THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

I was never a big fan of horror for obvious reasons like jump scares, the old folk tale about something that lurks in the dark and haunts kids, all these tend to just stay in my head and my imagination would go wild whenever I’m alone and I end up scarring myself from within.

For my Project Brief 2, I decided to confront my fears and do a little research on the whole horror genre and why people enjoy the thrills of getting frightened countless number of times to the edge of their cinema seats. My findings came up to the fact that people enjoy and want to be scared, it’s the chase for the adrenaline rush you get when you’ve been faced with a supernatural being under a save and confined space. Having stimulated in a fight or flight (or in this case, fight or fright) scenarios, your body releases adrenalines into your bloodstream and you feel contended, satisfied having known you have survived what was presented to you. And filmmakers exploit that idea behind frightening their audience, at a micro level of the mise-en-scene of a particular shot, to the entire plot. Audience just want to see how the evil being gets destroyed or banished, in return for causing all the problems and struggles the protagonist might have faced. And again, it’s that sense of satisfaction they have survived a horror film that people chase, quite similar to that of surviving a roller coaster right.

The screening for this week was Berberian Sound Studio (2012) directed by Peter Strickland. I was following the film pretty much all the way until the main character, played by Toby Jones, started speaking Italian, as throughout the film he was an English man brought in by an Italian filmmaker to do some foley recording for his upcoming horror film. The film doesn’t seem to resolve properly and for the rest of the day, I kept replaying the film in my head to make some sense out of it. To no avail, I couldn’t draw any conclusions, until we talked about it in class on Thursday that it was a psycho-horror and the filmmaker was playing the minds of the audience. We don’t know if we were in his head the whole time, until he spoke Italian, or vice versa.

Coming from a music and audio background, I could relate to the film at a personal level, when I saw the slashing of vegetables, voice acting, and going take after take after take, it reminded me of the days when I was pursuing my diploma back in Singapore where we had to do such things for our assignments. And I could relate to the frustration of Toby Jones’ character when he can’t seem to get the take right or when other people interferes with his work. Sometimes when egos collide in the studio, creative things could happen, other times it could just bring down an entire production. Having said that, I liked how Strickland leaves out any footages of the horror film that the Italian director was working on, but yet, we as the audience, can roughly make out what the horror film is about.

Horror has been around since the 1930s, and it’s still ongoing, we have seen it take different forms and shapes from depending on the country that produces it, but the common elements that make a horror film stays. The suspense and anticipation of the monster jumping out of the closet, the dissonant chord progression soundtrack, and heavy use of makeup and special effects. After understanding horror a little better from the research I have done for PB2, I can safely say that I now know why I would stay away from horror films. And no better way to remind myself why I loathe the horror genre than some movie clips being shown in class from the Exorcists.