By Beom Joon Baek
“I’ll be back in a minute.” That’s
what they always say in the movies. A blonde jock says to his blonde girlfriend
that he’ll check out what’s going on outside. He leaves. Only the prom queen is
in the room. She hears some muffled noise outside, but something eerie is in
the air. “What was that?” She turns around, just to see a bird on the tree
branch. “Damn, shouldn’t have watched that crappy horror movie. Where’s Ethan
anyway?” She need not have to question that no longer, for she sees his
head the next second. Just his head. And a masked man with a bloody axe on his
hand. She looks beyond the mask, beyond the eyes of the unknown, and for the first
time in her life, she feels the cold smell of air.
That’s how a typical horror movie.
With a typical jock and a typical prom queen, with a typical serial killer,
with the typical story of sex and death, horror films have dominated our sense
of guilt and pleasure at the same time. As Halloween is just around the corner,
horror movies are going to be a quite a sensation. However, for the sake of
good Halloween, and for the sake of protecting the minds of Daewon students
from the nefarious influences of watching a crappy horror rip-off, this is a list
of four horror films that you may have heard about, but didn’t had
the guts to see for yourself.
The first film that will haunt you
for the rest of your lives is the horror classic The Shining. Based on Stephen King’s eponymous novel, it was
directed by the legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Jack Torrance, played by
Jack Nicholson, is a down-to-his-luck writer who accepts a part-time stint as
the manager of a local hotel during its winter. He brings his wife Wendy and
his son Danny along. The relative peace of the hotel deteriorates as Danny
starts to have “the shining,” the ability to see ghosts that haunt the hotel.
However, the true horror of this film is not the ghosts:;
it is us, the humans. As the inherent tension within the hotel begins to
manifest itself in the most grotesque ways, murder lurks within those
inside. In order to describe the
movie, it is imperative to know the enigmatic director who made it.. Stanley
Kubrick was the Steve Jobs of filmmaking. His filmography is, contrarily to the
other renowned directors like Spielberg and Kurosawa, known for its brevity. Of
his career spanning half a decade, he only made 16 films, relatively not a huge
number. However, it was his zealous perfectionism that made him the jack of all
trades. His masterpieces would range from black comedy (Dr. Strangelove) to war (Full
Metal Gear) and science fiction (2001
Space Odyssey). The key to success wasn’t that he was a genius; he was
literally a paranoid director who could not care less about the means, just as
long as he got the ends. One infamous instance could be found in The Shining. The movie’s female
protagonist, Shelley Duvall, could simply not act as the director wanted her
to. So, he would abuse the fellow actress, both physically and mentally.
Bullying proved to be his superior weapon against her, turning all the crew and
the producers on her. Then he moved to physical level, where the director,
furious and fastidious about one shout, tried to rip Duvall’s whole hair, just
for the sake of directing. Duvall went beyond what a normal actress could cope
with,, and her reactions during the whole movie, like when Jack tries to kill
her with an axe while saying his signature line “Here’s Johnny,” are more or
less genuine.
The second film is also a modern
classic, albeit one not as renowned as the first one. In Battle Royale, by famed Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku, the
Japanese authorities, having seen the youth being more rambunctious and chaotic
than ever before, organizes a tournament called “Battle Royale.”
The totalitarian government, named the Republic of Greater East Asia, organizes
this paranoid game as to stop any kind of insurgency within the mainland Japan.
The main point of the game is for the students to kill their classmates for
three days until there is only one winner. To chick-flick fans out there, think
of it like The Hunger Games, only deadlier
than before. The reason why I picked this movie over other Japanese horror
movies is that Battle Royale might be
the only one that we, as students, might be familiar with. Although it is a thriller,
and although we don’t kill each other ( but we could,
depending on the definition of killing) , the story very
much reflects the problem of the current educational system; there is only one
winner. In this world of competition, Battle
Royale is everywhere in our lives, from Mr. Kim’s CR words to our dear Mr.
Cho’s Lit class. Along with a laconic comment on the prevalence of violence in
our media, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale
makes us reconsider what it means to be a student and a teenager. Once we
start to be cognizant of the fact that as students, we are forced to beat,
compete, and fight each other until there is only one winner, the true horror
of this film is echoed around the hollow souls of our ferocity.
The third film is the most obscure
one on
this list. Being a cult film, it remains one of my favorite films. Possession, by bizarre Polish auteur
Andrzej Zulawski, is the film that will obfuscate all of us. Mark is a secret
agent, and when he returns home for months after a secret assignment that we
are never told, he tries to reconcile with his inattentive wife. He starts to
doubt the reason why, and find out that his wife, Anna, is
cheating on him. Her lover’s name is Heinreich, a German man with a sound
complexion that makes Mark envy him. However, the real queer thing about this
film is that Anna’s real lover is a giant squid-like creature. No kidding, that
the movie does not become a slapstick comedy after that. Anna kills her
Heinreich, her husband’s personal detective, and tries to kill her husband. The
plot goes off the record, as the movie itself becomes very dreamlike and
chimerical. Along with gore and sex, Zulawski, while bewildering the viewers,
manages to give a commentary about marriage and the responsibilities of bearing
a child. In this era a nuclear family, the director manages to explore the
hidden tension within the boundaries of the so-called home.
And if you thought The Possession was weird, you have not
heard of David Lynch. Lynch is one of the most famous surrealists in Hollywood,
and he has a good reason for that; his films, from Blue Velvet to Mulholland
Drive, have captivated the modern moviegoers with his more surrealistic and
nihilistic approach to any kind of storytelling. The reason why I put David
Lynch’s whole filmography under the label of horror is that he manages to elicit
our subconscious fears as we watch his film. As I watched his magnum opus, Mulholland Drive, my rationality started
to fade away, and what remained inside was pure emotion, not romantic but
bestial and savage in nature. To make a film that elicits such a response,
David Lynch tosses the truth of humanity itself, that we are, after all,
animals, disguised under the façade so delicate and diaphanous that even the
most complicated and sound rationality cannot stop the flood of our desires.
This is the four movies that I want
our readers to watch this Halloween. Some are violent, others are not. All are rated
over 19, so you might say that you can’t watch it, but seriously, we all know
that you don’t care about the ratings system. So, this Halloween, grab your
best friend (or your girl/boyfriend) and test your abilities to be the horror
master!
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