SILVER SCREAMS: More movie thoughts, in and out of synch with Sean Collins. Follow-up to this post.

1) He’s almost entirely right about “The Birds.” His take on the movie itself is totally right on. I think it’s more unusual for Hitchcock than he does, but maybe that’s because I think movies about original sin (“Strangers on a Train”) are pretty much the opposite of movies about evil as absurdity (“The Birds”). I do feel the need to point out that Hitchcock’s scariest movie, as well as the best movie ever made by him or (as far as I know) anyone else, is “Vertigo.” (More on that from Oakhaus. “Devastated” is exactly the right word.)

2) “The Wicker Man“: There’s a streak of self-righteousness (not the same as hypocrisy!) and cruelty in the Christian police officer’s character. Very much a “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican” streak.

But I definitely didn’t find the movie’s sex-pagan alternative even slightly attractive. Not even in the (sadly, quite large) pre- and anti-Christian segments of my brain. I didn’t find the Summerisle religion life-affirming or natural or sexy or vibrant. It wasn’t Diana of Ephesus–it was a car radio blaring, “Every freakin’ night and every freakin’ day/I wanna freak ya baby in every freakin’ way.” It was your freshman counselor demonstrating how to put a condom on a wooden phallus. Which is about as far from eros as I can possibly get. It was post-Christian, not pre-Christian.

3) “The Sixth Sense” and “The Shining”: There’s more to say here about the parallels between these two movies, because in some ways they are halves of a good movie. “TSS” got the better characterization; “The Shining” got the imagery.

The King novel still scares me silly every time I (stay up all night to) read it. King is a ferociously frightening author–Pet Sematary is his best thing by far, with The Shining, The Dead Zone, and Cujo next in that order. (TDZ marred by “Manchurian Candidate” ripoff third section, sigh.)

The Shining, for me, is a mosaic of pure horror: “The plants under the rugs are moving”; the moment when you realize that Jack Torrance really did [spoiler excised, but… um… it’s the scene where he’s removing the wasp’s nest from the roof or wherever it is]; the dog-man; the moment at the end in the shed with the roque mallet. Wow.

I’m not totally sure what didn’t work for me about the translation to film. Part of it is that so much of the horror of the novel, for me, came in the slow destruction of Jack Torrance (or the playing-out of the destruction that had already happened, or his failure to reverse that destruction), and the movie just doesn’t have that kind of time. Part of it is that we didn’t get right inside his head the way we do in the book. Part of it is that, as everybody who dislikes this movie always says, Nicholson plays crazy from the get-go, and that doesn’t work.

And a big part of it is that when Jack Torrance doesn’t work, NONE of the story works, because the wife and child are not characters. They’re plot-device victims.

Cole, the child in “The Sixth Sense,” is less thoroughly defined by his victimization than Torrance’s wife and child, but I do think “TSS” falls into that same trap. And the images in “TSS” aren’t nearly as haunting as the ones in “The Shining” (movie), although some of the dialogue is chilling (“All the time… They don’t know they’re dead”; and the bit about “Do all your soldiers speak Latin?” “No. Only one”). But the actual dead people don’t look scary.

At any rate, I’m really looking forward to the rest of Sean’s “13 Days of Halloween” movie reviews, because even though I wasn’t super sold on the two flicks I’ve watched at his recommendation so far, they both provided food for thought and I find it illuminating to sharpen my impressions on his.

Plus, I want to be scared.