The Importance of Aesthetic Distance in American Horror Movies :: Movie Film Essays

The Importance of Aesthetic Distance in American Horror Movies What then do we make of American horror movies? In the canon of horror pictures they almost always come second in respect to foreign horror movies and any American horror film that is considered to be artful is the one with the most aesthetic distance. Upscale slashers like Johnathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or David Fincher's Seven (1995) are both gruesome and bloody borrowing many of the same shock techniques as their lower budget counterparts (for example, Russell Mulchahy's Sevenish thriller Resurrection (1999)), both focus on the body and its violation, either through sexual means or violent means, and both feature villains who fit easily into Carol Clover's assessment as "distinctly male; his fury is unmistakably sexual in both roots and expression." The logic behind heaping plaudits on the upscale slashers and highbrow horror pictures lies, as with foreign horror, with the concept of aesthetic distance. Film analyst Ken Hanke theorizes that many critics simply praise so-called highbrow horror films because the acclaim comes from "people with little or no knowledge of the genre...What seemed so fresh and creative to them was largely a reshuffling of a very old bag of tricks." While Hanke's thesis is logical, I think the real reason these pictures get such acclaim is (you guessed it) their aesthetic distance. Both The Silence of the Lambs and Seven are considered to be more psychological in nature, as they present killers whose motivations are explainable. The unexplainable is infinitely more terrifying than the explainable so in elucidating the motivations to their gruesome behavior the audience is given an easy out. Believing that evil has a root cause, the audience does not have to accept the shocking hypothesis that evil can simply exist without rhyme or reason. Even in the masterpiece Halloween (1978) we are tossed a half-hearted psychological explanation as to why Michael Myers does what he does. The psychobabble that Donald Pleasance spouts is simply that Myers is "pure evil," and there are some vague connections made between Myers witnessing his sister engaging in premarital sexual activity and his slaughtering tendencies. Director John Carpenter t hen gets to have a killer who seems like a force of nature, yet is still explainable within the realm of psychology. Carpenter also gives his audience a sense of aesthetic distance through his numerous in-jokes and references to other horror films.