This essay was written for a BFI Film Journalism course and was uploaded to their website as an example of students' work. I still think I was ahead of the curve in noting this trend in horror way back in 2004.
With the release of Ring 2 at cinemas and the arrival of The Grudge on DVD, it doesn’t take a dyed-in-the-wool horror buff to see that the genre is currently being shaped in the East. Directors such as Hideo Nakata (Ring, Dark Water) are taking folk tales and contemporary novels and fashioning them into dark, clammy shockers, only to see them lifted wholesale and remade in comfortably American surroundings. But this unprecedented dominance of Asian style in a commercial genre has blinded critics to an equally intriguing development in America’s own horror cinema.
The turning point is burned in everyone’s memory. It’s the end of the movie, the kid’s going to be OK, Bruce Willis returns home and tells his sleeping wife he loves her. But then his own wedding ring falls from her hand and rolls slowly across the floor towards him... The realisation sinks in - he’s a ghost! The gasps from audiences worldwide kept the tills ringing for sales of The Sixth Sense DVD for months to come – it was officially the best twist ever. The thing is, there was one group in the audience who weren’t so impressed – horror aficionados themselves. They’d seen the twist coming a mile off – after all, wasn’t it just a replay of a movie called Jacob’s Ladder? Not many people had seen this film. A flop for Adrian Lyne, director of Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal, it tells the story of a Vietnam vet who is injured in battle – just as Willis is shot at the start of The Sixth Sense – and who returns to America experiencing weird visions and flashbacks. It turns out that he was actually killed in action and that he’s undergoing a rite of passage to the hereafter. Like Willis, he must accept that he’s moved on from life and that his presence in the world is now merely spiritual.
These two films are not alone. They’re part of a growing sub-genre in which characters realise they’re not part of a ghost story – they are the ghost story. Think of Nicole Kidman in The Others – desperately trying to protect her children from malevolent entities only to discover that they are in fact the true occupants of the house and her family the problem spooks. It’s a new kind of horror where the object of fear is not some loathsome monster or supernatural fiend but insecurity over one’s very own existence. In this sense, it’s a fascinating development of the genre as a whole. As early as the 1970s, horror filmmakers were finding that the old stalwarts of vampires, werewolves and ghosts were no longer frightening audiences and that new areas of terror had to be explored. David Cronenberg turned his back on the supernatural and recognised that the more acute fear of the modern age was disease and ill-health. In the era of AIDS, he had characters attacked by deadly viruses or mutate into new forms. The object of horror became one’s own body – its organs, its flesh, its very cells. But now that audiences have become accustomed to such “body horror”, filmmakers have pushed the genre towards its logical conclusion – anguish over one’s own mind or soul, what might be called “identity horror”.
At the end of Angel Heart (1987), Mickey Rourke screams into a mirror “I know who I am, I know who I am!” Except he doesn’t – he’s about to discover that some years ago he sold his soul to the Devil and the body he’s inhabiting is as much his as a rented tuxedo. It’s the definitive scene of “identity horror” and fittingly appears in the film that arguably spawned the genre. Directed by Alan Parker, Angel Heart follows a downbeat private eye contracted by one Louis Cyphre (Lucifer for those not gifted at puns) to pursue a missing man and possible killer – who turns out, of course, to be the detective himself. Together with Jacob’s Ladder, it acts as a stepping stone between the horror of the ‘70s and the more popular, commercially accessible fare of The Sixth Sense. How two such egregious sensationalists, two such Englishmen-in-Hollywood as Parker and Lyne, came to effect such a major shift in genre cinema is a mystery in itself but there is no doubt that their two films form the missing link.
Although they were made in the late ‘80s, both pictures assume the guise of the two crucial genres of ‘70s American cinema – the neo-noir (or detective drama) and the Vietnam war movie. Directors used these genres to probe the ugly aspects of US society in the paranoid era of Nixon, the neo-noir being particularly interesting in the way it followed lone figures peeling away the layers of society to reach the corruption underneath. Parker twists this notion by having Rourke find that he is the corruption. Similarly, Lyne eliminates the Vietcong altogether and the American marines discover that it was they that killed each other. Both directors, then, update ‘70s concerns and subtly accentuate the pessimistic vision of America, indeed portraying America as hell.
Which leads us back to a third standard of ‘70s cinema – the demonic possession picture. From Rosemary’s Baby onwards, there seemed to be a surfeit of devil worshippers (The Mephisto Waltz), possessed kids (The Exorcist) and even demon babies (It’s Alive). What’s intriguing about Parker and Lyne’s films is that the supernatural element in both pictures shows a Dantesque progression from this vision of earth as Inferno to one of Purgatory. In Angel Heart, Rourke is certainly going to hell. Robert de Niro’s wearing shiny red contact lenses – in case you don’t really believe he’s playing Satan – and just to enforce the point, the lift Rourke enters at the end of film goes down and down for a very long time. Like Parker, Lyne is fond of crashingly unsubtle symbols – Jacob finds himself on an underground train reading an advertisement that says HELL. Geddit? But this happens at the start of the movie. From then on, it’s all uphill for Jacob. He even sees the obligatory tunnel of light – in the form of a glittering spider’s web or hospital light – before meeting his dead son and ascending some sunlit stairs.
By the time we reach The Sixth Sense, the ghosts of ‘70s angst have disappeared. We are no longer in an America struggling in the shadow of ‘Nam or in the paranoid world of a neo-noir. Rather, we’re in a family melodrama set in a cleanly-photographed Philadelphia. The protagonist does not go through a personal hell – instead, he is given the chance of redemption by helping one boy overcome his problems after he failed another. This is a more comforting, more reassuring portrait of the afterlife – no demons and wild hallucinations here. Rather, the various ghosts, including Willis himself, are revealed as troubled spirits, returning, as in medieval tales, to give the living messages or hope for the future. In the talking heads documentary “Between Two Worlds” – a curious extra on The Sixth Sense DVD – the scriptwriter of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder, Bruce Joel Rubin, sums up the film’s theme as being the reassurance of immortality for our loved ones and ourselves – “it’s saying ‘It’s all right, I’m here, cheer up!” That “cheer up!” says it all. Gone is the pessimism of the ‘70s to be replaced by positive faith. As the documentary goes on to make clear, the question “Is God dead?” reverberated at the end of the ‘60s and the general sense of disaffection in society made fertile ground for horror which has always fed on the fears of the zeitgeist. But in an age where the religious Right and Christian Fundamentalists are increasingly making their presence felt, and there is an upsurge in the amount of young people joining groups like Alpha or turning to New Age religions, that horror has given way to a more spiritual way of representing the cosmos. Rubin himself talks of The Sixth Sense audience as a “group participating at a higher level” in a discussion of immortality. It’s almost though he sees the cinema as a church with the director playing the priest role, delivering messages of hope and consolation.
So the filmmakers are no longer bombarding viewers with grisly imagery and terrifying shocks but instead a new kind of “family” horror film has been born that trades in polite chills and happy endings. It’s not just about chasing a 15 certificate for a newly-conservative audience, however. These films are for the family but they’re also about the family. Back in the ‘70s, childbirth was a site of horror – from the look on Rosemary’s face when she sees her new-born devil child to the extraordinary image of Samantha Eggar giving birth to evil dwarves from a second womb in Cronenberg’s The Brood. Kids could be evil and disrupt a stable family setting as Damien does most spectacularly in The Omen. In the era of free love and greater adult freedoms, cinema seemed to be slyly portraying the family unit as the nightmare most to be avoided. But in Jacob’s Ladder and The Sixth Sense, it’s a young boy that shows the protagonists the way towards peace and enlightenment, a Beatrice leading their Dante up into the heavens. In both cases, the boys tell the men they’re taking them “home” – thereby equating heaven with domesticity – and return them to the family unit. You see, Jacob has strayed. He’s separated from his wife and has shacked up with a sexy Hispanic girlfriend, who just happens to be called Jezebel. But as the demons gather around him, the ghost of his dead son draws him back towards his old home just as Bruce Willis returns to his wife at the end of The Sixth Sense. And it’s only here that they finally realise the full extent of what’s happened to them and how they can be at peace. From the libertine ‘70s, we have reached a point where home is not just where the heart is, but where the spirit should be, too. And children are no longer demon babies springing from the womb but admonitory angels guiding us along the right path.
But it looks as though this new genre may have come of age in the form of A Tale Of Two Sisters. Made in Korea, it tells the story of a disturbed teenage girl trying to protect her sister from a haunted house and malevolent mother-in-law only to discover that both the sister and the mother-in-law are creations of her own mind. As such, it shows the flow of ideas in horror cinema finally trickling back from West to East. But here, the ghosts and apparitions are psychological in origin, the girl being the inmate of a lunatic asylum. Might it be that the future of the genre will see the spiritual dimension refuted and the demons identified as hand-made? After all, the last shot of Jacob’s Ladder is of the protagonist’s corpse laid out in an army hospital among all the other wounded, not of him in some otherworldly realm. Perhaps the film is just a vision on the point of dying, the feverish imaginings of a mind in pain. And perhaps this is the real message of “identity horror” – that our intimations of immortality are but a dream within a dream…