Page 22 - Cinematic Thinking Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema

12 Kelly Oliver

In Terror and Everyday Life: Singular Moments in the History of the
Horror Film, Jonathan Lake Crane sets out three key elements of contem-
porary horror, which he claims originate with Night of the Living Dead
(1968) and Halloween (1978): "all collective action will fail; knowledge and
experience have no value when one is engaged with the horrible; and the
destruction of the menace (should it occur) carries no guarantee that the
future will be safe"; in fact the most popular horror films are those in
which the monster is not killed but returns over and over again in sequels. 4
Crane also maintains that what is horrific in these films is their connec-
tion to everyday life, which separates them from earlier horror films that
no longer seem scary at all. Given Crane's description of the contempo-
rary horror genre, Hitchcock's turn to horror in the early 1960s seems
definitive.
In neither Psycho nor The Birds is the "monster" killed; in fact, The
Birds ends with thousands of birds covering the landscape and the sugges-
tion that they may be moving into more urban areas; and Psycho spawned
several sequels in which "mother" continues to terrorize. Although terror
in The Birds acts as a form of "family therapy" that brings Mitch and
Melanie together and gives Melanie the mother that she never had, it
comes at the price of the continued threat of the birds and Melanies cata-
tonia. This type of melancholy "resolution" that leaves open the threat of
the "monster" continues to be popular today in films such as Alien (1979,
1992), Aliens (1986), and War of the Worlds (2005). In addition, the film
never reveals why the birds attack. And although Psycho ends with the
psychiatrist explaining Norman s psychosis, this is the most disappointing
scene in the film—even Hitchcock told his screenwriter that it was "a hat
grabber," meaning that viewers would grab their hats and leave the the-
5
ater. In the end it is "mother" who has the last word when we see Norman
in his cell and hear mother's voice saying that she wouldn't hurt a fly, while
her skull is superimposed on Norman's face. The last scene, of Marion's car
being pulled from the swamp, suggests just the beginning of the process
of dredging the swamp for others. Psycho and The Birds prefigure the con-
temporary horror genre's lack of resolution and the failure of knowledge
and action to prevent horror, but most shocking of all, they locate horror
in the everyday.
Hitchcock moves the animal, whose supernatural threat dominated
earlier horror films, into the realm of the natural and everyday and re-
places earlier literal transformations of humans into monstrous animals