A very hard movie to summarize. When I first saw this movie, on VHS, back probably around 8th grade or so, I didn't think too much of it. I liked a few of the images. When I revisited the movie later, during college, I liked it much more. Now I really like it. It's the Lovecraft movie we've never gotten. None of the standard Lovecraft movies have been able to capture the atmosphere, and the wild loss of sanity that makes his stories interesting. This one does. It has lots of references to Lovecraft's work, but more importantly, it captures the odd things that happen in his stories, combined with a lack of understanding of why things happen. And more importantly, the theme of losing one's mind.
This is part of my effort to identify what things make horror scary. I'm not relying on things like gore, editing tricks, or sound-related jumps. I'm talking about the core ideas, or the structural elements that make things creepy or tense.
First, repetition stands out as a major element. Repetition combined with variation. We see the same scene play out a few times in this movie. Our hero walks down a street, looks at a large ad for a Sutter Cane novel, hears some noise from an alley. He walks over to it, and sees a man in a police uniform beating another person. Each time this plays out, there are changes. Graffiti on a wall says "I C" at one time. Later, it says "I CAN SEE" The policeman turns from being a snarling normal guy, to being a deformed monster. As our hero observes this, on one occasion, a group of infected people gather around him with axes. These sequences work because we've seen the setup, and it was filmed in a distinct way. Each shot runs long enough to sink into our brains.
This actually made me think of The Ring. Once the video was shown, the movie was able to use the symbols that appeared as a tool to raise tension. This was an ingenious tool. It allowed fairly normal things, like a ladder, to appear creepy, and heavily symbolic. What does the ladder mean? We don't find out until the end!
Second, the sense of unpredictability that permeates the movie. A lot of the things that set this up aren't things I care about. They involve arms reaching out unexpectedly, shadows dashing in the extreme foreground. The scene where the investigator and the girl are approaching Hobb's End. They're driving in the darkness. She sees the same person riding a bike; both directions, and the person is aging. It isn't clear if the person is coming or going, or even if they're supposed to be the same person. When we see them a second time, we don't know what's going to happen. Are they a threat?
Third, there's a huge sense of world-building in this movie. This is unique in horror movies. Most of them have a small focus. This one has a huge one. We get the impression that what happens in this movie has a huge, huge span. And it's been going on for a long time. Sutter Cane is a conduit for some ancient, evil force. Something beyond time. We don't understand how the black church came to be, only that it has a longer history than we can gather. This is where world building has a risk. This movie would probably suffer if it had a sequel. It would suffer if it had a prequel. We get exactly the right amount of information in the movie. Anything more or less would be unsatisfying.
There's also a theme that I consider to be a core of horror. Loss of identity and control. One of the ideas of the movie is that free will is an illusion.
All of these traits work together. Repetition, variation, symbols, unpredictability, and world-building.
Unrelated to my research, this was the first time I watched this on Blu-ray. It was great - I could actually see an effects shot that was always obscured on DVD.
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