Common Sense

Sad to say, American horror films started going downhill fast in the 1980s.

There was a time when Universal’s horror films ruled the box office and sequels meant The Wolfman meeting Frankenstein’s monster with Bela Lugosi in some role. Do you remember the first time you saw John Carpenter’s Halloween? The scene at the end when Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character, has sent the kids to the neighbors for help and she thinks that she’s killed the “boogeyman.” Suddenly, you notice in the background that Michael Meyers has sat up and is coming towards her… slowly. If you’ve had the good fortune to see it on the big screen, I’m sure the audience is doing the same thing me and my drunken friends do when we watch it on TV; we’re shouting “Turn around! He’s right behind you!”

Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) arrives just in the nick of time to empty his revolver into Meyers, sending him over the balcony and onto the front lawn. But when Loomis looks over the balcony, Meyers is gone. And you see all of these still frame shots of where Meyers has wreaked his havoc, but he’s nowhere to be seen, all to the creepy soundtrack Carpenter came up with on his keyboard one day. For God’s sakes, you know the name of the villain, but the credits merely list him as “the shape” because he’s supposed to represent the deep evil just under the surface of all of us.

By the end of the next decade, we get Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. More like Jason takes my insomnia away. I can suspend my disbelief only so far and a teleporting serial killer zombie who gets finished off because they flood New York City’s sewers with toxic waste every night at midnight is just too far.

I took my girlfriend in college to go see Jason X. When Jason puts the brown-nosing teacher’s pet’s face in the liquid nitrogen and then smashes it on the table, we did what the rest of the audience did: We laughed. Horror movies aren’t supposed to be funny, they’re supposed to be horrific.

The last gasp of good American horror came from Sam Raimi and his crew with the Evil Dead trilogy.

Thank God for Asian cinema! While American’s were making a crappy sequel to a franchise that’s harder to kill than the main character with a bunch of nobody, Canadian, Dawson’s Creek lookalikes, Japanese directors like Takashi Miike were making truly disturbing movies like Audition. And we started to copy them.

When you watch Saw and see Cary Elwes cut off his own foot with a hacksaw to escape and then you watch Audition to see Asami Yamazaki’s character cut off the feet of the male lead so that he can’t escape her apartment, you know where that influence for truly horrifying cinema comes from.

That’s why Eli Roth makes sure there is a Miike cameo in almost every single one of his movies.

We’ve also had to import several directors from Asia to get it right. Ronny Yu had such great potential but, Bride of Chucky? Freddy vs. Jason? Takashi Shimizu remade his Ju-on series for American audiences as The Grudge and The Grudge 2, which were fairly good and a lot less confusing.

Raimi and company came back to their roots and imported the Pang brothers for their first American movie: The Messengers. It paid off.

Right from the get-go, the film is creepy. The Solomon family is leaving their financial and emotional troubles behind in Chicago to start a sunflower farm literally in the middle of nowhere. Roy (Dylan McDermott) wants to take an abandoned farm and turn it, and his family’s fortunes around. Denise (Penelope Ann Miller) is trying to support him while troubled teen Jess (ably played by Kristen Stewart) is looking to put her own mistakes behind her.

Right from the start, Jess senses something is not right, but in typical fashion, her parents won’t listen to her. Only the stranger that has come to help Roy work the land, John Burwell (John Corbett), seems to really connect and understand her plight.

As things become more terrifying for Jess, we learn that ghosts aren’t always evil. Sometimes they are messengers to warn us of what dangers may lie ahead.

Watching the special features, it was really interesting to see how the Pang brothers overcame the language barrier by using their keen sense of the visual to relay how they wanted things to progress and how the movie was to be shot. The screewriter was right there in the room with them, writing the script as they described their shots, virtually storyboarding out the scenes with his words in the script. Then having the talent from the actors to take that direction and that script and make it come to life. Stewart’s eyes express more fear and tell more of a story in one close-up than 20 minutes of exposition in Yu’s Freddy vs. Jason ever could.

And that sense of the visual translated to great shot selection as well. Close-ups were just off 90 degrees so that one side of the face was closer than the other while showing more background on these great set pieces. Wide-angle lenses for shots down a long, dark hallway in the upstairs.

Style goes beyond shot selection, though. Any idiot can put a camera somewhere and capture something on film. Just look at those dad’s who got video cameras for Father’s Day. The Pangs also like to play with light and dark. Half the scenes in the movie take place in what looks like an idyllic sunflower field, but they make it seem much creepier than anyone would be comfortable with.

Then they switch it up and suddenly you’re in the dark cellar where we know something terrible happened. It’s an old farm house so the only light enters through a small window and in between the slats on the storm door to the outside.

They’re is no “gotcha” moment in the film, either. That has become so cliche that the Pangs studiously avoided it. When a crow (they actually used ravens, which is even creepier) bumps into a window, instead of immediately turning around startled, Jess realizes that something unusual has just happened and you see it in her eyes. Then she turns. The Pangs have become masters of the “long pause.”

Everytime you think you’re going to get the sudden jolt because Fluffy the cat has been hiding in the closet, it never materializes. Too many directors go for that easy, but pointless release of tension and I instantly loose respect for them when they do that. In Messengers, the tension continues to build with only momentary relief until the final denouement when we learn why the Solomon’s house and land are haunted and they confront their own ghosts in the process.

I’d have to give this 3 out of 5 sunflowers. My only peeves were that for asian-inspired horror, it was not the gorefest I would for. I guess I’ll have to go see Hostel 2 again to sate that appetite.

All in all, not a bad first American effort from the Pang brothers and I’m glad to see Sam Raimi doing something besides Spider-Man and its endless sequels.