My latest article at Anorak is up! It is called Childhood's
End, and it concerns the horror movies that embody a child's viewpoint to
create horror.
Here's a snippet:
"ALFRED
Hitchcock once remarked that every person understands fear, because everyone
was once a child. “After all,” he declared, “weren’t we all
afraid as children?”.
According
to the authors of Monsters under the Bed and Other Childhood Fears (Random
House; 1993, page 1), “childhood is a time of many fears” and children
between the ages of six and twelve “experience an average of seven different
fears.”
At its best and most illuminating, the horror film genre
expresses fears about the future, about mortality, and about, even, how we live
day-to-day. Some notable horror movies, however, have also attempted to
explicitly sow terror (and indeed, melancholy…) by adopting the perspective of
a child as he or she broaches change, and the onset of maturity.
After all, the end of childhood is also, in many ways, the end of innocence
itself.
The
following five genre films masterfully express the difficulties of childhood’s
end with expressionistic and haunting visuals, and thus explore, in cinematic
terms, what it can mean to “grow up.”
Phantasm creeped me out when I was 9. Shudder. Watching it as an adult, I can see why: Coscarelli et al. weren't experts in film, that is, they weren't encumbered with film theory or well-tread Hollywood conventions, they were just making a movie the way they thought it should be made, letting their imaginations play freely on the screen. That's why it was so disturbing to me as a kid: it wasn't like any other film I'd seen. It was from another place.
ReplyDeleteI love your description of Phantasm, David. It really is like no other horror film ever made. I find it very emotional because of the subject matter, which I truly see as a young man's reckoning with mortality in the world.
DeleteYour film choices are excellent examples of the childhood fear of life under the age of twelve. I read your post all at Anorak. Great! This is my comment: John you have captured what it felt like to be a child and deal with fear. I still remember the way I looked at the world as a boy in the '70s and these films, some of which I own, reflect that too. I think it is such a special time of endless possibilities and fears. Good film choices.
ReplyDeleteSGB
Hello, my friend.
DeleteI appreciate so much that you took the time and energy to post at Anorak too, SGB. Thank you! I agree with you about the 1970s: there is something about that era in film and television that can be either wondrous, or absolutely terrifying!
Happy Friday!