Blog Description

A low budget sci-fi/horror feature film written by AWGIE award winner Stephen Mitchell, directed by Ian Dixon with editorial by Stephen Cleary. The film commences shooting in 2015 and will be shot in increments over the course of a year.

scary trees

scary trees

THE STORY

THE STORY
In a remote Australian forest, nine year old Sarasi races through the darkness of her isolated family home. Somewhere she can hear the screams of her one-year-old sister Nayana and the vicious, snarling attack of their once-loved family dog Tripi.

Outside, her mother and older sister lie dead - killed by a mysterious force that imprisons Sarasi and Nayana inside an invisible perimeter with no food, no power and no-one to help them. Cut off even from sunlight in a never-ending, preternatural night, can she withstand the terrors of the dark and combat her starving dog? Will she keep her baby sister alive? Does she have the strength to become the savage survivalist she needs to be?

And what of the deadly perimeter? What - or who - has brought it into being? What if escape is right under her nose, but demands a brutal choice no child should ever have to make? What if, outside, it is not just the lives of two children at stake...but everyone's?

Wednesday 10 June 2015

Why do we like horror?

It doesn't seem to make sense. What is the appeal in subjecting ourselves to disgust, loathing, apprehension and, most particularly, fear? Isn't it contrary to our most fundamental human instincts that put pleasure as our highest priority? Don't we want to feel good, not bad?

Clearly, we don't. At least, we don't want to feel just good. Unmitigated pleasure is more than simply boring, it is anti-life. Imagine having a switch like Larry Niven's wireheads which allows you to inhabit a moment of intense pleasure forever, or at least until you die from self neglect. Consider our response to drugs which envelop us in a joy so addictive that we forget about eating, about sex, about friendships and simply pursue the drug state even if it kills us. What is our reaction to hedonists who eschew responsibility, consequences, ethics? Don't we consider all of these missing something essential to life?

Pleasure only has potency when it is coupled with unpleasure. So, is pleasure intensified when we deepen the sensations of unpleasure? Possibly. But that suggests a binary nature to pleasure/unpleasure that simply doesn't exist. One isn't on because the other is off. Fear and desire, lust and disgust, love and hate often occur simultaneously.

Herein lies one of the more intriguing aspects of horror as a genre. What's your preference? Do you like action movies? Detective stories? Romantic comedies? Do any of these attract the sort of visceral judgements put on horror? Does anyone suggest that you are 'sick' because you like historical adventures?

We all have our different individual emotional chemistry. Horror comes in a multiplicity of forms and each have their afficionados. For me, slasher and splatter horror don't really create that satisfying tension between pleasure and unpleasure. Torture porn neither. Zombies don't do it, nor monsters generally (Alien being a notable exception). But I vividly remember as a rather-too-young teen reading The Exorcist late into the night and reaching the moment when Regan, having murdered the foul-mouthed Burke Dennings, turns her head backwards and says in his voice to her mother, 'Do you know what she did? Your cunting daughter?' That moment in the novel is electrifying and the most shocking and celebrated in the film. The sense of defilement is overwhelming. Here is a child taking on the awareness of a debased and degraded adult and delighting in the evil of his death and her own corruption. It is spine-chilling and, at the same time, utterly thrilling.

That synchronicity of pleasure and unpleasure is what gives horror its power and psychological impact. The internet is full of theories about the attraction of horror (there's a pretty good overview here). Desire to cathartically face our fears? Need for predominantly male viewers to participate in a social display of bravery? Primeval motivation to experience extreme danger by proxy? Dopamine receptors in the brain? Sure, maybe. But none of these persuade me of the compelling appeal of horror.

Part of the answer for me might lie in Freud's notion of the uncanny. In German, that's 'unheimlich'. 'Heimlich' means 'secret', 'hidden', 'private' and has an additional, less common meaning of 'familiar' and 'agreeable'. The 'unheimlich' is therefore the exposure of social taboos with all their attendant threat and sense of abomination as well as our own individual forbidden (and hence repressed) desires.