Category: Blogs

Most
potential viewers would expect a film made in 1971 with the title Let’s Scare Jessica to Death to be a
teen slasher picture, but in fact, it is a subtle, moody piece of cinema that
explores the fragility of the mind and the persistence of the past, achieving
moments of rich psychological insight. 
It is also one of the most powerful treatments of the dream of getting
away from it all, and the horrors that ensue when we seek refuge in places we
little understand and where, in the end, we may not really belong. 

The story
is told largely from Jessica’s point of view, and creates a disturbing sense of
uncertainty in the gap between her own perceptions and those of the other
characters. This is nicely captured in
the opening scene’s voice-over narration, spoken by Jessica (Zohra Lampert):
“Nightmares or dreams … madness or sanity … I don’t know which is which.”  Her seemingly tenuous grip on reality is
partially explained in the back-story given in the early scenes of the
film. Jessica has just spent several
months in a mental institution, and she and her husband Duncan (Barton Heyman)
have decided to escape from the confines of their Manhattan apartment to try
the curative powers of country living on an apple orchard in rural
Connecticut.  Later, they encounter an
antiques dealer who made the same move, and he recognizes in them fellow
“refugees from urban blight.” But despite this antique dealer’s idyllic
portrait of the area they’ve just moved into, the newcomers are given many
signs that something is seriously wrong in this superficially bucolic retreat.

In the nearby
small town, they encounter hostility from the native population, which seems to
consist almost exclusively of old men. 
While the newcomers are all evidently in their thirties, the enmity
seems largely to derive from a generation gap, one that is reinforced by the
hippyish appearance of Jessica and Duncan’s friend Woody (Kevin O’Connor). Though their unfriendly encounters appear to
be the expected clash of anti-establishment baby boomers with the so-called
“greatest generation,” these tensions also derive from a more ancient enmity,
one between country folk and city folk. Many great films of the seventies address this theme, notably Deliverance, Straw Dogs, and The Texas
Chain Saw Massacre, but what makes Jessica’s
treatment unique is the brooding ambiguity that shrouds the true nature of this
rural community. Since portrayed events
are filtered through the protagonist’s melancholia and relentless self-doubt,
it becomes impossible to be certain whether we are witnessing mere uncultured
rudeness and suspicion of newcomers or something much less benign.

My wife
and I moved to the mid-Hudson valley five years ago. At that time, we often felt such
doubts. The demographics of this area
are difficult to read from an outsider’s point of view, and we often felt
uncertain of the nature of our adopted community and its environs. Driving through the countryside on weekend
rambles, we would be mystified by the sudden transitions from quaintly
gentrified little towns with espresso cafes and antique shops to run-down
whistle stops with little more than a gas station and a grain silo, where
locals sip 40 ouncers and stare malevolently as you drive by.  While generally I find New Yorkers to be the
most friendly people of any state I’ve lived in, I have also walked trails in
the Catskills where people pass by stonily ignoring my hello, or worse, glaring
back silently.  Though I have come to
know my neighbors for the wonderful people they are, when we first moved in,
they frankly gave me the creeps.  Perhaps
this is because one of them introduced himself by saying that he had watched me
carry my wife over the threshold when we first moved in.  Moving into a new place has its perils, in
the city as well as the country, but there’s something especially unsettling
about the country’s unique sense of isolation. If your country neighbors turn out to be monsters, who you gonna call? I’ve seen enough horror movies to be wary of
the local sheriff’s connections. At the
end of the day, one’s doubts and suspicions most often turn out to be
groundless; but then again, what if they’re not?

As with
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby,
Hancock’s film carefully choreographs our doubts by selectively withholding
information and calling its protagonist’s perceptions into question. And yet, as with Rosemary, Jessica’s point of view
is richly, sympathetically rendered, and as the film progresses we begin to
feel that the men in the film are the naïve, deluded ones. Jessica’s world is magical and strange, an
effect largely achieved by Joe Ryan’s complex sound design, in which
non-contextual sounds and voices form a constant countercurrent to the film’s
narrative flow. Wind blows even when the
trees are still, and queasy, seething electronic noises provide an aural
equivalent to the characters’ unease. Jessica’s disembodied voice offers a running disjointed monologue, often
uttered over spare piano or melancholy acoustic guitar figures. The increasing claustrophobia of this
would-be idyll is as much a product of the protagonist’s psychological
isolation as the characters’ rural equivalent.

With the
entrance into the story of the enigmatic character Emily (Mariclaire Costello),
Jessica’s internal monologue begins to incorporate other voices. Emily appears to be a free-spirited wanderer
squatting in the house newly purchased by the film’s protagonists, but as the
film progresses she seems more deeply connected to the town’s history.  Jessica seems uniquely attuned to this, a
connection furthered by a séance scene in which she declares her receptivity to
“everyone who has ever died in this house.” 
The abiding presence of the dead and their stories is a theme struck
early by the film, when the three main characters (who drive a hearse, by the
way) stop at an old cemetery so that Jessica can take rubbings from
tombstones. These rubbings adorn the
walls of her and Duncan’s bedroom and seem to summon further voices in
Jessica’s head.  In some respects she is
a visionary, attuned to the local spirits.
Yet this potentially empowering receptivity gives way to powerlessness as
the characters begin to reenact the family dramas of those long dead. Let’s
Scare Jessica to Death moves subtly from being a film about retreating to
an idyllic place to being about the spirits of that place reasserting themselves.

Although
the spirit of place in Jessica is
clearly malevolent, the film’s cinematography, saturated with color and
suffused with shimmering natural light, continues to seduce us into its dark
pastoral world. Like all great horror
films, this is not so much about what horrifies us in our daily lives, but also
what entices us, revealing two seemingly conflicting sides of the same
experience. One of the voices in
Jessica’s mind often repeats the phrase “You’re home now,” but after a certain
point it becomes difficult to tell if this is the incorporated voice of the
mysterious Emily, or Jessica herself; the seemingly malevolent voice of the
rural township or the consoling voice of Jessica’s own city-bred mind, hoping
to reconcile herself to her country retreat. 
At the conclusion of the film we return to where we began, with the
voice-over musing on whether we are living a dream or a nightmare.  Though horror films can show us how easily
one can turn to another, they can also muse upon those paradoxical moments when
our life choices seem to unleash an uneasy combination of both.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

The most harrowing film ever made about childhood opens with
a lullaby that is anything but soothing: “The hunter in the night / Fills your
childish heart with fright / Fear is only a dream / So dream, little one,
dream.”  As we stand on the threshold of
Charles Laughton’s haunted masterpiece Night
of the Hunter, this lullaby sings us into the world of a scared child who,
strangely, is being encouraged to dream a dream of fear, which is a fair
description of the film that follows. While
Night of the Hunter wonderfully
defies classification, blending elements of expressionism, gothic, fairy tale,
and film noir, I would like to offer a reading of the film as a very particular
kind of horror film, one that enables us to see the world from a victim’s point
of view. Such films are anything but
empowering, in the sense used by the kind of self-help guides and memoirs of
personal struggle that litter our nation’s bookshelves. Rather, these films teach us sympathy and
compassion through a humbling sense of disempowerment,
which, in the case of Night of the Hunter,
involves taking us back to the horrors of childhood.

The tale is set in West Virginia during the Depression, and
the scarcity of those times drives the cruel deeds that unfold. We first see little Pearl and John Harper playing
happily in their yard when suddenly their father appears, on the run from the
police for a bank job in which two people were killed. He thrusts the stolen money on young John, which
will soon make him the object of murderous greed. Fear is John’s inheritance, yet the film
implies that even children who don’t experience his and his sister’s unique
form of persecution are born to suffer. Later in the film, as they flee from danger, they are forced to beg for
food along with other children. Their
grudging benefactor gives them each a potato before shooing them off, as she
muses: “Such times: when young’uns run the roads….” Near the end of the film,
when their guardian, Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), recites the story of Herod’s
slaughter of the innocents, she reflects: “It did seem like it was a plague
time for little ones, those olden days, those hard, hard times.” The film subtly parallels “those olden days”
with the “hard, hard times” of the Depression Era, and in its prolific use of
fairy tale motifs, connects this with the struggling peasant culture that
spawned the classic folk tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.

Although oral folk tales were traditionally recited to old
and young alike, they have a special resonance for children because of their
prominent place in the narratives, a place that is, as we all remember, often
terrifying. Whether being abandoned by
one’s parents in the woods because there isn’t enough food to go around, like
Hansel and Gretel, or being chopped up and fed to father in a stew, like the
child victim in “The Juniper Tree,” the children of fairy tales have much to
fear, especially from their parents. Once their father burdens them with the secret location of $10,000 in
stolen bank money, John and Pearl Harper’s story enters the dark dream world of
the fairy tale as they are pursued by Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), a sinister
self-anointed preacher who is alluded to several times as “a wolf in sheep’s
clothing.” Yet the children are the only
ones able to see Harry Powell for the Big, Bad Wolf that he really is, and Night of the Hunter deftly captures that
sense of powerlessness all of us felt when, as children, we sensed something
wrong but weren’t able to do anything about it.

The film is a virtual catalogue of iconic images of
childhood fears: closed basement doorways, crescent moons in night skies, empty
barns, shadowy attics, dark forests, and treacherous swamps make up Night of the Hunter’s haunted
landscapes. One of the film’s most
frightening scenes takes place in the Harpers’ basement, when Powell drags the
children down to help him find the stolen money. When the supposed cache turns out to be
empty, he turns viciously on John, who manages to extinguish the light and
overturn a shelf of canning jars on the villain’s head. Powell’s usually sly, seductive patter turns suddenly
into an animalistic wail. In the claustrophobic darkness of the basement, this
transformation is especially chilling, recalling many a downstairs journey and the accompanying fears.  The children
flee up the stairs, shot expressionistically as a thin
corridor of angular light hanging in a sea of blackness.  As in many scenes, the light and dark contrast here
is so strong as to make the image look like an old woodcut illustration. The children barely escape, slamming the
basement door, as vicious animal growls emerge from behind it.  As he continues relentlessly pursuing them as
they flee downriver, at one point John hears him singing his signature hymn,
“Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and wonders, “Don’t he never sleep?”  Fairy tale threats never do: they only take
on new forms as we grow older.

It’s striking to note that this film was produced amidst the
optimism and economic recovery of the nineteen-fifties, and perhaps this is why
the film initially flopped. Though
dream-like and fanciful, it nevertheless presents an unpleasant reminder of
hard times that remained all too real in the memories of older filmgoers.  Seen now, this classic takes on new life as a
dark fairy tale for an age of austerity. The world we are entering will indeed be, as the children’s guardian,
Rachel Cooper, says, “a hard world for little things.” Yet, given the grim outlook for our
collective future, it seems surprising that so many people remain so eager to
bring more little things into it. It is
this, as much as the perversely self-satisfied culture of child-rearing, that
inspired my previous piece on the film Who
Can Kill a Child? 

Climate scientists recently announced that we’ve reached a
dreaded milestone for CO2 levels, an announcement that received surprisingly
little attention.  But last year a
similar, and to my mind even more disturbing, milestone was passed, and some
actually considered it, perversely, as a cause for celebration. On March 12, 2012 the world population reached
seven billion, and while we might hope for a future in which this growing
population will be able to reduce its carbon footprint, there is no denying the
simple fact that more people means more mouths to feed, and if the wasteful way
we produce our food doesn’t change in a drastic way, those little mouths are
going to be very hungry. This is one of the things I think of when I hear
Rachel Cooper’s words during the Christmas scene that ends Night of the Hunter: “Lord save little children.  You’d think the world’d be ashamed to name
such a day as Christmas for one of them, then go on in the same old way. My
soul is humble when I see the way little ones accept their lot.”

The triumph of Laughton’s masterpiece is to make us
similarly humble by imaginatively putting us in the vulnerable position of
children.  It is a vulnerability they
share with other creatures, a point clearly established in the film’s most
memorable scene: John and Pearl’s nighttime flight down the Ohio River. As they pass a series of animals on the
Ohio’s banks—frogs, owls, turtles, foxes—they eventually come to a herd of
sheep corralled behind a fence. Time
hangs suspended as the children and the sheep stare at one another, sharing a
mutual recognition that the film has prepared us for by frequently referring to
John and Pearl as “little lambs.” This
mutual recognition anticipates the later scene of Powell’s capture by police,
when John cries out in pain at his former persecutor’s suffering. He later refuses to testify against him at
the trial, with compassion which stands in stark contrast to the vengefulness of the
townspeople, who form a lynch mob bent on Powell’s blood.  It is the virtue of great horror movies to
remind us what it was like to be a child, and to sympathetically identify with
victims, whatever their age might be.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Having
children is one of those bourgeois activities that leave me baffled, like
playing golf, eating sushi, or watching Downton Abbey.  Although I remain on speaking terms with
friends who, regretfully, choose to have children, there’s no denying the gulf
that separates the baby-haves and the baby-have-nots. And there’s nothing like the chill that grips
me when couples my wife and I have known for years, and who always claimed they
would remain child-free, suddenly announce: “We’re going to have a baby!”  From that point on all previous conversations
about how annoying kids are will be forgotten, to be replaced with the silent
assumption: yes, but ours are different. 
At such moments I turn to horror films for solace, and while Village of the Damned, The Brood, and The Omen all help, there’s only one film that truly captures the
experience of being trapped in a world of children and those who adore them.

Who Can Kill a Child (1976) is a
relatively obscure Spanish horror film directed by Narcisco Ibanez Serrador,
but it should be much better known, and not only by people like me, who are sick
of having to pretend to be awed by how wonderful children are. It is a challenging, confrontational work
that raises difficult questions concerning overpopulation, inequality, and the
nature of evil. The film tells the story
of an English couple vacationing on the Spanish coast as they enjoy their last
weeks of freedom before a very pregnant Evelyn gives birth to their third
child.  Distracted by the noise and
crowds of Benavis, where a festival is being held, they rent a boat and go
alone to the island of Almanzora, which they find strangely deserted, except
for occasional bands of vacantly smiling children, who grow increasingly
threatening, and eventually homicidal. While the premise is admittedly unoriginal, if tantalizing, the power of
the narrative emerges through its sense of quiet unease, complex character
development, and provocative intrusions of topical and historical sound bytes
into the film’s otherwise eerily isolated world.

Taking its cue from the Mondo Cane films—those
pseudo-documentary films of the sixties and seventies that shocked audiences
with their depiction of violent rituals and grotesque behavior from around the
world—Who Can Kill a Child’s opening
credit sequence runs over a disturbing montage of twentieth-century atrocities,
beginning with the Holocaust and spiraling through numerous wars and civil
conflicts, in each case emphasizing the overwhelming toll on children.  Disturbingly, the sound of children’s
laughter can be heard over the grim stock footage, as well as a child humming a
haunting melody reminiscent of Krzysztof Komeda’s indelible theme to Rosemary’s Baby. As the death roll finally reaches its height, we cut to black and white footage of barely clad children crouching
in the dirt, which seems to signal another abject image of orphaned destitution
until the camera pulls back, transforming to bright color footage of a beach
crowded by leisurely European tourists. This striking contrast
underscores the film’s later meditations on the thin borderlines between
comfort and chaos.

As Evelyn
and her husband Tom later enjoy the spectacle of a local parade, they discover
that their camera has run out of film and duck into a shop.  As they wait for the clerk to bring their
rolls of Kodak, they turn to a television on the counter, broadcasting
footage of a massacre in Bangkok. When
the clerk returns, he shrugs and observes: “The world is crazy. In the end the ones who suffer the most are
the children. From war: the
children. From famine: the children.” It
is an observation that will echo in the English couple’s minds as their
vacation continues. After making this
morose speech, however, the clerk smiles and says: “What a lovely day to take
pictures!” In the following scene, disturbingly enough,
Evelyn wades in the ocean while Tom tries to snap her picture. The thin membrane between the first world
privilege that safeguards their “lovely day” and the disorder that lurks beyond
their borders is suddenly broken by an ambiguous disturbance in the distance, a
disturbance that is later revealed to be a body washing ashore. These early scenes are loaded with many such
moments of horror lurking just beyond the vacationers’ perception.

The answer to the question of why a film that is about to present us with packs of homicidal
children is so preoccupied with reminding us how vulnerable children are in a
treacherously unstable global economy remains ambiguous, but some hints seem to
be given in the conversations between Tom and Evelyn on the night before their boat
trip.  As they walk down a crowded
street, Tom asks, “Would you like to sit down?” and she replies, “Where, it’s
so crowded.”  Looking down at her
pregnant belly, he observes: “Well, we’re not helping the situation, are
we?”  Later, as Tom broods over the
events of the day, he recounts a story from Fellini’s La Dolce Vita about a man who kills his two children, his wife, and
later himself. When Evelyn asks why, he
answers, “I imagine he was trying to save his children from the future.”  This prompts his wife to mention that they
were almost going to “kill this one,” pointing to her belly, and asks if he’s
glad they didn’t.  Tom doesn’t seem
entirely sure, and he equivocates that they had two children already, before
reassuring his wife as they go to sleep. 
Such scenes suggest a certain parallel, if not complicity, between their
household population and the rest of the world’s.  Overpopulation, the film indicates, is a problem we like to
project onto other countries when it often happens under our very noses, and it
is our privileged, first world children who are going to leave the largest
carbon footprint, and consume the most resources, indirectly fueling the
violent conflicts that hover around drought and famine like flies.

All this
might seem like a rather ponderous set-up for a horror film, but what is
astonishing is how deftly these elements are woven into the fast-paced establishing
shots. Soon we find ourselves on the
island of Almanzera, where we enter a very different reality. From the raucous crowds of the mainland we
shift to an almost silent, dreamlike space reminiscent of Val Lewton’s great
noir-thrillers of the 1940s, like I
Walked with a Zombie, and Isle of the
Dead, but with one significant difference: while classic horror films use
darkness as their medium of fear, Who Can
Kill a Child uses light, an almost blinding, stark Mediterranean light, as
relentless and omnipresent as the increasing sense of menace to which it seems
tied. Like a mischievous child, the film
plays hide and go seek with the violence lurking just behind every corner. One particularly disturbing scene shows
Evelyn calling Tom’s attention to an old man huddled in a doorway in a distant
angle of a narrow but brightly lit street. A girl appears in the distance, smiling pleasantly as she walks towards
them. Once she reaches the old man she
looks happily to her right at him, though we still can’t see anything more than
his arm holding a cane. After smiling
guilelessly towards the couple, whose point of view the camera shares, she
turns to the man again, seizes his cane, and sets to beating him violently to
death, though we only see the evidence of this from the increasing amount of
red visible on the cane as it repeatedly rises and falls and the girl laughs
with glee.

Such
moments of barely concealed horror parallel the couple’s reluctance in
admitting the children’s monstrousness, a reluctance shared by another adult
whom they encounter, who tells them the story of how the children suddenly
changed. As he describes how they killed his wife, he notes with amazement that
nobody moved to stop them, because, of course, “who can kill a child?” It is an
understandable reluctance that the English couple have a hard time getting
over, putting them in even graver danger. As the film progresses towards its harrowing conclusion, it forces the
viewer into the uncomfortable position of the protagonists: though the children
are often shown blank-faced and coldly malevolent, there are also many scenes
where they are depicted as infinitely charming, seemingly innocent.  When they nevertheless show themselves
capable of horrendous violence, we are tempted to ask, along with Evelyn,
“Isn’t a normal child incapable of killing another human being?”  When we recall how violent the 1970s were,
this line has a disturbing historical resonance.  It’s sad to think there was once a time when
adults could be so innocent as to ask such a question.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

You never forget the
first time you fall in love, especially in the movies. My moment came when I was eight years old, at
a Saturday matinee in a cramped multiplex theater.  Setting my sights high, the object of my
adoration was Kali, Hindu goddess of Time, Change, and Death; or, rather, a
statue of her, brought to life by the magical powers of Ray Harryhausen, the
special effects wizard who, sadly, passed away this week at the age of 92. His influence on the development of cinema is
incalculable, but in many respects he will be representative of an age that is
likely never to be reborn, a time when special effects were created with the
hands as well as the mind, with clay instead of pixels, with palpable objects rather
than streaming data. By showing us how
malleable cinematic reality could become in the hands of an artist, he
anticipated the wholesale manipulation of the visual field brought off by CGI technicians,
yet the texture, the movement, and the presence of his animated creatures belong to
an entirely different realm from that of the smooth, seamless, and ultimately lifeless
digital beings wandering somnambulistically across today’s screens.

The animated statue of
Kali with whom I first fell in love appears in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) the first Harryhausen film I’d
ever seen—certainly not his best, but filled enough with wonder for anyone with
imagination. The feelings I felt for
Kali, or at least her animated model, were different from those I felt for the
sexy slave girl Morgiana (Caroline Munro), whose I Dream of Jeannie-style costume left little to my boyish
imagination. The love I felt for
Harryhausen’s Kali was pure, a sense of reverence for something beyond me, a
power outside my understanding, a life form fundamentally different from my own,
yet no less alive. Harryhausen’s
animated figures burn with a hard, gem-like flame, a quicker pulse than the one that beats
in the rest of us. Like many of the
animator’s best creations, the statue of Kali moves all of her limbs at the
same time, particularly impressive given the fact that she’s got six arms, each
wielding a scimitar. As befits her
statuesque origins, Kali’s face never moves, but she nevertheless conveys a
distinct personality in her carefully choreographed movements: graceful yet
relentless, cool yet malevolent, hard yet supple, not unlike the goddess on
whom she is based.

Harryhausen’s creations
have an undeniable presence on the screen, often eclipsing the flesh and blood
actors with whom they perform.  Yet their
life remains on a different order than that of mere mortals, and in that they
are purely cinematic. The statue of Kali
is set into motion by the evil wizard Koura, played with high camp by the
fourth Doctor Who, Tom Baker. It has
often been said that the magician Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest can be read as a kind of
self-portrait, of the dramatist as maker of magic. Similarly, Baker’s Koura could be seen as a
kind of stand-in for Harryhausen himself, the wizard who brings life to
lifeless things and sets them dancing before our amazed eyes. The remarkable thing about Harryhausen’s
effects is how they never fail to convince us of their unique powers of life,
even while they remain unremittingly artificial, thing-like. Kali’s unmoving face, her claylike texture, her
blocky feet keep her firmly bound to her material origins, yet this only
makes her performance as a living thing all the more beguiling.

As with all of Harryhausen’s
creations, we know Kali is fake, but this enhances rather than diminishes her
power, since we can watch and watch and still never fully understand what makes
her move. There are documentaries that
show stop-motion animators like Harryhausen working at their painstaking craft, so that
we can more or less see how it is done, but like cinema itself, there remains
something essentially magical in what happens between the frames. Film, or at least the analog kind that moves
in frames per second, works through persistence of vision, the overlapping of
impressions left on the eye by a rapid series of photographic stills to form a
seamless illusion of movement. When we
watch Harryhausen’s animation, it is as if we see this process happening before
us, as if his creatures are embodiments of the cinematic process within the
film itself. 

Each movement made by Harryhausen’s
creations is made up of countless tiny sub-movements working together to
produce a living whole. This is perhaps
most dramatically demonstrated by the famous scene in which Jason battles seven
fighting skeletons in Jason and the
Argonauts (1963). No matter where
the eye turns, it sees diverse movement: this skeleton raising a sword; that
lifting a shield; this stalking around the scene of battle, looking for an
opening; that recovering after being knocked down. Under closer scrutiny each of these figures
reveals a further host of movements, the raising of the sword involving the
lifting of the upper arm, the extending of the forearm, the extension of the
wrist, the back arching, the thigh bone connected the knee bone, etc. The more we look, the less we perceive this as
constructed by a master-craftsman and his crew: something else is happening
that ultimately evades simple cause and effect.

This “something else”
Harryhausen named “Superdynamation,” which, besides being a wonderfully
appealing branding of his distinct visual style, is also an apt description of
its peculiar appeal. The life he gave
his creatures exists in a kind of hyper-reality, their movements more dynamic
than mere organic motion. Though given a
distinctly 1960s American brand name, Superdynamation has much in common with a
visual effect that is quite ancient, one dubbed the “uncanny” by Freud. The hair-raising frisson of the uncanny is
experienced “when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive
or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one.” One need only mention the idea of a
ventriloquist’s dummy coming to life to convince us that Freud was on to
something here. Doors screeching,
windows rattling, shadows moving: these are all stock elements of gothic terror, but
there is something uniquely creepy about the “too much like” animation
perfected by Harryhausen. 

Although
he created a few cute and amiable beings, monsters were Harryhausen’s métier,
and the best are those that are explicitly artificial. After falling in love with Kali I needed to
see more of her sisters, brothers, and others, scanning the TV listings for
late-night showings of Harryhausen’s films. One of my favorite monsters is another statue, in this case of Talos,
the mythical Greek man of bronze, who is set into motion in an early scene of Jason. The sound effects contribute marvelously to the peculiar power of this
brazen being, whose every movement screeches like rusty metal. His brute materiality, his thingness, is,
paradoxically, what makes him a believably living being on the screen, yet it
is also what makes him vulnerable: Jason defeats him by simply unscrewing a
plug on his heel, from which his life-blood relentlessly flows. There is something grotesque yet moving in
Talos’ slow death, like Superdynamation in reverse, motion bringing death
instead of life. It remains for me one
of cinema’s, and Harryhausen’s, great moments.

Although
I will inevitably be accused of technophobic nostalgia, I can’t help but feel
that the possibility of such magical movie moments have passed away, along with
their creator. Younger viewers who have
grown up with CGI don’t seem to have the problem with it that I do. To them the special effects of yesterday
appear “fake,” yet surely the effects of today don’t look any more “real.” I’m not sure that was ever the point. When the poet Rilke stared at an “Archaic Torso
of Apollo,” the message it spoke to him was that he needed to change his life,
to aspire to the superdynamic quality embodied in great art. The question isn’t what is fake or what is
real, the question is what quality of life does it achieve. Ray Harryhausen’s uniquely analog art wasn’t
merely alive, it was in Superdynamotion, and as far as I’m concerned it’s a
life with which digitized special effects will never catch up.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.