In this edition of Horror Madness, we have a face-off between two good old-fashioned slashers. In one corner stands a film with one of the all time great horror titles, George Mihalka’s 1981 My Bloody Valentine:
In the other we’ve got the heavyweight champion of the world, the movie that needs no introduction, the one that started it all, you know the one:
See the introduction and full slate here: http://oftenveryvile.ghost.io/introducing-horror-movie-madness/.
Both opening scenes feature a lady in a white bra. Is that anything?
You know what, it is kind of. If there’s one thing Hitchcock taught subsequent filmmakers (and obviously there isn’t just one thing) it’s that there are a lot of shades of meaning within the word “thriller,” that to be thrilled is to be aroused, and you can make audiences sit up a little if you show them some sexy stuff on the way to scaring them. The tendency of slasher films to do this ended up being analyzed through a moralizing/gender lens; the naked or semi-naked women tend to get killed pretty violently, so of course you have to wonder whether they’re being narratively punished. That’s a part of it, obviously, but there’s also a dumber, simpler explanation, as there usually is with horror: showing people a pretty girl is a way for the film to tell them “pay attention. Something is going to happen.”
What both of these films get is that just the sexiness isn’t necessarily enough; you need to immediately contrast it with something. These films take place in decidedly unglamorous places: Psycho in a series of motel rooms and gas stations and offices, none of them especially nice to look at, and My Bloody Valentine in a mine and the decaying town it once supported. Psycho is probably Hitchcock’s least glamorous film, and most have been especially shocking coming immediately after North by Northwest, in which a never-less-than-impeccable Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint navigate beautiful sets and beautiful scenery. My Bloody Valentine’s griminess is much more of its time, a product of a low budget as much as anything else. But this seedy, ugly quality works to the thematic and narrative benefit of both films.
There are stories here about the way our economy transforms places that used to be useful, or at least ordinary, into something else. The Bates Motel used to be successful, but then they moved the highway. The motel can’t move, so the motel fails. What used to be a business is now an accidental stop on the way somewhere else, but the key to the film lies in the fact that it was really always that way, even when before the highway moved. My four-year-old recently asked me what the difference was between a hotel and a motel, and the answer is that a hotel is usually a destination, and a motel (a motor-hotel) is a place you stay on your way somewhere else. The problem with the Bates Motel isn’t that people always just pass through it – that’s the nature of motels. The problems come when people – Norman, Mrs. Bates, Detective Arbogast, Marion Crane – can’t leave. People, in different ways, get stuck in the place that time and capitalism have moved on from, the place that they were always supposed to move on from. They’re like Norman’s taxidermied birds: they’re the suggestion of motion there, but they’re trapped in one place. Development and movement have been frozen.
My Bloody Valentine takes place in a town that is defined by its past. It could be any of a number of post-industrial towns or cities in North America that was built around a single industry that is now gone. The mine works mostly as a nostalgia piece; it’s no longer a living, working thing but a place where people used to work, and a place where a lot of people died. A lot of mines are like that. What used to be a workplace has turned into a trap, a place frozen in time and space, with only death inside it.
Horror is about being trapped in liminality, and capitalism has a way of both creating liminal spaces – there really weren’t motels before widespread car ownership, no need to spend money while taking a road trip before the highway system was created – and of turning formerly ordinary places into liminal ones, by sucking all productive capacity out of them and leaving only a facade. Both of these films are about being trapped in the past. In each the killer is assumed to be someone old, from the past, but is actually a young person unnaturally clinging to a past and unable to let go of it.
So it makes sense that both movies are pretty grungy. They’re about being stuck where you don’t want to be. There’s a lot of horror in tedium, of knowing you’re in the same situation and place, every day, no matter what you do to escape it. The Bates Motel would not be horrific if it were glamorous. The town in My Bloody Valentine would not be horrific if it were still a thriving mining community. That said, Psycho is beautiful. Hitchcock couldn’t really make an ugly movie, and part of the interest in this one is, again, from contrast. Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh were both striking people, and part of the point is that they both seem a little too much for their surroundings; they were meant for other, better things. My Bloody Valentine is only ever that striking sometimes, and it comes mostly from the surroundings: an abandoned mine really is an ideal horror setting, and it looks really good on film.
Psycho is going to win it, and are you surprised? Everything that MBV did, Psycho did first, and better. It’s one of those movies with everything going for it.