National Post

WHY LAUGH AT A SCARY MOVIE?

Laughter kills the mood for everyone else

- Calum marsh

When I was 16, I saw The Ring at the cinema and two girls my age behind me laughed and laughed. A couple of years later, in college, I watched Night of the Living Dead in an introducto­ry film class, and the whole room laughed, even when Duane Jones slapped Judith O’Dea, a moment of violence I found shocking. In my 20s, I ventured to a midnight screening of one of the best and most frightenin­g of all horror movies, David Cronenberg’s The Brood, and was bewildered by the theatre’s endless ironic laughter.

What was so funny? These movies were, I’d humbly assumed, scary. Moreover, they demanded of their audience a certain willingnes­s to take them seriously — they wished to cast a spell, and we were obliged to at least try to submit to it. Don’t we owe this to the genre? If horror has any hope of horrifying, we can’t just yuck it up.

Only much later did I come to understand laughter as a defence mechanism. I saw what will be obvious to anyone reading this now: those young girls were shielding themselves against the possibilit­y of terror. They sensed the movie’s invitation to submit and be vulnerable, and they rejected it the best way they knew how. Through laughter. A dense layer of inane giggles insulated them against the monster with the ink-black hair crawling out of the television screen. They vanquished the movie’s power to frighten by reducing its sinister images to something ridiculous and silly. It was a kind of safety measure. But, of course, it had the effect of spoiling the experience for those around them, too — because their laughter suffused a shared space meant for an almost sacred sobriety.

It only works if we all agree to let it. The girls kidded around, punctured the sanctity. Nobody else had a say.

The students watching Night of the Living Dead were responding differentl­y. It was not fear: it was intense skepticism. They doubted whether the movie was worth the effort of taking seriously, and they did not wait very long to find out. Doubtless a black-andwhite independen­t zombie picture from the late 1960s faces something of an uphill battle with contempora­ry audiences. Suspension of disbelief is harder-won and more difficult to maintain in horror, as reactions are more immediate and intuitive. One sniff of phoniness is all it takes to snap us out of it, and in horror, phoniness has a tendency to become more evident with age. Still, Night of the Living Dead remains an exciting movie. Laughing derisively at its dated elements is a pretty uncharitab­le approach, one that, in the context of a public screening especially, gives the film no chance to really work its magic and prevail.

The Brood is an interestin­g case. On the one hand, it seems to me a victim of circumstan­ce: a midnight rep screening is not exactly a night at the opera, as members of the audience are almost encouraged to mock the movie by the mordant, jocular atmosphere of the room. Add to this the vaguest impression of obsolescen­ce — made in 1979, the film seems to modern eyes an antique — and the crowd that descended upon the cinema at this late hour for an amusing time can hardly help but let loose and go wild. The Brood is about the murderous demonic progeny of a woman scorned. It is wildly emotional, eerie and disturbing. But naturally the audience got one look at those killer children and howled with hilarity until the credits rolled.

People are entitled to watch movies however they would like. There is no right or wrong way. But horror movies are uniquely dependent on the mood or tone of the environmen­t in which they are being enjoyed — and laughter, in public among strangers, greatly and irrevocabl­y changes the mood and tone of any moviegoing environmen­t. If you decide you are superior to a horror film from another era because the special effects or performanc­es seem oldfashion­ed, and if you elect to snicker and jeer instead of attempting to watch it seriously, you are making a decision about the way the movie will be received both for yourself and on behalf of those around you.

Similarly, if you are quick to mock a horror film you suspect may otherwise be too frightenin­g, you are neutering its capacity to scare not merely for yourself, but for the room.

This is a problem of courtesy, you might say. Laughing at a horror movie ruins the movie for anyone in earshot who wishes to be scared — an imposition on fellow moviegoers that is the cinematic equivalent of taking off your shoes and socks on the train. But more than simple rudeness, it is ignorance that the horror laugher invariably betrays. Ignorance first for the richness of horror, of the breadth of its history and the range of its historical idioms. Ignorance of the extraordin­ary power great horror has when one opens oneself and allows the fear to bubble up from the gut. And ignorance of how rewarding it can be to suppress the instinct to ironize everything and embrace art in earnest — if that doesn’t sound too lofty or pretentiou­s for the likes of The Ring.

Fear is a precious sensation. Better to cultivate it than to laugh and snuff it out.

 ??  ?? Horror movies are uniquely dependent on the mood or tone of the environmen­t in which they are being enjoyed.
Horror movies are uniquely dependent on the mood or tone of the environmen­t in which they are being enjoyed.

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