Metapoetic character Cat People (Cat People, 1982) is reflected not only in the specific way in which the film 'acknowledges' its own origins, but also in the director's ambiguous procedures that paradoxically 'synthesize' both the genre basis and the author's aggressive artistic intervention. Thus, what was originally supposed to be just a modernized remake of the horror classic of the same name Jacquesa Tourneura, schrader turned it into one of the deepest, most naked and most heartbreaking love films in the history of the seventh art, which, at the same time, presented his then-current relationship with Nastassja Kinski and was an almost abstract view of male-female relationships determined by (and) animalistic passions.
For the author, the horror contextualization in the form of the transformation into a black panther is a powerful metaphor of the Calvinist postulate about fallen human nature, thus radicalizing to the extreme the question of realizing (romantic) love: Schrader uses the story of cat people to offer another complex staging organized around the metaphysical knot of predestination .
If everything is predestined, then what is the status of love, does it have an immanent transcending and/or redeeming power, is it congenial with fate? Schrader is in Cat People intriguing and ambiguous: both Irena (Kinski), who remained in animal form due to her inability to cope with her sexual impulses, and Oliver (John heard) by accepting loss in all its tragedy, they experience that freedom is achievable only if the outlined path is unquestioningly accepted.
In an intriguing coincidence, another emphatically auteur horror that draws its key motivation from a wrenching fascination with a charismatic protagonist, also rests on a 'real' basis, on the real trauma of the dissolution of a relationship in which mimesis and film were mixed. By the very Zuławskijevom recognition, Possession (Possednost, 1981) was written as a reaction to the breakup of his marriage to an actress Margaret Braunek: by the power of metaphorical enlargement, the melodrama of life has necessarily turned into an abstract, but nevertheless devastating horror, and the figure of the woman is 'doubled', where Anna/Helen (Isabelle Adjani) a double reflection of the same fatal symptom.
Hence, Zuławski conceived his film as a violent encounter with the feminine structure, with the physical, mental, psychological and even philosophical consequences of a situation where a woman retains her desire, for which a man does not and cannot possess an explanation, which is embodied in the repulsiveness of the monster, the intruder not only at the level of 'logic', but also of real design: Possession is an anxious staging of the imbalance between male symbolic scripture and female real convulsion.
That is why in Zuławski's masterpiece the filmic, feminine and interpretative forms are psychotically matched for the horrified male gaze in which fetishism is taken to its aporic limit. Obsessive, possessive and possessed mise-en-scène: the monumental scene in the metro is, among other things, a metapoetic staging of burdensome the torments of cinematic representation faced with the female 'essence' which, within the available tropes, is expressed precisely between childbirth and exorcism, conception and abortion (the essential scope hysterical, 'wandering wombs').
Cravenov, however, the final entry into the space of commercial success and mainstream appreciation occurred with the achievement of a clear metapoetic constitution. If in the characters of The Circle in The Last House on the Left and Jupiter in The Hills Have Eyes director proved that he was capable of creating memorable villains, then with the creation of Freddy Krueger (Robert englund) managed to go even further: to create a globally popular horror icon. The director's concept in A Nightmare on Elm Street (The Horror on Elm Street, 1984) consisted in radicalizing the common basis on which horror rests: the transformation of a nightmare - its imagery, excessiveness and 'illogicality' - into reality.
The realistic coordinates of the world are thus usurped and delegitimized, just as the once solid boundary between reality and dream is disrupted by the malignant visions in which Krueger rules: Craven almost ironically records in A Nightmare on Elm Street what happens when dreams come true.
Da Cohenova works possess a wide range of associativity, the most plastic evidence of which can be The Stuff (Foam, 1985), another in a series of the director's films in which an 'eccentric' starting point is used to highlight a very serious social issue. Foam begins to emerge from the ground, which has an extremely pleasant taste, but also creates a feeling of addiction. Soon, the foam is manufactured in factories (it thus develops into slave), the number of consumers is growing rapidly and they are behaving very 'strangely'.
Sound familiar? Consumer hysteria, of course, is one of the fundamental features of the movement of multinational Capital, and Cohen, by reinforcing this context, can engage in the deconstruction of his subject. It's never enough.: the advertisement used for foam also expresses the logic of continuous capitalist progression, the insatiable trajectory of self-expansion, whereby individual identities must disappear - the uniformization of the individual is finally achieved when he is reduced to a consumer, a passive and dependent 'drug addict'. Both comically 'naive' and deadly serious, The Stuff on a metatextual level, it shows where the director's imagination comes from, as well as how Cohen's unusual analytical methodology works.
Day of the Dead (Day of the Dead, 1985) again testified that for Romero splatter rhetoric most effective for painting social tensions and communicative breakdown, for the intellectual reduction of depressing anthropological insights that are also metapoetically mediated. Again in a dystopian context in which the world is ruled by zombies, a small group of survivors, made up of soldiers and scientists, tries to find a way out.
But soon the tensions within the group become irreconcilable, and people begin to clash with each other, despite the external danger: there is nothing in common between them anymore. As in the previous two cases, for Romero, zombies are not only carrying an element of suspense, but also a pointing indicator for the awareness of human deficits.
As they already hinted and Rabid (1976) and The Brood (1979), second side Cronenberg's The horror of the constellation - of a universe that suddenly loses its ontological structure and ontic recognizability in the erasure of existential boundaries, in the 'expansion' of flesh into the space of the spirit - is actually a melodrama, a disturbed gaze that observes the dissolution of love and family ties, which signals terror, but also the existence of a strong emotional component.
The film in which both dimensions of the director's procedure culminate, in which both segments find their most excessive (or sentimental) expression, is The Fly (Fly, 1986): the terrifying process of transformation of Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) into a fly, or rather a fly into a human, since there is a mutual absorption, a painful crossing of different spheres of life and species, is accompanied by the increasingly strong melodramatic positioning of Veronica (Geena Davis) through whose lens the entire spectacle of transformation, disintegration, and biological deformation is ultimately viewed.
Cronenberg's strongest and thus metapoetically regulated connection of form and content in The Fly gives the ideal 'mutant': through body politics the director 'blasphemously' but with surgical precision compresses two bodily genres, and the result is an indistinguishably unified horror-melodrama, equally authentic in its disparate constitutive elements.
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