The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies held its first class of the 2011-12 academic year last night. Instructor Charlie EllBé
led the class through a lecture on the origins of Universal Studios' first cycle of horror films (1931-1939), with screenings of clips from F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu and the Spanish version of Dracula, shot on the same sets (at night) as the more iconic film starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning. EllBé also elaborated on the inspiration and production practicalities for the set design of the Universal horror films, pointing out shared elements between Browning's Dracula and the sets of films such as The Man Who Laughs (1928, d. Paul Leni). A screening and discussion of Browning's beautiful, poetic and dreamily-paced film followed. Highlights of the lecture and discussion included insights into Bela Lugosi's star-making performance, as well as regarding the film's careful, impressionistic use of sound and silence, and its parallel visual play with fullness and lack, particularly in the film's framing of its iconic monster, Lugosi. I look forward to three more weeks of Universal Horror studies!
A classic (and horrifying) example of "creeping camera," Dennis Giles' term for unmotivated camera movement in horror films that creates a sense of monstrous presence without manifesting a monstrous object. The sense of absence or lack courts a scopophilic response in the spectator of horror, a simultaneous desire to see the monstrous and to be protected from full revelation of the monstrous. This series, hosted by actor James Coburn, aired from 1981 to 1982. I adored it as a kid. Sadly, it is not available on DVD in North America.
Joel Anderson's 2008 reality horror film, Lake Mungo, is constructed as a conventional documentary focusing on the mysterious death and spectral reappearance of a young woman named Alice Palmer. The film bills itself as a "record of ... events" in a series of hauntings in which a ghostly Alice Palmer appears in a variety of media, including photographs, cell phone video footage, and amateur video recordings. Alice’s own narrative—her ability to speak for herself—is a deeply embedded text in this document of her disturbing visually mediated re-entries into the world of the living. In addition to Alice’s spectral presence in the film, images of the living Alice in photographs, home movie footage, video-recordings of her sessions with a medium, and even a sex tape, emerge as a further techno-Gothic embedding of Alice's story, overwhelming the person with visual evidence and talking-head conjecture. The film's various narrators—police, family members, neighbors—cannot hope to capture a sense of the young woman in life or death. (Nobody, it seems, really knew her.) And though the film’s numerous probing zooms into photographs promise visual evidence of Alice, they produce only abstractions: grainy, broken and blurred images. As with The Blair Witch Project (1999) and the more recent Paranormal Activity films, Lake Mungo encourages the viewer to scan, scrutinize and probe its varied video and photographic “evidence” in search of a ghostly, possibly monstrous, Alice—evidence that is, at worst, proven to be a hoax, and, at best, shown to be equivocal. Lake Mungo is thus about the near impossibility of representation of the subject at its center—like Blair Witch especially, it documents a subject who is not there.
Anderson’s film is self-consciously constructed around a number of concerns that the mock-documentary horror film (or “reality horror” film, as I term it) has at heart. Among these notions is a concern with contemporary subjectivity as media-obsessed, simultaneously valorizing new visual technologies and deeply distrustful of them. Something of an extended allusion to the popular turn-of-the-20th century practice of spirit photography popularized by such influential figures as William H. Mumler, Lake Mungo explores conceptions of new visual technologies as having to do with attempts to capture time and conjure ghosts. In a key scene, as Alice Palmer races through the dark of the dried up bottoms of the film’s eponymous lake, the ill-fated girl’s cell phone mediates a premonition of her own death by drowning, suggesting the same connection between “magical” new technologies and the supernatural that can be found in a millennial dread of technology at the turn of both the 20th and 21st centuries. As its title hints, Lake Mungo continues a trend in the Australian Gothic cinema—found in such films as Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1974) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976), Nicholas Roeg's Walkabout (1971), and the first half of Greg Mclean's Wolf Creek (2005)—where nature and natural formations carry uncanny, possibly supernatural portents of future (or present, but insidious) disaster. In its combination of fake found-footage, hoax imagery, news footage, police video, talking-head interviews, and other visual media designed to evoke the reality effect of a documentary aesthetic, Lake Mungo proves to be not just a fascinating update on the conventional Gothic ghost story, but also a record of the deep anxieties of a culture confronted with new media hybridity as one of the ways we can construct postmodern subjectivity. A film largely concerned with the very personal trauma of loss and mourning, Lake Mungo can be seen in the context of an anxious millennial response to new technology somehow mediating spectrally between present and past, living and dead, especially as evidenced in late 19th-century spirit photography and memorial photography, the latter practice even referenced in the film's disturbing title sequence. Lake Mungo is also a shrewd updating of traditional horror conventions, such as the genre’s traditionally circumscribed subjectivity, its deep distrust of the rational and scientific notions attendant with new technology, and Roger B. Salomon’s (2002) notion that the horror narrative relies heavily on its narrators as troubled witnesses, challenged with the task of chronicling an impossible reality.
