I agree, this is an excellent discussion.
I think you have a pretty good point here. Now, the monsters in Pitch Black didn’t really scare me, because as others have pointed out it’s such an obvious Alien ripoff; I was so distracted by the outlandish design of the creatures (hey! instead of a long head, we’ll have a wide head!), and preoccupied by trying to figure out the food chain on the planet, that I couldn’t let myself get carried away. But on the other hand, I did think the T-rex attack, and later on the raptors in the kitchen, were pretty scary.
I’ll buy this, to some degree. Notice in Jurassic Park that none of the really scary beasties is shown right away. The thing with the disappearing goat has already been noted; remember also that the velociraptors were introduced as rustling bushes around a haplessly lowered cow. In both cases, we see only their effect at first, so their attack later can be even more frightening. Spielberg knows what he’s doing when it comes to audience manipulation.
I think the dinosaurs are kind of a special case, though, because we already know what they look like. We’ve all had the picture books, or visited the natural history museum, or whatever. As a creature, it isn’t a surprise. The only shock in Jurassic Park is how freakin’ real the beasties looked. As compared to, say, Gwangi, which is obviously stop-action, and where you can see how the effects are interacting with the live-action plate, your mind has less of an imaginative leap to make. When you see comparatively “primitive” effects, there’s a moment where you must consciously let your skepticism go (the old “suspension of disbelief”) and accept the film’s reality. The original King Kong was on TCM over the weekend, and it’s hard to get more primitive than that. (Well, not really. It was followed with a 1919 silent short called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. But you get the point.) Audiences for the original Kong were, compared to us, fairly unsophisticated; the big ape didn’t look “real,” exactly, but it’s the story that puts it over the top.
Even so — and here I go contradicting myself (but the reason will become clear in a moment) — I’ll mention another scene for comparison, one that scared the crap out of me when I was eleven: Perseus in the Medusa’s chamber in Clash of the Titans. Old-school stop-action special effects, yeah, and a monster you get to see all of. In the scene, the tension is not released (or “consummated”) by the appearance of the monster, it’s escalated, because it’s so freaky. Most people don’t know this, but Ray Harryhausen basically re-invented the way the Medusa looked with that scene. Up to that point, owing to Greek tradition, the Medusa was usually portrayed as a woman with snakes in her hair. Harryhausen took that as a starting point and completely reworked the creature; his design, adding the scaly face and serpent body, has been so influential that it’s what most of us think of when we think of the monster in other contexts. My point here is that, in this case, a totally new monster can be scary on the reveal, under certain conditions.
And hey, as long as I’m contradicting my thesis, I’ll give you another one: the Gentlemen in “Hush,” the fourth-season episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Dunno if you’ve seen it, but these are the guys who rendered the town of Sunnydale mute because they were vulnerable to a human scream; the silence meant they could prey at will. Every time these guys show up, they’re truly frightening (thumbnail), but (and here’s where I come back to my original point) it’s not about what they look like, it’s how they behave. Design-wise, they’re pretty good, but what makes them really scary is the silence, and the way they glide effortlessly along without touching the ground.
Maybe that’s part of why, for me, the beasties in Pitch Black weren’t all that scary: they didn’t really do anything new. Alien pioneered the creature that didn’t growl and snarl; it had a vocabulary of hisses and squeals we hadn’t heard before. Once that’s done, it’s done. The creatures in Pitch Black just skulk around and kill. Seeeen it. Somebody else mentioned 28 Days Later, which riffs on zombie conventions, except that these guys sprint rather than shuffle, and the infection takes hold with alarming rapidity; the movie gets a lot of mileage out of these simple differences. It does, however, get old after a while: All they do is run at you and kill you. Again — seeen it.
Compare, for example, that flesh-peeling demon from Buffy in season seven. Design-wise, nothing special; he looks like a supporting character in Legend. But his actual behavior is deeply disturbing: he paralyzes his victims and slowly peels off strips of their skin to eat while they lie helpless and terrified. Or look at the Thing in John Carpenter’s movie of the same name: Every time it appears, you get a pretty good look at it, except that each time you don’t know where it’s coming from or what it’s going to look like in this incarnation. The bit where the guy with the defibrillator gets his wrists chomped, for instance, counts as one of my top-ten horror moments of all time.
The point of all of this is that horror, in my opinion, really works is when the source of the terror cannot be entirely comprehended. In some movies, that means you don’t show the monster. In other movies, by contrast, while you may see the monster, you can’t quite wrap your head around it. In The Thing, you sort of know what’s going on in the abstract, but you don’t know what the monster “really” looks like or how it’s going about its business. It’s unknown, and hence it’s terrifying.
Or look at The Wicker Man, a horror movie that doesn’t even have a “monster” in the conventional sense. For the first hour of the movie, you’re thinking, okay, this is kind of strange, but why the heck does this movie have the reputation it does? And then the police inspector steps over the top of the hill, and everything falls into place, and your brain explodes. You know, in a sense of “the story on paper,” what is going on, but trying to actually understand it, to make sense of it so it can be placed in context of what you know as the real world, is impossible. This is horror in the true sense of the word: not “gotcha!” shocks, the slasher surprises that are mislabeled as and pass for horror these days. It’s horror in that it freaks you out and shoves a splinter of unresolvable uncertainty into the comfortable skin of your reality.
So perhaps “showing” the monster is the wrong terminology. It might be better to say “explaining” the monster. Part of what’s wrong with modern horror, in my opinion, is that there isn’t much to the average monster beyond the threat to life and limb. It doesn’t really matter what the monster looks like if all it’s doing is lurking in the shadows and killing people if they get too close. But if the monster is doing something else — gestating in the chest before bursting free (Alien), or taking control of ordinary people and making them do nasty things (as in the Japanese horror movie Cure, which works really well up until a lame ending), or causing so much sheer fright to somebody that they die without being touched (as in The Ring), or otherwise threatening not just our bodies and blood but our actual relationship with the world in a manner that we can’t rationally grasp, then that can be scary.
I know this is long and convoluted. Does it make sense?
