Horror, and such

My darling Yoko is Japanese. She also has a different take on what's scary and what's not. In particular, things like the little girl in The Ring are scary to her, but not unbearably so; the little girl in Ringu (the Japanese original), however, is so freaky and scary that Yoko will not even watch that movie. There is a tradition in Japan of scary being not that which does terrible things, or the things done, so much as the psychotic woman with long, stringy black hair over her face laughing psychotically.

One could extrapolate a fear of disorder or a fear of the irrational, if one wished, but I'll leave that for someone else to do.

So, since American scary movies don't scare her, she does, occasionally, want to see them to see what all the buzz is about. Sadly, I'm a full-fledged wimp when it comes to scary things. Well, okay, that's not entirely true, although I'm not backing up here just to assuage my bruised male ego. I can (and will) watch scary things, and even gross things, and laugh. It's just, well, I'm pretty well aware, intellectually, of the evil that people do to each other, and most horror films don't grip me enough to make it worth my while to follow them all the way through.

Oh, and zombie movies seriously freak me out to the point where I have trouble sleeping*. There, I've said it, and I am unashamed to admit it**.

My friend Z-, on the other hand, likes scary movies. He saw the new Dawn of the Dead. He's looking forward to renting The Descent.

So when Yoko made it clear that she would, at some point, like to see Slither and Hostel, I knew whom to call, and it wasn't Ghost Busters.

We had a lovely meal at Z-'s place, and then we watched Slither and Hostel. Reviewishness, with possible spoilers, follows behind the cut.



Of the two, Slither was the lighter, funnier one. It's about aliens taking over people by way of oral invasion or through impregnation via tentacles to the abdomen (shades of Xtro and hentai anime). Really. Oh, yeah, and there's a certain zombie-ish manner to the people who get taken over. And the impregnees eat a helluvalot of meat and then get really big. And then explode. And then more slug-like things come out and try to get in people's mouths. So you can see how it's the lighter, funnier one.

Seriously, though, it has a few gross-out scenes and plenty of anticipatory suspense scenes (the one in the bathtub really had me wondering just how far the director was going to go with this, but he thankfully turned back just on the brink of, um, bad taste).

Hostel is the one that got lots of press as a scary film. Here are the spoilers: there are scenes where people are tortured with power drills, chain saws, scissors, scapels, a blowtorch, and a claw rake; there are also lots of scenes of bodies being chopped up. And it's disturbing and gross. And yet....

In 1929, Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel made Un chien andalou in which they simulated cutting a woman's eyeball. It does not matter much that they subsituted a dead calf's eyeball for the woman's eyeball. The effect of just reading about that scene is so incredibly off the scale that I submit that it is the ne plus ultra of cinematic torture, barring the actual existence of a snuff film.

Hostel doesn't really get close to that. In addition, Hostel is a carefully crafted movie that adheres closely to the zero sum karma rules for horror films (and, might I add, tales of heroic journeys and transformations): the better things are, the worse they must become, and the worse things become, the bigger the payoff must be at the end of the film. In Hostel, you get the torture, but you also get the redeemptive, retributive emergence of the protagonist into the light, escaping from the Underworld damaged but mostly intact, and utterly transformed.

So, if you can get past the ick, it's actually not a bad film.


* Look, there's just something about the silent or quiet shambling (or running) dead creeping about in the dark looking for living things to eat/infect that makes every creak of the floorboards and every click or groan of the house settling make me lie in bed with my eyes wide open, listening intently.

** There are two exceptions to this: 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead. And even they made me twitchy.