Why Horror?
Generally speaking, as a species, we don’t seek out things that are scary, or ugly, or unpleasant. We don’t actively look for experiences we know will repel us. It’s part of our survival instinct, our DNA. That may be why art exists. It allows for a certain remove, the ability to step back and wrestle with a question many of us confront, especially in middle age: is this really happening to me? Is the life I am living, at this moment, real?
Sometimes, answering that question requires stepping outside your comfort zone.
For those of us who decide to do this, it helps to have a guide, someone who knows you and art well enough to take you to places you may not know you want to go. Bradford Louryk has been my horror film sherpa, my terror-seeking Tenzing Norgay.
Let’s go back to the beginning.
Sometime in the early ’70s, someone had the nerve to drag me to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a film ostensibly made for children but so full of frightening scenes and images that it wound up scaring the shit out of me. Gene Wilder’s performance is nightmare fuel. Awful things happen to children. Our heroes are almost sliced to death by spinning blades.
Growing up, filmed entertainment for me was animated Disney films and musicals: Tom Sawyer, Mary Poppins, Grease, Robin Hood, Jungle Book. At one point, I sat on the front steps of our house searching the skies, hoping Julie Andrews would magically descend and make my dreams come true, one spoonful at a time.
Meanwhile, dreams were becoming reality at the local multiplex. The gritty reality of 70s auteur films (a phenomenon I missed) had given way to blockbusters. I saw Star Wars seven times in the cinema in 1977. Anything Steven Spielberg and George Lucas created were must-sees, from Close Encounters and E.T. to Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequels. After my dad took me to see Moonraker in 1979, I became obsessed with James Bond. I saw John Hughes movies, and, during a lengthy intellectual detour, immersed myself in the canon of Woody Allen (the early, funny ones).
In 1979, I accidentally caught a pivotal moment of Tobe Hooper’s TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. It, too, scared the crap out of me, and it wasn’t the last time television did that. In Boston, we had The Movie Loft (with host Dana Hersey), a nightly UHF program that showed top-quality films, sometimes unedited. It was in the Loft that I first encountered Alfred Hitchcock, not “fun” Hitchcock like Rear Window and North by Northwest, but horror Hitchcock like Psycho and The Birds, as well as films like The Deer Hunter and Spielberg’s Duel.
Why did I watch it? Because it was on. In the ’70s, you couldn’t watch whatever you wanted at any given time. Shows ran and then they were over. There was no video. No DVR. No rewinding or fast-forwarding. Streaming wasn’t even a thought. In Boston, if you turned on Channel 38 around 8:30, you saw Janet Leigh being sliced up in a shower. You caught Tippi Hedren being attacked by seagulls in a phone booth. You witnessed Christopher Walken and Robert DeNiro playing Russian Roulette. If you missed it, you missed it. Maybe it would be on again in the future, maybe it wouldn’t.
Those films changed me, whether I knew it or not. So much so that in 1982, lured by a cool poster and the idea of Spielberg as producer, I saw a little film called Poltergeist at the local second-run cinema. The tale of a suburban family contending with demons that abscond with their little girl into an alternate dimension, Poltergeist, with its scenes of monsters emerging from closets, maggot-ridden steak, and scientists clawing their faces off, was just a thimbleful of the mayhem that was to come. I wasn’t exactly hooked. But I wasn’t looking away.
Flash forward: 8th grade ski trip. As our nighttime entertainment, the teachers screened Roger Corman’s X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, starring Ray Milland as a scientist whose experiments into the titular power drive him insane. The film is best known for its ending, in which the mad doctor stumbles into a tent revival meeting and is instructed by the preacher, “If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out.” Of course, X does just this. (I suppose one could question the judgement of teachers who show a Corman film to 13 year olds, but who knows? It was 1982.)
Smash cut to 1986, the summer I graduated high school. Someone, God knows who, talked me into seeing David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly, now widely recognized as a body horror classic. It’s a film that succeeds on many levels, thanks in large part to the empathy you feel for its leads, played to perfection by Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. Through it I learned that horror films don’t have to be just scary. They can be funny, moving, even humane.
I also learned that seeing a scary movie in a theater full of rabid horror fans can be a game changer.
Dissolve, like Seth Brundle, to later that year. I was home from college for winter break. My cousin was in town with her boyfriend. We decided to see a film at the old Harvard Square Theater in Cambridge, and for whatever reason, the decision was left up to me: David Byrne’s True Stories, or another film getting decent reviews at the time, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.
I believe there’s a moment in everyone’s life when the world tilts on its axis, and like Dorothy, you’re suddenly seeing everything in Technicolor. For me, that was the night I saw Blue Velvet. And while technically not a horror film, there’s enough psychological mayhem in that movie to scare the daylights out of anyone; indeed, I had nightmares for days afterward.
My eyes officially open, I started embracing new genres. I sought out films I hadn’t seen, finally open — not only to the terror, but the beauty. Because of, or perhaps despite, their genre trappings, I saw greatness in these films. I enjoyed the feeling of being scared, of experiencing the strange, the uncanny, the morbid, the insane. Watching the world through barely parted fingers was what it meant to be truly alive.
I’m a different person now — older, jaded, set in my ways. But one thing remains true: I’m hooked on the thrill these films provide. And now, with Scare U, I’m opening my eyes a little wider, stepping outside my comfort zone, and letting a friend take me to places in which I wouldn’t be caught dead thirty years ago. I may love what I see. I may hate it. But like a kid discovering for the first time that vegetables actually taste good, I’m ready for wherever the journey takes me.
