Post by No Personality on Mar 10, 2010 8:27:11 GMT -5
I take excessive films and films with excessive themes very seriously. If I think for even one second that some director is trying to take advantage of human suffering and debasement or the trend of what is often seen as the brutal style of 70's horror just to make themselves look cool or tough or confrontational in any way, I take issue. And I say so whenever I get the chance. Filmmakers can easily become overly ambitious or use the horror film to manipulate audiences into believing we need to see extreme violence. So let me take the opportunity to say that nobody needs to see this movie. That's certainly not what any of my higher ratings imply. Nobody needs to see any film about violence or rape or sadness or humiliation to understand it.
True, real horror is inherent in human nature. We have dark thoughts and our imaginations are strong enough where we can know something is wrong without seeing it. Most of us, at least. Sometimes when people aren't so sensitive it's because they may have psychological / mental abnormalities (which is rare) or they've been desensitized by someone or something in their life. Their upbringing. That makes them believe it's best not to be sensitive. I won't tell you which is right. But we have the capacity to understand what is wrong by putting ourselves in the position of someone else. Most of us, though some put up a kind of shield, are reasonable human beings. We can be made to understand without experiencing something terrible. Because- bad things happen to everyone.
The Last House on the Left is a landmark horror film because it both predated and predicted a trend of films to come in both the horror and exploitation genres to begin dealing head-on with real violence, what it does to the people it devastates, and what the onslaught of it says about American culture. Where it sort of comes from. It never says right out. It's always more allegorical, with dialogue scenes calling attention to class differences and various cultural references to sexualized violence and dirty crimes- the glamour of it, the prestige. It subtly points fingers at the helplessness of the established "good guys" / authority figures of America. Including the Mother and Father of the traditional family unit. Leading the young, 'innocent' characters to have to fend for themselves.
It's a film direct from a kind of hippie era of filmmaking. People who either were outraged and offended by violence and war, or people who were responding to the huge trend of hippie films and filmmakers (John Waters). Both were commenting on American society, youth and youth trends, and traditional values being kind of corrupted and re-invented by the people living in a time where America was a wilder and less safe place. When every day people were confronted with a disgusting war-happy government, rampant anger and distrust, and rebellion against many of the rules of America. People sought to break taboos. As a result, bringing mainstream attention to "free love," hardcore pornography, swinging and swapping, the hardships of black Americans, interracial dating and marriage, gay liberation, etc.
What eventually sprang from all this social tension and unrest was a brand new wave of horror films. Social commentary wasn't new to the genre and it began getting more overt with 1968's Night of the Living Dead. Everyone knows this. The 60's was a very hard time for black Americans, while for a lot of whites it was looked at as the time of a sexual revolution. Only the people who lived back then knew what was really going on. Today, we're bashed over the head with images of hedonism, drug experimentation with seemingly no rules or boundaries over what people did or would try, and sexual freedom. Vans, hemp leaves, long hair, flower power, bell bottoms, hairy bodies (probably body odor as well), communes, and thanks to The Brady Bunch- boxes of cheap (but often damn cool-looking) nostalgic memorabilia.
My mother and father were babies of the 50's, and children of the 60's who didn't want to grow up when the harsh, cold reality of the 1970's slapped them in the face. My mother used to tell me very depressing stories about my father's problematic, abusive alcoholism. He talked about doing drugs in the 60's with no shame (but no pride either). And yes, my conservative, Republican-voting father had long hair too. And they did the very Roseanne thing of being very into riding motorcycles and how that sort of thing represented freedom. They had a van and they traveled all over America. And probably went to Mexico as well. They've got memorabilia. And photos just like everyone does. But their life had a very dark side. My parents had major issues with abuse in their families and you'd better believe they threw it onto me when I came around in the 1980's. My father wouldn't even look at what was going on culturally in the 80's. He wanted to pretend that the 60's never ended. And that he never had children.
The difference between Night of the Living Dead's portrait of an America dealing with racial violence and fear of minorities overtaking us and the outbreak of new violent 70's movies wasn't just a shift in atmosphere. From the spooky old house type setting that retained dark energy from troubled spirits (it was about fear of the unknown until it revealed the black character to be the main protagonist) to the hot, smelly, dirty, and very real modern day time and place. The 70's really broke away from gothic horrors and classic settings such as castles, and themes of mutant / animal monsters, things from another planet. This of course began with Rosemary's Baby, the first horror movie taking themes of distrust and deception into the modern fears of young Americans being in a way violated or controlled by their elders.
Or an elder mentality. Almost like us versus them. Which was really what the 70's became. About how something coming from a group or governing body gave us the catalyst from wence something horrible could enter our reality (because it came from a source bigger, more organized than us) and either destroy us or change the way we lived (usually for the worse). Themes of military control / oppression came in the form of 1973's The Crazies (Romero's attempt to make his legion of "undead" that attack and kill his core group of survivors a lot more human) and Bob Clarke's Deathdream, and Cronenberg's excellent and underrated 1977 feature Rabid (both of this and Deathdream were Canadian and Canada is mentioned in the dialogue during Last House). Those films dealing with people turning monstrous.
On the entirely human side of horror, this film and 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre didn't show any real images of soldiers nor did they make much mention of the government. But the importance society of the time stressed on class differences and the results of economic woes play a huge role in creating the horror which is visited upon the unsuspecting victims. Again, the youth. Who are not innocent in the eyes of the adult society during this time (this theme reaches its' fever pitch of horror in 1976's Carrie). Today, the tendancies of the youth to be more loose with sexuality and so-called "bad" behaviors is something we're all more numb to. And so we pay less attention to it. But in the early 70's, this kind of instinct to roam away from the control culture of the sort of government-elite class usually got you killed in movies.
Because movies like this and Chainsaw actually meant something topically in the 70's (and that again being because of the war, the government, and the economy), it's possible that a lot of fans of today's trend of survival and torture horror flicks (which owe more to the excess of the exploitation genre than these very important horror films) would have you believe that their gratuitous violence and heavy-handed extreme scenarios are necessary to watch or that they actually comment on what's going on in the world today. And over the last 10 years - though intriguingly very few horror films have been made about what really caused the Iraq War and 9/11. The aftermath is more scary to them. Probably because they're paranoid about what could happen. Nevermind what actually DID happen.
There's nothing in movies today scarier than the elimination of freedom by voter fraud, the Republican-rigged national elections, and the corporate control of the Democratic Party. Or maybe scarier still- how people keep believing each party really takes care of its' own. Meaning the constituants they preach to. The ignorance of feeling like you've got to be able to cling to something or else life has no relevance. No ability to congratulate yourself for doing the right thing. We're living in a kind of bubbling cauldron (thank you global warming) of moral and ethical anarchy. That anarchy has lead to films mimicking the 70's in radically degraded forms using leftover formulas from 90's films like Se7en and Nightwatch, and the defenses of films such as this which were extreme in the 70's are being reapplied to the new millennium "horror" films by candyass college kids, hotshot music video tech whizzes, and lame nostalgists.
Back in the 70's however, filmmakers like Romero, Cronenberg, Larry Cohen, Brian DePalma, Bob Clark, and Wes Craven were highly intelligent men with vision. They didn't need excuses. They didn't need to be apologized for or defended. They had ambitions to do the best they could with usually limited resources and were able to make their points through their work. Their films spoke for themselves. Most importantly, these films were eventually looked upon as classic works of art. With good reputations mostly deserved. That's not to say they didn't incur any backlash. Most of them in fact did, along the way. Usually from people who didn't understand their higher ambitions. I've heard some interesting stories of people who went to this film and took children with them. What about a film advertised as scary, intense, and with this as its' tagline: "To avoid fainting, keep repeating; it's only a movie... only a movie..." says- "bring kids to see it!"?? That's a good way to describe this movie. I guess some people just didn't pay attention.
As you may have guessed, this isn't a movie where people sit around and talk intellectually about life. This is a movie about young people from the lower class. From, as Mari's mother is said by her to have put it, "the slum." These people have no families, so they become their own family unit of Father, Mother, Son, and Uncle. But the area where they live is overrun by crime. They've been living down for so long, their hurting people is almost just to keep from being bored. Their existence in the story here is brilliantly rooted in shocking coincidences that are like a combination of wicked irony and tragic fates that were mapped out long before we realize what's happening to the girls. The deadly journey on the road to nowhere is both spontaneous and predictable. But you couldn't put yourself in the victims' shoes and be able to know what will happen.
The Last House on the Left is a gripping, powerful film about tragedy, loss, and becoming lost- even though you know where you are. Wes Craven as a psychology teacher and a man who knows a lot about that created this sorrowful and crude mini-epic. And the fact that it, as sick and vicious as it is, was able to tap into the space of the human mind that changes your behavior when something traumatizing is happening to you, makes it all the more underrated. While the majority of people who talk about this movie to date just focus on the minor element of the raping of the girls. The rape is just another form of violence in the movie. Another method by which people are torn apart.
The films to come after it, the ones to try to use this film to justify their cruelty or their detachment, are nothing more than soulless imitators. Films that can't capture the deep, profound destruction of hope. The film is filled to the brim with intense, heart-stopping moments. Made all the more horrifying because the situations are based on the real chase between a group of murderers and a smaller group of victims. The film's reputation now is that it isn't nearly as shocking as it actually is. With the endless parade of torture films, today's so-called horror crowd see this as lightweight. But they don't see the true humanity of it. In a way, cinema is doomed to have the most delicately focused efforts misunderstood by the majority. Or held onto for the wrong reasons. This very important anti-violent film hates what it shows us. But shows it to us anyway. I certainly learned something from it. That we never need another film as excessive again. At least, not one this realistic.