Death in Venice: Metapoetic Horror in the Seventies (iv)

Given the rapid commercial and aesthetic rise of horror in the 1970s, it is not surprising that authors with more self-aware strategies found enough inspiring moments in this generic context not only to shape their own mise-en-scène more precisely, but also to realize their best works in the field of horror and terror. In their examples, horror turned out to be a privileged genre for metapoetic explorations that were strongly integrated into the narrative setting.

U Walkabout (1971), the previous film Nicolasa Roega, the resolution of the plot rests on the heroine's inability to decipher and accept the message sent to her by the Aboriginal man's dance, in a masterpiece Don't Look Now (Don't Look Now, 1973), the plot essentially rests on a persistent series of failures by John (Donald Sutherland) to salutarily read the signs around him, to place the visions he perceives in the appropriate context, which is why the film grows into one of the most important genre achievements in the seventies: horror is a hermeneutic that dramatizes the process in which the intrusion of the Real, for one reason or another, is not can symbolically remove.

With a special organization of mise-en-scène in which the 'clarity' of the visual representation is accompanied by an interpretative deficit (and precisely in Venice, a topos where death is present, both through the power of literary references and through architecture that inevitably sinks into decadence and ruin, in advance phenomenologically imprinted), Roeg masterfully treats this fateful constellation in an allegorical key: a 'letter' sent from beyond the grave seeks its addressee. (The famous sequence in Don't Look Now in which, in a parallel montage, scenes of lovemaking are crossed with the post-coital 'routine', it marks a regenerative respite before the story gains fatalistic acceleration.) Of course, the moment when the recipient finally recognizes that the message was intended as a warning only to him all along is the moment of death: only the pre-mortal 'sublimation' of the previous episodes ultimately provides a 'coherent' narrative where all the segments are finally ordered as an unstoppable sequence of events.

Don't Look Now is a melancholic and metapoetic study of predestination, all the more effective because the very ending - in which John's precognition finally gains its true spatial and temporal position in the narrative revelation of the outlined plan - possesses an ambivalent satisfaction. Don't Look Now is, therefore, a beautifully atmospheric horror whose rhetorical power increases with the passage of time, even though it was made just before a violent change in the genre paradigm: compared to, say, The Exorcist i The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the film possesses Jamesian bizarre sophistication and moribund baroqueness.

Steven Spielberg has also used horror for its superior expertise. Unlike other grandiose horror creations in which the basis for fear is found in the creations of so-called mother nature herself, The Birds (1963), where they Hitchcock monsters - at least in a certain dimension - allegorical exponents of a malignant cosmic constellation, in Jaws Spielberg took the easy way out, opting for a simpler approach with excellent visual results: after all, his monster is terrifying enough in and of itself - the great white shark, the ultimate predator.

With such a 'head start', the director ingeniously crafted his first enormous blockbuster and best film as an incredibly penetrating, masterfully timed shock machine. Here Spielberg has made the most of his own technique to produce a brilliantly orchestrated suspense that is linked to an economy - the director's shot is always precisely informative, or in special cases, precisely disinformative - of the sea monster's presence. In Jaws is primarily about the stylistic induction of tension, and that is why we are talking about a paradigmatic film that is essentially intended for all those interested in the 'pure' visual functioning of the film mechanism.

I Peter weir will find in horror the ideal terrain for promoting the most sophisticated authorial themes. If in The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) ambivalence was the result of the intersection of multiple genres, then it is in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was used as the primary means of introducing the film into authentic horror waters, without any major representation of violence. The film follows what happens when teenage girls from a girls' institute disappear while visiting an Australian natural 'wonder'. The plot surrounding the disappearance will not receive a classic narrative closure, but Weir's suggestions are certainly contained in the style, in the way the mise-en-scène treats the location where the girls disappear.

Set in the dying Victorian era, Picnic at Hanging Rock Thus, he develops sexual associativity by insisting on the phallic potential of the rocks where the disappearance occurred, whose character is constantly threatening and endangering: beautiful view je habitat horror. By logically developing his argument, Weir is able to convincingly present the insight that the loss of virginity is almost equivalent to rape by (phallic) Mother Nature. In this sense, Picnic at Hanging Rock rests on the director's metapoetic ingenuity to combine lyricism and mystery, which resulted in a superb, distinctive horror film of exceptional evocative atmospherics, which at the same time subtly autopaetically builds on the debate surrounding the director's crucial question: is reality really reality, and who ultimately has the right or power to constitute it.

George Romero used the 1970s to expand his own horror repertoire. Given the director's priorities, it's no wonder that Martin atypical vampire film: Romero's revision is not exclusively tied to conventional vampire iconography, in the sense that the title character (John Amplas) does not have the classic characteristics of a bloodsucker (in one scene he even performs a parody when he puts on fake fangs to scare his cousin who is supposed to cure him), but is also aimed at underlining the ambivalence about Martin's status.

What he actually is - a vampire or a psychopathic case, a true incarnation of evil or an alienated teenager who likes to confess his torments on the local radio, a consequence of a family curse or maladjustment - are dilemmas that preoccupy the viewer, but in any case this will not diminish the concreteness of the violence committed, which Romero insists on when he shows Martin's carefully prepared attacks, and when in the end, drawing the wrong conclusion (perhaps the only time in the film!), the relative decides to drive a stake into the heart of the 'nosferatu'. Martin is one of the rare films that managed to painlessly place a vampire story in a contemporary setting and draw fresh conclusions from it.

That the authorial status in a metapoetic perspective can be confirmed even in a low-budget production is confirmed by Abel Ferrara. In his debut, The Driller Killer (The Drill Killer, 1979), the director plays the unsuccessful New York painter Reno in a significant way. Driven by Oedipal guilt and further destabilized by a noisy punk group from the neighborhood, Reno kills bums: the short plot basis already enabled the director to strongly mark the space of urban paranoia and nightmarish existence, which the author would explore more and more thoroughly in the following period. Perhaps the most striking point in The Driller Killer is that neither the priest nor high culture can ennoble and save the main character, and he falls headlong into destructive madness.