Everyone has their fears.
Horror movies are made to play with those fears. They are meant to exploit the fears that
people have and make for a frightening movie going experience. If they are not frightening, they are at
least supposed to pump up your adrenaline and get the viewer exhilarated. If you’re afraid of clowns, movies like
Poltergeist, or the mini-series of It will use those fears to create
scares. If you are afraid of ghosts, you
have movies like the Paranormal Activity series to get you. Then there are the movies that are there to
scare the people who are afraid of animals.
Shakma falls into the category of animal attack horror
movies. The 1990 film is about a group
of medical students locked in a school building while a vicious baboon is on
the loose and killing them. Along with
the students is their professor, played by Roddy McDowall. He’s joined by Christopher Atkins, Ari
Meyers, and Amanda Wyss in the cast.
I’ve written about animal attack movies before. They are basically slasher films that are
dressed up as something else because the animal is the cause of the deaths
instead of a serial killer. At the most
basic level, however, the two subgenres are nearly identical. A group of people end up in a situation where
someone or something is picking them off one by one. I went much more in depth about that aspect
of animal attack movies before, but this time I would like to use Shakma as an
example of how an animal attack movie can be used to play with the audience’s
fears.
If you took a survey of your average movie going audience
and asked about things that they were afraid of, you would get a myriad of
answers. You would hear things from
heights to darkness to death to public speaking. You would also hear some fears of different types
of animals. I’m not sure that too many
people fear baboons, only because most people typically don’t have experience
with baboons. Shakma puts the baboon
fear right into the hearts of the people that don’t have it, and it never lets
up once it begins.
The movie starts by setting up how ferocious a baboon can
be. Then they add that the baboon in
their laboratory is even more ferocious than that, upping the ferocity that the
viewer is about to witness. To the
average viewer who might not be paying attention to every single thing
happening in the movie, they might think that it’s only a normal baboon. This is where the fear sets in.
Shakma is a movie about a baboon attacking people. It was released in 1990. There wasn’t a vast wealth of computer graphics. This means that for a movie of Shakma’s
budget (1.5 million dollars), a real baboon had to be used. When Shakma the baboon appears on screen,
it’s a real baboon. When you see Shakma
running down the hall, jumping off walls, destroying lab equipment, screaming,
and attacking people, it’s a real baboon.
The audience is watching a real baboon doing these things. When computer graphics are used in place of a
real animal, there tends to be a disconnect between the movie and the
audience. The audience doesn’t get that
visceral feeling that they would experience while witnessing the real thing.
Also playing on the fear is the way that the attacks get
more and more violent. The first attack was in an open area. The second attack included acid. Then there was an attack in an elevator with
the doors open, in an elevator with the doors closed, and finally in a bathroom
stall. The first attack was the first
attack, the second was more dangerous, and then the attacks began to occur in
smaller spaces with less chance of escape.
The situations in which the attacks happened became worse and worse,
instilling a deeper fear of the baboon in the audience.
Finally, take the attacks and toss in both the shrieking of
the baboon as well as the physical prowess of the animal. Shakma puts a lot of focus on these two
aspects. The baboon is frightening
because of it. The shrieking can be
heard throughout the silent building in a way that could chill a person to the
bones. The physical ability of the
baboon was shown through the numerous clips of it running, jumping, and
fighting with people. The combination of
these two characteristics helps to highlight just how scary a baboon can be.
The people behind Shakma worked hard to create a fear
through the animal. It was playing on
the human instinct of survival. They
built up the villain, in this case a baboon, to be of a nearly unstoppable
strength and dangerousness. The movie
shows many instances in which the baboon overpowered the humans and killed
them. It makes the audience fear the
baboon. It has used fear to give the
audience a satisfying horror experience.
Many animal attack movies and horror films in general use
the fear inside the audience to make the experience of seeing the movie ever
more frightening. Shakma used the fear
created through the baboon to build scares within the movie. The movie might not have been entirely
successful at providing the scares due to factors outside of the villain, but
it had enough of a blueprint to make the movie worthy of a watch. It is entertaining like many other horror
movies that try to build scares. Will it
put the fear into you?
There are a couple of notes for this post:
- The original animal attack post was for Two-Headed Shark Attack.
- If you have any suggestions for future Sunday “Bad” Movies, feel free to leave a comment or message me on Twitter.
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