The Thing That Should Not Be

August 17, 2018 8:57 AM

Sean T. Collins writes: ALL HAIL THE MONUMENTAL-HORROR IMAGE - "How striking scenes from ‘The Shining,’ ‘The Wicker Man,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ and other iconic horror movies make an indelible mark on us."

Collins draws on his senior essay from Yale [PDF] from 1999 to develop his theory of the monumental-horror image in movies from The Wicker Man to Eyes Wide Shut and Unedited Footage Of A Bear, from Adult Swim

posted by the man of twists and turns (38 comments total)

i was fine with them all until the shining bathtub image and now i'm looking at cat videos instead
posted by poffin boffin at 9:05 AM on August 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

(Also serves as an example of The Needlessly Difficult Webpage Design That Should Not Be.)
posted by Spathe Cadet at 9:08 AM on August 17, 2018 [19 favorites]

Ask your MetaFilter Moderator if Claridryl is right for you.
posted by Wordshore at 9:19 AM on August 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

Feel free to post links, poffin boffin. *rubs eyes*
posted by kinnakeet at 9:53 AM on August 17, 2018

.....Dammit, I've already been having trouble sleeping because of a recent nightmare about such an uncannily-creepy thing happening in my apartment (gibberingly insane guy somehow managing to slither between the double panes of my window, up through the crack between them and into my bedroom, I woke up right when his head was emerging). These are all exactly the kinds of things that are going to make me sleep with the lights on, why did i look
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:55 AM on August 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

I feel like this is giving the horror genre way too much credit. Sure it's art and can be well made, but it's not a Fabergé egg.
posted by Brocktoon at 9:56 AM on August 17, 2018

I kept waiting for the image of Linda Blair coming backwards down the stairs in The Exorcist. I suppose maybe that wasn't quite "monumental" in the way the author has in mind here, but the uncanniness of that scene damn-near had me crying and hiding under my chair.
posted by DingoMutt at 9:59 AM on August 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

......but it's not a Fabergé egg.

Hey - I have some episodes of Hannibal that would like to have a word...... or possibly a fork..... with you.
posted by Gyre,Gimble,Wabe, Esq. at 9:59 AM on August 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

I was fine with all the shots from the Exorcist, It Follows, Rosemary's Baby, etc., but when I saw that still of BOB from Twin Peaks my brain started whimpering "No no no no no" and I had to take a break.
posted by zoetrope at 10:04 AM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Sure it's art and can be well made, but it's not a Fabergé egg.

You're right. Horror is way better.
posted by Maaik at 10:05 AM on August 17, 2018 [9 favorites]

Ask your MetaFilter Moderator if Claridryl is right for you.

10 million bonus points for including Unedited Footage of a Bear.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:05 AM on August 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Some great examples, starting with Wicker Man. I was especially impressed by the stills from Night of the Hunter, Prince of Darkness, Blair Witch. Alas, Rosemary's Baby had the wrong shot (nothing monumental there).

Still thinking about this.
that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. That's one interpretation of monsters, as warnings (if you accept the weird etymology of monere) that something has gone terrible, radically wrong. So perhaps these monumental images are a medium-specific instance of the power of monstrosity.
posted by doctornemo at 10:06 AM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

when I saw that still of BOB from Twin Peaks my brain started whimpering "No no no no no"

This was the exact moment I got fear goosebumps too.
posted by misskaz at 11:08 AM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed that a lot. Yes, it's not enough that the image be of something bad or painful; it has to be something that registers as wrong.

The resemblance of the black and red geometric patterns behind the text can't not be a reference to the carpet in the Overlook Hotel, can they?
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:33 AM on August 17, 2018

omg that page design is more horrifying than any of the images, by far.
posted by supermedusa at 11:34 AM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Nice shout-out to Marble Hornets. I hadn't seen the unedited footage of a bear, either.
posted by lkc at 11:36 AM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

I would characterize many of these as "things that shouldn't be there and are looking at you"...
posted by jim in austin at 11:39 AM on August 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

So, I don't know if this fits, because it's not a static shot, but the scene that springs to my mind is the train on fire in Spielberg's War of the Worlds.

Because that was a such beautiful illustration that things are not okay.
posted by BrashTech at 11:41 AM on August 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Sure it's art and can be well made, but it's not a Fabergé egg.

Got you covered.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:42 AM on August 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

Among the many other fine examples from David Lynch, I don't quite see the Lady In the Radiator from Eraserhead as an image of horror.
posted by mubba at 11:49 AM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

I was surprised not to see anything from Carnival of Souls, but you can't expect everything in one piece
posted by The Underpants Monster at 11:50 AM on August 17, 2018

that page design is awful. tried reading a thing about the face transplant girl and it was the same thing. i love face transplant stories and i just couldn't deal with the full screen non-resizable fading in and out images. who came up with that shit?
posted by misanthropicsarah at 12:21 PM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Last Christmas I visited a friend likes smoking ... alternative leaf, let's just say. I noticed he didn't have a TV any more, which was odd, as it was his pride and joy on which he'd watch movies in the total dark, backed up by a full sound system.

It turned out he'd watched a particular movie, got partway through to one particular scene, got up, immediately ripped the TV from the brackets, gone to the river, and thrown the TV in.

Me: Which movie?
Him: Uh, four blokes, civil war, one bloke goes into a tent with the devil, screen goes black, lots of screaming for a while, then...
Me: Oh. Okay. That one. You watched that movie and that scene while stoned. Heck.
posted by Wordshore at 12:27 PM on August 17, 2018 [10 favorites]

Kind of an odd shot from Prince of Darkness, as well. I think one of Alice Cooper would have fit the theme a little better.
posted by lkc at 12:40 PM on August 17, 2018

I can't imagine finding the statue in The Exorcist spooky; it's like accidentally making eye-contact with a dude with an inconvenient boner and in a futile attempt to make things less weird he gives this awkward little dorky wave of acknowledgement.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 1:12 PM on August 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

I like this idea, and how it ties in to "cursed images". I was always struck by the quote from Karloff:

“I think the title leaves the stories wide open to be based on melodrama not violence or shock. They’ll be stories about people in ordinary surroundings and something happened to them. The whole thing boils down to taste. Anybody can show you a bucket of blood and say-‘This is a bucket of blood’, but not everyone can produce a skilful story”–Boris Karloff (1960)

Mentally I always shorthand it as "making you afraid of the bucket", where a director enlists innocuous things and makes them terrifying: there's nothing inherently scary about cassette tapes, or bees, or folk songs, prams, twins, Cadillacs, balloons
king is good at this
clowns, birds, or any other bucket that's turned up over the years.

The other aspect is the shot where we are suddenly and finally assured that everything is not OK. This is not a prank, the cure for infection is not here, you didn't just lose the keys to the car, Kane is not feeling better for the voyage home, Seth Brundle no longer wants to be cured.

I think the monumental horror shot exists somewhere at the intersection. Now I want to watch Ōdishon for the amazing job it does of leaping across that line.
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 1:42 PM on August 17, 2018 [4 favorites]

The other aspect is the shot where we are suddenly and finally assured that everything is not OK.

from Get Out
posted by the man of twists and turns at 2:00 PM on August 17, 2018 [5 favorites]

I think an aspect of this is the timing of the shot... to be effective, the shot has to last just long enough for you to be intrigued, to have a vague idea of what you saw, but not long enough for you to process what you just saw. The result is a jolt- 'did I see what I think I just saw'?

Tad Danielewski skirted on this topic in his novel The House of Leaves. There, he calls it 'unheimlich'-

Essentially, the purpose of the monumental horror shot is to displace the viewer from the sense of a rational universe.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 5:13 PM on August 17, 2018 [3 favorites]

I'd be interested in reading this if it were available in a format that didn't interfere with basic browser functions like "page up" and "page down". Argh.
posted by Lexica at 6:49 PM on August 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

I've been hoping this idea would get fleshed out a bit more by these comments. I still don't think this is a thing, this Monumental Horror. I certainly understand what he's trying to get at, but it seems to be super-vaguely defined. Some of those images are immediately jarring out of context. Some of them require you to squint. Others would make sense in any movie, good or bad, set up or not. If he's just talking about the appearance of something impossible on screen, well that takes a thousand forms, horror or otherwise. Surrealism serves many purposes.

I'm not saying I have good arguments for or against this conceit, I'm saying that I don't understand what the conceit is and could use some help.
posted by es_de_bah at 7:54 AM on August 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm not saying I have good arguments for or against this conceit, I'm saying that I don't understand what the conceit is and could use some help.

As near as I can explain it -

There is nothing intrinsically"scary" about a man standing still.
There is nothing intrinsically "scary" about nighttime.
There is nothing intrinsically "scary" about the sight of a neighbor's roof out the window.

But if you combine those elements in the middle of an already-tense moment it can be creepy as shit.

Same with how "a well" isn't scary, "a crawling wet girl" isn't necessarily scary, but you combine the two and it freaks you out. Or how "a clown" may not be scary, nor is a storm drain, but combining the two just feels wrong.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:07 AM on August 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've been hoping this idea would get fleshed out a bit more by these comments. I still don't think this is a thing, this Monumental Horror. I certainly understand what he's trying to get at, but it seems to be super-vaguely defined.

I think that's a fair response since, were I grading this, I'd tell the author that's it's a good first pass at an idea, but needs a lot more work in the details. (And is a complete fail at presentation.)
From my perspective, the use of the shots selected serve a couple different functions within the films and selecting them as stand alone still images sort of hides that, even as the similarities in framing do give some sense of there being a connection that is worth noting.

There are, basically, two kinds of shots the author is focusing on, but their uses differ. The first kind of shot is that of the people staring at the camera, which is often a signal to character awareness of the vision, but not always. Since horror movies so often have a quasi-religious element to them, let's call these the Baptist shots. They, essentially, prophesize some greater horror to come which the character is being made gradually more aware of. The shots are often something only the central character sees, offered in a scene of seeming normality, that provide a hint at something uncanny lurking beneath the surface.

The audience, being generally aware of the context of the film, will respond to these as clear warnings the character should be heeding, even as the character themselves lack the larger context to make sense of the vision, so they often ignore what they see, or minimize it, since it doesn't fit the norm. If they do react, as in the clip EmpressCallipygos linked, it's still from a perspective of the vision being explicable and thus fitting regular existence. At the same time the audience "knows" it is really a true sign of something more drastically amiss. It builds the tension as audience and character awareness starts to come closer, but is still at a slight remove as the characters see but don't wholly accept the information the audience "knows" as real.

In some instances, like that of the shot from The Innocents, it can signal that perhaps the character themselves is somehow seeing things or that the vision is a real threat, leading to a sense of conflict for the audience as the reality of what they see is now called into question, even as the threat itself is not. Other times, the vision made be something the character misses seeing, looking away at just the wrong moment, while the camera lingers to show the audience something the character didn't see, as in "us" seeing someone staring intently at the character or a person obviously out of place shown as the character turns their attention elsewhere or walks away. This builds a similar tension in the audience for how close the threat is to a still "blinkered" character. The desire is in the warning or want to warn the character over what is coming, but is not yet seen.

The second kind of shot then is the "Jesus Christ! WTF!" kind, where the prophetic hints are know given full revelation and true horror of the situation and the derangement of the norm is now unavoidable. One of the most common shots of this kind is the all too familiar "reveals" of some secret room in a serial killer's home where the walls are plastered with images of those he killed or someone or something they are obsessed by. This is more a true monument shot in a traditional use of the term sense, where something physical has been created that represents a major diversion from the norm signalling some heretofore hidden yet extremely powerful belief. It says what you believe you know is wrong there is some other order at work in the world you are not aware of.

The reveal of the Wicker Man, the use of human remains as sculptural objects in Hannibal, the secret rooms or grand designs of serial killers are given perverse "reason" in these moments, though that "reason" is only hinted at through its excess and differentiation from acceptable normalcy. This is one of the perverse keys to much horror, that it somehow could be explicated in rational terms, that there is based in some ideology that underlies the conventional surface of things, always there but invisible to most people save the "enlightened", who pay a dear price for their new awareness. That horror lurks under the surface of our normal day to day lives purposefully planning and waiting can help build a sense of uncanniness to the films as it can be transposed to the everyday world where conspiracies of horror may be happening that we are too blind to see.

Horror coming from sudden eruptions of irrational violence too can be frightening of course, but they often carry a different imagery and understanding. The "people" shots in those are more often of immediate threats as yet unseen as opposed to prophesies of some greater rational meaning. The first view of the ghouls in Night of the Living Dead, for example, hint at the larger horror to come, but not at an ideology behind it. The "people" themselves are the horror, nothing more grand.

The author's noting of the similarities in shot construction though, the frequent centering of the subject in the shot, is worth considering though for how that most formal of constructs, the balanced centered shot that places one's attention squarely on the object to be observed is itself a bit unsettling as it isn't how we experience the world. It calls attention to itself for being a constructed shot, something we are demanded to see. It is the artifice of it which can be so unnerving, something Wes Anderson, for an obvious non-horror example, too is well aware of in much the same way Kubrick could be. That though is drifting from the core of the piece.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:51 AM on August 18, 2018 [5 favorites]

Oh, sorry for going on so long, but it may also help to relate the Monumental shot the author talks about for horror, to similar "reveals" in other movies like the Death Star in Star Wars for example. This shot type isn't something unique to horror. It serves similar, though not identical functions, in other kinds of films.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:29 PM on August 18, 2018 [2 favorites]

Thank you for going on, gusottertrout! I like your focus on exactly the visual, directorial input. One question from a film geek but not a cinema scholar: isn't putting the object we're looking at in the centre of the frame a pretty default way of filming?
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 2:37 PM on August 18, 2018

It depends, in general centering objects constantly makes for pretty dull film making. There are movies and directors that tend to default to this mode, but it's lazy and doesn't provide much for the viewer to really engage with as it is directly telling them what to pay attention to all the time, removing the need for added engagement and wonder from them.

More effective is the occasional, highly noticeable centered shot or a tight close up of some object giving it some hugely increased sense of importance. Hitchcock's films, for example, are filled with these kinds of close ups, where some object fills the screen, giving it a weight far outside its normal sense of meaning. The object itself may or may not be so important, but it signals the attention given to it by the character and thus makes the viewer more aware of its function or fate.

There too is a difference between a generally centered composition that lazy filmmaking has and a purposeful one that directs viewers attention in a way that stands out for running counter to the preceding shots or the otherwise established visual language of the film. Even in extreme cases like that of Wes Anderson, he centers almost everything in highly artificial, exceedingly balanced shots, which is unusual, where a more usual centering is done without as much care for formal balance, it just puts the main thing in the middle and says screw the rest, essentially, which makes the backgrounds almost completely devoid of interest, something one can't ever say for Anderson's films.
posted by gusottertrout at 3:06 PM on August 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Since this is about film, I wonder about the strange image of Orlok from Nosferatu.
posted by doctornemo at 6:00 AM on August 19, 2018

I found the article okay to navigate on an iPad, it seems designed to work well on a smallish screen with swipe ability. Which is terrible because dammit, there's more to the web than iPads.
posted by harriet vane at 8:44 AM on August 19, 2018

Since this is about film, I wonder about the strange image of Orlok from Nosferatu.

Heh, which strange image of Orlok? There are a lot of them.

I think this one, a little less than a minute into the clip, is the one that best fits the author's claim. It isn't quite like many of the others mentioned for Orlok's status already shown beyond any doubt, but for the situation on the ship and the method of reveal it works. Others though might be chosen, like the one to appear shortly into this clip perhaps.

But then Murnau had a gift for powerful imagery, check out this beauty from Faust, monumental in scale, but not seen directly by any character.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:13 AM on August 19, 2018