The Morbid Imagination

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) is the kind of intelligent horror movie that I have been praising and elevating in The Morbid Imagination from the start; how could I not like it?

To be sure, Antichrist is not a perfect movie.  Unnecessary pretension rears its ugly arthouse head from time to time and there are moments that don’t work, either as art or horror (the talking fox – ouch!). But overall, Antichrist is a thoughtful horror film in the tradition of Peeping Tom or Repulsion.

The movie opens with a lyrical sequence depicting the death of a toddler, who falls from an open window while his parents are having sex in the next room. His mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is traumatized and paralyzed by anxiety. The father (William Dafoe), a therapist, pushes a form of shock therapy on her in the hopes it will convince her to confront her grief and move past it. Eventually, he convinces her to join him in a remote cabin in the woods where she spent a summer alone with her toddler. Things don’t go as expected, of course, and his attempts to force her to confront her inner demons backfire spectacularly.

Antichrist is brutal and sexually explicit, in a way that is more daring than recent artsy horror films like Irreversible, High Tension, or Inside. Those films either failed to rise above genre forms or were undermined by pointless technical wizardry. There is a story behind Antichrist, a story that is believable, sad, and terrible. The time that von Trier spends developing his characters and the story pays off when the horrors begin to arrive; unlike the typical modern horror film where people die without ever developing beyond shallow, quickly sketched props.

Von Trier and Antichrist in particular have been attacked for their misogyny. So what? Do all stories have to have happy endings – particularly horror movies? I wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon watching von Trier’s films, but a downbeat slice of the underbelly of humanity is a nice palette cleanser every now and then. I loved von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) even though it is one of the most depressing stories I’ve ever seen. But as sad as it was, you cared about the characters, even the bad ones, because von Trier took the time to let you get to know them.

This is exactly what is generally lacking in the horror movie market today: intelligent and challenging movies that don’t conform to overly familiar formulas. I don’t care how big the actors are, or how slick the effects are, or how dazzling the director is, if filmakers aren’t getting the audience to invest in real characters and aren’t willing to take chances that keep them off balance, then it’s just disposable mass production.  You can get away with more in horror, anyway, so why not take chances?

Ann Radcliffe, The Supernatural in Poetry

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them. I apprehend, that neither Shakspeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, though they all agree that terror is a very high one ; and where lies the great difference between horror and terror, but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?

Devendra Varma in The Gothic Flame (1966):

The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.

Sigmund Freud

Religions continue to dispute the importance of the undeniable fact of individual death to postulate a life after death…Since almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic, it is no matter of surprise that the primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation.

I saw this on the National Geographic Channel last night and it just really creeped me out. It’s the mummified body of Rosalia Lombardo, who died in 1920 and is entombed in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy. I could not get this image out of my mind, which may have led to my nightmares last night.