This is an experiment I wanted to try. Readers’ advisory is
typically through connections between books or authors, the algebraic equation
for this something like, “if you like x, you should try y.” But readers’
advisory can also be done with horror movies, not just by matching them with
subject matter (ghosts, vampires, etc.) but also with themes. These comparisons
won’t be movies made from books and vice versa (no comparisons between the book
The Shining and the movie), but comparing a book and a movie that talk about
similar ideas and even make similar conclusions. I wanted to try this
experiment, analyzing the connective tissue between films and novels, with two
stories demonstrate how horror works while also showing that it’s still
possible to feel terror when you can see inside the machine’s inner workings.
Hell House, LLC is
shot like an actual documentary about an incident at a haunted house attraction
at the Abbadon Hotel. The movie gets some interviews and backstory about the
incident, clueing in the audience, but the documentary crew lucks out by
finding survivor Sara Havel, who not only appears to tell her side of the story
but brings footage the crew of Hell House shot before the incident occurred.
This story has two parallel narratives, but one narrative works backwards,
providing the dark history of the hotel and the cover-up of the incident, while
another focuses on the Hell House crew getting the place ready, encountering
spooky goings on that gets progressively worse as they get closer to opening
night (the film even counts down the days left until the dreaded opening night).
The audience sees all the pieces come together at the opening night climax when
Hell literally breaks loose. Unlike found footage movies that can’t get beyond
the simple novelty of the genre, the directors of Hell House use the first-person viewpoint to generate some genuine
scares that feel like the audience is in the haunted house that will inevitably
cause so much destruction of life.
There is no visuals, no pictures, in Paul Tremblay’s A Head Full of Ghosts, but the story is
a great mediation on how one camera lens can be a limited viewpoint to process
tragedy, particularly when so many other things are going on behind the scenes.
The lens in question belongs to the show “The Possession,” which focuses on
14-year-old Marjorie Bennett, a girl prescribed an exorcism to deal with her
demons and her family pushed to their breaking point. The book reveals, through
the blog entries of The Last Final Girl, what the home audience saw of the
Bennet family’s nightmare, but younger sister Merrie offers her own personal view,
influenced by being eight-years-old and forced to watch her beloved sister’s
mental and physical decline as well as the ultimate tragedy that spares no one,
living or dead. Like Hell House, readers
are given brief sips of foreshadowing before consuming the main course of this
family’s pain, culminating in a climax that, while more subdued (less people
screaming, less explosions), it still manages to be just as, perhaps even more,
horrifying.
From the use of Seward’s phonograph in Dracula to today’s found footage films, horror has been on the cusp
of using different media to offer multiple viewpoints, generate frights, and
even confuse the viewer as to what’s actually happening. Some key phrases that
might interest patrons include “slowly building tension” and “insane climax”
(jaws may indeed hit the floor) but there’s also the fourth-wall breaking that
both movie and book do, showing how the scream machine works but letting
readers and viewers know that those who operate said machine are powerless to
stop it once its running at top speed.
