The scream and Halloween reveal the greatest sin of terror: curiosity

Curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity also killed the naive horror movie. However, cats have nine lives and naive ones do not. Advantage: cats.

In 1996 Scream, horror scholar Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) sets the rules for getting out of a horror movie alive: don’t have sex, don’t smoke or get drunk, and if you leave the room, never, forever tell your friends you’ll be back. These are the deadly sins of the genre in Meeks’s book. But there is a more common sin than the rest that characters often commit in horror movies: curiosity. When something makes a “hit” at night, saying “I’ll be right back” doesn’t condemn you; your curiosity does. Don’t look in the basement. Don’t go to the creepy old house on the hill at midnight. Don’t hang out in cemeteries. Don’t read the old tome bound in human skin and written in blood. Frankly, we should listen to edgar wright more than Randy Meeks. Just don’t do it.

Curiosity is not a new sin in horror. It is an original sin that dates back to the experiments of Henry Frankenstein and Jack Griffin, carried out during the 50s, 60s and 70s in movies like The thing from another world and The fly, Black sunday and Onibaba, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The wicker man. Then came Tony Randell’s Hellbound: Hellraiser II in 1988, with the most complete, and completely unbearable, explanation of the role that curiosity plays in horror cinema (and in literature, for that matter, where horror cinema finds much of its base).

“And you wanted to know, ”Says Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins), a smile on her lips sharp enough to pierce the spirit, as she betrays her lover, Dr. Phillip Channard (Kenneth Cranham) to a fate worse than death; left him to the tender mercies of Leviathan, the god of hell in Barker’s gothic horror series, drained of fluids, mutilated and remade into a Cenobite, demons for whom pain and pleasure are the same. “Now you know. And i wanted everything. Now everyone is happy. ”

Channard, gurgling and screaming in agony, would disagree, but that’s the price of his curiosity. His obsession with Hell, and specifically Lament Configuration (an ornate puzzle box seemingly forged out of sheer temptation), has led him to a gruesome end. If used correctly, the Setup evokes the most famous Cenobites from the movies: Pinhead (Doug Bradley), Chatterer (Nicholas Vince), Butterball (Simon Bamford) and Barbie Wilde’s “Female Cenobite”, as if being a woman was enough distinguished. All Channard wanted was “to know.” About hell, about Leviathan, and about the cenobites themselves. Knowing is not a sin in the real world. In the world of horror, it is a lack of partying that is punishable by execution. Channard isn’t the only person in the Hellraiser movies to find out about the consequences of messing with the Settings, but he’s the first to be brought home clearly, and with wicked glee, that is It’s what you get for snooping.

There are horror movies before Hellbound: Hellraiser II, and there are horror movies after Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Cotton’s delightfully ruthless monologue makes it impossible to watch horror movies without pointing out the characters looking where they shouldn’t and inflicting misery on themselves, their friends, their families, and any helpless idiots who stand in their way. “Investigating the mysterious sound” is one of the basic tropes of the genre, along with “let’s separate and look around us”, two fatal mistakes that are committed regularly despite the obvious danger that lurks. These are tricks. They are also necessary to advance horror plots. For paraphrase John FordIf the characters made smart and thoughtful decisions rather than bad ones, that would be the end of the movie. Us need characters to scratch curiosity itches to make horror work.

Drew goddard’s The cabin in the woods provides one of the best contemporary horror examples of this dynamic in action, a meta-analysis not only of why the characters do stupid things in these movies, but how important is it that they do it. Here, an obscure organization, known quite creatively as The Organization, employs engineers Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford) to carry out an operation-ritual of primal sacrifice, with a group of university students serving as victims. ; each represents an archetype of horror movie character, a’la the whore, the athlete, the scholar, the fool, and the virgin, and each has to die to appease the old gods that stir beneath the surface of the Land. Failure to meet these basic requirements spells the literal end of the world.

The ritual begins in earnest when curiosity takes hold of the cast; stumble upon a veritable treasure trove of very obviously evil objects In the old basement of their rustic getaway cabin, the gang rummages around and goad these various curiosities, until Dana (Kristen Connolly) reads a diary aloud, summoning a family of zombie torturers to stalk and kill them. That’s just the first floor of The cabin in the woods‘ curiosity; Finally, the two remaining characters, Dana and Marty (Fran Kranz), descend into an underground lair where The Organization runs the show and discover the terrible truth about zombies, gods, and ritual. They take that knowledge and decide to make everyone kill them by angering the gods. So it goes.

Knowledge and curiosity go hand in hand with horror. Many horror movies of the 2010s make a connection between curiosity and the rewards of curiosity; the characters search for the truth and regret finding it. By Jennifer Kent The Babadook uses a classic horror setting, The Haunted Book, which invites the ghost adorned in a top hat and trench coat of the title to the home of a single mother (Essie Davis) and her son (Noah Wiseman). The demon torments them, especially her, day and night, for reading his story. By Ari Aster Midsummer draws upon the lore of folk horror for a grueling tale of daylight madness, where cultural anthropology students travel to Hälsingland to study an enigmatic Swedish commune and become the centerpiece of a 90-year-old sacrificial ritual.

Most overtly of all, John Carpenter’s David Gordon Green’s 2018 sequel Hallowe’en, simply called Hallowe’en, starts off with true crime podcasters goading Michael Myers, a man who is not known for being talkative, to say something, whatever, anything, when ever it is something. Eventually, Myers stalks and kills them, and eventually their own medic, Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), attempts the same feat. Myers crushes his head like wine grapes in return. However, the nature of the deaths is not critical. Hallowe’en Being a slasher, we are there to kill at least in part. However, the reason why those deaths occur, it is critical. If the podcasters hadn’t bothered Myers, they would have lived. If Sartain’s crazy desire to study Myers “in the wild” hadn’t gotten over him, then everyone else who dies in the movie would have lived too. Yes, Myers is the one doing all the murder, but curiosity means there are other hands holding the knife.

Movies need conflict. Conflict arises from action. Characters act and make decisions that keep the storytelling engine running. In other words, horror movies are not unique, but the mechanism that fuels them is still the main one of the genre. Without curiosity, a strip of horror movies … Hallowe’en, The Babadook, Midsummer, The cabin in the woods, Us, Sea fever, The regret, The autopsy of Jane Doe, Crawl, V / H / S / 2, Spring, Sinister – just don’t happen, and that’s just a current sample. Curiosity is horror as much as the murderers and monsters that make up the most iconic villain in the genre. Forget about the cat; If you’re not careful, it will kill you too.