In this Horror Madness match, we explore why it’s so scary when somebody walks very slowly behind you.
In one corner, we have David Robert Mitchell’s contemporary classic It Follows:
And in the other, we see Jacques Tourneur’s gothic variation I Walked with a Zombie:
See the introduction and full slate here: http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
Place tends to matter in horror, for the same reason it matters in tragedy – because they are both genres about (among other things) the state of being trapped. If you could easily extricate yourself from wherever you are, then you could probably get away from whatever it is that is horrifying you or otherwise causing you problems. Not all the time; sometimes it’s the person that is haunted or cursed, not the place. But even then, the self is another thing that cannot be escaped, no matter where the person goes.
It Follows and I Walked with a Zombie are on one level fairly straightforward monster films, and their concerns have a lot to do with the politics of sex, gender and race. They are both films about all of the terrible things that can happen when a white lady has a sex drive. But both films are intimately tied to place, though they have deliberately shifting relationships with time. Both films are about the terror of being relentlessly followed, but what is the “it” that’s following? Only history, the nightmare from which we’re all trying to awake.
It Follows is careful not to position itself at any particular time, though its association with its place means that can only be taken so far. It is a film about Detroit and its surrounding suburbs, and though we don’t see Detroit at any specific year, it is clearly Detroit After: after industrialization; after white flight; after urban decay. The city has been a popular setting for horror films recently, partly because Michigan makes it cheap to film there, and partly because exactly those factors we just listed – the de-industrialization, the white flight, the urban decay – mean there are plenty of cavernous abandoned buildings in which to film. Detroit has become a place where something is not quite right; a place that used to have prosperity which disappeared for unspoken reasons but is clearly gone. Poverty is scary, and not just for the poor; it’s something those of us in the ever-shifting middle class have to define ourselves against. It’s something over our shoulder, out of sight yet creeping up behind us no matter what we do.
This means that there is a limit to which It Follows can tell its story outside of time. There’s a precarity to everything that is impossible to ignore; even the nicer suburban houses look a little run down, a little worse for wear. Perhaps that’s the point; history may have ended, but the liberal hegemon that won the battle left some behind in a limbo, a liminal state where time never moves forward but things still fall apart. There are consequences to everything; every pleasure must be paid for, even when you live a life that seems like a success, even when history seems to have ended.
I Walked with a Zombie is a classic gothic: a young woman comes to work in a dark, mysterious manor, for a dark and mysterious man. The estate contains history within it, history that cannot be escaped. Here, too, pleasures must be paid for, and to its credit the film is specific about what those pleasures were and the human cost for them. Anglo literature likes to position the Caribbean as a tropical paradise, a place where you can relax and forget your cares, perhaps remake yourself, but Tourneur remembers that no place is a tabula rasa.
The black people who are everywhere, driving the white characters around and serving their meals and caring for their sick, are all well aware of how their ancestors got to the island in the first place, and why, and what kept them there, and what that meant. They don’t let the white landowners forget their own history either. The past won’t stay dead, here. It follows, everywhere, forever. That’s what a zombie is: the thing that won’t die. As I’ve written elsewhere, the zombie myth is one that was born out of the fears of the slave in the new world. It’s the fear that nothing ends; that the life of servitude, half a life itself, will be eternal, lasting beyond death.
Darby Jones’s face, expressionless and severe, appearing suddenly out of the darkness, has all of this history in it. It’s an image, and a performance, as arresting and memorable as anything in horror. Images like that are what horror is for. It Follows is good, very good, but it doesn’t have anything quite like that.
This was a hard decision. I like It Follows a lot; it’s clever and well-made, and has one of those monster metaphors that works on an immediate level but is more interesting the more you think about it. I Walked with a Zombie is better, as beautiful and smart and sad as horror gets. These are both great films, but the master Jacques Tourneur wins again.