I’m working on a couple pitches right now for comics anthologies. Since I’m generally interested in the gruesome these days, that’s where the pitches are leaning. Horror stories. So I been thinking about ‘em. Reading old DC Comics’ House of Mystery stories. Watching freaky flicks recommended by friends. Just generally getting in the mode you know? It’s been pretty natural coming up with freaky, ooky, grotesque concepts. That seems to be the easy part. Nailing down that ick factor. That sort of unusual angle on something familiar that makes you squirm. But what’s the motivation behind it all? What’s the trick that makes these things tick?
So I saw a couple of horror-ish flicks that made me think about it, how they each had a weird world that they are developing, but needed to come up with some reason behind it. The Machinist follows a freakishly skinny Christian Bale as a factory worker who hasn’t slept for a year, and is watching his life fall apart around him. He gets caught up in a Lynch-ian mindfuck mystery of paranoia, which is you know, great. Freaky dude, trying to figure out who’s fucking with him, that’s a fun ride for a narrative. But what’s the why motivating him?
Then I watched Bug. This was about a paranoid woman, living by herself in a crappy motel, hiding out from her ex-con husband who may or may not have been released on parole. But then this strange drifter comes into her life who may or may not be infested by bugs, of both the creepy crawly and the spook variety.
Both these flicks were, well, weird as hell, surreal at parts as their characters took em to increasingly gross places. But what held them together was that smash of real, that fragment of motivation in the back of each of their protagonist’s life that they were trying to find. A bit like Memento, how he’s trying to find that piece of himself. Each of the main characters, in this case the machinist, and Ashley Judd’s bug-ridden heroine, each of them were recovery from some real-life trauma in their past. Something human. Something cripplingly real in the way tragedy strikes the lives of any normal person. And for each of them, the resolution of this mystery is I think what made them work, or not.
This is what I think is part of the glue of a good horror story; that element of real repressed trauma from life, which then are extrapolated and metaphorically enacted by the fantasy elements of the story. But it always returns to that trauma. The return of the repressed. We need to know that awful things happen for a reason. Which makes horror movies sort of therapy, as the characters reach for the light at the end of the tunnel, the recognition, the reconciliation with their shattered pasts, even if means embracing their death.
How much more crippling would it be if they failed in their journey, perhaps which could be said to seen of a film like The Descent. Or perhaps if the horrible, the metaphorical forced upon them was without cause at all? I can’t tell which would be worse. The link to the real makes it something you can relate to. Hits close to home. Gets you in the guts, in the way that pure causality might not be able.
Anyway, see Bug and you tell me.
