Page 199 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

Yes, because horror is the 'bad boy' of movies, after you get past pornography - it's just one step
up! And what it means is that you can deal with anything! Something that non-horror fans don't
realise is that horror films have a very rigid moral structure, more so than normal movies. If you just
adhere to the structure, you can do anything you want and this is a kind of a freedom you don't get
with other movies. So horror does often deal with things that 'normal' movies would have a hard time
touching. There's a fundamental freedom in the horror movie.
Beyond being the bad boy of cinema, the horror film also deals with themes of incest and sexual
perversion, which seem to be repeated features in your own work from Society onwards. Is psychoanalysis
something you're interested in?
Yes, because horror and psychoanalysis both deal with madness. If you communicate an image of
madness - then it is in the horror genre. That's what the horror audience thrive on. It's almost like
getting an electric shock, and a horror movie is like constantly poking around in an electrical socket!
And then at a certain point it just jabs you and you get this feeling in your flesh, your whole flesh
crawls from the electrical charge and that's the feeling you get from horror.
For example, Psycho (1960) was arguably the original 'slasher' movie and I'm old enough that I
saw it when it first came out, when I was a twelve-year-old. The shower scene was physically horrific
when we saw it, but the highest horror moment of the whole movie was the very end when we see
both the mother and Norman in the same body - this moment is madness, the wobbly knee moment,
the skin-crawling feeling. This is horror. It's something that is dreamlike, and something deeply
psychological. Ultimately what I do with genre movies is look for the expressionist quality and the
sutrealist quality to recreate that psychological impact.
The other feature that unites both psychoanalysis and horror cinema is an interest in the unsettling
images and meanings behind dreamscapes.
Well, one of the scariest movies I know to enter the dream world is Robert Wise's version of The
Haunting (1963). Wise's version is probably rhe purest ghost story made into film. It has a poetry of
fear that enables you to watch it many times and still get the creeps. A n d yet this is a movie that only
takes you into the madness of Eleanor in the movie. A n d the big moment is when she is seeing the
thing trying to come through the door and she looks at the trim of the paint around the door and
suddenly these very innocuous patterns start looking like strange faces mocking. This is the moment
you start going crazy, and I think this is vety important to horror.
Most horror movies don't work on such a subtle level, but I think though they work on a
very crude level they're really in that same continuum. So the head, giving head, in Re-Animator
(1985) is really on the same level. I mean it seems totally incongruous, but it really is. The idea in
Re-Animator that a head could talk or breathe just because it was injected is absurd, but there is a
more mythical level to this, there's a dreamlike level in which heads can talk and the disembodied
intellect is just that, and there's only one way to satisfy a head, sexually. And in this type of stuff
there are so many levels of irony that you really are in a dream world of horror. And because it's
consistent Re-Animator has become a classic. When it's not consistent it just becomes yet another
genre movie.
Just to play Devil's advocate, couldn't you say that the head giving head defines another feature of your
films: that they all focus on an excess of immorality?

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