New Format, Silent Lambs
Welcome to a new version of this newsletter. I've been writing essays and other long-form projects elsewhere, so I haven't been able to contribute full essays to this space.
What I can do is continue to think about horror in a more casual, short-form, but still serious way. I want this to be a weekly quick-read. Read on for my first stab at this . . . .
From the Grave.
Three ideas from horror cinema's past.
Prompted by viewing the wonderful documentary Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus, I rewatched Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs this week. An endlessly rewatchable film, it remains, of all the great adaptations of Harris on film and TV, still the most terrifying.
- A serial killer thriller would typically open with an intense hook—a crime scene, a killing or kidnapping, a grisly discovery. The opening scene in The Silence of the Lambs has, instead, Clarice Starling jogging, then running, through the woods at an FBI training facility. And yet it’s distinctly compelling. There’s perhaps a touch of concern evoked at the sight of a woman jogging alone in the woods, but we’ve seen the training-course ropes and her FBI Academy sweatshirt. She doesn't seem to be in any peril. What’s powerful is the thick, heavy mood of the autumn trees, the surreal quantity of fog, and Howard Shore’s eerie score. It’s a feat of atmosphere. It’s an opening that demonstrates how pure mood can sometimes be all the hook that's needed.
- Silence doesn’t open with Buffalo Bill, and we wait a long time before we finally encounter him. It isn’t until just about minute 32—after Hannibal Lecter tells Starling, “Our little Billy must already be searching for that next special lady”—that we finally cut to the abduction of Catherine Martin in Memphis. We've heard a lot about him before this point, and we've seen his handiwork (crime scene photos, an autopsy), but we haven't met him. It’s a riveting, terrifying scene, finally in his space, in his presence, watching Catherine’s mundane evening hijacked by a killer. Delay and build-up do so much here, serving dramatic irony in the extreme—something so scary, so vile, but that Catherine has no idea is right there with her in the parking lot.
- On the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, there are around 40 minutes of deleted scenes. They’re an interesting, fun watch (they include, among other things, a long televangelist broadcast that we ultimately only catch a bit of from Lecter’s cell in the final cut). If you watch these scenes, as I did, having recently viewed the film, it’s a little shocking how off some of them feel. Especially clunky are a couple scenes in which Starling gets suspended and then Jack Crawford sends her off to investigate Buffalo Bill anyway, suspension-be-damned. These scenes don’t work, first, because they’re rote, cop-show fare that doesn’t stand up to the rest of the movie. They also don’t work because Starling’s academic and career progress has such lower stakes than Catherine Martin’s predicament in Bill’s well. Why, at this point in the film, should we care? Imagining these scenes in a film of such assured tone is a difficult thing to do. Though their existence cannot be called a surprise—cutting material that doesn’t work is just part of the filmmaking process—they're a reminder of how essential the right cuts are. It’s hard not to believe that Silence’s classic status rested for a moment on a knife’s edge—on the decision of whether to cut or not.
Right Behind You.
A thought on horror's present.
- Zach Cregger’s Weapons (light spoilers ahead) opened this weekend to packed theaters, and it made me think about the relationship of mystery to tone (as Cregger’s Barbarian did in 2022). The mystery in Weapons feels like urban legend or creepypasta: At 2:17am, all the children (but one) in a single elementary school class get out of bed, leave their homes, run off into the night—arms out at their sides in an “airplane” pose—and disappear. It’s bizarre and eerie. Especially creepy are the images of the children captured on doorbell cameras, running off alone into the grainy night. So too are images of the suburbs at night, Gregory Crewdson-evoking roads and yards lit unevenly by streetlights. As the mystery reveals itself, though, the tone shifts. Gone is the spell of the suburban uncanny, replaced by something more monstrous, more garish, more comic. Tone shift is inherent, to some degree, in revelation. Revelation might deepen or sharpen tone, or undercut it, or replace it with something entirely new. The Vanishing, for instance, has its all-time classic revelation, and an attendant tonal change. But its final, definitive bleakness marks a fitting endpoint for all the dread that came before. It’s a tonal continuity that others, like Cregger, aren’t attempting.
Living Deliciously.
A recommendation.
- On the topic of eerie tales of disappearing children, I’ve just read “The Stories We Tell About Ghosts,” a story from A.C. Wise's collection The Ghost Sequences. Laced with metafictional thinking about ghost stories, it’s a potent ghost story in its own right, tracking a group of neighborhood kids, particularly the narrator and his more timid younger brother, as they become absorbed by a ghost-hunting, augmented-reality game on their phones—a sort of horror Pokemon Go. If this sounds goofy, it isn’t. "The Stories We Tell About Ghosts" is spooky and intense, its central sibling relationship a real, fragile thing.
Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. Here in Los Angeles, ICE agents continue kidnapping mothers, fathers, grandpas, grandmas, and children off our streets. The time for resisting fascism is now.