Horror Movie Month: The Supernatural

The movies that always scared me the most as a kid, and even now, were not about killers with knives and agendas, but the ones about things you cannot see, things that were not of this world—the supernatural. As a kid the things everyone told you weren’t real always felt like they could be real. Was there really a way to prove there wasn’t anything under the bed, or outside the window? How did you know for sure that the time you went into the house all the other kids said was haunted wouldn’t be the one time something out of this world really happened? There’s nothing there in the dark that isn’t there in the light, but how do you know? It’s too dark to see that.

In my search for good horror movies John Carpenter has come up more than a few times. He directed the original Halloween, which is, for my money, the best of the slasher sub-genre. But he has also made some very effective and spooky supernatural horror movies. In the Mouth of Madness is a movie I wanted to see but was too afraid of when it was released in 1994 and I was 9 years old. When I finally saw the movie, it gave me the creeps, but it a good way. In the Mouth of Madness is based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft though no specific work is credited. The story is about an insurance investigator John Trent, played by Sam Neill, who is hired to investigate the disappearance of the ultra popular horror novelist Sutter Cane. Sutter Cane is a combination of Steven King, Clive Barker, and, of course, H.P. Lovecraft. His macabre works seem to be driving people insane and the further Trent investigates he finds that things from Cane’s books appear to be real, and he appears to be a character in Cane’s latest book. The movie has a dated soundtrack and some obvious spooky music cues, but the visual effects, all practical as far as I can tell, are still realistic and effective. The movie plays on the line between reality and fiction, sanity and madness.

11 years after making a movie about a book that makes people insane, John Carpenter took on the next logical step, a movie about a movie that makes people insane, or rather a short film. John Carpenter's contribution to the short lived Showtime series Masters of Horror in 2005 is called Cigarette Burns. It's only an hour long, but it's a very spooky, creepy 60 minutes. In the movie, a young theater owner, who also finds prints of rare films, is hired by a wealthy, and creepy, film buff and collector to find a print of the rarest film in the world, "Le Fin Absolue du Monde." The rare few times that the film was shown all those who saw it when insane. It might be hard to find at the local video store, but if you are able to find a copy I highly recommend it for a great spooky night.

Of course there are a number of other sub-genres that fall into the category of the Supernatural, but I wanted to highlight these two particular films because I feel that they're largely unseen but very effective, well-made scary movies. Ghosts and demons are two other supernatural creatures featured in many movies. The best haunted house/ghost movie, in my opinion, is, of course, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. People will say, and I agree, that The Shinning isn't so scary as it is creepy, but that's all this movie needs to be. Rather than going for easy scares Kubrick sets a tone of dread and fear best exemplified in the scene that follows. Steven Spielberg said that in this scene if Kubrick had not used the point-of-view shot and instead had Jack Nicholson just appear over Shelly Duvall's shoulder, he'd have had people jumping out of their seats. But Kubrick used the point-of-view shot to created that feeling of impending danger. It's not meant to create mystery, we know that Danny is in their room, so it must be Jack. This shot means that her husband, whom she is trapped with in this hotel, is now a predator.