What are we talking about when we talk about "New Wave Horror"? Scratch the surface of the bulk that's been said about it and you'll soon find that the "New Wave" moniker is often bandied about with little justification. Even so, applied carefully, the term can be enlightening rather than obfuscating.
Suspension of disbelief alone isn't quite enough to truly enjoy a horror film. As a viewer, you've got to accept total submersion into a dream state, a world of symbol and metaphor, as if consenting to hypnosis. Great horror films don't merely scare an audience -- they possess it like a demonic entity or fatal curse from which the only escape is to see it through to the very end. While basic elements of terror have been constant since the invention of the ghost story, certain changes have mutated the genre, both gradually and in sudden fits that have seized the medium like a compulsive bloodlust.
Watch a batch of classic horror films from the first decades of the century and you'll notice certain themes and styles of presentation emerge. Often these early works are stories about individuals in conflict with society and the seductiveness of the dark side of human nature. Taboos are delineated and vilified and moral solutions are proposed. The Dracula myth, for example, for all that we now know about what the Victorians were up to behind closed doors, is often read as a dissertation on erotic sexuality in opposition to the constraints of late 19th century mores.
In these films, internal corruption and evil typically mirror the external, monstrous forms of the antagonists. These beasts are easy to spot and are clearly an infection to be repelled from the citizen body and then destroyed, preferably for good. Both Island of Lost Souls (1932) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941) reveal men at war with the animal inside and depict failed attempts to overcome our beastly nature with societally approved systems of order such as science and law.
These horror classics were often based on works written in the 18th or 19th centuries and hadn't yet caught up with the latest in 20th century intellectual fashion. Once film did catch up with modern literature, though, newer, more complex forms of storytelling began to arise, and ambiguity, graphic violence and dysfunctional psychology entered the language of the genre.
Director Tod Browning was one of the first truly modern horror directors in that he often looked at extremely dark manifestations of human behavior, saying, in essence, that we needn't look any further than ourselves if our aim was to closely examine evil. Although most often remembered for Dracula (1931), it is his other, lesser-celebrated works that are often the more disturbing ones. Audiences must have been truly shaken by early silent works such as The Unknown (1927), which featured the always brilliant Lon Chaney as a supposedly armless sideshow knife thrower, Alonzo, who lusts after his assistant, Estrellita, played by a very young and quite stunning Joan Crawford. Estrellita has this phobia about being touched by men's hands and Alonzo indulges in an elaborate ruse to convince her that he lacks them -- which culminates in a terrifying act of self-mutilation. The uncomfortable manifestations of the film's sexual politics are so disturbing that the film still works its dark magic even now. Browning's twisted masterpiece, Freaks (1932), starring real, and in some cases, deformed, sideshow performers, was so reviled at the time of its release that it was banned. Clearly, Browning wasn't afraid to depict controversial subjects, which marks him as one of the great innovators of modern horror.
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