Death on the Road

This week, the perilous road, genre and the Internet, and Symbolist art. Spoilers for Road Games.

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Road Games, dir. Richard Franklin, 1981.

Road endgames. The trucker in the popular imagination might be an everyman or a folk hero, but, in other contexts, especially in horror, might also be someone to fear. The road can be a dangerous place. It’s a world apart from our everyday lives, set as they are in known, fixed locales. The road is a place free from the constraints of our rule-bound social worlds. It’s a place of anonymity, and a place where people come together and, just as quickly, disappear from each other’s lives forever. The trucker, as a creature of the road, is both a the subject of an FBI serial killing initiative and a recurring horror villain. In Road Games, our trucker Quid isn’t dangerous at all, but his occupation makes him an object of suspicion for a series of killings occurring along the Australian highway. Richard Franklin and Everett De Roche wanted to make Rear Window on the road and, for the same reason the trucker’s an object of fear, the trucker is the right character to notice a killer on the move. Life on the road, life within this menacing environment, gives him the right context, the right perspective, to apprehend the danger despite the motion, the chaos, and the anonymity. 

Suspicious minds. It’s a lot of fun to suspect someone of something. In the thriller or horror movie there tends to be an emotional divide between characters and viewers. Characters are worried, they’re anxious. A viewer might very well be anxious too but, also, enjoy the uncertain, often macabre fascination of targeted mistrust. Quid, like a viewer, is having it both ways. Stuck on the often monotonous road, Quid’s suspicion is helping him stay entertained. Quid does all sorts of things to pass the time: talks to his dingo Boswell, plays harmonica, listens to music. When he brings someone on board, he’ll rope them into a game of twenty questions. And when he picks up “Hitch” (Jamie Lee Curtis), he brings her into his world of suspicion of the man in the green van. They are, of course, appropriately anxious. But their speculation about murder is also a way of passing the time. The tone can be, at times, as light as a game of twenty questions.