For the next 30 days (or whenever I stop being lazy and finish it), I will be giving my fingers short bursts of exercise by completing the 30 Day Horror Challenge, found here. Hopefully it will give you a bit of insight into what horror is for me. Don't forget to check back every day for a new installment.
Day 26: An aggravatingly incompetent protagonist.
Bobby, the brother in Wes Craven's original The Hills Have Eyes, takes the award for most aggravatingly incompetent protagonist. Played by Robert Houston, Bobby is the brother of the family whose car is sabotaged in the desert, miles away from any civilisation, and being hunted by a cannibalistic tribe. An important point of the film that Craven makes is that people don't communicate, which brings Bobby to perform his most annoying act; when one of the family dogs goes missing, he finds it disemboweled, yet he is too embarrassed to tell his family this, until later, when he awkwardly cock-blocks his brother-in-law to share the doggy secret. If he'd said it to them earlier on, they could have been prepared for something amiss about to happen, or else warned the family or the bad idea of splitting up. The cartwheeling bastard (yeah, he cartwheels) is pretty ineffective in a fight, shows himself useless with a gun, and seems to only make it so far thanks to his sister. In defense of him though, if he had been in any way competent, the Hills Have Eyes wouldn't have been nearly as classic a film as it is remembered as today.
For the next 30 days (or whenever I stop being lazy and finish it), I will be giving my fingers short bursts of exercise by completing the 30 Day Horror Challenge, found here. Hopefully it will give you a bit of insight into what horror is for me. Don't forget to check back every day for a new installment.
Day 16: A frightening dream sequence/hallucination
This entry comes care of Wes 'responsible for some of the arguably greatest horror films of the last 40 years, so you shouldn't need any titles here to help you out' Craven; The Serpent and The Rainbow. Starring Bill Pullman (or is it Bill Paxton... whichever blew up the aliens. You know which aliens I mean, right?), The Serpent and The Rainbow is Craven's most underrated work, possibly because a lot of viewers thought they were experiencing some mass nightmare and not a film. Now, I'll admit, this film isn't scary, and there are more terrifying dreams sequences out there, but there is no film that captures the essence of a dream as this film. There is never a moment where you are able to be sure if you are in the sane, waking world, or on your way down the rabbit hole. One moment, you're walking through the forest, the next, you are plummeting into a pit with disembodied hands reaching out for you. The film is an examination of drugs that turn people in to zombies and a Westerner's entitled ignorance in the subject, so not only is the topic rife for crossing boundaries, there is an added element of an entire culture resenting this man who is questioning their beliefs. It is difficult enough to tell the real world from the dream, but the frequency and intensity of the movement between the two makes The Serpent and The Rainbow one of the most masterful displays of unreality in cinema.
