How Freddy Krueger changed horror movies

http://movie-critics.ew.com/2010/04/30/how-freddy-krueger-changed-horror/

Apr 30, 2010
How Freddy Krueger changed horror movies
by Owen Gleiberman

At some point in the 1980s, probably around the time of the fourth or fifth Friday the 13th sequel, I realized that horror movies had, in effect, become comedies. It was all part of a ritual. You went out to the multiplex with your buddies, or maybe on a date, to see the latest by-the-numbers blood feast in which a sick young man in a goalie mask devised creative new ways to gouge and dismember a series of good- looking and eminently dispensable bad actors. In theory, everyone in the audience was there to be scared, to be shocked into fear by the awesome savagery on display. Yet these movies, in the space of about five years, had grown so formulaic, so predictable in their extremity and slaughter, that their very “terror” had turned fatally campy.

And so the audience cowered, and trembled a bit, and jumped out of their seats — and laughed. We laughed at the giddy fun of being scared, but also at the sheer dumb corny roteness of those hulking, heavy-breathing faux-brute killers. The predictability of it all was funny, and maybe borderline insulting, a kind of shared in-joke. On some level, it was all about the comic high of feeling superior — to the victims on screen, and to your own anxieties. Don’t go in the attic! Oh, look, he’s going in the attic! Watch that friggin’ dumb-ass get what he deserves!“

But until A Nightmare on Elm Street, in 1984, we were all laughing at these movies, not with them. Freddy Krueger changed all that. Apart from the fact that he was a ghost who slaughtered you not in the basement or some godforsaken cabin but in your dreams, he certainly did have plenty in common with Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, the two superstars of slasherdom. (Leatherface, the godather of them all, was a far greater screen character, but at that point The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was still a cult film, under the radar for most of the mass audience. Why, it hadn’t even spawned a sequel!) Yet Jason and Michael, in their angry, wordless, bruised-adolescent way, were straight men, lugs with machetes. Freddy, with his leer and his cackle and his slightly goofy scarecrow look, was a showman, a snarky demon clown, a burlesque master of ceremonies. In his first big scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street, he holds his arms out wide, like a wall-shadow parody of a boogeyman, then mockingly slices off two of his own fingers. A new kind of killer has arrived. He’s not just here to scare you — he’s here to have a good time doing it. Let’s party!

I should point out that there are many, many precedents to Freddy Krueger’s antic high comedy of evil-as-fun. Back in 1964, Herschell Gordon Lewis, the trash visionary who invented the splatter film, made his masterpiece of drive-in gore, Two Thousand Maniacs, and if you’ve never had a chance to see it, by all means get hold of a copy (it’s out on DVD). Set in a Southern small town whose residents take revenge on a pack of Yankee visitors by slaughtering them in gruesomely kooky ways, it’s an all-out funny monster-redneck bash. Texas Chainsaw was definitely influenced by it, and so, perhaps, was Sam Raimi when he made the Evil Dead films. The granddaddy of the slasher genre — and the greatest horror film ever made — is Psycho, which Pauline Kael (even though she never much cared for it) aptly described as “a gothic horror comedy.” The comedy is there in the movie’s shower-curtain-pulled-out-from-under-you slyness — but also, quite directly, in the character of Mrs. Bates, with her mockingly exaggerated scolding whine of a voice. Speaking of homicidal harridans, you can trace Freddy Krueger’s sinister, grinning gamesmanship right back to Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West, when she lights Ray Bolger’s arm and cackles, “How about a little fire, Scarecrow?”

All of these films know, on some basic level, that horror is comedy (or can be). What set Freddy Krueger apart is that, as played by Robert Englund (with madcap inspiration), he was at once the movie’s monster and its vaudeville host, standing outside the action, saying, in essence, “Get a load of this! Get a load of me!” (In that sense, the age of horror-as-one-liner snark probably started the moment that Jack Nicholson poked his head through the door in the The Shining and said, with bug-house sarcasm, “Here’s Johnny!”) That stylized circus-ringmaster quality only grew as the Nightmare on Elm Street series went on. By the time of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), the best movie in the series apart from the first one, Freddy popped up as a kind of giant slime-snake, looking like nothing so much as a float in the homecoming parade. He couldn’t smash a girl’s face into a television set without rasping “This is it, Jennifer! Your big break in TV! Welcome to prime time, bitch!” At that point, the audience was definitely having fun — and, in effect, rooting for the killer. Like Freddy, we, too, were standing outside the action, watching ourselves watch Freddy scare us, and laughing at the whole fun-house charade.

Of course, it’s not as if horror movies after Freddy just became comedies. By and large, they went back to being played straight. Yet what had begun in the days of those junky and interchangeable slasher flicks, and what Freddy more or less officially locked into place, was the garish, low-comedy, eye-rolling disposability of the horror genre. It wasn’t so much that horror films could now be funny. (Many of the best ones, from Psycho to Night of the Living Dead to Chainsaw to Carrie, had always been funny.) It was that horror films were now almost defiantly movies not to take seriously. Freddy ushered in an era where you almost had to laugh at them, or the joke was on you.

How Psycho changed cinema

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8593508.stm

Thursday, 1 April 2010
How Psycho changed cinema
Stephen Robb
BBC News

It's 50 years since Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was unleashed on a soon-to-be-terrified world. Even if you've never seen the film you've probably been exposed to its extensive influence.
Alfred Hitchcock had made his name as the "master of suspense" with brilliant, glossy thrillers like Rear Window and North by Northwest, but Psycho was altogether different - the like of which most cinema-goers had never seen.

With its shocking bursts of violence and provocative sexual explicitness, Psycho tested the strict censorship boundaries of the day as well as audiences' mettle - and it gave Hitchcock the biggest hit of his career.

Awakened to the box office potential of violence and sex, mainstream filmmakers followed suit. Here is how Psycho changed cinema:

GRAPHIC VIOLENCE

The 45-second shower murder in Psycho is possibly the most famous scene in cinema history.

David Thomson, author of The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, has said it still ranks "legitimately among the most violent scenes ever shot for an American film". According to the book Story of the Scene, by Roger Clarke, it "changed cinema forever".

For the film's first three-quarters of an hour the audience has followed Janet Leigh's Marion Crane, building engagement with the film's supposed central character.

Then in an electrifyingly brutal scene, as Marion readies herself for bed with a shower in the decrepit Bates Motel, she is hacked to death by a barely-glimpsed old woman.

THE SHOWER SCENE

Most of the film was shot quickly with a crew from television, but the 70-plus shots for this 45-second scene took a week to film
To get the scene past the censors Hitchcock claimed the knife never touched the victim, but studies have since suggested it does
Chocolate sauce was used for blood, and the hand holding the knife in some shots is Hitchcock's
Janet Leigh said she avoided taking showers for the rest of her life after filming Psycho
Source: Story of the Scene by Roger Clarke
"They [audiences] had never seen anything quite like it before - the total shock of killing off a lead character a third of the way in, and just the complete feeling of disorientation," says Michael Brooke, Screenonline curator at the British Film Institute.

Psycho was filmed in black and white - unusual for Hitchcock by that stage of his career - partly to cut costs, but also to manage the graphicness of this scene. Hitchcock knew he would not get shots of red blood splattering the wall and floor past the censors of the time.

"The shower scene in colour in 1960 would have just been unshowable," says Mr Brooke.

Psycho "opened the floodgates" for screen violence, says Mr Brooke, paving the way for the slow-motion bloodshed of Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch in the late 60s, up to today's torture porn of Hostel and the Saw films.

Though "watching the film, you think it's a lot more graphically violent than it actually is".

It is a mark of the shift in levels of violence in cinema that Psycho, given an adults-only "X" certificate in the UK in 1960, now carries a relatively tame "15" rating.

SYMPATHY FOR THE KILLER

Arguably the film's most appealing character is Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, the awkward, softly-spoken young man resignedly running the declining family motel and caring for his abusive, invalid mother.

After Leigh's slaughter, the film switches to Bates' point of view and the audience is invited to sympathise with his agonising dilemma over concealing his mother's horrific crime.

"There is that scene just after the shower murder when the car is sinking into the swamp and it pauses momentarily," says Mr Brooke, "and in a weird kind of way you almost want it to carry on sinking. You don't want him to be discovered even though he is covering up this hideous murder."

Mummy's boy - Bates' character was meant to draw viewers' sympathy

The effect was to toy with audiences' sympathies in a way mainstream thrillers hadn't done before.

Psycho is considered the first modern horror film and credited with launching the "slasher" sub-genre. But Paul Duncan, author of The Pocket Essential Alfred Hitchcock, argues its greatest legacy is the shifting point of view that became a common device of the slashers.

Most of Hitchcock's peers worked in the "third person", positioning their camera as a detached, neutral observer of the film's events, says Mr Duncan, whereas Hitchcock's "first person" camera allied his audience inescapably to key characters.

"That, I think, is probably the most copied aspect of Hitchcock's movies," he says.

John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween, whose considerable debt to Psycho is emphasised by the presence of Leigh's daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in the lead role, is a "very good example of point of view camera being used brilliantly", he adds.

Don't give away the ending - it's the only one we have!
Psycho promotional slogan

Having switched the film's point of view to Norman, Hitchcock has manoeuvred his audience exactly where he wants them for the film's shattering, shock twist.

"With all the information you are given you believe him to be innocent, and you identify with his crisis," says Mr Duncan.

SEXUAL EXPLICITNESS

The film opens on the skyline of Phoenix, Arizona, on a hot December day, the camera panning lazily across the rooftops before casually zooming in through a window to a hotel room where - unmistakably - an underwear-clad Leigh and shirtless John Gavin have made love moments earlier.

RELEASE OF PSYCHO

To keep secret the film's final twist, Psycho was not screened for critics or cinema-owners before release
Unusually for the time, cast and crew had been made to sign non-disclosure agreements preventing them speaking about the film
No-one was allowed into the cinema once the film had started - enforced by uniformed guards, this was an extraordinary measure in an era when people were used to coming and going during theatres' continuous programmes
These first moments are almost a statement of intent from Hitchcock. "He was quite deliberately testing the waters as far as the censors were concerned with the film," says Mr Brooke.

"It took what had previously been only suggestive sexual undercurrents and made them absolutely upfront."

At that time most US studio films were constrained by the puritanical Production Code, which dated from the 1930s and restricted depictions of sex, drug use, drinking, offensive language and anything else that could "lower the moral standards of those who see it".

When he was unable to secure financing for Psycho from studios fearful of the film's potential for controversy, prompting him to put up 60% of a scaled-down budget of less than $1m himself, the director found himself with an opportunity to work outside the restrictions of the studio system and deliver an exploitation film Hitchcock-style.

The overt sexuality of the film's sightings of Leigh in her underwear, the shocking violence - even a shot of a flushing toilet - were radical in commercial cinema at the time.

And while there had usually been varying amounts of humour in Hitchcock's films, it had never before been combined with such dark, violent material as in Psycho. Today, that pioneering blend of shocks and laughs is notably evident in the films of Quentin Tarantino.

USE OF MUSIC

The violins wailing away during Psycho's shower murder scene have achieved the status of cultural shorthand - denoting imminent violent insanity.

Their importance to the impact of that terrifying scene is emphasised by the fact that at pre-release screenings of a cut of the film before the music was added, many viewers reacted with mild indifference.

"It was only with the second version, with the music added, that people just leapt out of their seats - especially when the shrieking violins started," says Mr Brooke.

The most memorable part of Bernard Herrmann's score has now been imitated to the point of being "one of the all-time aural cliches", he adds.

The great director - Hitchcock put much of his own money into the film

But the entire soundtrack is integral to the mood of the film, from the blast of strings over the opening credits onwards, says Mr Brooke.

Its influence can particularly be seen in films that use music to evoke a sense of menace and heighten sudden shocks, such as Jaws.

This is not the only way in which Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster, in turn massively influential itself, bears the influence of Psycho, says Mr Brooke.

"When they made Jaws, one of the stated aims was they wanted to make America's beaches as empty as American motel showers were when Psycho came out."

How's `Hancock' stack up among movie twists?

http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/ap/20080707/121543770000.html

How's `Hancock' stack up among movie twists?
Monday July 7, 2008

A Will Smith movie packs in millions of people over Fourth of July weekend. No surprises there.

Yet Smith's "Hancock," the tale of an anti-social boozer who happens to be a superhero, comes with an abrupt plot twist, one that has divided critics and the moviegoing public in the real world (Critics and everyone else can't agree. Now there's a real surprise).

For those who have yet to see "Hancock," we won't give the secret away, but it has something to do with why Charlize Theron's soccer-mom-style character doesn't want Smith's surly superhero anywhere near her family.

Critics generally thought the turn the movie takes halfway through was a cheat, spoiling what had been a promising idea that was a fresh twist on the superhero genre in its own right.

The people who turned "Hancock" into an instant blockbuster beg to differ to the sum of $185 million worldwide at the box office in just a few days.

The plot twist in "Hancock" won't go down in cinema history alongside Darth Vader revealing he's Luke Skywalker's pappy in "The Empire Strikes Back" or Anthony Perkins turning out to be a slasher in his mom's housedress in "Psycho."

However, it does give us a chance to buzz once more about the really great curve balls and maybe a wild pitch or two that Hollywood has tossed our way.

Here's a look at some of the most memorable screen surprises, in no particular order:

MY GIRL: Has there ever been a stranger what-the-heck moment than the revelation that the enticing woman Stephen Rea lusts after in "The Crying Game" really is a guy? The dreamlike gotcha gesture delivered from beyond by Forest Whitaker's character was directed as much at male audiences everywhere who had to hit the reset button on their manhood after falling for Jaye Davidson as a hot new screen goddess only to learn he shared their XY chromosome makeup.

THE SECRET INGREDIENT IS US: How do you turn an utterly forgettable movie into one for the ages? Let Charlton Heston learn that the super-food of the future is made of humans so he can bellow "Soylent Green is PE-E-E-OPLE!" And don't forget the "Saturday Night Live" skit about a "Soylent Green" sequel where Phil Hartman impersonates Heston, learning that the powers that be didn't change the recipe like they promised, so he can holler "It's still PE-E-E-OPLE!"

HEAD IN THE SAND: Heston gets to curse out humanity in general in "Planet of the Apes" as he stumbles on the noggin of the Statue of Liberty lying on the beach and realizes he's been on Earth all along but in the distant future, after his species has blown itself up. Tim Burton's remake substitutes a terrible twist as astronaut Mark Wahlberg makes it off the simian world and returns to his planet, only to find a monkey named "Ape Lincoln" sitting on the Lincoln Memorial.

POOR BRUCE IS DEAD: With "Breakfast of Champions" and "The Story of Us," Bruce Willis' career might have been dead. But M. Night Shyamalan kept him alive by killing him off in the opening moments of "The Sixth Sense" but concealing that fact so completely that movie-goers were shocked into seeing the flick again and again after they learned he was a ghost. Audiences were somewhat less than shocked with Shyamalan and Willis' next surprise ending superheroes are real! in "Unbreakable."

READY FOR MY SHOWER, MR. HITCHCOCK: Perkins as his own mother has enduring shock value, but Alfred Hitchcock pulled a true stunner earlier in "Psycho" as the killer snuffed Janet Leigh, the movie's lead character up to that moment. That's like Dickens having Oliver Twist die of cholera in chapter three. Who do you root for when the heroine gets tossed in the trunk of her car and submerged in a swamp?

KEYSER SPACEY: As prime suspect Gabriel Byrne lay dying near the end of "The Usual Suspects," you just had to wonder "Well if it's not him, who the heck is Keyser Soze?" Watching Kevin Spacey transform from the grubby, gimpy little Verbal Kint into world-class criminal mastermind Soze in the space of one city block is one of those moments that makes you think "Yeah, this is why I like movies."

MY SISTER, MY MOM: Incest turns out to be the stuff of one of cinema's most artful surprises at the end of "Chinatown," when we learn that Faye Dunaway's little sister also is her daughter. And we get to see Jack Nicholson slap the information out of her repeatedly in a climax that's nothing short of a gut-punch.

MISSION IMPERTINENT: Speaking of slaps in the face, arguably the worst plot twist ever comes in Tom Cruise's first "Mission: Impossible" tale. Millions grew up watching Peter Graves' noble Jim Phelps run the Impossible Mission Force on the small screen. So when Jon Voight's Phelps turns out to be the bad guy in Cruise's version, it was disrespectful of both the source material and its fans. Why didn't Cruise just play Phelps himself, but as the hero everyone remembered the character for? Maybe Cruise was afraid that, like Graves, he would wind up hosting episodes of "Biography" in his golden years.