Spooky Magic 101 part II

Welcome back. Last time we talked about the meaning of horror itself. We established that we had to put people in the proper frame of mind for horror and let them scare themselves. Now we need to talk about how to pull that off practically.

Less Is More

You hear this all the time, but I'm willing to bet few people have explained to you how to use it effectively. Well, haunted magic provides an excellent context. Picture the scene if you will:

A dark, well-dressed medium is sitting with you and a few other guests around a table with a couple of candles and the lights turned low. Shadows are long and deep. The darkness gives everything a paradoxical sense of claustrophobia and depth as you gather around in the tiny pool of available light while also being unsure of just how deep the shadows go anymore. The medium speaks as if to a sitter seen only to him, something which may indeed be the case. You watch the one-sided conversation and can only infer what's going on by the medium's reactions. It's not going well. It's turning into something like an argument. The medium is sweating. You look back and forth to the other sitters as if seeking some sort of comfort or validation for your anxiety. The air feels a little staler than before. The medium keeps getting cut off in mid-sentence by whoever he's talking to. He keeps calling the name of his spirit guide but doesn't seem to be getting an answer. Seeming to humor the belligerent specter, the medium holds a piece of paper up to one of the candles. Writing is slowly forming in the scorch marks spelling out words. FIND THAT BASTARD HARLEY "Lights," the medium says with a sense of urgency. "Get the lights. We need to stop."

Now try reading that paragraph in the dark with all the lights in the room turned off. You looked over your shoulder didn't you? Now break that paragraph down. Think of how little action took place in it. There was a conflict between the medium and an unseen force. There was only one effect. But there was enough atmosphere that it put you in the right frame of mind. Did you hear any small noises in the room or outside your window or even in the next room? Were you anxious about investigating them?

People are very good at scaring themselves. Much better than you ever will be. But if you set the stage properly, you won't need to do any real work. Their imaginations will do all the heavy lifting. With that in mind, I'm going to give you a phrase that I want you to write down and put it some place visible in your practice space:

The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.

Yeah, I know that's an odd thing to say, even for me. Are you a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000? In season 8 they riffed a movie called, I'm not kidding, The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies. It was a truly incomprehensible film with a writer/director/star who looked like a cross between Nicholas Cage and a Moai statue, and a cast of other oily people with giant hair and little discernible talent. And musical numbers for some reason. Anyway, there was one scene that actually stood out to me at the time. After Nicholas-Cage-looking-guy zombies out and kills someone conveniently and cheaply off-screen, her date arrives at the house and wonders why the lights suddenly have gone out. He opens the front door and walks in, seen only in shadow through the light coming in through the front door. Nicholas-Cage-looking-guy comes up behind him and stabs him in the neck, the camera cutting away the very instant the knife makes contact. Again, that killing is seen only in shadow.

I was about 14 or 15 at the time. Spooked the hell out of me. The movie was really boring and I couldn't make heads or tails of the plot. But that one scene stuck with me. I found out much later that the movie was shot by one Vilmos Szigmond. Mr. Szigmond is a famous and highly respected cinematographer. With a name like that, what other career was he going to have? Anyway, he went on to make a lot of genre flicks, as well as some really good movies like Deer Hunter and The Bonfire of the Vanities. He won an Oscar in '78 for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. My point is, this is a man who knows how to make a good image. That shot of the killing in shadow was one of those moments of a bad movie that got one thing right in a big way. And that's why we're going to use it now. The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.

One thing that mentalists are generally better at than magicians is the use of implication. This probably has something to do with the fact that mentalism is a much more implicit experience by and large and lacks the sort of sensory extravagance of traditional magic. The sad thing is that most magic could do with less talk and exposition and more actual magic. As Elvis Presley famously said, a little less conversation, a little more action please.

Horror fiction is interesting in that well-written prose understand that showing is better than telling, and that implying can be more effective that showing. Stephen King's fantastic novel "Pet Semetary" is a fine example of this, merely hinting at some of the more disturbing themes such as cannibalism and having a bleak, defeatist ending that still goes out leaving so much to the imagination. Compare to that to the movie that left almost nothing to the imagination. Of course if we're being honest, my favorite part of the movie was the Ramones song so make of that what you will.

Horror film used to understand the concept of less is more much better in the past and this was largely due to technical limitations. Special effects were very primitive and crude. It wasn't until the 1960's when Hammer Films eroticized horror and pornographer Herschel Gorden Lewis invented the splatter flick that gore and explicit content became the order of the day.

However, it wasn't until the 1980's that this sort of subtlety truly started to be ignored. As we'll detail in a later entry, the 80's was an era of excesses. It was also the point when special effects tech really jumped ahead. And while this produced some really good movies like David Cronenberg's The Fly and John Carpenter's The Thing and An American Werewolf in London, it also produced a lot of direct-to-video crap. The nadir for less-is-more in cinema is arguably the brief period of mainstream popularity enjoyed by the torture porn sub-genre, which started with Saw and Hostel and ended pretty decisively with the box office flop of Captivity, quite possibly the stupidest, most pointlessly sick movie ever made.

Video games are experiencing a similar problem. Early horror games, as the linked video in the previous entry pointed out, had to work within technological limitations. One of the best examples of this remains Silent Hill 2. The PS2 was very strong technology for its generation, but it still had limits. Konami kept the thick fog from the first game in order to limit the draw distance and deliberately kept everything just ever so slightly out of focus so that they wouldn't have to render as many textures. The result was picture perfect atmosphere for horror, plus indistinct features on the monsters that left room for the player's imagination. And they didn't stop there either. In for a penny, in for a pound. Since the game's aesthetic was built so heavily on allowing your imagination to fill in the gaps, they also presented this derelict town with a handful of other characters who were universally unreliable and never seemed to see the same things you did, leaving you to wonder just what the hell was going on. Furthermore, the scenery was littered with enigmas such as the famous graffiti piece, "THERE WAS A HOLE HERE. IT'S GONE NOW."

But nowadays, games want to show off their technology. Every texture is rendered with realism rivaled only by James Cameron's most recent cash cow. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's often done in a manner of just giving the level and character designers an ego boost. The graphics wars are to video games what the weekend box office totals are to Hollywood. It's a pointless game of one-up-manship that's only holding the industry back.

So take a moment to think about what you're doing. Are you providing too much exposition? Are you explaining too much? Are you taking the mystery out of mystery entertainment? Are you leaving anything to the imagination? If you really want to make a scary routine this Halloween, you need to learn to let the audience scare themselves. The shadow of a knife is scarier than the knife itself.

Now, as promised we'll wrap up with some recommended movies.

Nosferatu (1922): The first vampire film ever made and still one of the best. The original Symphony of Horror.













Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): This was the beginning of the paranoid horror movie playing on the anxieties and xenophobia of the 1950's to create a ubiquitous and Freudian uncanny enemy.













Psycho (1960): One of the most iconic films in history and to this day it's still scary and disturbing. A perfect example of the Neo-Gothic.













Carnival of Souls (1962): Produced on the cheap by educational documentarian Herk Harvey, this is still a monumental and significant film for its innovative use of sound and silence, atmosphere, and haunting imagery. Avoid the 1998 remake like the bloody plague.













Rosemary's Baby (1968): Polanski's career defining masterpiece still resonates today for its portrayal of paranoia and creeping dread. There is very little explicit content, no blood, and yet it's one of the most haunting films ever made. This shows you don't need to be some whacked out creepazoid carrying severed body parts to be scary.













Halloween (1978): Forget the sequels. This film is often imitated but never equaled. Unlike the slashers the followed it, the film contains little actual blood, only a few on-screen kills, and a nail-biting buildup of tension to the eventual climax.













The Thing (1982): The 80's were no less a paranoid time than the 50's. And though the Cold War is over, modern anxieties over terrorists and extremists make the story of the enemy within just poignant today as ever before. Here we have one of the most frightening movies ever made because it's so unpredictable and it alternates between showing us every disturbing detail and then giving us nothing. From the spectacle of the wet death to being left with only our own paranoia. Take away the right lessons from this and you'll learn a lot about being scary.