All-Russian State University of Cinema, named after S.A. Gerasimov
The concept of "fear film" [1, p. 16] is introduced by Yuri Arabov to designate films whose authors work with fear as a dominant emotion in communication with the viewer. Fear films are not only horror films, but also thrillers. If the former work with the predetermination of events happening to the hero and the irrational fears of the audience, then thrillers work with the hero's uncertainty about the reality surrounding him and rational anxieties. Not everyone is afraid of meeting a witch in the woods and dying ("The Blair Witch Project") or being judged in Hell for not loving their mother enough ("Beau Is Afraid") — the horrors underlying horror. But a completely adequate reaction is to be afraid of a maniac with a knife who got into the house ("Shining Girls") or that the murderer of the deceased parents may be the person you trust most of all — for example, your own uncle ("Territory").
There is a whole class of fear films in which the characters suffer from an unexpected turn of events on a journey. In such films, everything always goes wrong as planned. When faced with some problem, whether it's a disaster, fatal carelessness or getting into a so-called "lost", mystical place, the characters get into a terrible bind, which ends tragically for them. In such films, various kinds of attractions are actively exploited: there are screamers, a monster hero, who, rather, causes banal disgust, rather than mystical horror from contact with the bearer of a dark miracle, and elements of violence are often pronounced. The problem with such paintings, which are usually classified as slashers, is that they have not frightened the viewer for a long time. And sometimes, on the contrary, they cause the emotion of laughter.
The modern viewer wants to see more psychology in what is happening on the screen in order to establish an emotional connection to the hero and experience genuine horror, rather than watching technological advances ingeniously adapted to the film language. Good thrillers and horror films are, first of all, the hero's journey to his own fear. And when this fear is archetypal — that is, universal, easily recognizable to the viewer, then the film has a much better chance of success.
As an example, consider the painting "Midsommar" by Ari Aster — the story of a girl Denis, who suffers from severe psychological trauma after her sister kills her parents and then commits suicide herself. Denis has the only person left who could support her, but hardly copes with it — the guy Christian, who has long been eager to part with her, but out of pity, because of the tragedy Denis has experienced, has not yet decided. And Denis feels it, she knows how Christian really treats her. It seems dramaturgically justified that the heroine subsequently finds herself in a secluded Swedish village of sectarians — a place that, on the one hand, is filled with primitive cruelty, which she recently encountered, and on the other, which is able to restore her lost sense of belonging, merging with a group of people. In fact, this is a story about a confused person's fear of being completely alone in this world. And it is natural that in the finale of the film, choosing between Christian and an unknown member of the community — whom to sacrifice, Denis decides to sacrifice Christian: paradoxically, she has already found her new family here in the sect, and she no longer needs Christian. This is how Denis moves from a codependent relationship to an absolute dependent one. This plot can be read as a dark fantasy of a woman about revenge against a man who did not satisfy her emotional needs and did not really love her.
It is noteworthy that the plot movement of the characters in the artistic space of fear films ends in the vicissitudes of the end of the first act (this is how Denis gets stuck with his boyfriend and his friends in a secluded Swedish village), or at a central turning point (recall how in "The Blair Witch Project" the characters suddenly discover that they cannot get out of the forest and, moreover, they have been circling around the same place for a long time), or in general, the spatial journey is completely "packed" into the second act — as in the film "The Green Knight", where young Sir Gawain, the nephew and only heir of the king, is challenged to a duel with a mysterious guest during the Christmas celebration in the castle. According to the condition of the knight's challenge accepted by Gawain, anyone can strike the Green Knight first, but after a year and one day he will have to meet the Green Knight in the green chapel and take a blow in return. Gawain beheads the Green Knight, but he suddenly puts the severed head in place, reminds of the agreement and leaves. A year later, Sir Gawain, true to his word, sets out to meet his fate on a dangerous journey. Interestingly, nothing happens to him on the road, he literally wears a shell of invulnerability — because how he will part with his life is strictly predetermined: his head will be removed from his shoulders at the appointed time by the Green Knight. There are even two endings in the film, one of which is open. This is a kind of postmodern flirtation with the viewer: the denouement is predicted, but we still do not know for sure whether the Green Knight cut off Gawain's head or not. At the level of an idea, we have a story about a life that has been held hostage by honor, about the fear of accurate knowledge of impending death, about the loss of hope for a miraculous salvation. By the way, this is one of the reasons why stories about a miracle as the vicissitudes of experiencing the situation "the impossible becomes possible" do not work in the horror genre, and the picture "The Miracle" (2019, directed by A. Proshkin, screenplay by Yuri Arabov) is almost the only example of a film where a miracle as an event is given in the genre of a thriller, albeit not pure. In films of fear, a dark miracle dominates — the supernatural, invading the realm of everyday life of the characters, and there is a bearer of fear, possessing a miracle, mystery, authority [1, p. 32] (let us recall how the main character of the series "Shining Girls", having become a victim of an unusual maniac traveling through time, experiences a cosmogonic failure every day – an uncontrolled change objective reality, traveling through a personal multiverse).
At the chosen point of the dramatic composition, the author of the film of fear intentionally restricts the spatial movement of the characters — thus, at the level of the plot, they fight like a trapped butterfly in a jar. And this prepares the transition to a journey of a different order — a spiritual leap or a strong psychological change in the characters when faced with their fear, which occur already at the level of the plot. To get out of the trap, the hero must overcome himself, overcome his fear. The character's movement, from the point of view of the plot, at this stage looks like running through a maze, whereas, from the point of view of the plot, he moves on. A good example of such an artistic construction is the TV series "Territory", where the protagonist Egor Chudinov goes in search of his parents who disappeared during an ethnographic expedition to the Perm Region, and at the climax of the story he is locked in a cave and experiences mystical ecstasy there, discovering that he himself has a shamanic gift.
Modern films of fear generally tend to have complicated spatial topologies, which are accompanied, as a rule, by mixed conventional spectator structures. “Shining Girls” series is declared by genre as a thriller, science fiction, drama, detective. This is a film about the fear that someone, once invading our lives, may turn it upside down, injuring us, and as a result we may lose ourselves. It is this elemental, violent force that is personified by the maniac who attacked Kirby. A maniac in this case is a person who tracks down his victim throughout her life, moving through time, and attacking at the point of fate when the victim is about to reach the apotheosis of his dreams. Thus, the basic horror underlying this series is the fear of not taking place, not succeeding in life, and the composition of the multiverse is a suitable form for visualizing this very relevant fear.
"Beau Is Afraid" is a comedy, horror, drama and one of the most daring film adaptations of Camus's book "The Outsider". According to the plot of the film, Bo is no longer young, he is afraid of everything in the world and tries once again not to leave the house. On the anniversary of his father's death, Bo is going to visit his mother, but someone steals his suitcase and apartment keys right out the door. This egregious incident sets off a chain of events that forces Bo to embark on a journey full of oddities that transcends space and time. Obviously, Bo has not yet separated from his mother. And Bo's main fear is not a crazy world full of dangers, as seen from a superficial reading of the plot. Bo is afraid that he is irreparably to blame for his mother: he once left her, leaving his father's house, and now that his mother is dead, he has nowhere and no one to return to. And that's why, in the finale of the picture, Bo discovers that his mother is actually alive, and he is being tried in an improvised Hell for the sin of not loving her. In form, this painting is Homer's "Odyssey", only told in Kafkaesque language, which is the best way to creatively comprehend our chaotic and absurd reality.
Do we know many horror movies with a good ending? How often does the protagonist manage to overcome his fear? Thrillers are much more likely to end with the rescue of the hero despite fatal circumstances, horror almost never. In them, if we speak in the terminology of the concept of the path of the hero or monomyph proposed by Joseph Campbell [2, p. 34], a return from the adventure zone to the comfort zone is impossible: the hero either remains in the world of evil altogether, or finds himself in the ordinary world, but he is invariably overtaken by signs of the horror he has experienced. Thus, there is no full—fledged transgression from the realm of the sacred, supernatural to the realm of the profane, that is, the film of fear is a construction, in a sense, of the hero's never-ending journey.
It seems that the search for a modern fear that will truly resonate with the viewer, as well as an actual dramatic form of its expression, is a difficult dramatic task facing the authors when creating films of fear. Despite the structural contradiction between the basic condition for the emergence of fear in the artistic film space and the motive of the hero's journey as an open-source space, the combination of the travel format and genre elements of horror and thrillers opens up new opportunities for creating film plots.
Bibliography
- Arabov Yuri. Genre as an emotion machine (The initial chapters of a large book). Textbook. — M. : VGIK, 2020. — 58 p.
- Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. St. Petersburg: Piter, 2022. — 352 p.
Filmography
- "The Blair Witch Project": Coursework from the other world (1999), dir. Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez.
- "Beau Is Afraid" (2023), dir. Ari Aster.
- "The Green Knight" (2021), dir. David Lowry.
- "Shining Girls" (2022), dir. Daina Reid, Michelle McLaren, Elisabeth Moss.
- "Midsommar" (2019), dir. Ari Aster.
- "Territory" (2020), dir. Igor Tverdokhlebov, Dinar Garipov.
- "The Miracle" (2009), directed by A.Proshkin.
