins starched cassock. (Interestingly, the uncut re-release shows too much of Blair and isnt as scary.)

But the best horror writers, directors, and producers use us as much as the screen to achieve the unforgettable scenes that, strung delicately together, produce horror; our unconscious, primal fears are a built-in theater on which these images land best.

And it works over and over and over. Another of the scariest movies ever is Alien (and Aliens , for that matter), and you can trace its roots back to at least an episode of Night Gallery (another of my childhood faves) where an earwig enters the brain of a hapless man who soon learns that it was a female whos laid an evil nest therein. Yet the best horror finds new ways to tell old stories, and that is what we tried to do on The X-Files. Though we mined an age-old genre, we always sought new ground.

This was not without an added degree of difficulty. That is, the censors. Disallowed even from showing someone getting a shot from a doctor, we were forced to try to scare folks using a bag of tricks searched by the networks own version of the TSA. (Ironically, as others have pointed out, you cant show someone getting a shot but you can show someone getting their head blown off in five different camera angles.) This was a fact of life and it made us clever.

When I had written an episode about a necrophiliac (Irresistible, guest starring the excellent Nick Chinlund), the network balked at making it. Necrophilia wasnt acceptable network fare. A Death Fetishist, however, passed muster and the cameras rolled. Again, terror lives in our minds. The episode Home was made without any interferenceuntil it aired and caused near-heart attacks for Fox executives whod been looking the other way. The show, about violent brothers who may or may not have had sex with their mother, was immediately banned from further airing. Now it lives as one of our most popular.

The best horror Rosemarys Baby is unsurpassedrely on our fear of not what we see, but what we fear well see. Doing a network TV show, we used this axiom to maximum effect, and not just because it works. My friend Rick Carter, an Academy Award-winning production designer, gave me invaluable advice on a most effective way to do a scary network show. Rick had just designed 48 episodes of Amazing Stories for Steven Spielberg, and reading my pilot he said I wouldnt have the time or money to scare people with elaborate special effects. Keep whats scary offscreen, he said.

And going back to The Exorcist , apart from the spider walk down the stairs and the scene with Regan stabbing herself with the cross, the scariest moment is not bloody, not gory, and barely even perceptible: a subliminal image of the devil in black and white.

It feels odd writing about horror. Like a magician revealing his tricks. Best-of lists of horror movies have been compiled, and doctoral dissertations have been penned, but some of the best writing about the genre has been done by John Kenneth Muir. I am particularly grateful to him for the time and attention hes paid to things others have overlooked, underappreciated, and often written off. His is a fans perspective first, but with a critics eye to theme and underscore, to influence and pastiche; and maybe most impressive of all, its simply for the love of the movies and TV shows he writes about.