One of the things that makes people into people is our want
or need to categorize things. Good, bad,
dangerous, safe, bright, dark… People like to describe things. It’s almost an instinct. The more specific that people can get about
their categorizations, the better the people can describe the things. As a species, humans want knowledge more than
almost anything. They want to know as
much as possible about things. That’s
why there are so many advancements in technology, medicine, and journalism. Each has a different priority, but all are
important to people in terms of obtaining knowledge.
On a much less important note, this desire to describe and
know about things can be translated to film.
The description part is why there are so many genres, subgenres, and
sub-subgenres. Go to Netflix and see for
yourself. People like to categorize as
much as they possibly can. That is why
Netflix has categories such as “Romantic Independent Movies about Marriage” and
“Action and Adventure Movies Based on Books.”
People like to know exactly what something is and the specific
classifications of movies into these various subgenres help with this craving.
The reason this is being brought up is because of a common theme
that I’ve noticed in some of the horror movies that I’ve watched. The first movies that come to mind when
thinking of this theme are Child’s Play, Jack Frost, and The Gingerdead
Man. Each of the movies features a
serial killer being caught and/or killed, only to return by having their spirit
possess something seemingly harmless. I
don’t mean that they possessed a harmless person and caused the person to go on
a killing spree. I’m talking about
objects that are not alive until being possessed. In the case of Child’s Play, a children’s
doll ends up being inhabited by a serial killer who is out for revenge. In Jack Frost, it is a snowman that becomes a
homicidal killer. The maniacal murderer
in The Gingerdead Man ends up possessing a gingerbread man. In each movie they use their new forms to
continue killing people like they did as humans.
As you can see, this trend has continued through at least
three decades. Child’s Play was released
in the 1980s, Jack Frost in the 1990s, and The Gingerdead Man in the
2000s. For three decades, movie
producers and writers were trying to scare their audiences with objects that
would not normally be frightening. There
are a few reasons that this way of providing horror was popular.
One of the biggest things that can make a horror film work
is for the story to be relatable in some way.
The reason that slasher films have been as popular as they have since
the late 1970s is that the majority of the well-known ones are about teenagers. Since teens are the biggest audience of
slasher flicks, making the main characters into teens will help to sell the
movie. The audience wants to feel the
movie and not simply watch it. The same
goes for the serial killer in harmless objects movies. It’s not that the situation of having a
serial killer possessing the object is relatable. That has not happened in a reality that I
know of. The relatable part of the story
is the objects themselves. These are
things that people know. They are things
that people have. Millions upon millions
of people have eaten gingerbread cookies.
What if the cookies could fight back?
The fear comes from knowing that you have these things. It comes from having interacted with these
things. The fear comes from how common
the things are and that they could be anywhere.
That is not to say that getting the scares to the audience
is always successful. With this type of
movie, it is difficult to make a normally inanimate object seem frightening
without going overboard into ridiculousness.
It’s really easy for a movie to cross that line into absurdity when
dealing with this kind of subject matter.
For example, The Gingerdead Man could be a chilling idea. A gingerbread cookie coming to life and
killing is something that is a scary thought, and with the right execution
could make for great thrills and kills. However,
the character design makes the monster nothing but ugly. It’s not a creepy design. It’s just plain ugly and takes any of the
ominousness out of the character. The
ugly design neuters any of the darkness that would normally be felt in the
movie. In the case of Jack Frost, the
writing is what takes the movie past being scary. Not by too much though. The serial killer snowman shoots icicles out
of his body and rapes a teenager with his carrot. They are in the realm of terrifying ideas,
but a little too farfetched for it to be a truly bone-chilling movie, and
that’s because they are done with a darkly comedic tone to them. Had they taken the comedy out of it, the movie
could have truly struck fear into the hearts of viewers. Instead, it feels more like a disastrous
attempt at horror.
There are still successful uses of this horror concept. Child’s Play, the other movie I brought up
when I first introduced this idea, is an example of how this concept can be
utilized well. Though the idea of the
spirit of a serial killer possessing a doll might be a little bit out there,
the movie succeeds by keeping the rest of it fairly simple. There are no magic attacks, no overly sexual
kills… It’s a doll with whatever object it can hold going after people. It’s as simple as that. The design doesn’t look ugly. The Good Guy doll looks like a doll you would
see children with. The simplicity of the
movie after utilizing the fantastical plot device helps to make it a better
horror movie.
Like any sub-subgenre of films, there are highs and lows
among the movies about serial killer spirits possessing objects. That doesn’t make it any less interesting as
a grouping of films. As much as I may
have ripped on parts of the movies, they are still enjoyable movies. But it takes the right filmmaker to make the
films truly frightening. The same could
be said of horror in general. That’s a
topic for another day.
There are a few notes I will make right now because I’m
going to make notes:
- Here’s the post I did for Jack Frost. I wrote about it in this post, I might as well give you that post.
- The director of The Gingerdead Man was Charles Band. He also directed Evil Bong, wrote Robot Wars, and produced Robot Jox.
- Robin Sydney was in The Gingerdead Man and also Evil Bong.
- I’d like to know about more of the serial killers possessing things movies. If you know others, put them in the comments for me.
- If you have any suggestions for the Sunday “Bad” Movies, you can put them in the comments, or yell them at me on Twitter.
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