Paranormal Activity

I’ve never known anyone who thought Paranormal Activity was “all right.”  It’s either another innovative testament to our fear of the unknown or a boring, soulless attempt by Hollywood to capitalize on cheap production costs. “Oh, doors slamming shut are all it takes to scare you?” As someone who falls into the receptive camp, I’d like to confirm that they totally are, because in that moment we’ve got no idea what’s on the other side.

There’s gotta be something to the hot-cold split in the reactions to this movie. Those who hate it tend to claim it’s poorly made and those who defend it insist the detractors “didn’t understand it” (which I guess could be said of any argument over artistic preferences), but the all or nothing dichotomy really has me thinking that an individual’s reaction to this movie is somewhat independent of both the film’s quality and the viewer’s critical merit.

Some stuff just isn’t for everyone. Some people’s taste buds just line up in a way that they don’t like a certain flavor. Where a million different variables create a more gradual distribution of enjoyment for most movies, the sharp cutoff for receptiveness to this particular movie indicates that it comes down to how affected you are by just a few distinctive elements. How scared you are of a door moving back and forth in the night has a lot more to do with your own subconscious ideas about danger and the unknown than it does with the ability of the person presenting it to you. Granted, it’s a storyteller’s job to figure out which concepts will press the right emotional buttons, but in the case of Paranormal Activity, the filmmakers did just that. The people whose fear nerves got all tingly when an invisible figure began pounding on a slammed door can attest to it.

This isn’t an argument for artistic quality being determined by popular opinion. This is a guess about this movie involving elements of horror that simply don’t resonate with everyone, based on the fact that the people who don’t like it tend to feel that none of it was even slightly scary. I’ve felt some fear watching horror movies I didn’t like. I’ve felt some fear watching horror movies I ultimately didn’t think of as scary. If you came away from Paranormal Activity completely unfazed by a single part of it, then, I’ve gotta ask: Do you think that you experienced Paranormal as it was meant to be experienced and simply saw through shoddy craftsmanship, or that there’s a chance that the movie hinged on an avenue of horror that just doesn’t click for you?

Elaine Mercado's 'Grave's End'

               Well, it was better than Amityville. I know, I know--dead horse, doesn’t tell us much, yadda yadda. If I didn’t come into this one with a bunch of no-fun-at-all skepticism keeping me in check, though, there’s a good chance I would’ve bought into it. It isn’t just that the writing is better than Anson’s (It is. It’s a lot better, even if it still felt like there was a gap between Mercado and a polished storyteller), but that the entities being drawn up here simply feel more believable. For the most part. While there was definitely a turning point at which the spirits of Grave’s End began reading a little too clichéd or nonsensical to take seriously (looking at you, weepy bride and ghost farts), the believability factor remained relatively intact throughout, thanks in no small part to the tedium and anticlimax that washed over the text like a cold shower.

                Fiction usually delivers. It’s kind of its thing. When it comes to fiction we can legitimately expect that justice will be served, that emotions will define events, and that big, loud, meaningful things will happen. We’re so accustomed to stories working this way, I think, that we’ve come to associate the opposite of these qualities with reality. Compared against fiction, reality is slow and boring and rarely delivers. You’re a lot more likely to fall in love by meeting someone through mutual friends and talking than by realizing the lab partner you’ve hated for so long actually gives your life all the beautiful things you never knew you were missing. When I argued that The Lovely Bones invested too much in establishing a sense of reality, I viewed the tease of dangling Harvey’s potential arrest in front of the reader, as well as the subsequent dashing of our hopes, as an attempt to show how real it was by painting itself in very “anti-fiction” colors. This isn’t to say that I don’t approve of the technique; George R.R. Martin’s got a similar thing going in his Song of Ice and Fire series, and I enjoy the hell out of that. On the contrary, I think it’s extraordinarily useful when applied with some tact, and it’s what elevates the sense of authenticity in Grave’s End’s hauntings over those of Amityville.

                Grave’s End is largely just a bunch of waiting. Waiting for the ghost antics to escalate, waiting for the psychics to arrive, waiting for Elaine’s marriage to fall apart. Its events stretch out over the painfully slow span of twelve years, and it ends with their first proactive attempt to manage the situation through a fairly uneventful cleansing. The conflict arc plateaus after the first forty pages and drops off effortlessly in the last five or so, and I can believe the hell out of that. I thought it was kind of boring, and I probably wouldn’t read it again unless I had to, but it definitely has the ring of a true story. Whether Mercado captured that feeling by accident, by legitimately telling the truth, or through conscious effort, her book has a quality that I think most fiction writers are constantly striving for. If we can maintain that level of truthiness and still work in all the juicy perks that make fiction worthwhile in the first place, we pretty much win the game.

The Amityville Horror by Jay Anson

               It’s hard to think of anything worth saying about The Amityville Horror. The work’s notoriety stems largely from the hoax that surrounded its release, as well as... Oh, wait. No. That’s all it’s got going for it. The quality of the writing is among the worst I’ve seen in published material, fiction or non-fiction, and the fact that it’s reached a level of popularity so far beyond anything the story itself deserves can only be a testament to the power of... gullibility? Hope? You tell me. Part of me wants to give it kudos for managing to generate controversy and investigation in the first place. Anson and the Lutzes must have struck some kind of nerve to ever get that far, right? I wonder, though, if they’re not simply the first people with the gall to lie that boldly and in that particular way. Whatever the case, they managed to convince some people for some amount of time, and given how heavily fiction relies on blurring the line between reality and make-believe, there must be something worth exploring in that.

                Even under its initial guise as the recounting of a real event, Amityville presented itself as a story rather than a purely informative work. More importantly, it presented itself as a story intended to scare. Anson’s always sure to pepper an exclamation point or two on top of anything we’re supposed to be astonished or frightened by, and every now and again he indulges his pronoun-starved prose with the poetic flourish of a writer setting a scene. It touts itself as an examination of events, but its identity as a horror story is unmistakable, and for the sake of developing an idea I’m going to assume that it’s a successful one. I’m assuming that the people who read it when it first came out were frightened, and that anyone who’s read this far in my essay is on board with my stance that the story’s pretty crap on a technical level, because doing so allows us to examine a pretty cool dimension of fiction. Amityville’s success as a horror novel in spite of its poor artistic merit illustrates how significant the complementary relationship between a story’s emotional potency and its grounding in reality actually is.

                I complained that The Lovely Bones invested too heavily in establishing a strong sense of reality, and I argued against Professor Johnson’s essay on the inclusion of reality translating to better storytelling, but Amityville’s got me re-examining both of those points. All fiction attempts to produce an emotional reaction from its audience, and because artists have succeeded in doing so through mediums as distant from reality as cartoons and claymation, I’ve never considered maintaining plausibility as being that integral to the artistic process. Something worth keeping an eye on, maybe, but nothing to get hung up over. I think I was wrong. Our reactiveness to the events in a work of fiction is based not only on the value judgments being triggered but on the extent to which the author has tricked us into believing that what we’re reading is true. If the triggered values make up a story's length and width, the sense of reality is what constitutes its depth, multiplying the impact by making it not just something that resonates with us, but by virtue of being more "real" something that threatens to genuinely affect us.

                For the initial readers of The Amityville Horror, then, the shoddy “width” and “length” were experienced in conjunction with incredible “depth”. By simply adding another lie to the long string of lies that make up any work of fiction--by claiming that it was real--Anson could write all the clichés and crappy dialogue he wanted and still impact his audience. I can only imagine how scared they might have been had this one-time-only opportunity fallen into the hands of a more capable author.  

Alice Sebold's "The Lovely Bones"

                 I’m always afraid of treating popular material unfairly in the name of insincere anti-conformity, so I do my best to give mainstream stuff every possible chance.  How “mainstream” Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones actually is might be debatable, but I’ll take the fact that my mom knows about it to mean it’s crossed some noteworthy threshold in popularity. Imagine my relief to find that I really dug the story, that I found the prose to be easily the strongest of any of the works we’ve covered so far, realizing a depth and poetic grace that Shirley Jackson, in my opinion, attempted and failed in Hill House. Imagine my disappointment to find that, after a powerful opening and a workable middle, Sebold apparently threw in the towel and opted to let her story peter out into a dull series of slice-of-life snapshots that everyone claims literary fiction is snobbishly committed to. I felt deflated by the time things rolled to a slow, yawning stop, and after looking back at the pages that I did enjoy, I realized that I should have expected it all along.

                The story is about grief and overcoming loss more than it is about seeking justice for a murder. I get that. That’s no excuse for spending the first half of the book toying with the reader’s legitimate expectation that events will develop into a conflict between George Harvey and the Salmons, only to look back innocently at the end of it all and say, “Oh, you were expecting resolution? What ever gave you that idea?” If poetic justice was never on the table, why show us so much of Harvey when a view of the Salmon family and the teenage hipsters would have been enough to explore the eventual focus? The argument that “it’s about dealing with the fallout of murder and Harvey’s one of the people dealing with it” doesn’t really hold, because nothing ever changes about the man. Every passage involving him only goes on to explain the depths of his evil and some off-putting features of his childhood, right up until the moment he’s killed by an icicle (‘anticlimactic’ doesn’t do it justice). It was a tease. Look how much you want him dead but nope-sorry-kids-life-is-tough-sometimes. At least when No Country for Old Men pulled this stunt it had the decency to make injustice the overt theme of the story.

                Harvey’s static nature underlies the bigger problem I had, which is that weight is never actually attributed to any of the characters’ decisions. Everything that happens is a product of coincidence, happenstance, or spontaneous insight, and the path each character takes is portrayed not as a series of crossroads but as arbitrary reactions to events they never influence. Jack just knows that Harvey did it. Ruth locked eyes with Susie once and remained obsessed ever after. While much of the novel seems to be establishing realism by denying any connection between value judgments and tangible consequences--Harvey does terrible things but he never suffers consequences; Abigail runs away from her family but nothing changes in her relationship with Jack--it saves its romanticism for absurdly hollow gestures like the Ray/Susie sex scene at the end. Their morally questionable intercourse is among the closest things we get to a climax (no pun intended, it was the best word for the sentence), and it doesn’t show us anything about either character we didn’t already know. None of the decisions did, really. Everything we needed to know was already told to us through Sebold’s beautiful, elegant narrative commentary, sparing the reader the burden of deciding for themselves what to make of the story’s events.

The Others

                 I can only think of a single other horror movie (and I don’t want to name it, at the risk of spoiling the ending) where the final twist is that the characters were never in any real danger, and with both films I walked away feeling like I had watched a drama rather than a horror. I didn’t think either of the movies were particularly bad, but I didn’t think they were particularly engaging either, and my brain really recoils at the thought of watching them a second time. By all accounts, I should like The Others--the characters are solid, the idea is original, and the atmosphere is top notch. I just wasn’t scared (‘cept the little girl/old lady bit), and the fact that nothing was ever at stake sorta lets the air out of what middling interest I did have.

                Even before I caught on to the twist (which happened around midway through the film) I never had the feeling that the unseen forces in the house were a threat to the Stewarts. This might actually be a testament to the skill of the filmmakers, matching the ‘supernatural’ occurrences to the actions of the defensive, confused individuals on the other side so accurately that the absence of malevolence shone through, but it’s hard to view the absence of horror in a horror story as anything but a handicap. I want to say that this is a product of our never seeing harm befall anyone at any point; we never get the “meat shot”, as Arnzen would say, to drive home the fact that the threatening force means business. Problem with that claim, though, is that a ton of horror eschews early demonstrations of the evil power in favor of working its way up to something big in the finale.  Paranormal Activity is one of ‘em, off the top of my head. Still, most of these stories do wind up throwing us a few bones at least midway through, and I tend not to like the ones that don’t (Hill House comes to mind). Maybe it has to do with attention spans, and varies from person-to-person.

                 I dunno. I don’t think The Others is a bad movie. Honest.  I just got kinda bored with it.

Stephen King's "The Shining"

           Stephen King has always read to me as an author whose strengths outweigh his weaknesses, like a fighter with lousy form who still delivers a solid enough knockout punch to earn his place in the ring.  I enjoyed The Stand but thought it ended poorly.  I was chilled by the finale of Rage but thought a lot of his characterizations were a hard sell.  In general, King’s skill with scene-building, character depth, and intensely emotive narration (as well as what has to be a gargantuan memory bank of brand names and colloquialisms) do battle with, and ultimately prevail over, his tendency towards overlong plots and prose that’s decidedly, almost deliberately, lacking in finesse.  The Shining wasn’t much different.  He puts us squarely in the place and minds of his characters, wallops us with some incredible, high-intensity scenes, and then more or less shrugs off the reader’s need for emotional closure.  It’s powerful, fun, and a little bit empty when it’s all said and done.  That’s what I expected and what I got. 

           From what I’ve read of King’s thoughts on writing, he wouldn’t consider the “weaknesses” I’ve outlined to be worth losing any sleep over.  Where other writers might get hung up on weaving a concrete detail into a scene without disrupting the flow of the action, King doesn’t bat an eye.  Dude just comes right out and says whatever he wants to say.  The chance that a lengthy paragraph of description or dialogue might weigh a scene down never pushes him to pass up an opportunity to bedazzle the reader just that much more.  Given that I’d seen enough clips of (though never actually seen) the film to have a general notion of how it all shakes out, it’s hard to say what was really “necessary” for the buildup of tension for this particular story, but amidst generous descriptions of the Overlook Hotel and a few too many scenes going over similar points (Danny is psychic, Jack has violent/indulgent urges, Winnifred is worried), The Shining did seem to take its time getting off the ground.

           And this shouldn’t be read as a criticism of the author’s style.  For any points I could make about a clunky dialogue tag here or there, the guy produces some furiously gripping work.  He can afford not to worry about how tight his plotting is because he more than makes up for it elsewhere.  For those of us not blessed with the high-speed (possibly corrupted) supercomputer that is Stephen King’s brain, though, reading his work from the perspective of a learning student can feel an awful lot like watching a circus performer in awe.  “Boy, that’s impressive!  I sure couldn’t do that, and I don’t particularly want to learn.”

"Ghost Story" by Peter Straub

         The idea of antagonistic species who hate on humanity for being inferior has always struck me as kind of funny.  It seems akin to a bunch of humans saying, “I hate dogs! They’re so stupid and predictable they don’t even deserve to live!” before going on to torture and kill anything with the audacity to wag its tail.  Just seems kinda arbitrary.  That being said, the ‘things’ in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story really were mysterious and intriguing as all get out through a solid majority of the novel, which is no small feat in story just shy of 500 pages.  While there’s definitely some depth to the journey experienced by the many protagonists as they overcome their internal struggles to take down the external ones, that topic hews a little close to my last essay’s, so my analysis of Ghost Story is going to be reined in to scrutinizing the presentation of its creatures.  More specifically, I’m arguing that the story is at its most frightening (though not necessarily its most entertaining) before we know the motive of the entities haunting the town of Milburn.

         Reflections on the unknown being scarier than anything we can perceive are overdone in this brand of discussion, but that’s probably because the truth in them is a basic principle of so many elements of horror.  I’m not exactly breaking new ground when I claim that an increase in information lessens the fright factor, so it’s important to clarify exactly what kind of information becomes ‘too much’.  For me, the turning point was the scene in which Gregory kills Mrs. Barnes, gloating to Peter of his origins and nature.  The scene doesn’t lay out a motive for the Bates brothers, nor does it give away information amounting to more obvious fear killers (like the fact that you can kill them the same way you can kill everything else).  What it does do is display a sense of awareness in the antagonists, signaling that we aren’t dealing with the purposeless hate machines the text insisted we were, but entities with feelings and ideas--ideas which can be broken down, examined, and criticized.

          This is crucial, I think, because evil ideas walk a tricky line between being stupid and being wrong, neither one of which is particularly frightening.  The times at which I was the most frightened by and interested in Anna and Co. were those in which their actions couldn’t be tethered to any particular motive.  Why did Anna spend so much time with Don only to disappear and kill his brother?  Why would these powerful beings be interested in killing a group of old men?  Why was Gregory so damn mean?  These questions are at their scariest when they’re unanswered, even if the story clarifies ahead of time that the questions cannot be answered (how many horror stories define their spirits as the physical manifestion of an emotion?).  The introduction of these characters in all their initial mystery--Gregory as a hateful force of nature, Anna as a whimsical harbinger of death--represents, to me, the peak of their intrigue and menace.  Their actions cannot given a “why” without giving up the vulnerable, vulnerable ideas, meaning that frightening characters can never really be ‘characters’. 

          There’s a point in Stephen King’s The Stand where Satan (or a Satan stand-in, I forget) tells one of the main characters that he’ll spare his life so long as he kneels down and worships him, at which point the character bursts out laughing.  I assume he would have laughed at the antagonists of this novel, also, as the concept of beings with such immense power and knowledge being coupled with the pettiness of a twelve-year-old girl is downright absurd.  This corner of the horror genre--big evil baddies with genuine motives--might be something that just can’t work.  Evil ideas just aren’t that scary.  They’re generally just stupid, and it’s only the possibility that anyone could act on them that’s worth fearing.