What’s the scariest movie you’ve ever seen?
It’s one of the most common questions film critics are asked. I get it a lot, since I’m particularly and often vociferously an advocate for horror films, not as Gothic camp or low-bar shock exercises, but as psycho-political machines of unease and neurotic revelation. A horror film can show all the zippers it wants, but if by hook or crook or simple craft it lances a hidden boil on my (or our collective) beleaguered psyche’s buttcheek, and manifests metaphorically or forthrightly that which we in our modern privilege and paranoia long to keep secret, then I’m all in. Needless to say, I’m far more disappointed by horror films than satisfied, as I suspect most people are, if they’re not genre geeks permanently ensconced in the mother’s-basement realm of making excuses for John Carpenter and George A. Romero, and rating films, even if only in their heads, with how-many-out-of-five vein-dangling little eyeballs.
In this context, “scariness” can be a proper assessment of the genre’s capabilities and aim, insofar as we differentiate it from “startling” and ”nauseating,” and as we understand that fear rises from within, in response to inner principles and ideas we privately believe must not be violated. This therefore is an even more subjective dynamic than what applies to comedy, the only other genre defined by the reaction it attempts to elicit in us as we watch. My answer to the “scariest” question at present remains The Blair Witch Project (1999), of which I was perhaps the most hyperbolic critic-fan at the time, writing about it virtually everywhere I could in celebration of how the movie uniquely and masterfully turned the rudimentary aspects of cinema—from the cut to handheld “realism” to the frame itself—against us, and reinvented, by way of conjuring the never-seen in an absolutely documentary manner, the notion of moviewatching as a dangerous and decidedly unsafe activity. I stand by that assessment, but of course by now the film is merely a historical footnote, The Great Train Robbery of found-footage horror mock-docs, which in their massive ubiquity since have successfully erased themselves, and dulled Blair Witch’s blades down to the ricasso. I caught both Apollo 18 (2011) and Frankenstein’s Army (2013) recently, two Blair Witch derivations that each must represent some kind of conceptual nether-region for the mock-doc subgenre (involving spooked lunar-landing footage circa 1973 and combat-mission 16mm footage confronting Nazi monster-making from WWII’s Eastern front, respectively). As inventive as both are, the genre is a wheezing antique by now, too familiar and too clumsy in its engine-work.
But that’s to a large degree because we’ve seen so many of these films by now, and our capacity for visceral reaction has become naturally numbed. Movies, like music and food, are subject to overexposure, and the way I reacted to The Blair Witch Project in 1999, at a press screening prior to any publicity push shy of the reports of its midnight Sundance premiere, would almost certainly not be how I’d react to it today, were it to appear for the first time in our post-Paranormal Activity landscape. Is it the same movie? Of course. But what I’m talking about when I talk about how frightening or affecting a horror film was when I first saw it depends in fact on how vulnerable I was to it at that particular point in time. Mock-doc horror films are fantastically fragile this way, and can only really be watched once. The film itself isn’t what’s being recalled or assessed, but rather our neurological experience of it. In other words, Paranormal Activity or Cloverfield or [Rec] or V/H/S or Apollo 18 might’ve hit the major Blair Witch chords in my gray matter if I had seen them first.
So, scariest? When I was in college, I might’ve given the nod to Sidney J. Furie’s The Entity (1983) or Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). Yet even then I probably would have been stuck, as I am now, on the memory of a film that scared me right out of my underpants more than a decade earlier: Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), seen on some rainy Saturday afternoon when I was a kid, lying on my living room floor rug, and feeling the shiver of goosebumps running across me turn into a full-on high-tension electrical current. The film still creeps me out, and resonates beyond the visceral, but I’ll never recapture that initial viewing’s dangerous charge, just as I’ll never get to be one of those Park City festival ticket-holders who saw Blair Witch, up in the Utah mountains in the middle of the night, before anyone knew what it was, and not knowing it wasn’t a documentary. Who you are and where you are and what you’ve already seen, matter.
Let’s go back one more personal-history step to the most terrorizing piece of film I’d seen before that, before tweenhood, which was a moment in an episode of Dark Shadows, the famed daytime Goth-soap watched avidly by my mother and my aunt, but not by me. At my aunt’s house one afternoon, it was on, and I watched as a young witch character had her Dorian Gray-type portrait in the attic slashed, and in a cut fell to the floor a withered, rotten corpse. (After some wasted time trying to Google-hunt the actual episode down today, I’ve given up.) It may not have happened the way I remember it, still to this day. But that’s what I saw, and suddenly the potential for reality to dissolve into chaos and howling, vicious nightmares was revealed. I may’ve been nine. I hid in my mother’s Ford on my aunt’s driveway for whatever remainder there was to the afternoon, refusing to come out, wanting only to go home. I perhaps thought in my traumatized little brainpan that I could escape what I’d seen, once we were moving, letting other things fill the day. But if I did, I was wrong. I still remember what I saw, whether it was real or not, and I still remember the sickening shudder with which my prepubescent body responded. There has been no escape.
Michael Atkinson writes regularly for The Village Voice, Sight & Sound, In These Times, Time Out Chicago, Fandor, Turner Classic Movies and LA Weekly. His latest books include FLICKIPEDIA and the novel HEMINGWAY CUTTHROAT.
