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Curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity additionally killed the horror film naif. Cats have 9 lives, although, and naifs don’t. Benefit: Cats.
In 1996’s Scream, horror scholar Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) lays out the foundations for making it by way of a horror film alive: Don’t have intercourse, don’t toke up or get blotto, and for those who depart the room, by no means, ever inform your folks that you just’ll be again. These are the style’s cardinal sins within the e-book of Meeks. However there’s a sin extra frequent than the remainder that characters often commit in horror movies: Curiosity. When one thing goes “bump” within the evening, saying “I’ll be proper again” doesn’t doom you; your nosiness does. Don’t look within the basement. Don’t go to the creepy previous home on the hill at midnight. Don’t hand around in cemeteries. Don’t learn the traditional tome sure in human pores and skin and written in blood. Frankly, we should always hearken to Edgar Wright greater than Randy Meeks. Simply don’t.
Curiosity isn’t a brand new sin in horror. It’s an authentic sin that dates again to the experiments of Henry Frankenstein and Jack Griffin, carried by way of the Nineteen Fifties, 60s, and 70s in movies like The Factor from One other World and The Fly, Black Sunday and Onibaba, The Texas Chainsaw Bloodbath and The Wicker Man. Then alongside got here Tony Randell’s Hellbound: Hellraiser II in 1988, with essentially the most thorough, and totally excruciating, rationalization of the function curiosity performs in horror cinema (and in literature, for that matter, the place horror cinema finds a lot of its foundation).
“And also you needed to know,” says Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins), a smirk at her lips sharp sufficient to puncture the spirit, as she betrays her lover, Dr. Phillip Channard (Kenneth Cranham) to a destiny worse than demise; she’s left him to the tender mercies of Leviathan, the god of Hell in Barker’s gothic horror sequence, drained of fluids, mutilated, and remade right into a Cenobite — demons for whom ache and pleasure are one and the identical. “Now you already know. And I needed all the pieces. Now all people’s blissful.”
Channard, gurgling and screaming in agony, would beg to vary, however such is the worth of his inquisitiveness. His obsession with Hell, and particularly the Lament Configuration (an ornate puzzle field apparently solid with uncooked temptation), has led him to a grotesque finish. Used accurately, the Configuration calls forth the films’ most well-known Cenobites: Pinhead (Doug Bradley), Chatterer (Nicholas Vince), Butterball (Simon Bamford), and Barbie Wilde’s “Feminine Cenobite,” as if being a lady is distinguishing sufficient. All Channard needed was to “know.” About Hell, about Leviathan, and concerning the Cenobites themselves. Realizing isn’t a sin in the true world. On this planet of horror, it’s a celebration foul punishable by execution. Channard isn’t the one particular person within the Hellraiser films to search out out the implications of mucking about with the Configuration, however he’s the primary to have it pushed residence clearly, and with depraved glee, that that is what one will get for snooping.
There’s horror cinema earlier than Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and there may be horror cinema after Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Cotton’s deliciously heartless monologue makes it unimaginable to look at horror films with out singling out the characters who look the place they shouldn’t and inflict distress on themselves, their pals, their households, and any helpless schmuck who winds up in the best way. “Examine the thriller sound” is among the style’s staple tropes, proper alongside “let’s break up up and go searching,” two deadly errors routinely made regardless of apparent lurking hazard. These are gimmicks. They’re additionally vital for transferring horror plots ahead. To paraphrase John Ford, if characters made sensible, considerate decisions as an alternative of unhealthy ones, that may be the tip of the movie. We want characters to scratch their curiosity itches for horror to operate.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Picture: New World Footage
Drew Goddard’s The Cabin within the Woods offers certainly one of modern horror’s greatest examples of this dynamic in motion, a meta evaluation of not solely why characters do silly issues in these films, however how necessary it’s that they do. Right here, a shadowy group, recognized fairly creatively as The Group, employs engineers Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford) to conduct an operation-cum-primeval sacrificial ritual, with a bunch of school children serving as their victims; every represents a horror film character archetype, a’la the whore, the athlete, the scholar, the idiot, and the virgin, and every has to die to appease previous gods roiling underneath the Earth’s floor. Failure to fulfill these fundamental necessities means the literal finish of the world.
The ritual begins in earnest when curiosity will get the higher of the solid; stumbling on a veritable treasure trove of very clearly evil objects of their rustic getaway cabin’s previous cellar, the gang pokes and prods these numerous curios, till Dana (Kristen Connolly) reads aloud from a diary, summoning a zombie redneck torture household who stalks and murders them. That’s simply the primary flooring of The Cabin within the Woods’ curiosity; finally the 2 remaining characters, Dana and Marty (Fran Kranz), descend right into a subterranean lair the place The Group is working the present, and uncover the terrible reality concerning the zombies, the gods, and the ritual. They take that information and determine to get all people killed by pissing off the gods. So it goes.
Data and curiosity go hand in hand in horror. Many 2010s-era horror movies make a connection between curiosity and curiosity’s rewards; characters search the reality and remorse discovering it. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook makes use of a traditional horror setup, the haunted e-book, which invitations the title’s tophat and trenchcoat bedecked spook into the house of a single mom (Essie Davis) and her son (Noah Wiseman). The fiend torments them, her most of all, day and evening, for studying his story. Ari Aster’s Midsommar calls on the people horror custom for a grueling story of insanity in daylight, the place cultural anthropology college students journey to Hälsingland to review an enigmatic Swedish commune and develop into the centerpieces of a 90-year sacrificial ritual.
Most overtly of all, David Gordon Inexperienced’s 2018 sequel to John Carpenter’s Halloween, merely known as Halloween, kicks off with true crime podcasters goading Michael Myers, a person under no circumstances recognized for being talkative, into saying one thing — something, something, so long as it’s one thing. In time, Myers stalks and kills them, and in time his personal physician, Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), makes an attempt the identical feat. Myers squishes his head like wine grapes in change. The character of the kills isn’t vital, although Halloween being a slasher, we’re there for the kills at the very least partly. The rationale these kills occur, nonetheless, is vital. If the podcasters hadn’t bothered Myers, they might have lived. If Sartain’s mad need to review Myers “within the wild” hadn’t overtaken him, then everybody else who dies within the movie would have lived, too. Sure, Myers is the one doing all the killing, however curiosity means there are different fingers holding the knife.
Films want battle. Battle comes from motion. Characters take motion and make decisions that preserve the engine of storytelling going. Horror films aren’t distinctive, in different phrases, however the mechanism fueling them stays chief within the style. With out curiosity, a swath of horror films — Halloween, The Babadook, Midsommar, The Cabin within the Woods, Us, Sea Fever, The Wailing, The Post-mortem of Jane Doe, Creep, V/H/S/2, Spring, Sinister — merely don’t occur, and that’s solely a gift day pattern. Curiosity is horror as a lot because the slashers and monsters that comprise the style’s most iconic villain are horror. Overlook the cat; for those who aren’t cautious, it’ll kill you, too.
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