Monstrous Motives

I was a monster kid in the 1960s.

I almost never watch modern horror films.

The classic 1930s monsters all had motives.

King Kong wanted Fay Wray.

Dracula wanted a safer base of operations.

Frankenstein* wants companionship.

The Wolfman wants to be freed of his curse.

The thing is -- believe it or not -- they can all be reasoned with.

Kong with Wray in his palm calms down.

Dracula is a fiend, but he doesn’t need to kill in order to survive (in fact, it’s against his best interest to create competition for himself), and we can conceivably hold him at arm’s length.

The Wolfman desperately wants to cooperate with you if it will stop his murderous rampages.

(I’m leaving the Mummy out because after the Karloff original, he became a desiccated Terminator at the beck and call of whoever hoodoo daddy brewed the tana leaves in that picture.)

The classic Universal monster movies -- starting with Dracula in 1931 and ending with Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948 -- do form a roughly coherent “monsterverse” where everything links up or, failing that, at least doesn’t contradict what came before.

Even TV’s The Munsters fits in, the monsters finally finding home and peace as immigrants in America.

And mind you, the stories could be silly and trite and stupid –

-- but they were actually stories.

They were stories because the monsters were characters and even to the occasionally ridiculous extremes Universal allowed them to descend to, they had recognizable and not at all impossible to empathize with motives.

Jump ahead to the 1950s.

It was mostly a sci-fi decade, and the monsters that could be considered bona fide characters were retreads of previous successes.

The Creature From The Black Lagoon is just King Kong with a lower budget.

The Fly and all other mutation movies were variants of Jekyll / Hyde mashed up with The Wolfman.

Big bug / dinosaur / kaiju movies were really about humanity trying to cope with elemental forces of nature] the monsters in them had no motives, no agendas.

Hammer Films brought back the classic monsters, and let the record show I like their efforts even if I prefer the Universal originals.

But they lost track of the thread of their stories early on, each film in their series turning into a virtual standalone effort, endlessly reiterating the previous incarnations over and over, varying only in how the monsters looked from entry to entry (give them points for trying something new in the 1970s with Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter and The Horror Of Frankenstein, however).

On a parallel track over at AIP, Roger Corman and others created a series of stylish Poe-inspired horror films, and while each stood independent of the other, again they at least featured characters who however fiendish still possessed identifiable motives.

Jump ahead to the late 1970s and the arrival of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

The first film in the series hints at some sort of identifiable motivation for the crazed masked killer, Michael Myers.

From what we see, we can assume Myers starts as a disturbed savant child prodigy, one who develops an incestuous fascination to his older sister.  When she kicks him out of the house so she can screw her boyfriend, Myers spies on them and is consumed by a jealous rage.

He kills her, and is caught.

It’s arguable whether he is actually clinically psychotic at this point or whether he’s merely a sociopath who deliberately feigns psychosis to avoid punishment and ends up actually becoming psychotic in the process.

Little matter; he’s smart, he’s capable, and presumably like The Batman has spent the remainder of his formative years prepping for his war on the world, even if confined to a psychiatric hospital at the time.

Okay, as a one-of-a-kind horror flick we can give Halloween a pass, but Hollywood being Hollywood nothing exceeds like excess and it was only a few months until Friday The 13th made an appearance, followed by a whole legion of masked slasher movies.

And, yes, there were plenty of precedents to the mad slasher genre of the 1980s:
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 and Dario Argento’s 1970-72 giallo trilogy and Mantis In Lace in 1968 and Psycho in 1960 and The Bat in 1959, but there were also films that glorified in irrational sexual violence Snuff in 1976 The Last House On The Left in 1972 and the infamous grindhouse “roughies” of the late 1950s / mid-60s all the way back to Maniac in 1934.

And unlike the Universal and Hammer horror cycles of the 1930s-40s and 1950s-70s, the 1980s horror characters --- Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees and Freddie Kruger and Chucky -- possess no motive other than satiating the sheer unbridled sadistic pleasure of the killers…

…and the audiences.

Oh, yeah, let’s call this one as it is.  Michael Powell had our number waaaay back in 1960 with Peeping Tom, released the same year as Psycho.

But Psycho was a crowd pleasure and Peeping Tom was not because Alfred Hitchcock -- while allowing the audience to participate in the kills via point of view shots – never did what Powell literally did in his film:  Hold a mirror up to the audience and ask them if they were any different from his sexually sadistic killer.

Modern (i.e., post-Halloween) horror films lack what made the classic Universal horrors bearable:  Motives for the monsters that audiences can empathize with.

The classic Universal monsters weren’t killing machines that took lives for the sheer pleasure of it.

Even The Wolfman, trapped as he was by his lycanthropic curse, didn’t want that and tried to find a way to stop.

They appealed to audiences then because as scary as they were, as villainous as they might act, audiences could still think “there but for the grace of God…”

We were invited to feel sorry for them but never to identify with their crimes.

Modern horror films too often seem to actively encourage audiences to identify with the monsters and joyously participate in their mayhem.

In particular, since the turn of this century, a new** category of horror films has emerged:  Torture porn.

Films like the Saw and Hostel and Human Centipede series (full disclosure:  I have seen none of these films and have no interest in doing so) now shed all pretense at justifiable motivations and focus solely on exciting audiences through sadistic sensationalism.

I blame Agatha Christie.

A lot of Christie’s books follow similar plots, but the granddaddy of this style of story is her 1939 novel And Then There Were None (I’m going with the American title, not the original UK or revised UK titles because frankly those titles were offensive then, offensive now, and Dame Agatha, you shoulda known better).

As drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs would say, it’s your standard spam in a cabin story.  A bunch of people are brought together and someone starts bumping them off one by one.

It wasn’t an original plot when Christie wrote it, and it’s been done numerous times since then, but Christie penned what can be called the category definer.

It’s a piece of crap.

It’s an insanely immoral story:
A mysterious host invites a group of disparate people to a remote, isolated location and then starts bumping them off one by one.

Christie’s story has a frustrated judge, now dying from a fatal illness, bringing in people whom he thinks got away with murder despite the courts and the law holding them not guilty.

He’s a one man lynch mob, and the fact that many of his victims have either paid or atoned for their killings in some manner, led productive lives thereafter, or in the case of two (at least in the play and film versions) aren’t even the killers the judge thinks are responsible.

The judge is a monster, albeit a charming one.  1939 saw the world up to its neck in unrepentant murderous thugs; Christie pointed her cannons at the wrong enemies.

Even so, in the play and film versions, the audience comes to realize the hero and heroine aren’t guilty of the crimes they’ve been accused of, and roots for them in the final confrontation with the judge.  

In the play, the heroine is left dangling at the end of a noose while hero and judge fight it out, the audience anxious for justice -- true justice -- to be served, the evil judge defeated, and the heroine saved.

Far too many modern horror films are Christie’s story told without any of her skill.  The original Friday The 13th has a psychotic Mrs. Voorhees killing teenage counselors at Camp Crystal Lake for having let her special needs son Jason drown a decade earlier but at the end of the movie Jason is shown to have still been alive all this time making Mrs. Voorhees one helluva negligent mother, not to mention completely nullifying any reason for the killings to have occurred, placing the blame on mom and son for not making the effort to find each other in the preceding 10 years.

And that pretty much sums up why I don’t like what I’ve seen of most modern horror films and why I’m happy to stick with Universal / Hammer / AIP productions.

There is no rationale in these kinds of films.

They might as well be about fires or cancer.

They’re disaster movies only with masked killers.

We watch disaster films to see characters prevail.

We don’t root for the fire or flood or earthquake.

Modern horror films urge us to root for the killers.

By initiating action, the killers are de facto heroes.

There’s no motivation in these films to justify their existence.

The solution is not to demand these films be banned.

The solution is to become better audiences.

Expect --- no, demand better story telling.

© Buzz Dixon

*  Don’t give me that; Universal established in Son Of Frankenstein that the monster and maker are now synonymous so it’s in officially canon.

** “There is nothing, son, under the gnu” as the late Robert Bloch might have penned.  Way back in the 1960s schlockmeisters like Herschel Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman and Ted V. Mikels were cranking out crap like Two Thousand Maniacs and The Corpse Grinders but to nowhere near the audience impact of similar films today, nor were their films presented as straightforward exercises in gratuitous cruelty but rather tongue-in-cheek campy excursions ala Le Grand Guignol or Charles Addams.  That they failed to achieve either’s blend of gruesomeness and giggles doesn’t alter the fact that their audiences could tell they weren’t supposed to be siding with the killers.