The Goth Vamp as Hero

Ghost House Pictures is on a roll. This partnership between magus Sam Rami (Evil Dead, Spiderman, Hercules and Xena) and Robert Tapert has been evoking some very successful movies. 30 Days of Night comes to mind. I haven't seen Drag Me To Hell, but the genre publication reviews are very good.

I recently watched GH's The Messengers, a movie set on a North Dakota farm. It was quite good, mixing computer generated poltergeists with the haunting memory of past crimes. Oh, and it had malevolent crows. You gotta love malevolent crows.  The movie combines a lot of modern anxieties: will the infant ever recover and talk? Can Dad make a go of it out here when he crashed and burned in the city?  Can we trust our teenage daughter?  It also delivers a useful warning: be careful in deciding what you should be afraid of.  It might not be the ghosts. 

Last night I watched The Children. I don't get scared by movies very often, but this one had me sitting up wide-eyed and wondering if Jane Austin wouldn't have been a better choice.

The film begins with a family reunion at an isolated house somewhere in the woods. Exactly where I couldn't tell, except that the steering wheels were on the wrong side of the cars and everyone spoke English. The house is occupied by a young couple and their two children. They have "sold their business" and retired comfortably to the countryside. Mom is pure domestic hippie, with lots of new age icons dangling everywhere, a chalk board of things to do, and gold stars for good kiddies. Dad sneaks off to smoke pot in the greenhouse.

Mom's sister arrives with husband, teenage daughter Casey, and younger children Miranda and Paulie. The film didn't make it easy to keep track of whose children were whose, but what mattered was the count: four adults, five children, and one teenage girl with straight black hair, red lipstick, and fishnet stockings below the miniskirt.

In short order the children show flu-like symptoms, then start acting strangely, and then turn homicidal. Teen vamp Casey sees it before anyone else, and of course when things go south, she is the initial target of suspicion.

The Children combines several familiar elements of modern horror fiction. Something ordinary and innocuous (in this case, little kids) suddenly becomes malevolent and deadly. See The Birds. Contagion and zombie-like behavior arise out of modern science colored by ancient fears. Since the children themselves are transformed by biological evil, the instinct to protect them becomes a fatal vulnerability.

Two things struck me as interesting about this film. One is that in incorporates a problem familiar to anyone who has raised a child or tried to housetrain a pet: you can try to modify the behavior of another animal, but you can do so only indirectly. What is going on behind those precious eyes is pure black box.

More basic to a fan of horror fiction is a transformation in the attitude toward a certain kind of hero. From the 1950's onward, the teen rebel as hero has been a staple of horror films. See Steve McQueen in The Blob. But until very recently, the moral was always the same: don't judge a book by its cover. Just because the hero has long hair, is young, has a pin in her lip, you should still listen to him or her. Crusty ole' bad adults don't listen, because they are crusty, bad and adult.

In The Messengers and The Children, the weight of responsibility shifts to the teen hero. So you want to dress in a way that is calculated to arouse alarm in adults. So you behave irresponsibly most of the time. Fine. But don't be surprised when you are the only one who sees the monsters coming and no one takes you seriously. That is an unlooked for sign of maturity in contemporary horror fiction. It also makes for pretty good plotting. If you are looking for some thoughtful chills, put these two on your Netflix cue.

Comments

[JW]

You sure do make the most of those three day weekends!

[KB]

You aren't kidding.