I'm Back

Well, I'm back. It's been nearly three years since I last posted to this blog, and I have a lot of catching up to do. For example, in 2012, shortly after my last post, a movie called The Possession came out, and I've only just seen it. I had grown tired of possession movies after seeing The Last Exorcism, so I had low expectations for this one. It was derivative, of course, rehashing all the moments that were done better in 1973's The Exorcist--the possessed little girl writhing, suffering from ugly makeup, performing feats of telekinesis. But The Possession had its moments, starting with a weird box the little girl, Emily (Natasha Calis), bought at a  yard sale. The box turns out to contain a demon, and, as a twist, it's a Jewish demon, a dybbuk, requiring a Jewish person to perform the exorcism in the movie's final act. Another twist: in the middle of the usual sequence in which medical science tries futilely to figure out what is wrong with the child, the doctors carry out an MRI, and they are astonished when they see this:

Yes, that is the demon in the left half of the image. You never saw that in The Exorcist. In fact, you get a good clear view of the demon crawling around a physical therapy room during the exorcism. In The Exorcist you see a statue of the demon, but that's all.

As in The Exorcist, the parents of the little girl are divorced, but in The Exorcist you never saw the father; the mother, Ellen Burstyn, has to save the girl on her own. This time it's the father, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who does more of the saving. Emily procures the wicked box while she is on her father's watch one weekend, and I suppose he feels responsible. The ex-wife, Kyra Sedgwick, is mainly fixated on blaming her ex and spending time with her boyfriend, until the dybbuk does a nice job of scaring away (or possibly killing) the boyfriend. In another interesting twist, the exorcism brings the family together, including a sister who has been mostly ignored while all the attention is given to the possessed girl. Now that Emily is safe again it is not outside the realm of possibility to think that Morgan and Sedgwick will remarry.

All things considered, The Possession was pretty good, dependent on its predecessors but with enough twists to keep my interest. Also, it fits well into my deformed-destructive theory of horror movies, spelled out at length in my book Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films. The demon is a deformed spirit, malevolent and rebellious against God, and physically repulsive when you get a look at it. And its deformity causes its destructiveness, which is revived at the end in a frisson involving a big motor vehicle crash and the box. People who love horror movies love a good deformed and destructive being, and this is served up in The Possession.

George Ochoa

The Form of Jennifer's Body

In this blog, I have talked about monsters as deformed destructive beings (DDBs), but I have not gone into detail about what I mean by that term. I will do so now, using a particular DDB as an example: Jennifer in Jennifer's Body (2009). As played by Megan Fox, Jennifer has a great body, even after she transforms into a demon, and it is hard to tell at a glance what is deformed about her.

St. Thomas Aquinas would have viewed the issue differently. According to him, Jennifer's body, impressive as it is, consists of two components: matter made actual by form. Form includes Jennifer's soul, which is invisible, but also the pattern of organization of her matter, such as two arms, two legs, two (notable) breasts, and so on. To look at her, Jennifer is well-formed, an excellent example of her species. The species essence is related to form: Jennifer's body is what happens when the essence of the human species (female variety) makes this matter actual.

However, Jennifer is actually deformed. She has been transformed into a demon, and a demon, however attractive on the surface, is a fallen angel, an angel whose good spiritual nature has been corrupted by rebellion against God. If you could look into the essence of a fallen angel, or demon, it would look something like this:

This is how Jennifer looks when she is not wearing her pretty face. Her mouth widens inhumanly, her teeth sharpen into shark's teeth, and her face is marked by decay. These are outward signs of her inward deformity. She is no longer attractive but repulsive.

Yet this is not necessarily a bad thing. DDB theory predicts that once a form has been sufficiently deformed, it may become a new form--in this case, the form of a demon girl. Because that form is new, it interests us, it makes us want to look and pay attention, because we have an inherent interest in being. New beings, however repulsive because of their deformity, are simultaneously attractive because that same deformity qualifies them as new types of being.

Our interest in the deformed being is intensified if the new form is inherently inimical to our human form. Such a being, by virtue of its deformity, is destructive toward us--a DDB. Jennifer is an example: the image of her with shark teeth is the image of her attacking one of her human victims. She lives by killing and eating people (preferably boys, though she goes both ways). We want to see these deformed and destructive beings precisely because they are new types of beings that would be inaccessible to us in real life due to their destructiveness. DDBs satisfy our hunger for being to a degree that would not even be possible outside of horror movies.

And that is why people like horror movies. They can see Megan Fox any time. But Megan Fox as a demon who eats people--that is a new type of being, for which one must turn to Jennifer's Body.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

The Return of "Gargoyles"

There are some movies I've seen so many times I've lost track. Others I've seen only once, and I would prefer to keep it that way. And then there is the rare breed: movies I've seen only once and have wanted to see again for years, but have been unable to for one reason or another. Gargoyles (1972), starring Cornel Wilde and Jennifer Salt, is an example of that breed--or was until today.

I saw Gargoyles when it premiered as a TV-movie when I was 12 years old. It made a powerful impression, but 39 years passed before I got a chance to see it again. When Netflix recently made it available, I pounced. I am pleased to say that it holds up.

Gargoyles is a horror movie about a scientist and his daughter (Wilde and Salt, respectively) who come across some demonic reptilian creatures in a western desert. The creatures, we learn, hatch every 500 years or so, at which point they make war on humans and are usually beaten back into obscurity. They have been the source of the worldwide myths and legends about demons; in western Europe, they inspired the gargoyles that adorn cathedrals. With help from a local police chief and some young bikers, Wilde rescues his daughter from the gargoyles and defeats them--at least for the moment.

Gargoyles is intelligent, original, and scary, an achievement considering its origins as a modestly-budgeted movie of the week. It has an ingenious plot (how many TV-movies purport to explain the origin of a global folkloric motif?), likeable leads, good support (from, among others, a young Scott Glenn as a biker), and credible monsters. I emphasize the last point. A horror movie is only as good as its deformed destructive beings, or DDBs, and these gargoyles are good. Created by a team that included budding creature effects master Stan Winston, they are dark, muscular hybrids of human and reptile, mixed variously with birds, apes, bats, and things out of Bosch paintings. Though often in shadow, the gargoyles are seen clearly enough that we don't suspect the filmmakers of trying to hide something. The DDBs' workmanship is good enough to sustain even daylight scrutiny.

Everything else contributes to the presentation of the DDBs. The gargoyle sound effects are creepy; the electronic music sets a foreboding tone. The gargoyles move at a slightly slower speed than the surrounding actors, making the DDBs appear more surreal. The production design of the gargoyle hatchery, which contains eggs that are destroyed by fire, preceded by 14 years the similar design of the hatchery-destroyed-by-fire in Aliens (1986). Without being overly topical, Gargoyles hints at social themes--for example, by casting black actor Bernie Casey as the lead gargoyle, and having him intone about gargoyles and humans as if they were two races in conflict.

Gargoyles is not perfect. It is constrained by its limited budget, brief running time (74 minutes), and TV censorship that keeps it from fully exploring the gargoyle-on-woman subplot that is briefly raised. The gargoyle costumes sometimes fold like the costumes they are. But overall, this is a good horror movie that is worth tracking down.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

"Molly Hartley" Needed More Haunting

Having just written about a good horror film (The Human Centipede [First Sequence]), I think it only proper to explain what I think makes a bad horror film. For that, I need look no further than the film I just saw last night, The Haunting of Molly Hartley.

I won't say this film is all bad. It had nice schoolgirl uniforms. Nor would I call it an incoherent, laughably inept mess of a film, such as Plan 9 from Outer Space. That would be rating it more highly than it merits. Laughably inept horror films at least provide laughs. The Haunting of Molly Hartley prompted little emotion at all, other than a strong desire to check my watch.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley, you see, was dull, and that is the worst thing a horror movie can be. The purpose of a horror movie is to present you with the illusion that a new form of being--a deformed destructive being (DDB)--has entered the world and is threatening to destroy you. That should not be dull. If it is dull, the horror movie is failing at its job.

Molly Hartley is dull for a number of reasons. The settings are bland, the dialogue is without crackle or spice, the acting is wooden, the plot is a copy of other copies of Rosemary's Baby, and at no point does anything surprising happen. Even when some hallucination or other pops out from behind Molly, accompanied by a loud noise, this is expected by the alert horror movie fan, because that is the sort of thing that happens at about this point in this kind of movie.

The worst disgrace of Molly Hartley is the lack of a strong DDB. Molly is supposed to turn into a demon or devil-servant or something on her 18th birthday, and we can expect that this makes her the DDB. But she is not physically deformed (aside from a scar daintily obscured by her decolletage), and although she is supposed to be spiritually deformed, she exhibits this deformity largely by adopting a mean schoolgirl manner common to the other mean schoolgirls around her. Perhaps this is supposed to be a comment on the banality of schoolgirl meanness, but it succeeds only in being banal.

Nor is Molly very destructive. She breaks a girl's arm and kills a couple of people, but her heart doesn't seem to be in it. Possibly actress Haley Bennett's heart wasn't really in it.

The greatest virtue of The Haunting of Molly Hartley is to clarify what makes a bad horror movie. This, in turn, makes the good ones scream louder.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films