​BEAUTIFUL HORROR – PART 2 by jonathan butcher

Way back in January of this year Jonathan Butcher wrote an excellent article on Beautiful Horror Films  (read it here)

"For casual observers, horror probably seems unconcerned with creating works of beauty, and far more likely to induce nausea than wonder.

This is a shame. Without horror we would have none of the morbidly gorgeous work of Poe or Clive Barker, no unsettling art from Goya or Bosch, and none of the harrowing delights of these pieces of music.

In a genre so driven by aesthetics and powerful emotions, horror is the perfect vehicle for creating visions of dark beauty. Alongside fantasy, the horror genre contemplates the unknown and reaches out to touch the paranormal and mysterious – and sometimes, horrific imagery becomes even more uncomfortable when cosied beside something visually pleasing."

Jonathan has written a follow up piece looking at more examples of beautiful horror from the wider world of horror taking in films, books, and video games.  

Horror is a beast with many faces. Some snarl, some drool, and some whisper unthinkable secrets. Others are gruesomely wounded yet remain grinning, while others still decompose yet continue to speak.

I’m here to discuss what could be horror’s rarest-glimpsed face: a visage so alien yet so utterly transfixing that it communicates something beyond revulsion and visceral panic. Sometimes, horror transcends its ghosts, ghoulies, and long-leggety beasties, and becomes an entity that can only be described as “beautiful”.

A truly beautiful horror tale that appeals to aesthetes and lovers of the gorgeously morbid is a rare and wonderful thing, and the story can be secondary to the visuals. Following my previous “8 Beautiful Horror Films” feature, I thought I’d expand on the concept to also include games, books, and shows in my search for unique horror experiences that approach elegance and artfulness.

Here are 8 more examples of beautiful horror.

Hausu (1977)

Imagine if Miike Takashi, Sam Raimi, and Dario Argento took hallucinogens together and decided to remake Evil Dead 2, but starring 7 archetypal Japanese schoolgirls instead of Ash. If you’re picturing a surreal, sumptuously shot haunted house horror film with moments of slapstick lunacy and bizarre sight gags that both unsettle and amuse, then you’re in the right ball park.

The following claim has been made about a lot of films, but in this case it’s true: without seeing Hausu, it is almost impossible to adequately describe the experience. While there is a great deal of ridiculousness going on, the inventiveness of the special effects and camera techniques are some of the most charming and occasionally unnerving I’ve ever seen. In fact, there is a section towards the end that is filmed in such an outlandish way that it makes me feel like my brain is glitching every time I see it: a jerky, off-kilter camera technique that comes out of nowhere and just…feels…wrong.

The film’s childlike atmosphere and scares come partly from the fact that director Nobuhiko Obayashi used his preteen daughter’s ideas in the script. This, combined with the fact that many of the experimental effects turned out differently to the way Obayashi had envisioned them, combined with the jarring yet attractive visuals, makes Hausu my absolute favourite haunted house movie.
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If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out on a one-of-a-kind movie experience.

Neverending Nightmares–Steam, PS4, PS Vita, iPhone/iPad (2014)
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This is a game I picked up by chance and I was not disappointed. As the title suggests, it is a game composed of a series of disquieting nightmares, during which our protagonist Thomas repeatedly wakes up only to find himself trapped inside of yet another horrific dream.

Neverending Nightmares is a survival horror that places a heavier emphasis on ambiguous storytelling than varied gameplay, using repetitive environments to powerful effect. By encouraging the player to notice subtle changes in the settings, the game manages to evoke a steadily rising sense of dread.

While the images and scenarios are surreal and dreamlike, this is a horror of the most personal, human kind, offering an allegory for psychological strain and mental illness. The tale concerns depression resulting from bereavement and trauma, and developer Matt Gilgenbach used his own experiences with OCD and depression to fuel the game’s oppressive atmosphere and storyline.
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The art style is the game’s greatest strength, and uses shadowy black-and-white pencil drawings to describe Thomas’s distressing experiences, with occasionally graphic splashes of red. While the game doesn’t offer any typical kind of “beauty”, Neverending Nightmares’ assured and distinctive art style is unforgettable.

The Love Witch (2016)

There are shots, sets, and scenes in this strange, uneven film that are so perfectly composed that they assault the eyes. Through the 60s pastiche and the deliberate cheese, this is a film that glories in its own era-defined gorgeousness, while still subverting the norms of the material it pays homage to.

The Love Witch tells the story of a witch who enchants and seduces men for love, but whose methods often lead to madness and murder. While there are shades of Jess Franco and other female-flesh-obsessed exploitation directors, in contrast to those The Love Witch bursts with feminist wit. Barely a scene goes by that doesn’t challenge the expectations of a viewer through themes such as the nature of love and the role of gender norms.

I finished this one unsure as to whether I enjoyed it or not. It’s an interesting, entirely unique film that contains some of the most startlingly beautiful imagery I’ve ever seen, but while I enjoyed much about it I’m not sure if it overstays its welcome.
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Still, it is a striking film and an impressive achievement.

Strange Playgrounds – George Daniel Lea (Dark Moon Books, 2013)

I’ve always been impressed by the consistent eloquence of George Daniel Lea’s Ginger Nuts of Horror articles, but I hadn’t read his fiction until recently. This fabulous collection is something quite special, and combines eroticism with fantastical, gruesome imagery.

It’s impossible to read Strange Playgrounds without comparing its sensuousness and silky darkness with that of Clive Barker’s – an influence and comparison with which Lea must be intimately acquainted. Just take the apocalyptic visions of Storm Song, during which human civilisation is rent limb from limb by Lovecraftian monstrosities, or the sadomasochistic affair in The State of Lovers that gradually descends into demonic obsession as the story weaves its eerie spell. While these stories carry plenty of their own originality, I often found myself being swept back to my first reading of Barker’s Books of Blood.
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It’s Lea’s poetic way with words that makes his tales so gorgeous, often touching a Poppy Z. Brite level of evocativeness as he describes his doomed lovers, sorrowful couplings, and carnal horrors. The language and descriptions he uses are brave and unapologetic, and if a lesser author were to attempt such a style, their words would seem pretentious or at least inadequate. For example, if I were to describe how a creature’s “triple-pronged prick … [was] an unambiguous invitation to perversity”, or a “fluttering dampness between her legs”, my own work would verge on parody; Lea, however, turns such exaggerated sexuality into an abstract, gorgeous reading experience.

Suspiria (1977)

If there has ever been a film that the phrase “dream logic” applies to, it’s Suspiria. Widely thought to be Dario Argento’s greatest work, this nightmarish and surreal tale places greater emphasis on its discordant ambience, sumptuous cinematography, and jangling, sometimes overwhelming soundtrack than it does on a sensible storyline. Essentially, it takes place in a ballet school where magic, mystery, and sadistic murder play a greater role than arabesques or pliés. 

Like The Love Witch, this is another film whose colour palette shifts and alters on an almost shot-by-shot basis. Ominous red lighting makes way for ethereal greens that wash over the cast, while ambitious camera shots trail from character to character through the halls of the school, suggesting supernatural presences without needing to show them. Just watch the opening 10 minutes and compare the distressing atmosphere it creates with the comparative mundanity taking place onscreen.
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Argento breaks all sorts of sound and camera rules to great effect in Suspiria, creating an uneasy mood that builds to the famous, horrifying finale.

Here They Lie – PSVR (2016)
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I’m new to VR, and it hasn’t lost its thrill yet. The feeling of standing within a game environment rather than merely watching it on a screen, tricking my brain into believing the 3D reality of it all, remains staggering to me. And of course, as a lifelong horror lover, I am terribly excited by the idea of VR horror games.

Here They Lie is a fairly nonsensical affair in which the options for environmental interaction generally involve picking up batteries, reading notes, opening doors, and avoiding death by hiding or running away from enemies.

As a standard non-VR game, Here They Lie would be a surreal, spooky experience. However, as a fully-realised 3D world I found it both enthralling and, frankly, terrifying. When viewed through VR lenses, the environments are immersive and quite often disturbingly beautiful in a grim and grainy way. At times you’ll find yourself somewhere familiar, such as a grey cityscape or an empty subway station; at other times you’ll be somewhere otherworldly, watching temples rise from the ground to create an alien metropolis, or standing at the edge of a gaping slash in reality and gazing into a swirling, endless abyss.
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This was the first time that I have felt like I was at the centre of my very own horror story, and I loved (and feared) almost every minute.

The Cell (2000)

Jennifer Lopez stars as a child psychologist who uses experimental technology to enter the dreams of coma patients, with the aim of treating them. One day, she is called on by the FBI to enter the dreams of a comatose serial killer in order to save his latest victim.

This is a gem of a film which I had all but forgotten, and while revisiting it for this article I revelled in the disturbing imagery. A vast beast of a man pleasures himself while suspended by chains above a bleached-skinned corpse; a chocolate-brown stallion is suddenly segmented into a dozen pieces that continue to flex and twitch; an imaginary playground-slash-torture-chamber displays BDSM-infused tableaux of murder victims, their deaths exaggerated and brutally fetishized. While The Cell offers a rainbow-spray of hideous visuals, it also serves up scenes of a more traditional yet equally captivating beauty; I particularly appreciated the moment where a panning shot of a rumpled bedsheet morphs into the slopes and dunes of a sun-baked desert.
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The Cell could easily have been a poorly-contrived mess (and I’ve no doubt that some critics butchered it when it first appeared), but I heartily recommend it. Ignore the occasional psychobabble and the silly rationalisations, and take a haunting deep-dive into the mind of a murderer.

The Haunting of Hill House – Netflix (2018)
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I’ve seen mixed responses to this show, but now that I have finished the series, I have to say it: in my humble opinion The Haunting of Hill House is a masterclass in superb characterisation and storytelling.

I was captivated from the opening scene of the very first episode, and have little to criticise about the entire show. As pretty much everyone reading this will know, it tells the era-spanning tale of a haunted house and the unfortunate occupants whose lives were decimated by the restless, malevolent forces it contains.

Aside from the beauty of the house itself, the poetic structuring of the tale, and the painfully raw honesty of the script, what I find beautiful about the show is the respectful way in which it treats the horror genre. There are jump scares and spooky apparitions, jarring deaths and hideous visions, but this is no TV equivalent of a ghost train ride. Instead, it’s about real, three-dimensional people who have found their own flawed ways cope with their traumatic pasts. To state the obvious, they are haunted both literally and figuratively, and the manner in which the series tells their separate tales as well as the overarching narrative is nothing short of exquisite.
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I don’t remember another horror show or film ever having literally made me whimper in shock, but a scare in episode 9 achieved just that. I’m sceptical about the rumoured 2nd season, but if it comes close to the heart-breaking beauty of the first 10 episodes, then count me in.
 
I’d love to hear your suggestions for other beautiful horror experiences, so please feel free to share them below in the comments.