THE HORROR FALLED

KINOBODKA

A couple of years ago, at the Cannes Lions festival, they played an amusing selection of commercials. All of them were built according to the same principle: at first, some kind of leaf tediousness appeared on the screen - peacefully grazing herds or a ladies' car, ...

A couple of years ago, at the Cannes Lions festival, they played an amusing selection of commercials. All of them were built according to the same principle: first, some kind of leafy tediousness appeared on the screen - peacefully grazing herds or a ladies' car sliding along a perfectly smooth highway among the hills ... And then, when the viewer was already nodding, dreaming that everything would finally end with a natural call to eat only such curds or ride on such cars, - at that moment, from somewhere on top of the screen, an incomprehensible disheveled creature protruded and screamed heart-rendingly: “Aaaaaa!!! Drink our energy drink!!! The hall immediately perked up: someone twitched, someone squealed ... By the way, I also twitched.

In the recent Russian premiere of The Omen, I was twitching, which is not surprising: director John Moore concocted a remake of the famous horror movie of the same name from the late seventies, using the same “contrast shower” effect. He used it not from evil, but, I think, from helplessness.

A horror film is made for that, after all, to cause horror, and not, say, laughter. "Omen" turned out to be a rather ridiculous spectacle - so forbidden tricks were used. The calculation is simple: when a very loud sound is suddenly heard in a quiet room, adrenaline is released in every mammal, the pulse quickens and the pupils dilate. When, in The Omen, some quiet and thoughtful character from somewhere above, squealing, kicking and biting, another character suddenly falls down (my one and a half year old daughter uses the capacious wording “Wow - fell” for such scenes), and the volume of the sound at This increases three times that way, all the above-mentioned changes occur in the spectator's organism, and the spectators then suspect that they were very frightened. And according to their symptoms, they misdiagnose the film as “terrible”.

The original The Omen was by no means a perfect film (both in terms of acting and in terms of meaning), but definitely frightening. The story of how Mr. and Mrs. Thorne adopted a baby with three six-moles on the top of their heads and realized too late that they had warmed the Enemy of the Human Race at the family hearth - this story really chilled the blood (which was worth the music alone - solemnly colorless operatic voices , each time "foreshadowing" a bad turn of events). Why, one wonders, the authors of the remake, having reproduced the original meticulously (up to the storyboard), the main mechanism - the mechanism of fear, without the insinuating ticking of which such a plot basis inevitably turns into lifeless trash - could not start?

The first thing that comes to mind is that the story itself, told in The Omen, has probably been devalued aesthetically. In the seventies, the idea that universal evil could nest in a cute toddler was still fresh and fascinated in itself. Now the creepy kids, repeatedly cloned by Japanese filmmakers, have completely sucked all the "energy" juice out of such a plot scheme ... This, however, is not an adequate explanation. Kids - no matter how worn out they are - can not prevent the use of horror film techniques appropriate to this genre. It is clear, after all, that real horror does not fall with screams on the head, but quietly thickens somewhere behind the scenes and comes slowly, stealthily. This rule was beautifully illustrated by Roland Barthes in his book Camera lucida, dedicated to photography. He “appointed” the most terrible picture not the one in which someone’s bloodied insides are visible, but the one in which nothing terrible actually happens: a small child just plays on the floor ... And a barely noticeable shadow of something looms slightly from the side and slightly from above something long and sharp - not included in the frame.

This banal suspense - the logic of fear - is becoming increasingly rare in modern horror films. The last really scary film was, in my opinion, the film "The Others" (and then only parasitic on the much more terrible "The Sixth Sense"). Everything else is fearless scary Japanese children in one or another ethnic version or movies in the “boom-and-fall” genre ... The logic of fear leaves the cinema along with logic in general. Semi-crazy pictures - in which the ends are not just not linked to the ends, but in general there is not a single, excuse me, end - appear like mutant mushrooms after some kind of life-giving schizophrenic rain. The recent "Flight Plan" - which is based on the fact that all the passengers of the plane accidentally did not notice a little girl flying with them ... The recent "Boomer-2" - in which the main character cannot find the main character in any way, and then she accidentally literally stumbles over him on the street, along which she was just running with a bouquet of white roses at the ready.

Cinematography is now clearly in an acute stage of mutation: the scale of changes is no less than it was during the transition from silent to voiced cinema ... Today, almost no one is able to tell a simple (simple!), intelligible, consistent story. A movie like Steven Spielberg's The Duel—in which nothing happens but a small car mysteriously pursued by a huge truck, with almost no dialogue, no special effects at all, but which is impossible to tear yourself away from—there can't be a movie like this today.

Paradoxically, technological progress, which once breathed soul - that is, magic - into the body of the "most important of the arts", has now turned against this very "most important". Magic with all its wonders - special effects, computer and animation inserts, clip interruptions - imperceptibly changed the composition and grew; destroyed and began to devour not just logic - in general, so to speak, narrative.

Cinema of a new generation is a cinema from which you can leave at any moment and return at any moment without missing anything. Cinema-interactive, in which only what is happening on the screen at this particular moment is important: thump - fell, thump - fell ...

About the author:

Anna Starobinets is a journalist and novelist, author of the collection of short stories The Transitional Age (2005) and the novel Vault 3/9 (2006), written in the phantasmagoric horror genre. Critics immediately dubbed her the "Russian Stephen King."