The Horror Lexicon #13: The Crime in the Past

The past is never dead, William Faulkner writes. And the author is certainly correct when in it comes to horror movies and their lexicon.  

In many modern cinematic horrors, particularly those of the slasher milieu, a terrible event in the past is the very thing that so dramatically shapes the present, and the future. Accordingly this “crime in the past,” is often dramatized in a scene I term “the deadly preamble,” an ultra-violent, motivating incident for a terrifying crime spree in the film’s body proper.

As I wrote in Horror Films of the 1980's (2007), horror movies utilize the crime in the past (or “the transgression”) and the deadly preamble for two reasons, primarily.  

The first concerns narrative: the trope provides a specific character motivation for the murders featured in the film, a wrong that must be righted.

Secondly, the deadly preamble starts the film off with a literal bang, with a colorful, violent, and scary murder scene that primes the audience for an hour-and-a-half of terror and violence.

In many significant ways, the 1980's represent the golden age for the “crime in the past”/”Deadly Preamble” productions.  

Two camp counselors are murdered by an unseen assailant in 1958 at “Camp Blood” in Friday the 13^th (1980).  

A jilted soldier arrives home from World War II to find his girlfriend dancing with another boy.  He rectifies that insult with a pitchfork, in The Prowler (1981). 

In Prom Night (1980), we see a practical joke at an abandoned school go horribly, murderous wrong for a group of school children.  

And in Pieces (1983), we go back to 1942 to witness a disturbed young boy wield an axe against his mother when she refuses to let him finish assembling a (sexually-explicit) jigsaw puzzle.   

Terror Train (1980) begins with another sexual humiliation.

One of the most notorious, artful and (best…) examples of the Deadly Preamble occurs in John Carpenter’s incredibly influential Halloween (1978).  We see young Michael’s brutal murder of his sexually-active sister, Judith, on Halloween night, 1963, the event that precipitates Myers’ bloody return some fifteen years later, in 1978, during the body of the film. The nature of this crime is so brutal and unexpected, that as punctuation, Carpenter’s camera retracts, up, up and away, in horror as it ends.

In some interesting cases, the crime in the past isn’t dramatized in a violent pre-title sequence or deadly preamble. Sometimes it is revealed through exposition (like the creepy campfire story that opens The Fog [1980] for instance.)  In other cases, such as Poltergeist (1982), the crime in the past is not revealed until nearly the end of the movie, as an explanation for all the haunting in Questa Verde. 

More recently, a crime in the past -- or several crimes in the past, to be precise -- dominates the legend of the Blair Witch in The Blair Witch Project (1999).

Sometimes the crime in the past is one that affects the film’s protagonist and the villain simultaneously (Cape Fear [1991]) and sometimes the crime in the past is actually the “tragedy” in the past, as we see in Interloper films such as Single White Female (1992), The Temp (1993) or Mother’s Boys (1994).

But the crime in the past is especially useful in those slasher films that feature masked killers, or killers of otherwise unknown identity.  The crime in the past often involves an innocent child and a trauma, and when the murders start – years later — that child is an adult, and therefore unrecognizable to audiences. 

We must ask ourselves: what was the impact of the transgression on that child?  Who is responsible, or who is to be held responsible?  And why are the specific victims being asked to pay, in most cases, with their lives?

In this century, the Saw films have played rather dramatically with the “crime in the past” trope.  Jigsaw, the killer, sees himself as a decider of justice, making immoral people pay for their past indiscretions and trespasses. Jigsaw himself suffered an injustice at one point, but on a whole, he punishes people for their flawed characters, and not only what they did to him, or to his life, specifically. 

The crime in the past is featured in films including (but not limited to): Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Friday the 13^th (1980), He Knows You’re Alone (1980), Prom Night (1980), Terror Train (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), The Prowler (1981), The Burning (1982), Funeral Home (1982), Humongous (1982), Madman (1982), Cape Fear (1991), Single White Female (1992), The Temp (1992), Dario Argento’s Trauma (1994), The Blair Witch Project (1999), and virtually all the Saw films.