Do horror movies pull their punches? *MAJOR* spoilers about "The Others"

Cafe Society
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OK, I just watched “The Others” and as usual a couple of things ‘whooshed’ me. This is coming from the guy who Didn’t get the huge plot twist in ‘The Sixth Sense’ even when it was revealed - yes I do get it now. 1) What was with the having to close one door of a room before opening another?

  1. What about the light sensitivity of the children? Was this a real illness they had when they were alive, or just a plot device to allow lots of shadowy flickering candle-lit rooms? Or was it because they were dead and didn’t like sunlight?

  2. Why did Nicole Kidman kill her children in the first place?

OK, now we’ve got that out of the way, I have another question. Whenever I watch a horror film, not that I’m a great fan of the genre, there seems to be lots of things the director could have done that would have scared me way more. It’s as if the director is pulling his punches to avoid scaring viewers too much. They always make good use of certain cinemographic devices - e.g. seeing something happening in a mirror behind one of the characters or a door handle being turned from the other side of the door.

But there are way scarier things (IMHO). For example - builld up a ton of tension, then suddenly fill the screen with a really scary face. Or - character looks under the bed and really does see something under there (would resonate with many childhood terrors.) -Or- (I recall this one was used in ‘Amityville’) character looks out of a window into the darkened garden, sees just a couple of red eyes staring back at her. Or - anyone remember the creepy British sci-fi series from the 70s, “Sapphire And Steel”? There was one episode where the evil entity was in the form of a guy with no face - just a smooth surface on the front of his head - for me that was one of the scariest characters I ever saw.

So, what do you think?

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So no light will spill in from other rooms.

It appears to have been a real illness during their lifetimes. Note, when the maid finally pulled down the curtains, the children reacted as if they expected to be harmed. Of course they weren’t, as they were already dead

She went crazy? Grief at the loss of her husband in the war and the children were too much a reminder of him? Too much time spent together in oppressive darkness and she couldn’t take the pressure anymore?

Umm, the director did exactly that when the medium opened up the bureau near the end. Scared the crap out of the entire theatre, IIRC.

Although it’s a matter of individual sensibilities, for the most part the unknown is far more terrifying than the known. One of the scariest ghost stories I’ve seen on film was the original The Haunting (1961) (definitely not the horrid 1999 remake) in which we see nothing of what haunts Hill House. Turning door knobs, throbbing walls, etc. were incredibly effective at building tension so that when we are treated to a climactic “boo” moment my heart just about stopped. Actually, The Others was directly inspired by The Haunting both in tone and subject matter.

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Note: spoilers abound (of course if you’ve gotten this far into this thread, you’d probably would’ve seen them by now).

The fact Kidman killed her children and herself was probably the most disturbing aspect of this movie. As for her reasons, the story is rather (deliberately?) vague and I get the impression there may have been more of an explanation in an earlier draft of the script. However, there are a few scenes that I think shed some light on what might’ve happened. In one scene, Kidman admonishes her children when, after reading aloud a story about Christian martyrs, they tell her that they thought it was dumb for the children in the story to openly admit to the Roman officials that they were Christians when it resulted in their execution. In a later scene, after Kidman’s husband tells her he’s leaving again, she refers to the fact that the Channel Islands surrendered to the Nazis. This might suggest that Kidman’s character in some way collaborated with the Nazis when they occupied the island and, as a result, she became such a pariah to the other islanders that they all avoided her (e.g., early in the movie, they refer to the fact that the priest refuses to go to the house). Soon, the guilt and the isolation–compounded with the children’s condition, her husband’s absence, and the constant gloominess of the house–were too much for her to bear. (Of course, that’s how I saw it. I might be way off base on these assumptions.)

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Ah - the closing the doors so light wouldn’t leak in from the next room makes sense - though I don’t remember them explaining that in the movie. I was thinking it would be something way more sinister.

I agree with what was said about the implied being scarier than the obvious. I wonder if horror movie directors really put the scariest thing they can imagine into the movie, though, or if they hold back for whatever reason.

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The Others would have been much scarier if not for the corny line delivered by the maid halfway in, in which she addresses “Mr. Tuttle” (or some other such goofy name that they gave the guy) in a goofy voice.

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It’s a real, but rare disease called Xeroderma Pigmentosum. They did explain the disease and why the doors had to be closed. Grace compared it to a ship; instead of sealing out water, they were sealing out light. However, the first time she instructs the servants about the doors, she gave no explanation. The kids really had this problem when they were alive, but did not realize they no longer had it in death. The director used this disease to keep Grace’s character isolated, and to give the house a creepy feel by keeping it dark in the daytime.

Grace went crazy and killed her kids. She was a control and order freak. She was isolated, her children required special attention, and her husband was killed in the war. The servants quitting was probably the last straw, although I wonder if the servants really did leave, or could she not see them because the servants were still alive, and Grace was dead…

As horror movies go, this one is in my top 10. It’s exactly what I like in a ghost story. YMMV

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Oh yeah, those kids deserved Oscars for their performance!

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Cool! I didn’t realize it was a real disease; I thought it was just another symptom of Grace’s craziness.

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I’m probably making the movie more complicated than it already is but I think there was more to what Grace did than her simply being a control and order freak. The first time I saw the scene where Grace scolds the children for saying that they would’ve denied Christ if questioned by the Romans, I immediately thought of the people living in occupied countries during WWII who denied their former allegiances in the face of their Nazi conquerors. The movie brought that into play during Grace’s conversation with her husband when they mentioned the island’s surrender. (Historical note: the place where “The Others” takes place–the Channel Islands–was occupied by the Germans during the war.) The servants might’ve quit because they were disgusted by Grace’s hinted-at collaboration with the Germans. (Although the movie never fully explains why thereby leaving it to the viewer’s interpretation.) Also, the mention by Grace of “children’s limbo” (i.e., a place where children who deny Christ in order to save themselves go when they die) corresponds with the house itself being “limbo”–Grace was there because she went against her beliefs in a misguided attempt to protect herself and her children (who she later ended up murdering).

Of course, as I said earlier, this is just my theory. Feel free to blast away at it if you want. (However, I would like to see an earlier draft of the script for “The Others” just to see if that’s where they were originally going.)

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It’s an interesting idea. I never made that connection. I do remember though, that Grace stated the germans never set foot in her house.
I feel that scene was to bring out her beliefs in limbo and purgatory (amongst other Catholic ideas), which the film sort of compares to superstitions such as keeping pictures of dead people.

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First off, I LOVED this film. Loved it. Loved it, loved it. And I’m really not into horror movies. But it was so brilliant - cinematically beautiful, well written, convincingly acted, etc. - that I was really impressed. Scary as hell, too - just reading this thread gave me goosebumps.

And now, my remarks -
SPOILERS (of course)

It never occurred to me that the children might actually have been light sensitive. I had always thought it was something Grace had taught them, in the misguided belief that it was for their own safety - she told them from earliest childhood they were allergic to light, so that she’d always be able to keep them locked up, and thus protect them. It would fit with her control issues and general emotional chaos. Did the film ever indicate for sure whether the children WERE sick, or could it have been a little hypochondria-by-proxy on Grace’s part? …Of course, I guess they could have been sick while they were alive and this would go a long way toward explaining why Grace went nuts.

One thing I found especially interesting was that they never did explain why Grace killed the kids and herself (hence the OP’s 3rd question). In real life, these things often aren’t explained, and I think it would have cheapened the movie to have it spelled out for us (though many films would have). Better to leave it unsaid, and give the audience a chance to try and plumb the scary depths of Grace’s mind. My read is, she was pent up all alone in this huge, dark house, during a terribly frightening time in history, her husband had just been killed, and she was left with two kids that she was in no way equipped to care for.
The whole kit and kaboodle should have gotten Oscars.

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I agree with what Hodge says here. It’s a long-standing tenet of the horror genre that what you don’t see can scare you far more than what you do see… because you can imagine far worse things than most media (movies in particular) can convey effectively.

The Haunting is an excellent example of this. I would add that the George C. Scott film The Changeling works on this principle as well, as do The Entity and The Blair Witch Project (which relied more on sound than visuals). Even Forbidden Planet uses elements of this well. Jacob’s Ladder is my favorite horror film for this reason – any hints of monsters or demons in the film are vague at best, and you never get a good look at what Jacob Singer is seeing, though what little you do see sure looks scary as hell.

The movie Signs is perhaps the best example of what you’re saying… most of the film is spent without ever getting a good look at the aliens, until the end. Everything up until that point is very tense and frightening, because you haven’t yet seen anything. Once you see the alien, your mind can put away all of what it was imagining and say, “Oh, is that all? Pffft.”

Once the monster is seen and known, the mind can encapsulate it. Until then… the possibilities are limitless, and the fear runs deep.

I kind of suspected the same thing myself… The Haunting is still far better, though. The Others was a good horror film, but didn’t really scare me much. It was good in an academic sort of way. And Nicole Kidman didn’t annoy me nearly as much as she usually does. grin

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I’m with Lost4Life on assessing this movie, although I would up the ante by listing it as one of my top 5. Particularly for the unrelentingly dark atmosphere and the great twist. Actually, re the kid actors, I have to give props to make-up; it creeped me out just to look at them. Also, am I the only one who was disturbed with the psycho mother forcing her kids to repeat something like, ‘This is our house. We will never leave?’ To me, the theme of control was at thr root of this flick. For whatever reason, the kids were kept in dark, locked places with movement allowed between rooms only under the most extreme sets of rules. The girl was forced to stand on the stairs and read from the bible for telling the truth and both were proscribed in what they could say or believe and then finally killed (ultimate control). But I think the notion that this kind of control can extend beyond the grave – even to the point of denying children heaven (and surely that is implied by her getting them to chant the above) – was most terrifying of all.

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BTW, I got the impression that the servants left because Nicole and kids were dead. Therefore, they didn’t have a job there anymore. Nicole and kids just didn’t realize it. The main point of the movie was that their new circumstances hadn’t sunk in yet. At least that’s what I got out of it.

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That’s something I forgot. Still, that doesn’t mean Grace didn’t say something to the Germans that indicated she didn’t object to their occupation. I think the Nazis would’ve been more likely to invade the house of someone who was openly resisting as opposed to someone who seemed friendly. If Grace was in the latter camp, there would’ve been no reason for the Nazis to set foot in there.

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I believe Steven King addressed this issue in his non-fiction book about the horror genre, Danse Macabre. He calls it “letting the cat out of the bag” and agrees that there’s a great risk for the artist here in that once something is revealed it may very well not live up to the audiences imaginations. And yet, if the artist tries to circumvent expectations by refusing to reveal anything, he risks raising the audience’s ire (see the large amounts of invective heaped upon the excellent, IMHO, Blair Witch Project) This is a big reason why I’m so fascinated by the genre. It requires a very fine balancing act.

Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, especially when it comes to monster movies and not ghost stories.

For anyone who loves The Others, I highly recommend that they track down the above-referenced The Haunting as well as another movie I should have mentioned earlier called The Innocents (1961). It’s an adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and shares even more parallels with The Others than it does with The Haunting. Deborah Kerr plays a governess who’s been hired to look after a young brother and sister in an isolated English country manor. Sound familiar? These movies share the same gothic aesthetic and disturbing psychological undertones and, AFAIC, all three are among the best of the genre.

BTW, Avalonian, we seem to be following each other around Cafe Society, recently. Apparently, we both share the same excellent taste.

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It does seem that way, doesn’t it? grin

I also loved The Blair Witch Project, specifically because it operated on the principle of showing almost nothing. I get quickly annoyed with films that rely on showing too much, and it makes me enjoy films that make a point of showing as little as possible

[hijack]Have you seen the second Blair Witch movie yet? I hear it’s terrible, though I haven’t gotten round to renting it yet.[/hijack]

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Hodge beat me to the Danse Macabre reference by a few minutes. As I recall, King is talking about revealing “the monster at the bottom of the stairs” or something, a typical horror setup. If, when the door opens, it’s a thirty-foot monster, that’s pretty bad, but the audience might say, hey, it could have been a forty-foot monster. If it’s a forty-foot monster, it could have been a fifty-footer. And so on.

I also agree about The Blair Witch Project. That movie scared the piss out of me, while it bored other people to tears. The thing is, it doesn’t show you everything; you have to put yourself in the situation and interpolate between the data points. Yes, it’s a tiny stretch of woods, and no, they shouldn’t be lost. But that’s all the movie tells you. I conclude supernatural interference. Other viewers, given the exact same information, conclude that the protagonists are idiots. Both conclusions are perfectly reasonable given the evidence in the film; different viewers will respond according to their personal storytelling preferences.

I don’t think horror directors pull their punches. I think filmmakers do, legitimately, try their best to make the audience wet its collective pants. However, actually frightening people in a movie theatre is very, very difficult (as opposed to startling them, or grossing them out, both of which are easy).

Consider the recent The Ring, which I thought was a mixed bag, overall. There was some wonderfully creepy, disturbing stuff in it (much of which was borrowed from the Japanese original, but let’s disregard that for now), such asthe surprise of prying the fly out of the TV monitor.That isn’t scary, necessarily, but it does serve to slowly pull the rug of comfortable reality out from underneath us. What the movie did quite well, I think, was to combine mundane elements in unexpected ways, in order to keep you off-balance; the bit withthe horse on the ferryboatmade the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Unfortunately, there was a bunch of other stuff that just plain didn’t work, such asthe untouched loft in the barn, complete with the decades-old but operational and still-rotating carousel lampthat sadly pushed the movie back toward convention and cliche, and undercut the film’s effectiveness as a whole.

The alternative to The Ring’s minimalist approach is the over-the-top visual feast, as in the 1999 remake of The Haunting. I’ve compared that to Blair Witch on these boards many times, as they represent the polar opposites of the genre. The Haunting shows you everything. I, personally, found it tedious and predictable and not at all frightening. But based on the vocalizations in the cinema, others felt differently, screaming and twitching and hiding their heads. Those are the folks who need to see the beastie, to have the threat made tangible and physical in order for them to register it. Different strokes for different folks, and all that.

The point is, there isn’t a single approach that works for all viewers. It’s quite literally impossible to formulate a single movie that would scare everybody, equally. I was creeped out by Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure, while others were bored to tears. By the same token, the Scream movies did almost nothing for me, while others labeled them the rebirth of modern horror.

I guess I just have to shrug.

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Actually, The Ring is the only horror movie that has recently disturbed me. I mean it… I was jumpy for a week.

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I tried to read The Turn of the Screw and couldn’t get through it. Will somebody please tell me what the heck was going on and how it ended?