“I always ask children about important things. Adults can only think about things they understand. At that level, a movie about sharks leads to a movie about bears. That’s the best adults can do. But children invent things that can’t be explained. They like the strange and mysterious. The power of art isn’t in the explainable. So I asked my daughter, who was ten, for an idea for an interesting story.”—Nobuhito Obayashui, director of the horror movie House
House never explains the mysteries it contains, and thus preserves its mysteriousness; and we believe everything that happens in it.
By contrast, Mario Bava’s beautifully filmed horror movie Black Sunday makes the same mistake that B-movie great Jean Rollin makes in many of his horror films.
The characters in Black Sunday explain the mechanisms behind the forces of evil. The explanations engage the viewer’s powers of reason, and thus lead the viewer to reason correctly that the movie isn’t real. Events that the viewer would have accepted if merely shown, are now criticized as implausible because they’ve been explained with reasons that aren’t convincing.
Now consider Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
The play connects evil with illusion.
Macbeth sees a dagger that isn’t there (“There is no such thing.”)
A sleepwalking Lady Macbeth sees spots of blood on her hands (“Out! Out damned spot!”)
Evil thrives in illusion; even the glory of being king is illusory.
Macbeth chooses illusion and jumps over the next life into hell.
Just before he murders the king, he hears a bell.
The bell interrupts his musings and spurns him to act. The bell separates him from himself; he does the killings as if hypnotized.
While he is killing the king, Lady Macbeth hears an owl, then a man’s cry, then a cricket. Each call calls her away from her fantastical thoughts and reminds her of reality.
Then Macbeth appears with bloodied daggers.
The play contrasts the gruesome reality of murder with the illusions that lead to it.
* Orlando Bartro is the author of Toward Two Words, a comical & surreal novel about a man who loves yet another woman he never knew. Find your copy at Amazon. Hardcover, paperback, and e-book editions available.
https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Two-Words-Orlando-Bartro-ebook/dp/B072MNB4F9
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