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.
Stephen (writer) has provided and exceptional vehicle and sutured in some compelling visual storytelling. Thinking about directing such an excellent script means tearing it apart and rendering the story in spatio-visual and practical terms. Since we now have the script in place (pending a few minor alterations) I can stop obsessing about all the things that could go wrong… like standing on set directing crew and actors with no screenplay… that’s a Freudian nightmare if ever I had one (and I have that one frequently). Thankfully, the script works – that means one of the major components is now in place for production. Next in line is casting (almost complete), then locations (completely locked in). Then there’s… the budget. This is always the big one: I’ve given public lectures where the audience is not interested in what I have to say about filmmaking or classic filmmakers – they only want to know: ‘where’d you get the cash?’ This appears to be a challenge I rise to every time. I don’t mind admitting, it’s proving difficult with The Perimeter, but the irons in the fire keep getting hotter… and the new angle on distribution cash flow rather than angel investment promises a new fulfilment. To be honest, however, this is the scariest part of filmmaking – everything else can be fudged if you don’t care for the quality… but budget, like laughter, cannot be faked. It takes lateral thinking, persistence and gumption. As a screenwriter friend of mine working in Hollywood once said: ‘I always think I am useless and was cheating everyone the last time I wrote a screenplay. I don’t know how I did it… And I face this every time…’ He said this on the eve of raising $3 million. Hopefully we can emulate this success from insecurity with our accumulating budget.
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