The Fool Reviews Pontypool

shut up or die

Hello, everyone ("everyone" meaning "those one or two people who actually give a crap what I post here"), and welcome to our very first installment of The Fool Reviews. 

In my previous post, you may have noticed that I generally prefer older horror movies to the new ones. My favorites are Halloween, The Thing, Night of the Living Dead, and The Exorcist - which shouldn't really surprise anyone, since they're all well-known masterpieces of the genre. However, there is another entry on my list of favorites which is rather more modern, and since MesserTod asked, via comments, about what modern horror movies I like, I thought I'd go ahead and show it to you.

This is Pontypool, a 2008 low-budget horror film which doesn't get nearly enough love. 

Before I begin, though, I think it's worth mentioning that this movie is actually on my top-ten list of all-time favorites, and I think that you'd be best off watching it for yourself to see why. It's by no means one of the best films I've seen, but it's definitely one of those that I most enjoy watching. Be forewarned that this review does contain spoilers, and that you'll lose a lot of the initial impact of watching it for yourself if you read this first. 

If you're interested in seeing the movie for yourself, the entire thing is available on YouTube in six parts. It has a total running time of about an hour and a half, so if you've got some free time, I highly recommend that you check it out for yourself. The first of the six parts can be found here.

From here on in, I'm going to assume that you've either scene the movie for yourself or don't mind spoilers, all right? Good. Now, on to the review.

Pontypool's opening is actually one of the best that I've ever seen, and is definitely one of the strong points of the movie. The film stars Stephen McHattie as Grant Mazzy, a radio DJ in the small Canadian city of Pontypool. McHattie's voice has been described by multiple people, myself included, as "orgasmic", "the best sex your ears will ever have", and "audible chocolate". Really. I would go gay for this voice. I'm not entirely sure that listening to him talk doesn't already count as having sex with him, and I'm even less sure that I care.

Anyway. The film opens with McHattie providing an extremely strange and surreal narration, which begins as him expositing about a missing cat named Honey:

Mrs. French's cat is missing. The signs are posted all over town. "Have you seen Honey?" We've all seen the posters, but nobody has seen Honey the cat. Nobody. Until last Thursday morning, when Miss Collette Piscine swerved her car to miss Honey the cat as she drove across a bridge. Well this bridge, now slightly damaged, is a bit of a local treasure and even has its own fancy name; Pont de Flaque. Now Collette, that sounds like Culotte. That's Panty in French. And Piscine means Pool. Panty pool. Flaque also means pool in French, so Collette Piscine, in French Panty Pool, drives over the Pont de Flaque, the Pont de Pool if you will, to avoid hitting Mrs. French's cat that has been missing in Pontypool. Pontypool. Pontypool. Panty pool. Pont de Flaque. What does it mean? Well, Norman Mailer, he had an interesting theory that he used to explain the strange coincidences in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. In the wake of huge events, after them and before them, physical details they spasm for a moment; they sort of unlock and when they come back into focus they suddenly coincide in a weird way. Street names and birth dates and middle names, all kind of superfluous things appear related to each other. It's a ripple effect. So, what does it mean? Well... it means something's going to happen. Something big. But then, something's always about to happen. 

And this narration is accompanied by nothing but simple audio line.

As I said above, I consider this to be one of the best openings in cinema history. McHattie provides what might otherwise be an extremely boring and pointless narration with so much mood and atmosphere so easily that it draws you in and makes you want to know more. The narration's surreal tone and strange topic matter create an atmosphere of mystery and madness, foreshadowing the strange wordplay that will provide the film with so much of its mood later. And, to top it all off, the lack of visuals establishes firmly for the audience the fact that sound and words, along with their meanings and repetition, will be much more important to this movie than the visuals. This is something that isn't done often in movies, and is even less commonly done well.

The movie then fades in to our first view of Grant Mazzy, driving in to work early in the morning during a heavy snowstorm. Mazzy has an argument with his agent over the phone which is entirely irrelevant to the plot, but the movie knows this, and only uses it as a setup to our first creepy moment: while stopped at a light, Mazzy is startled by the sudden appearance of a woman, dressed in oddly light clothing for a snowstorm, appears outside his passenger-side window. She says something to him, but the window is in the way, and the audience can't make it out. Mazzy rolls down the window to talk to her, but the strange woman is already backing away into the snowstorm, fading from view, and when Mazzy calls out "Who are you?", the only response is the woman shouting the same question back at him.

This is a really creepy scene. It establishes that something weird is going on, and reinforces the theme that words and repetition are important to this film. It also isn't so creepy as to qualify as a scare itself. Rather, the film uses it as a means to establish mood and atmosphere, making later scares more powerful. It's simple and well-executed, avoiding either extreme of trying to terrify the audience from the beginning (which rarely works, as the audience hasn't had time to get adjusted to the mood of the film and so such scares can only really be jumps) and attempting pointless build-up with no substance and no creepy events whatsoever (which leaves the audience bored).

From there, we move to Grant starting his work day, and the movie does a remarkably good job of setting up the characters with comparatively little dialogue. Mazzy is essentially the radio community's version of the cowboy cop, dedicated to "full disclosure, no matter the consequences." His boss, Sidney Briar, is the beleaguered chief of police, and Laurel-Ann Drummond is their bright and bubbly ex-military intern. Despite the fact that I've just summed up the characters into those three short phrases, they don't feel like cutouts or cliches, as the movie does a remarkably good job of showing their personalities, establishing that they're all good people in their own ways, and showing us that, while they might clash with one another occasionally, they genuinely are friends. And it doesn't hurt that the performances that McHattie and his supporting cast turn in are absolutely top-notch.


We're also introduced to our fourth character of the movie: Ken Loney, the faceless weatherman of the station who communicates with the rest of the crew via phone, because he's nominally in his "Sunshine Chopper" - actually his car parked on top of a hill due to the station's low budget. Loney's character is another pleasant surprise in this movie. It takes talent to pull off a character without having the actor ever actually appear on-screen in any way, shape, or form, and yet Pontypool gets you invested in this character as well. Granted, it's not to the extent of the main trio, and you never really get to care about him the same way you do the rest, but he's a character, not just a cutout.


We also get a couple of bits of information which, at first, seem like throwaway pieces of the movie. If you watch carefully, though, you can see their significance. Nothing in this movie is wasted. One, the movie takes place on Valentine's Day; two, there is a copy of Neal Stephenson's science-fiction novel Snow Crash on one of the desks in the radio station. Snow Crash's presence is a nice little bit of foreshadowing for those who have read the book, while the Valentine's Day date  has later significance. I'll explain that when we get to it.


We then get our next bit of plot: Ken Loney calls in for a second time, not to report on a change in the weather, but to let the rest of the crew know of a breaking news story: a mob has gathered around the offices of Doctor John Mendez, who is under investigation for writing unnecessary prescriptions. As Ken reports on the situation, he begins to panic as the building "explodes outward", with people tearing through the walls inside and trampling one another. Military vehicles and helicopters arrive on the scene, and dozens of people are trampled to death just before they lose Ken's signal.


And this establishes another critical point about this movie: Pontypool knows how to avoid opening The Door.


The majority of the creepy scenes in this movie are audio-only. Mazzy and the rest of the cast never leave the radio station. Instead, we hear reports of what's happening outside, and the lack of accompanying visuals allows us to substitute our own fears in place of the limited visuals that the crew would have been able to produce with such a small budget. This actually helps the film greatly, keeping it as a horror film, rich with atmosphere, rather than being a simple action movie.


Mazzy's report on the incident is, however, interrupted when a group of singers arrives for a pre-scheduled radio performance of one of the songs from a musical adaptation of Lawrence of Arabia. This might be interpreted as padding, except that it gives us another creepy moment at the end: the youngest of the girl singers, after the song is concluded, begins to speak:

I can't remember how it ends. It just keeps starting over and over. And over and over. And over and over. And it's not called "The Lawrence and the Table" and it's - not anymore. No. No. Prah. Prah. Prah. Prah. Prah. Prah...

Again, like the beginning of the movie, this is an incredibly creepy scene. It's even creepier because we've seen this girl over the past few minutes, and a few seconds ago, she was completely normal. It reinforces the themes of repetition and nonsensical phrases, and, because it was placed at the end of such a deliberately innocuous scene, it's extremely jarring and unsettling. Also like the beginning of the movie, it serves to frighten the audience without being so much of a change that it serves as a climax to the buildup of tension that's been happening so far. Rather, it both frightens and increases the already-intense atmosphere of the film.

Allow me to take a moment here to talk a little bit more about horror as a genre. We all know that the whole point of horror is to frighten, but there's more than one way to do that. Broadly speaking, though, there are two main ways to scare the audience: you can build atmosphere, or you can go for the payoff. Think of atmosphere as a resource which the horror writer can create and store. As long as he stores that atmosphere, it will drain away slowly, but as long as there's any left the audience will continue to be creeped out. The more you have in storage, the creepier your movie is. The "payoff" can, to use an extremely crude analogy, be thought of as the money shot. The more atmosphere you have, the more oomph your payoff will have, but it will completely empty your stores - and you have to be careful that your payoff is awesome enough to channel your entire store of atmosphere, or you've just wasted all that you had built up but couldn't use. If you haven't built up any atmosphere whatsoever, going for a payoff scare will have no effect on the audience. If you do it right, such as in the titular thing's reveal in The Thing, it can be incredibly, explosively terrifying, but it's a high-risk, high-reward type deal, and it's entirely possible to terrify your audience without doing it at all. Too many horror movies rely entirely on attempted payoff scares, not realizing that they're entirely pointless without the requisite buildup. Even fewer movies realize that you can actually make an entire movie absolutely terrifying without the use of any payoff scares whatsoever - but that's getting too far off track here.

The scares that we've seen so far in Pontypool - the woman in the blizzard, the phone call from Ken Loney, and the repetition from the little girl - have all been dedicated to building up the atmosphere of the film. Because none of them have been payoffs, the movie just continues to get more and more heavily atmospheric, and therefore creepier. The film is building up its levels of scary, and in an extremely well-executed fashion. The audience is unsettled and creeped out from just those three scenes.

I think it's also worth noting here that the film's soundtrack is excellent. It's rather like the Joker's theme from The Dark Knight, or the main theme to The Thing: extremely understated and rarely noticed, never in the foreground of things, but always building at exactly the right pace and hitting the precise pitch which will serve to emphasize what's happening while keeping the audience, in most cases, from even being consciously aware of its existence. This is something that a lot of horror films lack. The right score used in the right way can help to make a scary moment that much scarier.

Other callers begin to try and reach the station with reports of more unsettling incidents, but they all get cut off before Laurel-Ann can transfer them to Mazzy. Then Ken Loney calls a third time, claiming to have seen people walking the streets imitating the sounds of windshield wipers and chanting "Watch out for U-boats!" ad infinitum. Again, we don't get to see any of this, which only serves to make it all the creepier, particularly when Ken witnesses a horde of these people attacking a van, pulling the passengers out, and ripping them open in an attempt to climb inside them. Then one of the crazed mob members attacks Ken, only to break its own limbs and become unable to move. It lies there, whispering something, but before Ken can get close enough to make out what it's saying, the signal is interrupted by a broadcast made in French. The translation which Mazzy makes is, in my opinion, one of the greatest "oh, crap" moments ever:

For your safety, please avoid contact with close family members and refrain from the following: all terms of endearment, such as "Honey", baby talk with young children, and rhetorical discourse. For greater safety, please avoid the English language. Do not translate this message.

I mean, really. That's chilling. That's mysterious. That's suspenseful. That's ominous. And, to top it all off, it's followed immediately by Ken Loney calling in again to reveal what the whispering man was saying: "Mommy", over and over, in the voice of a baby.


Really, this is one of the creepiest scenes in all of cinema history. It's absolutely pants-wettingly terrifying. Even Mazzy freaks out to the point where he attempts to force the others to leave the station, only to be forced back inside when a horde of people - all chanting various things which the radio crew said on-air earlier that day - attack them. Laurel-Ann's military instincts save the day, allowing her to recognize the danger fast enough to shut the door and keep them out. 


And then she starts to begin repeating variations on the phrase "Mister Mazzy is missing".


Now, this is where I finally have to stop giving this movie nothing but praise. Pontypool is an excellent horror movie, and well worth the price of admission, but it does have two failings, both of which surface here. Following her repetition of that phrase, Laurel-Ann begins imitating the sound of a tea kettle. This is an incredibly unsettling scene until one of the windows of the radio station opens up from the outside, admitting a fat man in a suit. This man is revealed to be Doctor John Mendez. 


Mendez is one of the film's two weak points. He isn't bad. Far from it, in fact; he's an incredibly interesting character, because you know he's wrapped up in this and he knows more than the rest. But he is jarring. Mendez, you see, is presented as a funny foreign man, almost manic in his actions no matter how dark the situation gets. He never seems to really think that there's any danger. He's just interested. He's very creepy in his own way, but he does seem slightly out-of-place in this movie, particularly in those parts when he's acting as a sort of pseudo-comic relief.


Anyway, back to the movie. Mendez drags Sidney into the soundproof broadcasting booth, declaring it to be a "lifeboat", and locks the infected Laurel-Ann outside. He claims that she can't know where they are if she can't hear them, so the soundproof booth is their best defense. Laurel-Ann knows about the soundproof booth, though, and so begins throwing herself repeatedly against the glass. This is also a very well-done and disturbing scene.


Then we get to the film's biggest weak point: Mendez's explanation of what is happening. If you're familiar with Snow Crash, you've very likely guessed it by now: the "virus" isn't a virus at all, but an infectious meme. Certain words in the English language are "infected" - and it's not always the same word - and catch on the victims' brains when they understand them, turning them into replicators for the "signal". The victims are driven by a need to find someone else to "suicide into", to force into accepting the virus. 


Now, don't get me wrong. This is an idea that, even though it was inspired by Neal Stephenson's novel, has very, very rarely been done in fiction, and certainly never in this way. But it's still extremely outlandish, and requires a lot more suspension of disbelief than the rest of the movie has thus far. I will give it credit in that the explanation still leaves The Door closed far enough that the infection is still genuinely threatening, even though it is something of a jarring explanation just because it hasn't ever been done before. It's not bad, if you don't mind a little strangeness in your fiction (and I certainly don't), but it does stand a chance of shaking you out of your immersion if you aren't willing to stretch quite that far.


Ken Loney calls in one final time in an extremely creepy scene which reveals that he has also succumbed to the infection, and Laurel-Ann dies horribly, vomiting her innards up all over the glass of the booth in the film's only visual scare. It's well-executed and disturbing, and serves as a solid payoff to the buildup thus far. Unfortunately, Laurel-Ann's final demise doesn't mean that our three survivors are safe; the infected have found their way inside the radio station, and are crowding around the booth, trying to smash the glass. 


Mazzy, Sidney, and Mendez use the station's exterior loudspeakers to broadcast the message "Sidney Briar is alive" to the crowds, luring them out of the building and simultaneously sending a signal to Sidney's children, living several miles away in another city, that she hasn't succumbed yet. Unfortunately, just as Mazzy and Sidney begin to relax again, Mendez begins to repeat the word "breathe" to himself and babbles in another language. Mazzy and Sidney abandon him in the booth, despite his protestations and cries of "It's only the English language that's infected", in order to find somewhere safer to hide. 


And, while they're moving quietly through the station, we get yet another perfectly-executed scare: the singing girl from the beginning of the movie is lurking behind a desk, and attacks Sidney, echoing her screams of "Grant, run! Run now!" It's incredibly frightening, especially given the gore-discretion shot which comes into play when Mazzy and Sidney kill the girl. 


And then yet another thing goes wrong: the power flickers, causing the stereo system of the radio station to turn on and re-attracting the infected. Mendez runs out of the booth and sacrifices himself to buy Sidney and Mazzy time to hide themselves, proving that he was right in saying that only the English language is infected; he wasn't succumbing to the infection, but trying to avoid its effects entirely.


Mazzy and Sidney lock themselves in a supply closet, but Sidney begins to exhibit symptoms, repeating the word "kill". Mazzy, desperate, begins trying to counteract the effects of the infectious word by forcing her brain to reject its meaning. He finally succeeds through repetition of the phrase "kill is kiss", and Sidney is cured. Mazzy immediately seizes upon the idea that they can cure the rest of the infectees through a similar method using the station's broadcasting equipment, and the two of them return to the booth to make their last, desperate gamble to save Pontypool. 


Outside, military forces have begun slaughtering the citizens of the city in an effort to contain their spread. Mazzy and Sidney begin utilizing free-association techniques in an effort to confuse the infectees, forcing their brains to reject the understanding of the words which have taken them over. Outside, military officials use loudspeakers to scream, in French, that Sidney has to stop Mazzy from broadcasting, as he is infected. But the two of them both refuse to end their broadcast. When it becomes apparent that the military is killing people faster than Mazzy can hope to cure them, if he's having any effect at all, he shouts for everyone to stop -


 - and they do. An eerie silence descends over Pontypool, and Mazzy makes his final speech, which forever establishes him as the single most badass radio announcer in history. Unfortunately, it isn't enough to convince the military to withdraw. They haven't stopped killing people - they've just been withdrawing troops in preparations to carpet-bomb the area. The film ends with a French countdown, with Mazzy and Sidney kissing as it reaches zero.

Horror and Characterization

So, since I'm apparently awake and not falling asleep any time soon, a few thoughts on horror literature again.

Let me get one thing set out there first: I like EAT. EAT is one of the Fears that I consider most interesting, and I'll explain why later in this post.

Now, that said, I don't think EAT is as scary as the rest of them.

Some of you might be wondering why. After all, EAT absorbs you into a hive mind and replaces all the water in your body with itself, turning you into an only-partially-human abomination whose personality has been obliterated and subsumed by The Camper. That's pretty terrifying, right?

Well, no. I don't think so. EAT is, essentially, the Borg. It assimilates you. And the Borg, while awesome, are not particularly scary. They're intimidating, yes, but there's a big difference between being intimidated and being terrified. EAT also runs on paranoia fuel, since, conceivably, any drop of water could be the one that turns you into a zombie, but still, I don't find that to be terrifying. Would it be absolutely nightmarish to be in a world where EAT exists? Oh yes, the same way that it would suck to be in a world where the Borg were actually flying around space in those giant cubes.

But I don't find it particularly nightmare-fuel-y when placed next to the rest of the Fears. Why? Well, because EAT opens the door.

Like I explained in my last post, "opening the door" means "revealing too much information to retain the aura of sinister mystery which enables the audience to fill in the gaps with their own fears". EAT opens the door. It infects you when you drink part of its "ichor". Once you're infected, you become obsessed with something; if that obsession isn't enough to keep you away from the ichor, you drown yourself and become part of The Camper. Even the process of creation and development for The Camper is fully explained. This really leaves only one question for the audience to answer in the privacy of their own heads: "what does EAT's 'true form' look like?" And there's really only so much terror the answer to that can produce, even given Lovecraftian levels of atmosphere.

Beyond that, EAT is a character. EAT has a personality, concrete goals and desires, and, most importantly, a voice. It's possible for a character that speaks to be frightening, of course, but it's always going to be a very different kind of fright than that engendered by a silent antagonist. Going back to the Borg analogy here, in Star Trek: First Contact, the crew of the Enterprise is attacked by a Borg cube. But this Borg cube has something else with it: the Borg Queen.

Until this point, the Borg (except Picard, when he was temporarily assimilated) have been largely voiceless, emotionless, and entirely lacking in personality. They're nothing more than mindless assimilators. They're intimidating because they can't be reasoned with, they can't be bargained with, and they're nearly impossible to stop. Once the Borg Queen shows up, the Borg have a voice and a personality behind them. They weren't particularly scary to begin with, but once the Borg Queen shows up, they're no longer scary at all. They're still intimidating, yeah, but they're not frightening.

Why? Because the Borg Queen is not a monster. The Borg Queen has a face, a personality, a voice. The Borg Queen has an identity. The door is fully open for the Borg Queen. Contrast this with Michael Myers. We know almost nothing about Michael. Therefore, he is frightening.

That's what EAT is. EAT is the Borg Queen. EAT has a personality. Thus, EAT is not as frightening as the other Fears.

You might recall, though, that I said at the beginning of this post that I like EAT. Why, if I don't think it's particularly frightening? Simple. That's not EAT's role in the story. That's not what EAT is meant to do.

Because EAT has a personality, we can do things with EAT that we can't do with any other Fear. EAT has an agenda, and it's been known to work with humans to achieve its ends. That's something no other Fear really does. The Blind Man does it in some adaptations, but not as often, and rarely does it work with actual protagonists (as opposed to the cult which comprises The Archive).

So no. EAT is not particularly frightening. But it is extremely useful, and that's something that shouldn't be overlooked. Because EAT exists, the mythos is open to a lot of stories that wouldn't otherwise be possible. That's why I like EAT. When it comes to scares, I'll look elsewhere. But EAT can fill roles in the story that nothing else can, and that is a priceless tool.

An Intro To Horror

Horror stories are scary. That's kind of their defining characteristic. Without horror, they can't really be called horror stories, can they?

It's kind of an obvious thing. So obvious that most people don't think about it, in fact. But a lot of horror fiction falls flat on its face because it doesn't seem to understand that. It isn't enough that your characters have to be put in scary situations. That's important, yeah, but it isn't enough. Frightening the characters isn't necessary to frighten the audience. It definitely helps, but it's not necessary.

That's why a lot of horror movies and horror stories fail. Let's take one of the most egregious offenders as an example for closer study: the Hostel series.

The Hostel films are extremely simple and formulaic. They're set up like this:

1. The cast goes somewhere to get drunk and party
2. The cast is kidnapped by an organization that gathers subjects for rich people to torture and murder
3. The cast is tortured and murdered until one is left
4. The final survivor "escapes" one way or another

That's about it. There are slight variations regarding the methods of escape, but none of them are particularly important to the story. The vast majority of the movies are dominated by part three, with the escapes tacked on at the end as an excuse to say that the movie has an actual plot rather than just being a series of loosely-connected scenes of torture porn.

Now, here's the thing: the Hostel movies are not scary.

Oh, they're squick-tastic, yes. They have several cringe-worthy moments, yes; the series is practically built on them. The idea of being captured and tortured before being murdered is a scary one, yes. But the movies themselves are not scary. At all. You don't want to look at the screen, sure, because you don't want to see what's going to Hapless Cast Member #3 next, but you aren't going to go home that night looking over your shoulder every step of the way.

In contrast, let's look at what I would consider to be one of the greatest horror movies of all time: John Carpenter's Halloween.

On paper, the formula for the movie is extremely reminiscent of Hostel:

1. Psychotic killer escapes mental asylum
2. The cast is stalked by said psycho in their homes
3. The cast is killed off one-by-one until only a few are left
4. The survivors drive the psychopath away

And yet Halloween will have you looking over your shoulder for days after seeing it. I know many people who refused to go home alone after seeing the movie. People were genuinely frightened by this movie in a way that Hostel just can't compare to. 

So what makes Halloween terrifying and Hostel merely cringe-worthy? The answer to that is extremely simple, really, but there are many different parts to it which have to be considered. So let's break it down.

POINT ONE: Halloween has a plot.


Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said that the plot outlines for the two movies look very similar? Yeah, that's because the plot outline for Halloween was... well, an outline, whereas the "outline" for Hostel wasn't so much an outline as it was "everything that happened in the movie". Hostel's "plot" is incredibly simplistic to the point of nonexistence.

A plot is, traditionally, structured in the form of a pyramid: rising action, climax, falling action. That's an incredibly simple view of it, of course. The three-act structure is another way of looking at it, and it is possible to have a plot which doesn't fall into any established category. But Hostel doesn't merely have a non-traditional plot. It almost lacks a plot entirely, existing only as a vehicle for scenes of graphic torture and mutilation. The only thing which might be considered to be part of any sort of plot is Paxton's escape and subsequent killing spree, which doesn't take place until the very end of the movie and is largely pointless, serving only to add a few more death scenes to the list.

Halloween, on the other hand, has a much more complex plot than implied in its outline. Doctor Loomis' involvement, for example, or the fact that Michael is stalking his sister in particular, or the implied supernatural abilities that Michael may or may not possess. There is a lot going on in Halloween beyond "psychopath killing random people".

In Hostel, there are a grand total of two notable events: Paxton and his friends being captured and Paxton escaping to go on his murder spree. One happens at the beginning of the movie, and the other happens at the very end. So little of note happens in this movie that there isn't any reason for the audience to care.

Lesson to take from this: you need an actual plot in order to frighten your audience. Otherwise, the audience has exactly zero reason to care what's going on.

POINT TWO: Halloween has likable characters.

This point is very simple, but something that a lot of horror writers don't seem to understand. You can't just throw a bunch of characters into a scary situation and expect the readers (or viewers) to feel anything other than apathy.

There is a huge difference between seeing Captain Dallas' death in Alien and seeing Josh die in Hostel. Josh has little to no developed personality or defining character traits. He is essentially a prop for one of the antagonists to poke sharp things into. The only emotion anyone in the audience will feel watching Josh die is "eww, that's nasty". 

In Alien, on the other hand, Dallas is set up as the lead. We see Dallas trying to lead his crew to safety in the midst of the xenomorph attack. When he dies, it genuinely surprises and frightens us, establishing an atmosphere which declares that we cannot trust our expectations in this movie, heightening the feeling of suspense. This makes the movie scarier. 

Or, going earlier, Psycho sets up Marion Crane as our lead up until the famous shower scene. That scene terrifies us because we weren't expecting her to die. Her death meant something more than "oh, that prop with a face has been removed from the movie".

Lesson to take from this: you have to develop your characters if you want your audience to have anything but the shallowest reaction to their death. Sure, Josh's death was gruesome. But did we actually care that Josh was dead, or just that having your Achilles tendon cut sounds painful? Josh's death doesn't scare us, because there isn't really a "Josh". There's a mannequin with the name "Josh" painted on it. Seeing a mannequin get tortured doesn't frighten us. It just squicks us out.

POINT THREE: Halloween has contrast.

This is something that I think is vital in pretty much any kind of art. Contrast keeps the audience engaged, makes them want to see more. A work with no contrast between its various parts is entirely uniform and therefore uninteresting. Dragonforce is an uninteresting band because its music is nothing but shouted lyrics and wailing guitars all the way through. "Save Me", by Queen, is a fantastic song because of the contrast between its slow and sedate verses and its raw, powerful chorus.

Horror fiction benefits from contrast more than any other genre, though, in my opinion. This is something that every horror writer really needs to understand. The scariest things are those which are contrasted against things which are not scary.

This is yet another failing of the Hostel series. Once the torture starts, that's all there is for the entire rest of the movie. There are so few scenes with anything other than people being brutally tortured that the audience ceases to care, if they did in the first place. It's horror overload.

One scene of torture might be particularly effective, but each one afterward has less and less of an impact, because we've already seen lots of torture and are becoming inured to it. If there are multiple scenes of torture, torture ceases to be something to be afraid of. Even in real life, the threat of torture is more effective at extracting information than the torture itself.

Having one scene of torture is fine, after serious build-up (or even as part of it); it can help to drive home the helplessness and genuine scariness of the situation. But an entire movie consisting of a series of torture scenes stops being scary, because we know exactly what's going to happen. There's no suspense. There's only squick. Squick might be hard to watch, but it isn't scary.

Lesson to be learned from this: suspense is more important than the scare. A single scare, even a relatively "tame" one, which has been built up properly is infinitely more frightening than a series of "technically" scary things. The Thing's initial transformation in The Thing was more frightening than the first torture scene in Hostel simply because John Carpenter understands how to set up his horror. Horror without suspense is just boring.

POINT FOUR: Halloween doesn't open the door.


This is the most important part of horror, and something that I think that every aspiring producer of horror fiction needs to understand. I can't take credit for the analogy I'm going to use to get it across, though. While I had this thought myself a long time before I read Stephen King's Danse Macabre, he says it much more simply and eloquently then I could.

Imagine that you are producing a monster movie. Your monster in this movie is a giant, one-hundred-foot-tall cockroach. Early on in the movie, the protagonists are trapped in a building with the bug outside. It's time for them to open the door and unveil the monster for the audience. It's time for the big scare. Everyone watching your movie will scream and faint at the sight of this horrendous beast -

- except that they don't. Instead, the audience breathes a sigh of relief. Do you know the thought that's running through their heads? "Oh, well, that's not so bad. I was afraid it would be a thousand feet tall."

The lesson from this? Don't open the door.

How this applies to other types of horror may not be immediately obvious, so allow me to elaborate further. Always leave some element of mystery in your horror story. What the audience can come up with - or, rather, what they can't come up with - in the privacy of their own heads is always infinitely more frightening than what you can actually show in the story. However much we might like to think that we are just that awesome, we are not actually capable of writing down "cosmic truths" so horrific that the reader will literally go mad from the revelation. This is why Lovecraft only showed snippets of the Necronomicon's texts in his stories, and why he left the Outer Gods so vaguely-defined. The element of mystery means that they're genuinely ominous.

The understanding of this fact is Halloween's greatest strength. The lack of understanding of it is Hostel's greatest failing.

In Halloween, we never really get an explanation as to why or how Michael Myers does what he does. He's shown killing, without any mercy whatsoever, from a very young age. He's described as having "pure evil" behind his eyes by Doctor Loomis. He designates freakish strength, offscreen teleportation, superhuman durability, and absolute sociopathy - if, indeed, he possesses anything that can be called a personality at all.

What made him like this? We don't know. We never get an explanation. We never even get explicit confirmation that anything he does is actually supernatural. We don't know what he is, and that makes him a thousand times more terrifying than any normal human with a knife.

Hostel, on the other hand, tells us exactly what's going on. Rich dicks with a murder fetish. That's it. That's the entirety of the threat the characters are facing. And that could have been enough to base a plot around in another genre, but not in horror. It might have made for a good thriller or some decent suspense or an action movie. But "rich people being dicks" is not enough to scare someone.

That's not to say that all horror must necessarily include an element of the supernatural. But it does have to leave something unknown for a decent length of time to give the audience some suspense. Se7en has no supernatural elements, and yet it's an effective horror movie because we know almost nothing about John Doe except that he's crazy and kills using a seven deadly sins motif. The Silence of the Lambs is scary because Buffalo Bill is painted as barely human, and we don't know how or why he got that way or to what lengths he's willing to go. Lecter is even more terrifying, because he's shown to be something more than the normal killer but we never really get an explanation as to what's so different about him. And so on.

So, to sum up, I'll leave you with this well-known quote from H. P. Lovecraft. It's something that you should take to heart if you want to do anything involving horror.

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."