Fine Young

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Horror is getting harder and harder to define.  Maybe it’s because movies are venturing further and further into mixed genres.  The best genre I’ve seen suggested for Bones and All is “romance horror.”  It is a most unusual love story with a tinge of the supernatural to it.  Maren has an unusual problem.  She eats people.  This started when she was three and her father, when she turns 18, sets her out on her own.  Another “eater,” Sully, finds her by smell, teaching her that eaters can identify each other that way.  Sully begins to creep her out, so Maren heads west to try to discover her mother.  She sniffs out another eater, Lee.  Not sure he wants to get mixed up with another person with his issues, he nevertheless allows her to come along.  They travel from Kentucky, through Missouri and Iowa, to Minnesota.  Along the way other eaters find them, by smell.

In Minnesota, Maren finds her mother in an institution and learns that her mother was also an eater.  Eventually Lee confesses that his father was an eater.  Sully, who’s mentally unstable (for an eater) has been following Maren and decides he has to kill her for what she knows.  Lee rescues her, but is critically injured in the process and insists that Maren eat him.  Now, from that description you might think this is either a comedy or a film with horror score and stingers, but it’s neither.  It’s a straightforward romance, following two lovers with a unique problem.  Only it’s not as unique as all that since there seem to be quite a few cannibals around.  The theme, and the feeding scenes, are definitely horror.  But is this a horror movie?

Although Maren and Lee are moral people, and likable, they are the monsters in this film.  While they try not to kill, they are driven to eat other people and they do resort to violence to do so.  The signature accoutrement for horror are absent as the focus remains steadily on the building romantic relationship.  You want Maren and Lee to succeed because they’re nice people.  But they are monsters according to definition.  Often in horror serial killers and other humans may serve the monster role in the absence of supernatural, or preternatural creatures.  There’s an almost vampire-film feeling to this story (the heightened senses, and all that blood) but eaters aren’t constrained by daylight or crucifixes.  It’s the kind of movie that keeps asking the question “What am I?” and leaves the viewer to try to digest a definition. 

Silence Fright

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One of my first publications was a letter to the editor. The newspaper was The Scotsman, Edinburgh’s daily. We’d been hearing on the BBC that a new movie, The Silence of the Lambs, had inspired Milwaukee serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in his gruesome habit of cannibalism. For whatever reason, the Dahmer case had a real fascination for the British. My letter, a rather young attempt to promote an important cause, suggested that such movies could be very dangerous. In the many years since then I’ve read quite a bit about horror films and their effects on people and have come to the conclusion that they don’t cause the crimes. The reasons are much more complex than simply watching a movie since most people who see them don’t “go and do likewise.” When I told friends in Edinburgh that I’d found a teaching job in Wisconsin they said “hopefully not near where that cannibal lived.” Of course Nashotah House is not far from Milwaukee.

My personal embargo of The Silence of the Lambs ran up against my current research project, which involves horror movies. Thinking it over in what I hope is a rational way, I decided that I needed to see my bête noire. Besides, while living in Wisconsin I had learned about Ed Gein, the local serial killer who’d inspired Psycho, a movie I had seen with no ill effects while in college. Movies are as much a part of life as cars and taxes and all kinds of things that impact our ways of thinking. I was surprised at how well done Silence is and the number of references it had spawned that I had missed for the past couple of decades. It won’t be my favorite film, but I’m not afraid of it any more.

The concept of relying on a criminal to catch a criminal is a classic theme, of course. And since the release of this movie some which are much worse have come across the silver screen. We play our anxieties out for all to see. Hannibal Lecter, the cultured killer, is an ambivalent character—a savior criminal. There’s a strange comfort in knowing he has the knowledge to save lives as much as he has the desire to take them. In fact, there’s an element of the divine in that. The capricious nature of a power that has the ability to give and to take is one with which religions constantly deal. Yes, The Silence of the Lambs is a scary movie. The reasons, however, lie more with implications than with imitations.