Ghosts are a tried and true horror staple. They’ve been around since the dawn of man. Roman military logs speak very matter-of-factly about spirits of dead soldiers leading their men to victory. In their warm n’ fuzzy incarnation, ghosts give us an opportunity to mend an incomplete relationship, or find true love in a world gone mad. In their more horrific applications, ghosts are angry at the living, and want them to suffer before joining the ranks of the dead.

The sub-text to the ghost story is usually guilt. There’s a horrible act in someone’s past, or in society’s past. The main characters are forced to confront it and resolve it. Maybe they were directly responsible, maybe only peripherally. Sometimes, they have to pay the ultimate price.

Ghosts stories used to be relatively tame. First off, they couldn’t touch you. The best they could do is fly through you. Occasionally, they’d knock a picture down or howl. Things have changed (thank you, Japan!) Now, ghosts are able to impact our reality in a stunning variety of ways, including but not limited to casting reflections, altering your body, possessing you and making steak crawl.

The current ghost movies are so open-ended in terms of the spirit’s capacity to act, that they function more as dementia movies. The main character’s experience with meeting a ghost is usually the same as losing his/her mind.

Personally, I prefer a movie where the ghosts have a motivation for behaving the way they do. The main characters at least have an out, a possibility of redemption. But when the ghosts are just pissed off, and everyone dies—seems a little nihilistic to me. What happens next? Do the ghosts of the movie’s victims haunt the ghosts that killed them? And on through eternity?

But as our nation’s guilt continues to grow, expect more ghost stories, depicting a superior past and an intense anxiety over the justifiable guilt we feel.

Examples of Ghost stories include Ghost, Jacob’s Ladder, The Grudge, Sleepy Hollow, Friday the 13^th (sort of), Nightmare on Elm Street, Poltergeist and Beetlejuice, to name a few. Any others you can think of, chime in. In the meantime, keep screamin’!

CS

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the water (Jaws)—or safe to fly a plane in Canada (the Edge)—or safe to hunt lions in Africa (The Ghost in the Darkness)—or safe to check out the rain forests (Anaconda)—or safe to babysit (When a Stranger Calls)—or safe to drive on the freeways (Duel)—or safe to take bread crumbs to the park (Birds)—or safe to breathe (Outbreak)…

Death waits around every corner. And since the horror genre deals with our anxieties about any and all forms of death, sometimes the most affecting horror tales are the ones that could happen to you, right now, reading this (Fear dot Com)—

The horrifying thing about this particular sub-genre is that the victims are innocent of any wrong-doing or risky behavior. In most sub-genres, the main character does something to bring the horror upon him/herself. She explores her sexual identity, or he follows orders to the exclusion of common sense, or she sleeps with a football star, or he performs experiments he should not have performed, or she refuses to sleep with the killer… (Funny how when the girl gets it, it’s almost always to do with sex. Can we get over that? I’d personally like to get laid more often, and I think that might actually happen if we stopped punishing women for having/not having sex with us!)

But in this genre, people get killed because they went for a swim. Because they went on a honeymoon. Because they had a dog. All these blameless activities usually merit someone a gruesome and terrible death.

This is, perhaps, the very edge of the horror genre. Generally, we’re very moralistic. Horrible things happen, but they happen for a reason. But with this sub-genre, we examine a deeper truth. Nobody has it coming. Nobody deserves the harsh clutch of death. There are few crimes that merit being deprived of life, and yet, innocent, blameless, we all will die. Some of us will die painfully, or suddenly, or in very embarrassing situations, without a modicum of dignity. Even the luckiest of us, lying in bed, unconscious, surrounded by loved ones, will feel that vertiginous moment where the heart stops beating, and our identity slowly slips away, up into the ether, taking a final look at that thing that was you.

I’ve listed a lot of examples of this sub-genre in the first paragraph. Got any others? Chime in—before global warming cooks you alive. In the meantime, keep screamin’!

CS

It wasn’t until the 50’s that our fears began to cloak themselves in scientific respectability with the alien sub-genre. This is actually one of my personal favorites, so much more authentic to me, somehow, than atomic mutation or supernatural beings. Of course, maybe I’m just saying that because District 9 rocked!

People will say, and I wouldn’t argue, that this genre owes its vitality to H.G. Wells and “The War of the Worlds.” I recently read that book, and it is terrifying. The human race didn’t stand a chance. They were butchered mercilessly, and in one of the more unsatisfying endings (but somehow more terrifying for that,) only lost the day because of an insufficient immune system. Yet, other examples of the alien genre pre-1950s are few and far between. It really took off during the Richie Cunnigham era.

In the 50s, we had a confluence of sudden technological advancement, an increased awareness and hunger for the exploration of the moon, and of course, the horrible commies. While this was disastrous in terms of America’s relationship with the world, it made for great horror and sci-fi movies, as well as short stories and books. Who can forget such classics as Village of the Damned, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Blob, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing? I think Village of the Damned in particular rocked on all four cylinders of American paranoia—an alien beam shoots down from space, puts a whole village to sleep, and when they wake up, all the women are impregnated. They all give birth to creepy little children with killer looks—literally.

The message was simple—there’s a threat coming, and we aren’t ready. Sometimes the threat was identifiable, but sometimes, the threat looked just like us, or the people we loved.

Compare this to most alien movies of the 70s, especially Spielberg’s work. Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. gave us the warm, not so fuzzy aliens, with big eyes and kazoo voices. Star Wars gave us a future inhabited by aliens who were just like us. This was in an era of peace and government corruption. We no longer believed in war, or the feeble justifications for fighting one. All men, and other life forms, were our brothers. Even Alien, a movie that introduced one of the most horrifying cinematic concepts ever, even the alien paled in comparison to the bastards from earth who sought to manipulate and exploit this killing machine.

How times have changed. Post 9-11, and we’re paranoid again. Spielberg says the aliens are trying to kill us after all, and even the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still gave us an unsettling portrait of an un-empathetic alien consortium wiping out the human race for its ecological rapaciousness.

That’s why I loved District 9. It put the onus back on us. When confronted with an alien race, our impulse is to isolate them, put them in slums, force them to live by laws they don’t understand and which don’t protect them, deprive them of their rights (“inalienable”—get it?) and kill them at the least provocation. What Spielberg has apparently forgotten—there are no aliens. Just us. The shadows that we swipe at are our own.

Any other examples of alien movies, just chime in. In the meantime—Keep screamin’!

CS