--- On Mon, 8/25/08, Henry M. Taylor <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> In the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers it is at
> least
> suggested that the federal authorities (FBI) are able to
> contain the
> threat. The Birds is ambiguous, while in NOTLD evil clearly
> triumphs.
That is an amazing statement, because it seems to have taken you very little to label the authorities as something evil, regardless of basically the same narrative - the "monsters" threatening normalcy.
Concerning the question if there are intellectual horror films: I doubt it requires an intellectual approach to make an intellectual horror film or something that´s worth to be taken seriously.
(There are of course directors like Cronenberg who can elaborate thoroughly on what they are doing, and studies like Riepe´s "Bildgeschwüre" dealing with Cronenberg´s metaphors in the light of Lacan, no translation yet to my knowledge).
The same question is raised in "Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies". How could there possibly be an intellectual notion when there are first timers at work, having no intellectual background but a ridiculous time schedule and a shoestring budget, and the primary intent is to end up with a commercial product. Interestingly, the showings of horror films in the duck-and-cover age were often combined with those of ultrarealistic footage e.g. of child birth.
Someone already mentioned the different readings of the Body Snatchers metaphor, but the audience being the one attaching changing meanings not relying upon on pregiven auteur´s intentions. And I´d like to understand it that way, that the strength of the horror genre is producing and overwriting images - or more precisely cutting the meaning of an image from its meaning taken for granted, certainly like in comedies as The Great Dictator.
On a visual level, there´s a juxtaposition of the order being reinstalled in The Night of the Living Dead with the army regaining control, the same horror typical approach is at work when you show a policeman knocking at someone´s door and the image is suddenly stripped bare of the metaphorical "to protect and to serve" layer to reveal a potential threat - a total stranger carrying a gun.
To diminish the value of the "exploitation flicks", very often the anecdote that the poster artwork was created prior to the actual shooting, is brought up. But if you return to The Excorcist and look at the accompanying onesheet: Horror films don´t carry titles like "The Hero Comes to the Rescue" or "The Monster Gets Killed" and they don´t show the solution to a threat. It´s been a while since I have seen the film, but if I remember correctly, all the monstrous events occur after the excorcists have appeared, with the torturing (hospital) scenes of a relatively average innocent girl already shown.
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