PRACTICE // MEDITATION
Undirecting Your Horror Film
Use Awareness to Deconstruct Anxiety
by Dean Sluyter
W
hat makes a horror film horrifying?
Of course, there’s the Thing lurking
at the center of the film’s labyrinth:
the monster, the slasher, the hungry alien, the
nightmare clown, the live organ harvesting mill
disguised as a daycare center. But, especially
early in the film, before we encounter the Thing,
situations that seem normal on their face must
give us a creeping feeling that, “Ummmmm ...
wait a minute ... something’s wrong.”
How is that done? What special herbs and
spices do filmmakers sprinkle onto a sunny day
at the playground to create mounting anxiety
and fear? With so much anxiety and fear in our
own lives these days, that’s a question worth
asking. Sure, scary things are happening in the
world, but maybe we’ve been adding some
herbs and spices of our own. And maybe by
analyzing the filmmakers’ fear-generating tricks
we can see how we trick ourselves into fear —
and then stop doing it. The enlightened sages
tell us that, no matter how messy the world
may be, you don’t have to become a mess
yourself. There’s a deepest place within you
that’s mess-resistant, a place that always feels
like Ahhhhhhh!, and by dropping out of fear,
dropping into that place, and then acting
from there, you can deal with the world
most effectively.
The filmmakers’ tricks are so familiar that,
when they’re parodied in a film like Young
Frankenstein or the Scary Movie series, we
recognize them instantly. You’ve known the
spookiest of spooky lighting angles ever since
that summer night when your camp counselor
held a flashlight under her chin to tell a ghost
story. Horror films make heavy use of that
same low lighting angle, as well as low camera
angles that make the monster look more
monstrous, distorted by foreshortening as we
look up toward his nostrils. They also make
him look bigger, dominating the frame so that
all we see is Godzilla and the sky behind. As
the terrified citizens flee, they get the opposite
treatment, shot from a high angle to make
them look smaller and more vulnerable, pinned
to the ground like helpless insects.
In fact, the higher the camera angle, the
more helpless the subject. A textbook example
is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, when Martin
Balsam as the doomed Detective Arbogast
steps cautiously into the Bates Motel, hat in
hand, to nose about. As he pads silently up
the stairs toward Mother Bates’s room, the
camera gazes down on him, pulling steadily
back to stay always a few steps ahead. Clearly,
this guy’s cooked. Just as he reaches the upper
landing, we cut to an even more fateful shot,
from directly overhead, and Mother rushes out
to slice him up.
What are the equivalents in our own inner
horror film? We can find some hints in our
language. We speak of seeing things “in a differ-
ent light” or “from another angle,” of “looking
down” on people or “looking up” at them. This
should tell us that what we usually regard as
the facts of the matter (“That’s life,” we shrug,
“it is what it is”) may not be the whole story.
But to start breaking out of our old patterns,
to undirect our old film, we don’t need to start
directing a new one. Suddenly cranking up the
lights and trying to reshoot Dracula as The
Sound of Music usually doesn’t work. It usually
does result in a kind of superficial, trying-too-
hard, everything’s-groovy spirituality that, likeanything inauthentic, soon breaks down.
But if we simply recognize that our suppos-
edly objective view of things is actually subjec-
tive — that it’s just a view — we naturally
start to loosen our grip on it, and sometimes
that’s enough. Then we know it’s not absolute,
and the space of freedom starts to open up. If,
for example, you’ve been feeling defeated by
your employment situation or your romantic
situation or the political situation, it’s easy to
slip into fatalism and depression, to assume
that being stuck is just the way things are.
That’s a high-angle shot that keeps you help-
less. Perhaps you can switch to a low-angle
shot, with its enlarging effect, and now you’re
like young Steve McQueen in The Blob, taking
charge, taking your heroic stand, big enough
to go mano a mano with your monster. But if
that doesn’t feel genuine, just clearly see your
old, self-defeating high angle, see that you’re
the one who’s been aiming the camera, and it
will start to deconstruct on its own.
Here’s another hint from our language: Are
you seeing a situation in black and white?
Black-and-white cinematography is the natural
fit not only for horror, but for gritty urban
drama, film noir, and any other genre that
wants to avoid too much cheerfulness. Why?
Because color is pretty. When we allow our-
selves, say, to fixate on a personal problem or
to obsess about the news, things become black
and white, dark vs. bright, and dark usually
seems on the verge of winning. Will your
stocks survive the next crash or will you be
spending your retirement as a Walmart greet-
er? Will your biopsy tell you that you’re out of
the woods or that you need chemo? Will the
good guys prevail in the fall elections, or will
the thugs consolidate their power? Sure, these
questions demand our attention (and practical
response), but if we fixate on their black/white
dualities we lose the colors of the present mo-
ment. We won’t stop to smell the roses unless
we see them in front of us.
Music is, of course, crucial to a horror film’s
effect, and here too we have our inner equiva-
lent. In Get Out, the run-up to the revelation
of the sinister conspiracy against black people
is set in the sun-drenched countryside and a
gracious home full of smiling white liberals.
On the surface, everything looks fine. But
beneath the surface, layered African voices
sing in Swahili, “Brother, run! Listen to the