[The script follows:]
From the time we are little children we like hearing scary stories. Some
psychologists claim it’s because we use these stories to work through our anxieties.
Fairy tales and nursery rhymes expose us to fearful situations, and along
with Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, and Little Red Riding Hood, we see our way
through to daylight.
But for every little piggy who lives, another little piggy has to die…
Maybe there’s another explanation to why we like scary stories, a darker, and
perhaps a richer one than that given by psychologists. Perhaps we don’t
identify with the victors so much as the victims.
Horror films show us the dark underside of the
American dream. As one group rises to power, another is disenfranchised. Often,
violence is visited upon those who are in the minority.
Thrillers and action films celebrate triumph and
success. Horror films clean up the mess, mop up the blood, and show us what’s
under the rubble after the action hero lays waste.
Many horror movies’ victims, are women and
children, as in real life.
The Shining is
arguably the greatest horror film because it so movingly bears witness to the
suffering of the frightened wife and child of a violent alcoholic.
Wendy Torrance’s glassy-eyed smile holds a dark
history and a sense of nervous fear. This is revealed by the enormous ash
perilously dangling from her cigarette. The film will draw her repressed fears
out, writ large in bloody letters across the screen.
If this were a made for TV movie about spousal
abuse, a councilor or friend would come to the abused wife’s aid. That person
would help her to gain control of her life.
But the narrative and moral logic of horror films
tells us a different story, one that is, perhaps, truer to life: evil never
sleeps, and the dead don’t always stay dead.
It is a common story, sadly enough, but like all
great horror films, The Shining gives this
story the magnitude of a tragic American myth.
As family tensions mount in the Overlook, each
member of the family goes over the edge in their own special way.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may
not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add
some extra, just for you.” Poet Philip
Larkin’s words are particularly relevant to the American horror film. Many of the best horror films capture the
unique vulnerability of childhood. In the end, the horror movie makes us all as
vulnerable as little children.
The tradition of gothic horror has been replete with beings
whose monstrousness is as much a burden to themselves as a threat to others. There is no such thing as a victimless crime
in horror movies. Even the victimizers may be said to suffer.
We see Jack Torrance having a nightmare that,
the film suggests, is a kind of a vision brought on by the haunted hotel where he
and his family live. Such visitations vex him, and we can identify with his
anguish.
Jack can still feel compassion, though, and we sense
his torment and anguish as he confronts and eventually turns toward
derangement.
As such visitations increase in frequency and
intensity, Jack is transformed into a savage, and yet we continue to see him as
a victim driven to madness. And thus, his final transformation and his
merciless rampage seem all the more tragic.
Even in the end, he is no monster.
This is simply the dark side of human power.
The waxing and waning of power itself—in
cinema as in real life—is merely an illusion.
The horror film: It shows us the dark side of
power, and reminds us that we are all, at some levels, powerless victims.
Power,
in and of itself, is not a moral virtue, but compassion is.
Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.
Ken Cancelosi is the Co-Founder and Publisher of Press Play.
The film is a virtual catalogue of iconic images of
You never forget the
Each movement made by Harryhausen’s
Although
Like most of the explanations given by the film’s various experts, this is perhaps true, but only partially. It might explain Carol’s illness, or it might not: maybe she is only suffering from an exaggerated sensitivity to her surroundings as a result of the boredom of her privileged existence, or maybe she does have a real physical reaction to a genuinely toxic environment. The ambiguous pathology of her illness is brilliantly encapsulated in the striking visual symbol of a black couch delivered by mistake in place of the teal one Carol ordered. After a morning at the gym, she returns to her immaculate home. The living room is shot with a wide, deep focus, similar to the interior shots of Kubrick’s The Shining. Recessed lighting lends a chilly, bluish light to the scene, a visual cold enhanced by the furniture’s rigidly symmetrical arrangement. After a phone conversation in which she describes each member of the family as being “fine,” the camera draws back slowly, creating suspense for the unveiling of what we can’t yet see lurking outside the frame. As Carol turns to the left she utters a horrified “Oh my god,” her gaze transfixed as the camera cuts to reveal an enormous black sectional couch, like an interior decorator’s version of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the privileged Carol White, this is as much an existential crisis as it is an aesthetic one, to such an extent that later in the film Carol claims to fellow sufferers of environmental illness that her “totally toxic” couch was one of the triggers of her own breakdown.
There has been much dispute about who actually did what in the making of Poltergeist, with suggestions that Tobe Hooper’s title of director was only nominal, and that producer and co-screenwriter Spielberg was the driving creative force behind the scenes. Certainly the film would seem to have little in common with Hooper’s harrowing classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): the grainy texture and ruthless violence of that film are worlds away from the lavish visual spectacles that unfold amidst the comfortable middle class settings of Poltergeist. Nevertheless, Hooper’s direction and co-authorship may be felt in the sense of menace and threat manifested from the beyond, an otherworldly place revealed to be firmly rooted in the very earth beneath the concrete and sheetrock of Cuestra Verde. 
The film’s totem of forgetting is the television, and the Freelings are avid worshippers. There is one in every room of the Freelings’ home, and when Carol Anne talks with “the TV People” she raises her hands to the screen as if she were one of the apes bowing before the black monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Freelings are a good family who seem to have gone slightly astray, their lives detached from the larger world outside and from the history buried beneath their feet. At night Steve and Diane (JoBeth Williams) wind down by smoking pot and watching reruns of The Twilight Zone. Tellingly, Steve is absently reading Reagan: The Man, the President, the sanctimonious biography of a public figure uniquely successful in promoting a sanitized version of progress in which American capitalism redeems the nightmares of history. While the Freelings do not commit any crimes, they are complicit in an American culture of forgetting that allows people to be bulldozed for the making of a brighter future. 
At the center of the film are two portraits of domesticity, one warm and loving, the other bitter and resentful. When we first encounter these families there is little to distinguish them: they all seem to communicate in cheerful idioms suggesting all is hunky dory, you betcha. As the horrible crime instigated by the secretly resentful Jerry Lundegaard begins to unfold, however, we see the void at the heart of the chirpy Midwestern family. In the terms of Icelandic saga, we might say that the Lundegaards marry
These very different families are brought together by a series of murders that unfold as a result of a peculiar crime instigated by Jerry Lundegaard that reads like a bad Midwestern joke: “D’ja hear the one about the guy that had his own wife kidnapped?” What drives him to this act remains something of a mystery. When Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) asks him why anyone would want to do such a thing, he smiles nervously and stutters, “Well, that’s, that’s, I’m not go inta, inta—see, I just need money.” As the hired kidnappers press him, he nervously responds, “See, these are . . . personal matters.” Like his two hapless goons, the audience learns little more of Jerry’s motives, as he turns away all unwanted scrutiny with a wooden smile and conversational clichés. In what remains William H. Macy’s greatest performance, he transforms the annoying patter of the used car salesman into an accomplice to murder.
Suddenly the picture resolves into an episode of the PBS show Nature. The soporific voice of the narrator, in stark contrast to Showalter’s rage, intones: “The bark beetle carries the worm to its nest where it will feed its young for up to six months.” We then see Marge and Norm Gunderson in bed, bathed in the stark light of the television, Marge watching with a glazed look while Norm sleeps against her side, both lying amidst a spilled bag of Old Dutch Potato Chips. The narration continues: “In the spring, the larvae hatch and the cycle begins again.” Since Marge is visibly pregnant, the program seems to comment on her own young, soon to hatch. The Gunderson nest seems a placid place, a place of mindless gestation and hibernation. But when the phone call comes summoning Police Chief Marge Gunderson to investigate a double homicide, their home becomes a retreat, a sanctuary from the world of meaningless violence in which we have been immersed. It is a sanctuary from which Marge must emerge, restoring the world with love and order so that she can rear her child in peace.
Philip Pullman has said “your life begins when you are born” but that “your life story begins at that moment when you discover that you are in the wrong family.” This is the premise of all good children’s stories: once the parents are out of the way, fantasy begins. What makes Mama so rich in potential is its complex understanding of how inescapable the parental presence is, and how fantasies often end up giving more substantial form to the anxieties we had thought to escape. Once the girls are found and adopted by their uncle and his reluctant girlfriend (played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Jessica Chastain), they are exposed to parental forces more messy and complicated than the ghostly figure they’ve grown up with. Mama continues to assert her presence in their new home, and she seems to be a lot more fun than the adoptive parents: the children are heard laughing and singing behind closed doors, and the younger girl, Lilly, often giggles when she catches a glimpse of Mama's ghostly movements. This mother has conformed to the desires of her children, rather than the other way around, though the children will soon find that, in fantasy as in reality, love is haunted by possession.
Press Play Video Blog 