[Did this piece for Mint Lounge’s tennis special]
The final leg of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train has the narrative cross-cutting between two actions, until they converge in an exciting fight scene atop a carousel. In the first of these actions, the suave psychopath Bruno Anthony leaves his house to travel to a fairground where he wants to drop off a cigarette lighter. His purpose in doing this is to incriminate the story’s hero, Guy Haines, in a murder that Bruno has committed. The lighter belongs to Guy and has two tennis racquets embossed on it.
While this is happening, Guy – a tennis star with political ambitions – is playing an important match, but also knows that he must get off the court, and out of the stadium, in time to intercept Bruno and save himself; at the changeover between games, he looks tensely at the courtside clock, and we count the minutes with him.
As the sequence progresses, the cutting between the two narratives becomes increasingly urgent (and visually symbolic: at one point, Bruno must retrieve the lighter from a storm drain it has fallen into, his fingers slipping down ever further into the darkness; meanwhile, Guy’s racquet points sun-ward as he makes overhead shots). There is a hint of character development too. Guy has been a limp-wristed sort so far, not a strong, assertive hero (Farley Granger, who plays the part, had a similarly passive role in Hitchcock’s Rope), but now, facing crisis, he doesn’t have the option of playing the waiting game: he has to speed it up, move out of his comfort zone, take risks.
I have sometimes thought of that match while watching the theatre of men’s tennis over the past decade and a bit: a period that saw the riveting Roger Federer-Rafael Nadal rivalry followed by the ascent to greatness of one-time “third wheel” Novak Djokovic, and the continued doggedness of Andy Murray, perpetual bridesmaid in Grand Slam finals, who doesn’t get enough credit for his achievements in such a high-octane era. As a Nadal obsessive who has a great deal of respect for all those other players, I feel like playing devil’s advocate and wondering: what if Guy Haines was Federer, and what if the man he was playing in that scene was Rafa Nadal? Would the hero ever have got off that court? Would Hitchcock’s film have had a chance to end, much less reach its spectacular climax?
We saw a version of this story emerge in the last decade, when Federer fans had reason to view Nadal as the moustache-twirling cinematic “heavy”, always impeding their hero’s progress. Circa 2005, here is Roger, an efficient, confident, attacking player, accustomed to swanning his way through matches and finishing in time to toss out bon mots at the press conference. After which he can go eat a five-course meal on a glacier, or don a cape and rescue Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, or whatever it is Swiss superheroes do. Most of his opponents, much less skilled, play the game on his terms. But now the script changes. Along comes this Nadal, this Spaniard in the works, with his two-handed backhand and almost robotic ball-retrieving, grunting and fist-pumping as if every point isn’t just a point to be quickly won or lost, it is a battle for his very soul. Not only does he make you play endless rallies, he also takes his sweet time between them. (“He towels off after EVERY POINT, even after his opponent has double-faulted!” a friend of mine, no Rafa fan, once wailed. Not so far from the truth.)
In Strangers on a Train, the tennis match is a pit-stop on the road to something much more important – the real game with the highest stakes lies ahead, in the fairground confrontation. (In an impeccably crafted film, those tennis scenes are casually shot by Hitchcock’s standards.) For Nadal, on the other hand, the court itself is the carnival. There have been times, watching some of his longest matches (the epic 2012 Australian Open final and the grueling Madrid Masters semifinal of 2009, both against Djokovic, come to mind), when I have felt that even if he lost, the thrill lay in just being part of something surreal and never-ending.
Those words could describe another cinematic tennis match, from a very different sort of film. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Blow Up is one of those cool, avant-garde European movies that initially pretend to be narrative-driven (this one even pretends to be an exciting mystery), before yielding to abstract, enigmatic commentary on modern life, hedonism and flawed perceptions. In its closing scene, the protagonist Thomas watches a group of mimes “play” a tennis match with an invisible ball. At first bemused, he eventually succumbs to the conceit: his eyes move back and forth as if he is watching a real match.
You might call this match existential tennis, where the purpose isn’t to get a result but to go through the same motions over and over. And that is how some exasperated Federer fans describe not just Nadal’s playing style, but also most of the baseline-rally-dominated matches that Djokovic and Murray have played in recent years. For those purists, this is the un-beautiful game, so repetitive and tedious that their eyes glaze over and they can barely see the ball after a point.
Can we propose this binary then: that Federer was like the dashing hero of a Hitchcock thriller – a throwback to the crisper tennis of a past era, before surfaces around the world were slowed down – while Nadal, grinding away for hours, was the lead in a languorously paced film? Well, yes, if you have a very narrow view of what exciting tennis (or stirring cinema) should be. But here’s a caveat. Don’t try telling me that being a Nadal fan doesn’t involve high suspense – I have 11 years’ worth of chewed fingernails and accumulated grey hair to counter that thought.
Some of this suspense has come in great matches: such as the heart-stopping moment during the 2008 Wimbledon final when Nadal – with the match on his racquet in the fourth-set tiebreak – temporarily melted into a puddle of nerves; or the extraordinary see-saw of the third set of the 2013 US Open final, which Rafa somehow stole from under Djokovic’s nose after being nearly a double-break down. However, the bulk of the suspense has been off-court, in the constant second-guessing about his many injuries: how long before his knee, or shoulder, or back, gives way this time? How much is his team disclosing to the outside world? Can he make it through another round after that exhausting last match? When is a comeback likely to occur, and how effective will it be?
Given all this drama, watching Rafa win quickly can feel anti-climactic, even portentous. I was astonished a few weeks ago when I tuned in to his first-round match at the French Open to find that, in only sixty-five minutes of play, he was up 6-1, 6-1, 3-0 against an admittedly low-ranked opponent. It should have been thrilling, but it felt like the usual order of things had been mangled – it was too good to be true. A few days later, just as talk had begun about Rafa being in contention to win his tenth French Open, he pulled out of the tournament with a wrist injury.
Hitchcock once made a distinction between surprise (a sudden explosion that a viewer couldn’t possibly have anticipated) and its more effective cousin, suspense (we know there is a bomb under the table, but we don’t know when, or if, it will go off). For casual tennis watchers, Nadal’s pullout came as a blindsiding surprise. For perpetually jittery, stressed-out fans like yours truly who follow every practice-session report and press conference, it was more like the newest twist in a decade-long suspense series. Following him over the years has been – depending on the context – like watching an “arty” film full of long pauses and silences; or like watching a fast-paced thriller, waiting with bated breath for the moment where the roundabout careens out of control. That’s a good, varied menu if you’re a movie buff, and I’m not complaining.
[Some earlier posts on Rafa Nadal/tennis are here]
[Did this for Business Standard]
I’m not usually enthusiastic about having a camera aimed at me (though I’m not fascist about it either, like the people who believe the thing is a devil’s tool meant to suck their souls out through their eyeballs or something). Even when travelling in scenic places, I’d rather someone just took a candid shot instead of expecting me to stand in front of something and grin moronically at a lens.
Which in no way explains why, if you chanced to visit the Cinémathèque Française museum on a particular Friday afternoon last month, you would have found me squatting next to Mrs Bates’s skull and grinning moronically at a lens. And then doing it again, to get another angle; and then yet again, after checking the light settings and tut-tutting; all the while keeping an eye out for the museum police who frowned at photography in the premises. Nor does it explain why I then stood next to Maria the robot and made faux-dramatic poses in an attempt to replicate a famous scene from a 1926 film.
But these were special circumstances: Mrs Bates and Maria are important figures in my movie-watching career. The former is the shadowy protagonist of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which infected my life when I was 13, getting me thinking about films as art and sending me down a rabbit-hole of analytical literature about movies. The latter is one of the frosty legends of early film history, the automaton created by an evil scientist in Fritz Lang’s great silent film Metropolis. And so, having arrived in the city where people typically make a beeline for Notre Dame and Versailles, for Angelina’s hot chocolate and Berthillon’s ice creams, I prioritised a meeting with these two enigmatic ladies of the night. As Mrs Bates’s little boy Norman put it, “We all go a little mad sometimes. Haven’t you?”
Mother Bates makes her famous appearance in the climax of Psycho, in a creaky (by today’s standards) but unsettling scene in the basement, where we discover that Norman’s mummy is not a living, domineering harridan but a long-dead, carefully preserved corpse. If I had wanted my illusions to be just as well-preserved, I would have avoided going to the museum at all, so that my only mental picture of her would be as she appears in the film. There was something both comical and poignant about seeing her in a glass cage at the Cinémathèque. Bathed in a beam of yellow light, she stood out from a distance in the darkened room; the idea was presumably to make her look spooky, but it also drew attention to her as an exhibit, something that visitors could point and chortle at (or sit down next to and smile stupidly for a camera). Besides, she was unexpectedly small. (What was I expecting? A two-foot-tall skull with shark-like teeth?)
Looking at other artefacts – the starfish in the jar from Man Ray’s 1928 film The Sea Star, costumes from such movies as Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast – was a strange experience too. Props and objects that have such immediate, vivid associations for a viewer can, when removed from their familiar contexts, become banal and smaller than life. Cocteau’s film was in gorgeous black and white, but these costumes were in “real-world” colour and they seemed garish, almost vulgar when set against the images from the film, playing on a screen above. There was a series of still photos from the Beauty and the Beast set, which showed the 
blandly handsome actor Jean Marais applying the layers of makeup that would transform him into the imperious, tragic Beast. For anyone who has been immersed in the otherworldly milieu of Cocteau’s film, these stills are an exercise in demystification; with a movie like that, which gives the impression of having sprung fully formed from an alternate universe, you don’t want to be reminded that it was put together by a cast and crew, who were probably doing mundane things like talking about the day’s news or taking cigarette breaks in between shots.
Yet such experiences can also bring a new, more measured respect for the creative process – the processes by which everyday things are transmuted into magic and art, with long-term effects on people’s lives and personalities. (I would almost certainly not have become a professional writer if I hadn’t watched Psycho when I did.) Returning to Ma Bates: here is a wrinkled little skull replica, not particularly authentic-looking or scary when you see it in the cold light of day. Yet someone designed it keeping in mind a film’s lighting and colour scheme, and the desired Grand Guignol-like effect of the climactic revelation. They arranged it just so, placing it in a chair that would swivel around dramatically; at the crucial moment a swinging lightbulb cast shadows over it, making the eye sockets seem alive and menacing; and Bernard Herrman’s music score with its screaming violins added to the effect of the scene.
And now here she was more than 50 years later, outside of the film, in a boringly polychrome world, staring blankly at me from her glass home. It was a little deflating, but the sense of mystery wasn’t completely gone. For a moment I fancied I could hear Norman’s voice saying "I think we're all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out” followed by Mother’s cackle: “They know I can't move a finger, and I won't. I'll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do... suspect me."
[The earlier post with the museum photos is here. And here is "Monsters I have known", my piece about horror-movie love for The Popcorn Essayists]
Watched Hitchcock’s Notorious for the umpteenth time the other day, captivated as always by its almost flawless construction, unmatched elegance and fluidity, and the stunning performances by the three leads. Noting again how the film’s sympathies rest with the Ingrid Bergman character Alicia vis-à-vis the manipulative men in her life (this has always seemed very obvious to me, though I know people who disagree), I was reminded of the many allegations of misogyny in Hitchcock’s work. And this super interview of Camille Paglia, who rambles magnificently about Hitch and his artistic impulses.
I love her passion for the subject, even when I disagree with little specifics. This bit is notable, and I think it cuts to the heart of a major divide in “film reading” and how we tend to make up our minds about whether a movie is misogynistic (or racist, or whatever):
I’ve been very vocal about my opposition to the simplistic theory of ‘the male gaze’ that is associated with Laura Mulvey (and that she herself has moved somewhat away from) and that has taken over feminist film studies to a vampiric degree in the last 25 years. The idea that a man looking at or a director filming a beautiful woman makes her an object, makes her passive beneath the male gaze which seeks control over woman by turning her into mere matter, into “meat” – I think this was utter nonsense from the start. It was formulated by people who knew nothing about the history of painting or sculpture, the history of the fine arts […]
Hitchcock obviously had a complex and ambivalent attitude toward women. […] Any artist is driven by strange forces. The whole impulse in art-making is to untangle your dark emotions. There is some huge conflict and inner war in every major artist. And yes, the sexual battlefield is where those things were going on in Hitchcock. But look at his own life: From what people have been able to conclude, his actual sexual practice was fairly limited. He remained a virgin until he was 27, when he married, and he did produce a daughter. There’s some suggestion that perhaps his marriage was not particularly physical. He was almost a kind of priest or monk. The Jesuit-trained Catholic impulse in him was very strong. And if his film eroticism was voyeuristic, well, that’s what we want, for heaven’s sake, in a painter or a filmmaker! We want someone who lives through the eye.
The full interview is here. I also recommend Marian Keane’s piece “A Closer Look at Scopophilia: Mulvey, Hitchcock and Vertigo”, a riposte to Laura Mulvey’s thesis that the camera in Vertigo represents an active, controlling male gaze (which in turn implied that the film is “on the side of” the James Stewart character Scottie). A large part of Keane's essay can be found here, on Google Books.
Incidentally Paglia made related observations in an interview for this book on screen violence. An excerpt below:
Interviewer: I agree he was a great director, but he was nakedly misogynistic...
Paglia: I don’t accept this. That is an absurd argument. We’re talking about a man who made films in which are some of the most beautiful and magnetic images of women that have ever been created. I mean, for heaven’s sake, to call that misogynistic, when we think of Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief, when we think how fabulous Janet Leigh is in that shower scene, we think of Kim Novak in Vertigo [...] what I’m saying about all of the great artists from Michelangelo to Botticelli to everyone else is that in the fascination with these goddess-like figures of women there is an ambivalence, a push-pull in it, a complexity of response, but to stress the negative in Hitchcock...? I think you need far more complex terminology to deal with people who achieve at the level Hitchcock did. The women he created, for heaven’s sake, have absolutely dominated the imagination of late twentieth-century cinema. Everyone’s imitating it, everywhere, to this day.
Almost anyone with an interest in the history of film criticism knows about the great debates that took place around the auteur theory in the 1960s, with publications like Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight at Sound, and individuals like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, in the eye of the storm. But one journal that doesn’t get mentioned as much these days – though it was central to those conversations and provided some of the most intelligent, passionate film writing of its time – is Movie, the little magazine started by Ian Cameron in 1962.
I didn’t know much about Movie myself until a few years ago, but I came to feel a distant kinship with it when I learnt that two of the film writers who had most influenced me – Victor F Perkins (author of Film as Film) and Robin Wood – were part of the magazine’s core group in its early years. I knew of no connection between Wood and Perkins when I first read them, but I knew both stressed the importance of assessing film as a form with its own distinct language – subject to careful visual analysis that goes beyond the bare bones of story or plot – rather than as an underling to literature. Naturally, this meant according serious attention to works that lay outside the circles of cultural respectability at the time. (Wood’s path-breaking study of Hitchcock began with this now-famous passage: “Why should we take Hitchcock seriously? It is a pity the question has to be raised: if the cinema were truly regarded as an autonomous art, not as a mere adjunct of the novel or of drama – if we were able yet to see films instead of mentally reducing them to literature – it would be unnecessary.”)
Anyway, I mention this because I just came across this website with content from a recent revival of the journal, with Perkins – now in his mid-70s – still involved. There are older articles as well. Some of the writing is intense (and needless to say, requires familiarity with the films being discussed) but do bookmark and take the plunge once in a while; it’s worth it.
Some recommendations (the links are all PDFs):
“Films, Directors and Critics” – an important 1962 piece by Ian Cameron, which responds to charges of “over-analysis” in the first issue of Movie, spells out some of the journal’s main concerns, and takes a jab at the cultural conservatism of Sight and Sound (while also rejecting the most extreme definitions of auteurism proposed by the French critics). I think this piece should be read in conjunction with two other famous essays: Pauline Kael’s “Circles and Squares” and Andrew Sarris’s “Towards a Theory of Film History”. (Kael berated the Movie critics in her piece, even asking the – in my view bizarre – question “If they are men of feeling and intelligence, isn’t it time for them to be a little ashamed of their ‘detailed criticism’ of movies like River of No Return?”)
A 2010 editorial by Perkins, with context for the Movie revival and a reminiscence of the winds of change in the early 60s. (“1958 was the key year. It was the year of The Tarnished Angels, Touch of Evil, Party Girl and Vertigo, films to revere, to see and see again, but loftily dismissed by the critical establishment … The depth and eagerness of [Orson Welles’s] response to admiring interrogation about Touch of Evil did two things. It showed us that film makers might rise to the level of the questions put to them, and it stoked our fury at the blinkered terms of this film’s and others’ reception in the English-writing world.”)
A detailed piece by Alex Clayton about “the texture of performance” in Hitchcock’s Psycho and its “shot-by-shot remake” by Gus Van Sant. Probably best read with DVDs of both films handy, but there are useful insights of a general nature here too. I particularly like Clayton’s observation that the concept of a shot-by-shot remake is inherently flawed, being based on the idea that “the figures who populate film shots are not essentially constitutive of them, except as hominid-shaped design elements”. (In other words: casting Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche in iconic roles formerly played by other actors is one thing; but confining them in a pre-determined pattern of shot compositions and gestures that requires them to exactly mimic the original performers is another thing altogether.)
Andrew Sarris's essay on Luis Bunuel and Viridiana, from the first issue of Movie. ("There is a danger in attaching an explicitly political moral to Bunuel's career [...] His camera has always viewed his characters from a middle distance, too close for cosmic groupings and too far away for self-identification. By focusing on the abnormality of life, Bunuel forces his audience to accept man unconditionally.")
Also: two long pieces about Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Lang’s You Only Live Once, which I will read after watching the films again, but which look interesting if you have the films in recent memory.
Full table of contents here and here. Also, here is a listing of contents of old Movie issues. Wish all the pieces were available to read online.
[Related posts: Perkins on subject and treatment; a tribute to Robin Wood; thoughts on story and storytelling]
[From an on-off series about little connections between generally unrelated movies that happened to be made around the same time]
The films: Bimal Roy’s Madhumati and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, both released in the summer of 1958
The case: Hitchcock’s film (one of his least successful when it came out, but now among the most celebrated movies ever made) has a detective, Scottie (James Stewart), becoming obsessed with a woman named Madeleine (Kim Novak); they fall in love, but then she dies (or so he thinks) by falling from a great height, and he comes to believe he is responsible. Shortly afterwards, he meets Judy, who bears a strong facial resemblance to Madeleine – he emotionally arm-twists her into dressing up as his lost love so he can immerse himself in a fantasy.
In Madhumati, a tragic love story is similarly followed by an attempt at remaking/play-acting. Anand (Dilip Kumar) falls in love with a village girl named Madhu (Vyjayantimala) but loses her (she falls from a tall building, though this is not immediately revealed) and wallows in grief and guilt until he meets Madhavi, who looks just like Madhu. He persuades her to dress up as the woman he lost.
A strong similarity in plot points then, but there is a big difference in the two men’s personal imperatives and in the nature of the love depicted in the two films. The obsessed Scottie believes that Judy can somehow become the dead Madeleine, and his “love” has an ugly element of control or possession in it. Madhumati takes the more sentimental position. Once Anand realises that Madhavi is someone else altogether, he doesn’t show the slightest romantic interest in her; he asks her to pretend to be Madhu only so he can trap the villainous Ugranarain (Pran) into a confession.
The point is clearly made in an important scene where Madhavi comes to meet Anand in his cottage. Here is a flesh-and-blood woman who strongly resembles the dead Madhu, and who is sympathetic to his plight – yet he leaves her mid-conversation and dashes outside because he has heard the plaintive song of Madhu’s ghost. It might be said that like Scottie he is chasing a shadow, a woman who doesn’t exist – except that in the world of Madhumati the ghost does exist. A defining difference between the two stories is that Roy’s film believes in the supernatural, and this in turn allows it to posit an eternal version of love, built on the idea that Anand and Madhu are soulmates for all time. (Vertigo pretends for a while to believe in the supernatural – and in reincarnation – but this is eventually revealed to be a red herring.)
The twin motifs of climbing towards a height, and then falling from it, feature strongly in both films too (and in different ways suggest the vertiginous feelings that accompany romantic obsession). Both are breathtakingly good-looking films – one in colour, the other in black-and-white – and the cinematography has an ethereal quality: in Vertigo there is a scene 
in a cemetery where Scottie (and the viewer) sees the enigmatic Madeleine from a distance, as if through a mist; when Judy first emerges from the bathroom having “transformed” into Madeleine, she seems ghostly too. In Madhumati the mist is a palpable, living presence almost throughout the film, and Madhu is sometimes presented as an apparition, as someone not quite of this world, even before tragedy strikes.
In both films (I know, I’m stretching now) a tree plays a central part in the lovers’ assignations: Madhu and Anand use a tree’s shadow falling across a rock to mark the time of day they will meet; Madeleine counts the rings on an ancient redwood to reflect on the transience of human life. That might seem a minor detail, but the redwood scene is also a reminder of the big divergence between the films: Madhumati is built on circularity and the idea that nothing ever really “ends” – if Anand and Madhu can’t be together in this life, they will always have another chance in the next one – while Vertigo suggests that there are no such second chances and that an attempt to artificially construct one can only result in tragedy; lives are finite and circumscribed, and too often wasted in pursuing an ideal rather than in appreciating what stands in front of you.
And lastly, one of those pleasing coincidences that often occur when one is watching many (varied) films over a short period. Last month I saw two films – on consecutive days – that were dramatized stories about real-life directors. One was Hitchcock, which I wrote about here (and which made a reference to Vertigo’s plot as a variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s real-life treatment of blonde actresses). The other film, Meghe Dhaka Tara, was about Ritwik Ghatak, who was the story-writer of… Madhumati. (If this blog had a soundtrack, this would be the cue for an ululating ghostly wail.) Which brings me to an irony in the Vertigo-Madhumati association: Hitchcock – the “commercial” director, usually associated with escapism – made the more hardheaded film, a cynical work with many scenes that make a viewer feel like he has bitten into a sour lemon; while Roy and Ghatak – both archetypes of the "socially conscious" artist – created a lush melodrama (I don’t use the word pejoratively) about stormy nights, wandering spirits and immortal romance. It’s a pleasing reminder of cinema's limitless possibilities, and of the limits of classification.
I finally watched the 2012 Hitchcock, and it became a test case in the truism that you have to see a film for yourself to decide how you feel about it. That might sound blindingly obvious, but how often we read a movie synopsis (or even a measured review) and casually say, “Oh I’m sure I won’t like that one.” Even professional film writers – weighed down by deadlines or the tedium of watching mediocre movies week after week – sometimes make these assumptions, and regret them afterward.
As I wrote in this post last year, given my intense relationship with Psycho, I was always going to approach Hitchcock with a certain amount of dread, anticipating its many simplifications and inaccuracies. I expected to feel the same way about it as many Iliad-purists felt about Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy (a film I thought highly of) – wanting to elbow the stranger in the next seat every couple of minutes and hiss “That ISN’T how it really happened!” The project seemed to pivot around the casting coup of Sir Anthony Hopkins as Alfred Hitchcock and Dame Helen Mirren as his wife Alma, and given that relatively little is known about the inner workings of the Hitchcocks' 53-year marriage – or the precise nature of the contributions made by the publicity-shy Alma to her husband’s later work – it felt like this was going to be a neatly dramatized, easy-to-digest serving of Hitchcock Lite, for a modern audience that would probably have little time for his own films.
And to an extent, Hitchcock is all of these things. It includes Cliff's Notes-like summaries for viewers who have a basic acquaintance with the director’s work but who aren’t engaged enough to read books filled with analysis or biographical detail. (At one point, Vera Miles glibly tells Janet Leigh that Hitchcock is just like the James Stewart character in Vertigo, constantly needing to control and reshape women. QED.) It tinkers with the facts, placing a lot of dramatic weight on a subplot about the Hitchcocks’ writer friend Whitfield Cook that almost certainly has no basis in reality. But on the whole this is a better, more layered film than I’d expected. It is a considerate (by which 
I don’t mean hagiographic) pen portrait of a man who was all huff and bluster on the outside, and especially in public, but who may also have been insecure enough inside never to fully realize what a major artist he was. It is a largely engrossing account of a marriage going through a brief period of crisis, of a wife who was mostly content to stay in the background and of a husband who didn’t always acknowledge how vital her presence was to him. (The Lady Who Nearly Vanished vs The Man Who Knew Too Little?) And importantly, it is a droll, self-aware tribute that draws motifs from Hitchcock’s own work and understands something of his sensibilities.
Consider the very first scene, where we see the mass murderer Ed Gein (whose macabre adventures inspired Robert Bloch’s book Psycho) clunking his brother on the head with a spade near their Wisconsin farm, upon which the mood abruptly changes from the gruesome to the comical: as the famous funeral-march tune of Alfred Hitchcock Presents plays on the soundtrack, Hopkins’s Hitchcock enters the frame to introduce this story and to seal a blood pact with the murderer. Ed Gein committed horrible crimes, Hitchcock tells us in his patented faux-outraged tone, looking into the camera; but then, if he had never existed – or if he had been arrested earlier than he was – we wouldn’t have “our film”, would we?
This can be viewed as an artist’s admission to feeding off – and profiting from – the ugly aspects of the real world, and the suffering of others; but the words “our film” are also a reminder that Hitchcock implicated his audience in nearly everything he did, putting us through a gamut of disturbing, contradictory, morally ambiguous emotions. (An aside: as someone whose life as a movie-watcher and writer was hugely informed by Psycho, would it be callous of me to feel vaguely grateful for Ed Gein’s existence?) That opening scene catches so much of what the real Hitchcock was about: reflections on the relationship between life and art, between the artist and his patrons, between the watcher and the watched; the alternating of black, even tasteless humour with moments of human truth and insight. (At his very best, as in Psycho’s great parlour scene, Hitchcock used one to enhance the other.)
At times it is hard to figure out exactly what sort of audience Hitchcock was made for. It presumes that the viewer cares about Psycho, or at least has a good memory of the film (an intense scene where Hitch is shown directing Janet Leigh during the car-drive shoot, for instance, would lose much of its impact for someone who didn’t know Psycho well). But at the same time, the narrative emphasis is on something more universal: the relationship between two people as they approach the twilight of their long life together. One can 
tell the film is more interested in the Hitch-Alma relationship than in behind-the-scenes trivia, because it leaves out some of the most entertaining and filmable anecdotes about the making of Psycho, such as the one about Hitch taking Janet Leigh aside and asking her to “warm up” her cold-fish co-star John Gavin during their love scene, or the painstaking, half-successful experiments with moleskin to cover the “naughty bits” when Leigh had to be topless for the shower scene. The inclusion of such scenes would unquestionably have made Hitchcock a more accessible and exciting film for a mainstream audience; instead, it chooses to spend much of its running time on the bond between two people who have been married for 35 years.
Mirren and Hopkins play a big part in making this work. But equally notably, the growing tension and paranoia in the marriage (as Hitch wonders if his wife is having an affair) is presented not in the terms of a conventional realist drama but as Hitchcock himself might have opted to do it: there is a terrific scene where he crunches violently on celery in the kitchen and the camera moves in on Alma hunching over the sink, with the movement and the sound design suggesting that her husband momentarily feels like snapping her neck. (This may also be a reference to a darkly funny domestic scene in Hitchcock’s Frenzy.) Elsewhere too, the spirit – and some of the energy – of Psycho infects this film, from the deadpan one-liners (“You know where to plunge the dagger, don’t you?” is said during domestic banter in a scene that takes place, where else, in a bathroom) to the use of quiet, minatory passages from Bernard Herrmann’s superb score.
And there may even be a few hat-tips to the intense visual design of Psycho: the echoing gestures and movements, the use of similar-looking objects (windshield wipers in the rain, a knife swinging back and forth in a shower). Take two scenes – very different in mood – that have our portly director making flamboyant use of his arms. In one, deeply distressed, he insinuates himself into the shooting of the shower sequence, moving the knife savagely back and forth to show the crew how it is done (and indulging in self-therapy in the process). In the other scene late in the film, he stands outside the preview hall, so thrilled by the audience’s reception to the shower scene that he waltzes about and moves his hands like an orchestra conductor slashing a baton through the air. Neither scene plays like an accurate representation of what the undemonstrative Hitchcock might actually have done in those situations, but they achieve a poetic credibility in showing what may have been going on in his head (the latter scene is presumably a literalisation of his remark that he liked to “play the audience like an organ”). They make a good, playful stab at summoning the master's ghost, and for that I was happy to overlook this film's little inconsistencies.
P.S. I like Scarlett Johansson, but I was a little underwhelmed by her performance as Janet Leigh; though that is probably because the real Leigh in the first 45 minutes of Psycho – so skillfully holding the best section of the movie together – is so thoroughly embedded in my movie consciousness (it is a great performance, one of the best in a Hitchcock film). I might have felt the same way about James D’Arcy as Anthony Perkins, but the difference is that D’arcy has a smaller, less important part, and in the two or three scenes we do see him he bears a strong enough physical resemblance to Perkins and does a decent job of imitating the actor’s real-life earnestness – whereas Johansson has the harder task of playing Janet Leigh in recognizable scenes from Psycho (in the car, and in the shower).
Lata Mangeshkar has watched every Hitchcock film...and then some. Today's HT City tells me that Lata-ji loves Hitchcock's Gaslight in particular. Now, given that this isn't a Hitch film in the first place (which is okay, she is in her 80s and memory is treacherous for those of us less than half that age), I enjoyed the report's fussy inclusion of the correct year of the movie next to the title - even though the reference is part of a direct quote and it's unlikely that the great lady would have said something like "I loved Gaslight (1944) especially." Good to see some serious research going on at the copy desk.
(Having said which, what does one do when you're interviewing a legend and collecting quotes for a one-column snippet, and she makes a factual error? Do you gently correct her [assuming you know better yourself]? Can you simply leave the inaccurate bit out of your story, if the story is rendered pointless without it? And what does the poor guy on the copy-desk do when, after googling for a small detail, he discovers that the whole premise is dubious? I'm glad I don't have to face any of these dilemmas firsthand.)
Yesterday I had the very happy-making experience of watching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment in a darkened mini-theatre, on a screen that, at a rough estimate, had a surface area around 12 times larger than that of my plasma TV at home (a TV with which I have sometimes tried to simulate the theatre experience). For selfish reasons I won’t say where this screening took place, but there were only two other people in the room, one of whom was my viewing companion, a huge Apartment fan. We had both seen the film recently enough for it to be fresh in our memories, so we murmured through parts of the screening, exchanging nerd-trivia and observations, imagining how much more subversive it would have been if James Stewart had played the manipulative corporate heel Sheldrake - and even remarking on the film’s tangential similarities with Hitchcock’s Psycho (naturally I was the prime culprit in this), which released in the same week in 1960.
(Have trouble linking the two movies? Well, think about illicit sexual liaisons conducted hurriedly in rented rooms; think social outsiders living lonely lives in stripped-down settings, photographed in sombre shades of grey. Think of one melancholy working-class girl, played by a film’s ostensible star, who dies unexpectedly in a shower before the halfway point, and another who almost dies in another bathroom after swallowing half a bottle of sleeping pills halfway through her film. Think of earnest, likable young men performing clean-up operations after crimes 
have been committed. And both films – it just occurred to me as I was writing this – have discomfiting scenes where a bullying man in a position of power casually, callously hands over money to an unhappy young woman, an act that precipitates a life-changing decision for her. The scene in The Apartment where Sheldrake, having strung the vulnerable Fran along for weeks, gives her a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present, is one of the cruelest moments I can think of in a fiction film, and the look on Shirley MacLaine’s face is devastating.)
Anyway, the Apartment screening was a reminder that for all my mad love of old Hollywood, I have only rarely watched movies of that vintage on a big screen (what sort of screen can be considered “big” is of course a relative matter these days) and that one is at a vast remove from what the original viewers of these films saw and felt. It also reminded me of observations in two essays about cinema. First, one of my favourite film writers David Thomson***, in an entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Film:
Intensive film study and film scholarship now work by way of the TV screen. It is seldom possible to review the great movies “at the movies”. Suppose I wanted to see Sunrise, Duel in the Sun, and Ugetsu Monogatari on big screens – where would I go? […] Yet I might be able to summon them up on video, where I could see them as often as I liked, with “pause” to access the full beauty of the frame. Everyone is doing it, no matter that the colour is forlorn (the United States has the worst TV colour in the world), the image format is different, the sound is tinny…and the passion is not there. That passion is made by the dark, the brightness, the very large screen, the company of strangers, and the knowledge that you cannot stop the process, or even get out. That is being at the movies, and it is becoming a museum experience. How can one tell one’s students or one’s children what it was like seeing Vertigo (in empty theatres – for no one liked it once) or The Red Shoes from the dark. We watch television with the lights on! Out of some bizarre superstition that it protects our eyes. How so tender for one part of us, and so indifferent to the rest?
And here is Pauline Kael, from a 1967 essay titled “Movies on Television”:
Not all old movies look bad now, of course; the good ones are still good—surprisingly good, often, if you consider how much of the detail is lost on television. Not only the size but the shape of the image is changed, and, indeed, almost all the specifically visual elements are so distorted as to be all but completely destroyed. On television, a cattle drive or a cavalry charge or a chase – the climax of so many a big movie – loses the dimensions of space and distance that made it exciting, that sometimes made it great. The structural elements – the rhythm, the buildup, the suspense – are also partly destroyed by deletions and commercial breaks and the interruptions incidental to home viewing […] Reduced to the dead grays of a cheap television print, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons – an uneven work that is nevertheless a triumphant conquest of the movie medium – is as lifelessly dull as a newspaper Wirephoto of a great painting.
Reading these quotes, it might seem that both essays are prim condemnations of how things are “now” compared to how they were “then”, but that isn't the case - they are both pragmatic acknowledgements that things change, and that our assumptions, attitudes and ways of looking shift with them. Thomson in particular, being from a generation after Kael and having seen many further variations (including the phenomenon of people watching films on YouTube, or even on smart-phones!), has often written insightfully – in such books as Have You Seen...? and The Whole Equation – about the complex ways in which we engage with our art and entertainment in the contemporary world.
Meanwhile, in another astute piece, “Movies too personal to share with an audience”, Jim Emerson provides an important counterpoint to the idea that film-watching is best as a communal experience. I myself have had a terrible time watching films such as Vertigo with large, mostly indifferent audiences, and I know that I wouldn’t have enjoyed The Apartment so much the other night – notwithstanding the screen size and the print quality – if the room had contained people who had just happened to stumble in and didn’t care about the film. Perhaps what we thin-skinned and over-sensitive movie buffs really need is permanent access to a private screening room along with programming software that tells us exactly who we should be watching a particular film with.
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*** More on Thomson, and especially his book The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, in another post soon. And here are some other connect-the-dots posts: Mean Streets and Contempt, Ozu's Good Morning, Altman's 3 Women, and Peeping Tom and Psycho
It took some hours of procrastination and a cup of strong coffee, and my finger may have trembled as I clicked the “play” button, but I did finally watch the trailer of the forthcoming film Hitchcock, about Alfred Hitchcock and the making of Psycho in 1959-60. It was nearly as unsettling as I had imagined – and not just because Psycho is enormously dear to my heart, or because one likes to think that the world in which that film was made was necessarily a black-and-white world, or because I admire Stephen Rebello’s book on which this new movie is (very loosely) based. On the tiny YouTube screen was one of the most honourable actors of the past few decades – not hamming it up exactly, but imitating away.
A two-minute trailer is limited evidence to base a judgement on, but Anthony Hopkins’s performance in the Hitchcock role looked like mimickry to my eyes, as opposed to the considered acting that involves building a character from the inside out. The attempt to make his features approximate Hitchcock’s – such as the quadruple chin and the studied downward curve of the lips – made me cringe a little (it isn't as blatant as the use of prosthetics to make Joseph Gordon-Levitt resemble Bruce Willis in Looper, but still). In any case there is a touch of contrivance to the casting of Hopkins (such a well-known actor, now almost as closely associated with the playing of diverse real-life figures as Charles Laughton was in an earlier time) in this part - one wonders if the motive was the creation of a lucrative casting coup with the equally respected Helen Mirren, who plays Hitchcock’s wife Alma Reville.
In 1992, Robert Downey Jr played the title role in the biopic Chaplin, but - though Charles Chaplin was among the few movie personalities who was even more recognisable worldwide than Alfred Hitchcock - there was an essential difference in effect. The Chaplin on view in most of that film was not the iconic Little Tramp but the real-life person, whom very few viewers had any direct association with. Which meant Downey Jr had some space to work out his own interpretation of the character, to not be shoehorned into familiar tics and mannerisms. Hitchcock, on the other hand, always appeared in trailers, interviews and TV introductions as “himself” – he performed the same droll gestures (standing about stiffly, saying outrageous things in the most deadpan manner) in the same starched three-piece suit that was presumably attached to his body when he emerged into the world, much like Karna’s kavacha. And this is the figure that Hopkins has been called upon to play. Saddled with such a character – someone who is a vital part of our recent pop-cultural mythology – even a fine actor can be reduced to a pawn.** (The real Hitchcock, who believed actors should be treated like cattle or chess pieces, may have enjoyed this.)
Watching Hopkins as Hitch – or Meryl Streep accumulating a bundle of carefully observed tics and presenting them as “performance” in her imitation of another imposing real-life figure, Margaret Thatcher – one sees signs of things to come. Film history is at a point where we can expect an increasing number of biopics about people who lived recently enough that we have video evidence – and strong memories – of their real selves. And
if these biopics are to be made as box office-friendly as
possible, one can expect broad simplifications in scripts and shortcuts
in portrayals.
A related component is that with important anniversaries looming around every corner, there will soon be no getting away from films about our cinematic past. Consider just the very near future: in 2014 the movie world will celebrate 75 years of Gone with the Wind (75 years, in fact, of that cinematic annus mirabilis 1939), and personally I’d be astonished if a high-profile project about the making of GWTW has not already germinated in the mind of a screenwriter or producer. (What back-stories! What drama! Who could resist the possibilities of the real-life scene – as compelling as anything in Gone with the Wind itself – where David Selznick first laid eyes on his Scarlett, Vivien Leigh, her face lit up by the flames from the burning Atlanta set, at a point when production was already well underway?)
Two years after that, Citizen Kane will celebrate its diamond jubilee year, and so it will go. Critics often complain about excessive meta-referencing in contemporary cinema – that Quentin Tarantino, for instance, only makes films that are about his film-love – but it is entirely possible that 30 or 40 years from now we will have a film about Tarantino’s life: in other words, a movie about a boy who watched lots and lots of movies and then made movies that paid tribute to those movies. By that time mainstream filmmaking may be closed into a self-referential loop, with little room for anything external.
Yes, of course I’m being cheerfully alarmist. And yes, trailers can be misleading – it’s possible that the complete Hitchcock will reveal a more shaded performance with Hopkins reaching for a poetic truth about the director’s personality, as opposed to caricature. But given that this is a commercial project meant for relatively painless consumption, I doubt it. I will watch the film, but with my fingers splayed over my face and violins shrieking in my head, much the same way that unprepared audiences first experienced Psycho in 1960. In the age of meta-cinema, it is appropriate that a film about the making of a scary film should be... scary.
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** No
wonder Ranbir Kapoor said in an interview that he wanted to wait a while before taking on the daunting role of Kishore Kumar in a film. Who can blame him?
[Did a version of this for my Business Standard film column]
[Here is the full text of the essay I wrote for The Popcorn Essayists: What Movies do to Writers, about my horror-movie love. It’s been long enough since the anthology came out, so I thought I’d put it up here. While I’m at it, a reminder that the book contains excellent pieces by many fine writers. More information here]
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It’s June 1988, a summer vacation in London, and I’m sitting in a darkened room with my cousins and their friends, watching a horror film called House. Ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds huddle together, murmuring, waiting for the scary scenes. One of the adults partying in the living room outside sticks his head in, rolls his eyes dramatically and makes a deep howling sound, but we aren’t impressed; we saw Silver Bullet a few days ago, we know what a real werewolf sounds like.
So one of us gets up and bangs the door shut again, and now the only light comes from the TV set, which isn’t much to speak of, because it’s a dimly lit scene. We hold our breath as someone on the screen (the hero? Is there a “hero” in this film? Or am I thinking in the language of Hindi movies?) slowly walks up to a closet, puts his hand on the knob and turns it. Hanging in the air for a few seconds is the question: will a slimy monster leap out at him (and at us)? Or will he heave a sigh of relief (our cue to do the same), then turn around and find the fiend behind him (in which case our screams will be even louder than if the creature had been inside the closet in the first place)? Or will the jolts be postponed to the next scene? There’s a limited set of options and we know them all, but that doesn’t make the process any less frightening.
Afterwards we chase each other around the lawns, taking turns to play the film’s chief predator Ben (“Big Ben”?), a walking skeleton still grotesquely dressed in the soldier’s uniform in which he died. We were playing in the same garden a few hours earlier, but something has changed since then. The late-evening darkness is stiller than it should be, even though lights are on and the adults are just a few paces away. The rustling of the leaves in the trees and bushes seems full of strange meaning. Distant bird sounds carry portents. My senses are heightened, intensified, the world is suddenly an unfamiliar place.
More than twenty years later, as an adult movie buff with more developed and varied tastes, my favourite horror films continue to have this effect on me. Even when the films themselves are much more diverse in subject matter, style and vintage than the simple label “horror movie” could suggest.
The categories include (among many others) silent films like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (a movie about a madman’s nightmare that, thanks to its brazenly Expressionist set design, looks every bit like a madman’s nightmare) and Nosferatu, the creepiest vampire film I’ve seen. Psychological 
horror, as in Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, about a painter visited by phantoms of the mind, and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, in which a young girl left alone in an apartment slowly loses her bearings. Comic-gothic horror (Polanski two years later, with Fearless Vampire Killers, or: Pardon Me, but Your Teeth are in my Neck, about an Albert Einstein look-alike and his bumbling assistant exploring castles in Transylvania) and portmanteau ghost stories, like Masaki Kobayashi’s dazzlingly shot Kwaidan. And yes, gore films too – properly speaking, a different genre, but one that occasionally intersects with the sort of horror I love.
Not all these films achieve their ends in the same way. Many of them don’t have a single jump-out-of-your-seat scene but they have something more insidious, something that crawls back into my mind at the most unexpected times, long after I thought I’d forgotten all about the film.
It has been a long relationship. A few months after that House viewing, back in Delhi, horror films became my major entry point into the world of non-Hindi cinema. Thrills aside, there was something very accessible about them: the accents in American movies were sometimes hard to follow, but horror didn’t depend on dialogue for its effect. When Freddy Krueger leapt out at witless teens in a dark alley, chased them down Elm Street and slashed them to witless teenie-weenies, the visuals – and my senses responding to them – were all that mattered. The camera tracking in on the sinisterly glowing pumpkin (accompanied by the brilliant minimalist music score) during the opening credits of Halloween spoke more forcefully than pages of writing. This was film at its most egalitarian.
And so I rented video cassettes of the Evil Dead and Friday the 13th films, and a low-budget series called Demons, as well as slightly more sophisticated “mainstream” movies (though I knew nothing about those distinctions at the time) like Gremlins and Poltergeist. An education began.
Around the age of 13 my attitude to movie-watching began to change in subtle ways, and this was in large part due to a film that is considered a seminal horror movie, but which I’ve never really been able to think of in those terms. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho encouraged me to take cinema seriously, as an art form with its own methods and a visual language distinct from the words being spoken by the characters on the screen. It led me directly to movie literature and some of its scenes became personal reference points for my subsequent movie-watching (as you’ll see later in this essay). But I was never scared by Psycho in an immediate way. Maybe this was because I already knew all the major plot twists – I had heard jokes about “mummification” from my own mummy, and a friend in the school bus had given me a shot-by-shot description of the final revelation of the embalmed corpse of “Mrs Bates” in the fruit cellar. (Sorry if I’ve spoilt the film for you, but if you’re old enough to be reading this you ought to know these things already; it’s primary-level stuff.) Besides, my first viewing of it was on videocassette, in a well-lit room.
Or maybe it was that I was too moved by the film, that I found a deep sadness in it – “we scratch and claw, but only at the air, only at each other,” says Norman Bates, “and for all of it, we never budge an inch” – and surely a movie that put sad thoughts in your head had to be “more” than a “mere” horror film?
Today, of course, I know better.
Anyway, in the early 1990s the most important book in my life was a fat video guide that had nearly 20,000 capsule “reviews” packed together. The films were classified by a rating system ranging from four stars to one star, with a special “BOMB” rating reserved for the bottom-of-the-barrel movies. (The “review” for a long-forgotten Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton film called Boom was the single word “Thud”. Next to the film’s title was BOMB, in all-caps. Criticism at its tersest, and a good counterpoint to the lengthy film essays I was reading around the same time.)
I carried the guide around in a polythene bag each time I went to the neighborhood video library – in a modest, five-shop community centre in south Delhi’s Saket that would, years later, become the location of India’s first multiplex theatre – and it made many important decisions for me. With one exception. Horror movies were never allowed to fall under its hegemony.
The video-parlour bhaiya looks amused when I extract the thick book from my bag with my free hand – I’m holding open his catalogue with the other – and leaf through it.
“Iss mein duniya ki sabhi movies ka naam hai?” (“Does this have the names of all the movies in the world?”) he asks.
“Haan,” I say without looking up, not wanting to get into a prolonged conversation.
“Hum isska photo-copy karaa sakte hain?” (“Can I get it photo-copied?”) he asks, but I’m not listening. The film I’m looking for is a Hollywood classic from the 1930s. The cassette cover carelessly fitted into the catalogue shows Cary Grant and Irene Dunne – two of my favourite actors – and I tell myself that I’ll take the film if the guide gives it three or more stars. But then something else in the catalogue catches my eye.
Demons 3.
Which has the dreaded “BOMB” next to it in the guide.
The Grant-Dunne film won the best director Oscar for 1937, is rated three-and-a-half stars and considered one of the classic screwball comedies – a genre that I’ve just started to relish.
Irrelevant. Demons 3 it is.
Even at that impressionable age, eager as I was to listen to what the Critics had to say, I had accepted that horror films spoke to me in ways that no film scholar could understand.
If I had to name a single quality that marks my favourite horror films, I’d point to a near-ritualistic intensity, a sense of belonging to a very different world with its own, special set of rules: a good horror film, even one that’s located in a familiar setting and has no obviously supernatural elements, feels weirder and more self-contained (to me, at least) than a science-fiction/fantasy film that really IS set on, say, Middle-Earth or Narnia or the moons of Jupiter. My child-self experienced this in the garden after that House viewing.
(“So you’re saying House was a good horror film?”, you ask, backing away slowly [and thinking to yourself, ‘What’s HE doing editing an anthology of film essays?’] Well, yes, it was. For me. At that age. If I saw it today I’d probably laugh, or worse, yawn. But how is that relevant to anything? By the way, more than 20 years after that evening in London, I turned to the Internet to confirm that bony old Ben really did exist – within the world of the film, that is; that he wasn’t just a manufactured childhood memory. I was thrilled when I discovered a photo of him on a website, looking more or less as I remembered him.)
Opening scenes are always crucial to a film’s success in pulling me into its world. Consider the first five minutes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), where an everyday setting gradually turns into something lush and fantastical. As the credits roll, a solemn voiceover tells us that Suzy Banyon, a young American, has come to Germany to join a famous dance academy. We see Suzy walking to the airport exit, and a sense of menace is created by the most ordinary elements: the neon lights in the Departure terminal, a brief glimpse of a woman dressed in red in the distance, the sudden opening of the automatic doors through which Suzy walks (and our simultaneous realisation that a storm is raging outside the airport’s sterile, orderly interiors), the howling of the wind, the water flowing into a nearby drain, the initial obtuseness of the cab driver who takes her to her destination.
Contributing immeasurably to the mood of this sequence is the pounding, punk-rock soundtrack by the band Goblin, with whispers of “witch!” regularly punctuating the score. Suspiria is not especially discreet about the mysteries of its plot: you don’t have to be a student of the genre to figure out that Suzy will find a modern-day witches’ coven at the dance school.
Actually, for the most part this isn’t a subtle film. It’s very arresting visually, and it contains at least three grisly murders filmed with such imagination that I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the screen (isn’t this the opposite of what a horror film is supposed to do?). But unusually for a movie with a lot of gore and blood, it also has graceful scenes that only hint at something unknowable. The barest suggestion of witchcraft, for instance, in the shot where a chambermaid momentarily dazzles Suzy with the light reflected from the silverware she’s cleaning. Or the prolonged nighttime scene in a deserted public square where a blind piano teacher and his seeing-dog sense something evil around them but don’t know exactly what it is (the viewer is given the privilege of a shot of shadows flitting across a building facade – witches? On broomsticks? Or just a flock of birds or bats?). These are the setpieces that stayed with me for weeks after I saw the film. In contrast, when the supernatural is explicitly presented at the end, it’s anti-climactic.
Suspiria would be unimaginable without its lurid colours, but Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (“The Devil Woman”) (1964) is shot in what is usually described as “stark” black and white. Set in medieval Japan, this film opens with an overhead view of a windy grassland, the reeds – more than six feet high – swaying in the breeze. The camera moves closer to show us a large pit in the ground and the next shot is from deep inside this hole, looking up at the sky. The image reminds me of another iconic Japanese horror film, the much more recent Ringu – and its American remake The Ring – apart from evoking the passage in Haruki Murakami’s immense novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where a man shuts the world out by sitting at the bottom of a well.
But now Onibaba’s opening credits appear on the screen – the Japanese script is menacingly distorted at the edges – accompanied by a soundtrack that’s as mood-setting as the Suspiria score, but more drum-based and minimal, and much more disquieting. In the film’s (almost wordless) first five minutes we learn that the pit is a secret maintained by a middle-aged woman and her daughter-in-law, who live in squalid conditions in this large marshland. Struggling to make ends meet (the son/husband is away fighting in an army), they murder wounded Samurai who stagger into the grassland looking for shelter, and then sell the armour in exchange for meagre rations of food. Meanwhile they also get by with killing rats, dogs and whatever other creatures they can get their hands on, and generally live like wild animals themselves.
So claustrophobic and stifling is the mise-en-scene of Onibaba that one easily forgets it’s set in the same country and roughly the same period as Akira Kurosawa’s classic Samurai movies. Superficial details of time and place scarcely matter anyway; as in so many great horror films, the setting is really the human soul, and it’s always night-time. Atmosphere is created through hand-held camerawork, eerie aural effects (such as bird sounds in the scenes where the young woman, her face rapturous, races through the grass to meet a lover), and of course the setting itself. But for me the unforgettable image is the malevolent face of the old woman, a streak of white hair in her head making her look like a deranged simulacra of the Indira Gandhi photos I remember from the newspapers of my childhood. As the story progresses, my rational mind tells me that she’s a victim – terrified by the thought that her daughter-in-law will leave her to scavenge for herself – but when her piercing eyes fill the screen, the rational mind goes AWOL.
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In a lovely essay titled “Pictures and Secrets”, Ptolemy Tompkins recalled his father’s advice to him when movie monsters gave him nightmares. “Take them out of the context of the film,” said Peter Tompkins (co-author of The Secret Life of Plants), “and place them somewhere else. Control their actions with your own mind.”
At times I try similar mental games with my personal demons. So Onibaba’s “devil woman” reluctantly leaves her grassland at my bidding. I pull Gabbar Singh (bogeymen can come from far outside the genre) out of the sunbaked landscape that was the dacoits’ hideout in Sholay, then lure the rat-like Nosferatu out of his mansion and seat them all at a tea-party together, with a few zombies from George Romero’s films thrown in as foot-servants, and invitations sent out to Michael Myers from Halloween and Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The background music is the sound of Darth Vader’s raspy breathing (I can only hear, not see, him – there was nothing scary about the cheesy black suit!). Unfortunately my mind refuses to take this scenario much further; I’m not sure this lot would have much to say to each other.
However, the films I love have no trouble conversing with each other, even when they are separated by decades, different styles and languages, and an unbridgeable divide in quality. One scene frequently recalls another, setting off a chain of connections in my mind.
As an example, take a randomly selected scene from a film that isn’t strictly a horror movie but which made me shrink into the rickety seat at Delhi’s Shakuntalam Theatre when I first saw it: Fritz Lang’s M, about the hunt for a child-killer in the streets of Berlin.
Early in the film we see a pillar with a notice announcing a reward for the killer’s capture. A little girl bounces her ball against this pillar. At this point the scene is clumsy – there’s no spontaneity in the ball-bouncing, you can tell that the girl is carefully doing what the director is telling her to – but then the shadow of a man comes into the frame from the right. “What a pretty ball!” he says in a childlike voice. Shortly afterwards there’s an aerial view of him buying the girl a balloon while she titters excitedly. Cross-cut to the girl’s mother, waiting for her child to return from school, slowly coming to realise that something is wrong. The sequence ends with a pair of poetic images: the ball slowly rolling out of a hedge, into a patch of grass; the untethered balloon brushing an electric pole and floating away.
So here are three broad constituents of the scene: the girl; the man who approaches her; the ball and the balloon at the close. Whenever I think about any of these elements, other scenes from other films swarm into my head, one scene invoking another, and another, and another, building a monstrous skein of references.
The ball and the balloon adrift. A visual cue for the viewer: something terrible has happened to the little girl, we realise. But what did the man do to her, exactly? A 1930s film couldn’t plainly tell us, but in a way that makes it scarier.
“My son was torn to pieces!” screams the father in the 1980s slasher film Silver Bullet, more than fifty years after M (or five years earlier, in terms of my viewing chronology). In the 
scene before this, we see a young boy flying a kite late in the evening, in a deserted spot. He hears strange sounds, looks around him nervously; we already know that a ravenous werewolf is on the loose, and we half-cover our eyes. In the next shot we see a policeman carrying the kite, torn, dripping blood. And then the father’s cry.
In most ways that matter, there’s nothing to link M and Silver Bullet (well, except for the important detail that they are both made up of strips of film). Yet, for me, the dual image of the rolling ball and the unrestrained balloon are forever linked to the image of the tethered kite, and to the idea of innocence wantonly destroyed.
The man. The nervous-looking character actor Peter Lorre played the unhinged killer, the shadow on the wall, in M. Ten years later, the same Lorre – a little balder now – played the most scared character in one of my favourite dark comedies. There’s a genuinely creepy scene in Arsenic and Old Lace (assuming you watch it in the original black-and-white, not the hideous colorisation) where a runaway criminal played by Raymond Massey – made up to resemble Boris Karloff as the stitched-together Frankenstein monster – and his doctor, played by Lorre, descend the stairs to a basement. The bodies of 12 men lie buried here, which in itself is not as gross as it sounds: Arsenic and Old Lace is about a pair of sweet, well-intentioned women who do away with lonely old men to put them out of their misery. But the scene with Massey and Lorre going down the stairs, the shadows falling across their faces, the light flickering beyond the closed door they are approaching, gives me the shivers.
The girl: She’s a distant cousin of another young girl playing with a ball, in Federico Fellini’s short film “Toby Dammit”, about a depressive British actor visiting Rome for a movie shoot.
At a press conference, Toby Dammit is asked a string of banal questions. He answers them half-heartedly, crabbily; he looks like he badly needs to sleep. He turns around, seems to see images and people from his past. Dream and reality are blurred – it’s the sort of thing Fellini does so well.
A reporter asks, “Do you believe in God?” “No,” replies the actor.
“And in the Devil?”
Now, for the first time, Toby Dammit looks interested. He leans forward. “Yes. In the Devil, yes,” he says.
“How exciting,” exclaims the questioner, delighted to have hit home, “Have you seen Him? What does He look like? A black cat, a goat, a bat?”
“Oh no,” says Toby, a faraway look coming into his eyes, “To me the Devil is cheerful, agile…”
Cut to an insert of a girl, her face occupying the left half of the screen, grinning diabolically at the camera
“He looks like a little girl.”
Why the actor is haunted by this image I’ll leave you to discover for yourself. But while the little girl in M was a cherubic victim, the girl in “Toby Dammit” is Beelzebub. A role reversal, and a reminder that in horror there are no rules, no character types. Anyone can be monster or prey, or both at once.
But already the connections are overflowing, like the swollen river of blood coming through the slowly opening door in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. As I finished writing the last paragraph, I remembered that the British actor Terence Stamp played the lethargic Toby Dammit, and that my first ever viewing of Stamp was as the evil General Zod in Superman II. It was a supremely entertaining movie, with the inbuilt assurance (as in any Superman film) that things would turn out all right in the end, but it contained one scene that gave me many sleepless nights as a child: Zod and his two minions land on the moon, slay a human astronaut by tearing off his oxygen mask and then kick his dying body gleefully into the distance.
My chief memory of the film today is the utter helplessness of that poor moonstruck astronaut in the face of this assault by Godlike beings. It was so unfair, so far from a fight between equals. Even today, the scene makes it impossible for me to think of Superman 2 as a feel-good movie.
Other connections aren’t so obvious, or maybe they are obvious only to me. I mentioned Psycho being a reference point for much of my other movie-watching. Well, Suzy Banyon’s journey in the taxi at the beginning of Suspiria always reminds me of Marion Crane’s car drive in Hitchcock’s film – a voyage to the netherworld, with lightning heralding the way. It ends with a similar image too: a menacing building (the Bates Motel in Psycho, the dance school here) coming into clear focus through the rain-soaked night. Welcome to Hades.
“Take off your mask,” whispers Onibaba’s old woman to the young Samurai who has just told her that he has a beautiful face underneath the demon mask he is wearing, “I’ve never seen anything really beautiful in my whole life.” The words open a window to a lifetime of struggle and squalor, reminding us of the dire straits of the two women who need to hawk the armour of dead warriors to get food. But it also makes me think about the unhappy world that lies just beneath the surface horrors of Psycho: a world where the now-psychotic Mrs Bates was once a young widow, raising a little boy all by herself, vulnerable to the charms of a smooth-talking man who was after her money; a world where being left alone is the biggest fear of all.
But Onibaba’s Samurai mask is beautiful too, in its own way. It’s just as impassively beautiful as the smooth white face-cover worn by the young girl Christine in Georges Franju’s indescribably lyrical Eyes Without a Face. In this cult classic, the monster not only has a human face, he’s a loving father – a doctor who surgically removes the skin off the faces of kidnapped young women in increasingly desperate attempts to cure his disfigured daughter. Meanwhile she wanders the lawns of the mansion alone, wearing her white mask, communing with the birds and the captive dogs her father has been conducting grisly experiments on.
****
Often, when I’m driving alone late at night, I catch myself humming a certain tune without realising it. Then I remember: it’s Maurice Jarre’s spooky score from the opening scene of Eyes Without a Face, in which a middle-aged woman drives a car through deserted streets, occasionally stopping to glance in the rear-view mirror at a shadowy figure in the back-seat. We don’t yet know that the figure in the back-seat is a dead girl whose body has to be disposed of, but the music, the camerawork, the worried but determined look on the middle-aged woman’s face, combine to tell us that something is very wrong.
Driving, I look into the rear-view mirror, half-expecting to see a body slumped in the back-seat, its face inadequately covered by a large floppy hat, but darkened by a trick of the light.
Other scenes from other horror films have similarly infected my life, so that in certain situations and settings I find myself playing out those very moments. While sightseeing, if I see 
something I want to photograph and reach for the camera around my shoulder, my own gesture makes me think of the split-second shot in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom where Mark Lewis – a disturbed young man whose camera is almost an extension of his personality – reflexively reaches for his shoulder, where the instrument would normally be, the one time his lady friend persuades him to leave home without it.
Or when I’m walking through a deserted car park on a Sunday afternoon, I think of the agoraphobia-inducing scene in Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis in a desolate neighborhood on a sunny day (who said a slasher movie’s scariest scenes had to be shot in the dark!), dozens of cars parked around her but not a human being in view – and the seemingly omniscient killer Mike Myers presumably watching her from somewhere. It’s a suburban setting – the old rational mind tells me there must be people around, possibly in their houses, looking out from behind the curtains or lolling on rocking-chairs on their porches – but the effect of the scene is just as vivid and intense as if this were Little Red Riding Hood walking alone through the jungle at dusk.
If I’m in a large hall with many exits and corridors, and just a few people moving in and out of the “frame” of my vision, I find myself in the glorious tracking shot from the museum scene in Brian DePalma’s Dressed to Kill, where a middle-aged housewife alternates between being quarry and pursuer to a handsome stranger. But then, if a flash of light – a reflection from someone’s glasses or cellphone – catches my eye, the scene quickly changes and I’m in a late scene from the same film, where another woman is momentarily blinded by the light glancing off the razor blade that a killer holds in his hand. Or there’s the chambermaid from Suspiria again, flashing her silverware at me.
Thinking about it, I realise that hardly any of my favourite scary scenes would be improved by better technology. No other genre can make such a virtue of being shot on a shoestring budget. Once in a while, even incompetence can be a useful thing. A jerky camera or careless editing can be unsettling in a certain context, and how many cases there have been – especially in zombie and vampire films – of mediocre actors unwittingly making a film more effective because their reactions seem so unnatural, so removed from regular human behaviour!
Which is not to say that good, low-budget horror films are “accidents”. Far from it. But finesse and money can spoil their effect. It’s no coincidence that the silent film was particularly well suited to this genre – horror and fantasy films from that era still hold up so well because their creakiness gives them an unmatched visceral effect. Watch the hero slaying an obviously papier-mache dragon in Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Siegfried, a smoky liquid flowing out of the creature’s ruptured sides, and you’ll know what I mean.
Improved technology can dampen the horror-movie experience in other ways, I realise, as I watch a 70-minute “Making Of” feature on my DVD of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Generally speaking, DVD Extras, with their audio commentaries and interview packages and outtakes, have been a boon to me as a movie buff. But the information overload can be deflating when it comes to films that I’d prefer to think of as belonging to a special, self-contained universe.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre exemplifies that sort of movie, and it would be so nice to be able to think of it as something that was made anonymously – perhaps by a cannibal family as a macabre home video – and then deposited into the mailbox of one of the studios, with a note asking them to distribute it. But here, 30 years later, are the crew members – respectably middle-aged, laughing and joking with each other, relating anecdotes. Director Tobe Hooper tells us he decided on the film’s title when his girlfriend at the time exclaimed, “Yuck, I’d never watch anything called that!” (Decided?! And here I was thinking that everything about that film just fell into place entirely independently of such banalities as human decisions.) One of the scriptwriters (this film needed to be scripted?) relates the story behind the dead armadillo we see as road-kill in the first shot. And here’s the actress Marilyn Burns, whom I’d have preferred to freeze into my memory-bank for all time as the screaming, blood-covered Sally trapped in a house of horrors; now she’s gazing into the camera with grandmotherly indulgence. Even Gunnar Hansen, who played the chainsaw-wielding, retarded monster Leatherface, participates in audio commentary.
And now here’s the Onibaba DVD, with colour footage (!) of the tents where the crew lived communally, cosily together during the month-long shoot. Those grasslands no longer look unfathomably creepy and alive, and the people are dressed in modern clothes, even T-shirts. Between shots, they were probably reading Manga or listening to their Sony transistors! For a fan of the film, that’s a blasphemous thought.
Of course, horror-movie DVD extras can be illuminating (as when Dario Argento relates a childhood memory of having to walk down a long dark corridor to his room every night, each half-open door on either side seeming to contain a threat) and I still watch them with enthusiasm. But when I’m alone at home and it’s dark outside and I see shadows and hear little noises (and it’s probably my years of experience in watching horror films that has made me conscious of all these things), at such times I return to the pristineness of those childhood days, the days before I started reading about cinema and discovering back-stories: sitting in a room with cringing children, watching a film that I knew nothing about beyond the images flickering the screen – images that were more real than most things in the real world.
****
“Everything means something, I guess,” says a character in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Could he be talking about the tendency of film buffs to read layers and layers of meaning into a movie that means a great deal to them (especially when the film isn’t widely deemed to be worthy of analysis)? Could this be the hidden message: if a film says something to you, touches something deep within you, listen to it, open yourself to it; don’t give in to the hectoring of those who dismiss it as “cheap entertainment”, even if you’re in a minority of one.
After all, horror film are especially vulnerable to genre-snobbery, with viewers routinely putting cerebra before instinct when it comes to assessing their worth. There’s the common phenomenon of people being genuinely affected by a horror film while they are actually watching it, but then emerging from the hall and laughingly dismissing it as nothing more than escapism. I suspect that my love for these movies provided me with a conduit for a basic open-mindedness towards all kinds of films: once you’ve given your heart to a genre that many people are snobbish about, it becomes difficult to be too judgmental about others’ tastes.
There’s the popular story from the earliest days of moving pictures, about the unprepared viewers of a Lumiere Brothers short film who ran out of a Paris theatre when confronted with the image of a train seemingly coming towards them. This is probably apocryphal, but there are other similar, less dramatic stories from that period, and even common sense tells us that the first movie viewers must have experienced quite a few shocks to the system. Today, even the most casual viewers unconsciously process such aspects of film grammar as cross-cutting between unrelated scenes. But in the earliest days, even basic cutting from one image to another (let alone rapid-fire splicing) must have felt otherworldly. To some, it must have been frightening, even demoniac. (Was that puffing train the first movie monster?) Only gradually must viewers have become inured to the violence of the cuts, learnt to stop being scared and love the new medium.
Some of us, though, never stopped wanting to be scared, even as our love for the movies deepened and grew.