LEARNING TO LOVE AGAIN

by george daniel lea 

Hellraiser: Judgement. A reboot of the Halloween franchise just around the corner (what is that now, by the way? The third, the fourth incarnation? Ironic, given that the original film never warranted or required a sequel, let alone seven). A new Terminator. Another Predator. Seemingly endless instalments and offshoots and additions to the Alien franchise (one that I adore, by the by, but that I swore I would never, never pay money to see a new instalment of again after the lamentable Alien: Covenant).
 
Remakes, sequels and reboots can work. I am not fundamentalist or extreme in this regard. In point of fact, some of my favourite works in the genre (not to mention myriad others) consist of remakes or reimaginings of original films: Jon Carpenter's seminal Thing, a reworking of The Thing from Outer Space, takes the situation and concerns of the original and re-writes them for a 1980s socio-political setting. David Cronenberg's The Fly (a remake of the Vincent Price original of the same name) does away with the somewhat buffoonish campery and ropey effects of the original to create a lurid visual meditation on escalating cultural concerns and media obsessions (most notably, the increasing awareness of diseases such as Cancer and AIDs).
 
Remakes and sequels can equal or even surpass original works in quality, cleverness and general merit.
 
But it is rare.
 
Most works that are successful, that snare the collective imagination and resonate throughout culture, do so owing to confluences of circumstance that cannot be replicated: they catch, they flare; something in them speaks to the audience and lodges itself in their minds and imaginations, lingering long after the credits have rolled and the lights have gone up.
 
This phenomena cannot be contrived, cannot be deliberately orchestrated: it happens as accidental alchemy, a series of happy coincidences that intermesh to form something tapestry-like and artistic, often as much a surprise in terms of their popularity to their creators as to culture at large.
 
Sequels and remakes too often fail to understand this: that the lightning cannot be caught in the same bottle twice, that it cannot be induced to strike in the same place. All too often, they are decided not because there is merit or worth in another instalment existing, but because there is money to be made, franchise potential.
 
This is death to legitimate storytelling, as, all too often, there are no stories to tell; the strongest, the most meaningful, has already had its time, already expressed itself. This is peculiarly true of the original Halloween, which works in terms of its ostensibly simplistic situation and story owing to a certain ambiguity: there is no reason or explanation provided for Michael Myer's seeming invulnerability, other than some vague allusions to “The Boogeyman.” That he is a supernatural rather than secular force is made apparent at the end, when he disappears after sustaining injuries that would have killed any mortal human being, regardless of psychosis. 

​That suggestion elevates the material and leaves a wonderfully morbid echo in the audience's mind, a lingering suspicion and paranoia that is a delight for horror audiences, but which us sadly undone over a succession of unnecessary sequels that not only dilute the horror and impact of Michael Myers, but also corrode the implied mythology built up around him in the first film. The sequels serve no purpose, as there is no story to tell in this mythology beyond the first and the original (barring the criminally underrated Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which, ironically enough, provides an excellent framework by which sequels both in this franchise and others can be novel, original and engaging).
 
The lack of any sincere story to tell is powerfully evident, the films from Halloween II onward (at least those that feature Michael Myers) clearly lacking sincere scripts or even completed plots, hitting familiar beats and rehashing weary set-pieces and cliches, to the point that the series commits the ultimate sin of any created work or piece of fiction:
 
It becomes boring.
 
By the time we reach Halloween IV, the creators clearly aren't even trying any more; gambling on the innate appeal and dedicated audience of the franchise rather than on any genuine faith in their product. Numerous attempts have been made to re-imagine and re-tell the franchise's most familiar stories, all with extremely limited success.
 
Because there simply is nothing legitimate to tell after the original film. The themes are explored and left deliberately open ended, not to invite sequels or leave space for them, but so that they resonate in the audience's imagination and thereby maintain impact and significance long after the film itself has ended. By tying up these loose threads, by attempting to embellish and explain through unnecessary sequels, remakes etc, that quality is lost; the original film is sincerely diluted, by having its imagery and themes and plot become overly familiar.
 
Alien's original sequel is a sterling example of how you do it right; by taking the imagery and concepts of the first film and expanding them to fit a broader, more “action film” structure, yet still retaining the horror-chops and Giger-inspired disturbia of the original. But, more importantly, it exists for a reason beyond a simple studio desire to extend the franchise: the end of the original Alien leaves enough in the way of mystery and unanswered questions for at least one sequel, not least of which are certain questions that Aliens itself directly poses (“Who's laying these eggs?”). 

​Almost everything after, regardless of relative merit or lack thereof (and I do confess to having a soft spot for Alien 3; regardless of what problems the film exhibits, the fact that there is a film at all is nothing short of miraculous, given the studio's near constant interference and undermining of the project) is powerfully, powerfully redundant; struggling to justify itself, in the way that long-running franchises, particularly in the likes of horror and science fiction, consistently do. With every successive sequel, the franchise becomes less, not more; those with their hands on the reigns and the money in their coffers do not comprehend that novelty, surprise and genuine disturbance are part of what made the original films successful in the first place, prefering instead to bank on familiarity; to look at the beats, set pieces and subjects of prior instalments and attempt to replicate them with less money, different directors and a marginally different setting.
 
This “spoonfeeding” penchant, this pervasive condescension, is not only part of why genres such as horror struggle in mainstream settings or to sustain legitimacy, but also symptomatic of a wider poison; one that is increasingly reflected in our day to day discourses and media:
 
Our palates are infantilised when it comes to fiction, and increasingly so, on the level of general culture: as cultures, as societies (perhaps, arguably, as a species) we err towards the known quantity, the familiar beats and rhythms; that which we know rather than that which surprises. The resultant response is almost Pavlovian; something that studios and general media condition us to have, regardless of any genuine or legitimate response or emotion.
 
Thus, those of us who fell in love with the original Alien are supposed to sit up and pant at any film trailer that features the eponymous xenomorph, regardless of its framing, any wider quality of the work itself. Those of us who have entities such as The Terminator or Predator ingrained in our imaginations as part of our indelible influences are supposed to go gah-gah simply due to the fact of their inclusion in a film, regardless of whether said film has any merit in and of itself or there is any point in dredging them up from the graveyards of nostalgia.
 
And we are partially to blame for this status quo, as audiences, as consumers of this material: by and large, we do sit up and start salivating when the right buzz-words are used, when the right images flash before our eyes, when the right titles begin to emerge. We do con ourselves, just as we are consistently conned by other, insidious influences, into believing that there is some merit in this bilge because we experience a superficial -and ultimately unfulfilling- reaction to seeing childhood favourites on the screen again. The consistent box-office success of horror remakes, re-imaginings and reboots is more than consistent evidence of this, despite the fact that we have already seen most of these stories at their cinematic ideal; the apex and epitome has already been reached, the circumstances in which they were going to have such traumatic and profound impact have long since passed.
 
We cannot, much as we would like to, witness the Cenobites emerging from the shadows, tearing Frank Cotton apart again and feel the same degree of disturbia. We cannot witness the Face Hugger erupt from its distressingly fleshy egg and latch onto some unwitting investigator's face and experience the same hideous shock as we did when we were children or teenagers. Because we are different now; we have developed, we have grown up. The children and teenagers who first experienced those scenes and images and reactions are, quite literally, dead; dust in the breeze, ghosts that haunt our skulls, that we may lament, at times, but that can never be again, no matter how earnestly we try to recreate them. 

​That the effort to do so has become so neurotically enshrined that it has spawned entire genres of popular media shudders me to my core, evincing a wide-spread infantilisation and acute neurosis concerning our relations to ourselves, to our own childhoods, and the more developed, adult creatures that walk in their places. It closes us off, makes us backward looking, retrospective and delusional; it makes us resistent to the new, to the distressing, to the disturbing that might facilitate some genuine emotional or intellectual response and reduces us to infants, being distracted by favourite toys or cartoons.
 
This is particularly acute within the horror genre, as horror, by its very nature, relies on some degree of novelty and surprise; one cannot be genuinely distressed by something one has seen before and knows intimately. The beats and rhythms of a “slasher film” are so culturally enshrined at this point that even parodies like the original Scream are next to impossible to produce or take with any degree of legitimacy. One cannot sit down to yet another reboot of Halloween or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre without knowing in intimate detail how those stories are going to develop, what the film is going to throw at us. 

​And thus, horror dilutes itself, horror sickens and dies by becoming familiar and anodyne.
 
The worst of it is, studios and media in general would have us believe that there are no more stories to tell; that everything has been done, which is why we are now lost in a festering swamp of remakes and reimaginings, of retrospectives and hideous, hideous nostalgia.
 
Nothing could be further from the truth: go to Amazon, go to Google, conduct a search for “independent horror,” buy any random short story collection or a selection of novellas, and I guarantee you will find any number of stories and concepts you have never come across before, that have never been consigned to screen at any point.
 
There are even numerous examples in enshrined horror fiction: there are images in Clive Barker's Weaveworld, Coldheart Canyon, Imajica and Everville that have never, never seen the light of day on cinema or TV screens before. Likewise, the works of Billy Martin (AKA Poppy Z. Brite), Harlan Ellison, Christina Faust, H.P. Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell and numerous, numerous others are rife with material that would make for superb adaptations, in the right hands and given the right circumstances, which not even inveterate horror audiences have seen before.
 
The problem is not that material does not exist; the problems are complex and manifold, not least of which the fact that studios have become increasingly conservative in recent climates, terrified of alienating potential audiences by producing or funding something that actually disturbs or repels (both of which are part and parcel of the experience of any work of horror that can legitimately call itself such), instead, erring on the side of horror that is not horror; that fulfils all of the familiar beats and requirements, but succeeds in arousing nothing more than a few ghost-train ride yelps from the more sensitive or naïve.
 
But there is also the fact that audiences have become increasingly conservative themselves, on a steady diet of produced-by-committee, edited-by-test-audience super hero franchises, cynical rehashes of 1980s and 1990s toy and comic book lines, remakes of reboots of reimaginings of sequels to original works that serve no other purpose than to pander. We have allowed ourselves to become fat and bloated and spoiled, to return again and again to the familiar, whether it has any genuine worth or value or not.
 
This is particularly damning for horror audiences, who like to market themselves as being somewhat transgressive. The raw fact of the matter is: we are killing the genre that we love every time we return to our old loves, our original flames, when we allow them to abuse and neglect us and then thank them for the privilege.
 
There is stunningly good work everywhere. From YouTube to independent video games, from Amazon to numerous independent and small presses, there is good work. There is novel work. There is experimental and disturbing and beautiful work, that mainstream outlets would not touch with a ten-foot butcher knife. 

 
But finding that work requires effort on behalf of the audience; it requires opening ourselves up to disappointment, wading through the shit to find the diamonds.
 
The situation is not, perhaps, quite as hopeless as the tone of this article suggests: recent years have seen a certain uptick in mainstream venues allowing for a little in the way of more experimental work: the likes of Darren Aaronofsky's Mother, Adam Neville's The Ritual, Netflix's Annihilation, Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water and numerous others are all cause for sincere celebration, in that they demonstrate that, not only are studios sometimes, sometimes willing to take those necessary risks on deviant and transgressive material, but that there is a sincere and earnest appetite out there for it; that audiences ache for this stuff, often without knowing it.
 
As writers, as directors, as artists, it is our responsibility to fan those flames, to be fearless and novel and distressing in what we create, and to show audiences that the gruel they have been fed on since childhood is exactly that: insipid, empty, weak and watery; that there are alternatives, if they're only willing to rip out the drips and feeding tubes, wound themselves a little and learn to love it again. 
​

BOOK REVIEW: ​THE ANTIQUITY OF DARK THINGS BY  D.M. KEENAN