So, like many Americans I like violent, scary movies (though the line is really drawn for me at extreme amounts of gore). Lately, I've been watching a ton of horror/thriller films. When Funny Games, Michael Haneke's 2007 Austrian film was remade into an English language film starring Naomi Watts this year, I was desperately curious to see it, mainly because of Haneke's claims in promotional interviews for the film that he remade the film for American audiences because he wanted to confront Americans with their own violence. This claim sounded like a red herring to me from the get go. I went to see it expecting to be terrified, which I half was and half wasn't (I'm sure it didn't help that at every suspenseful moment in the movie, the man who had fallen asleep in the theater–whose snore sounded like a pig being slaughtered: loud, high-pitched, and punctuated with snorts–would ratchet up his snoring). The story is about a family who's held captive and tortured to death in their own home by extremely polite strangers. The movie is at times very suspenseful, but falls majorly flat in the the philosophical interrogation of the magnitude of human sadism department.
Naomi Watts is great in Funny Games; she's fast becoming a horror movie icon in her ability to play the hunted, haunted, fragile white woman that is so prevalent in the genre. Michael Pitt, who plays the psychotic leader of the Leopold and Loeb-like pair who carry out the home invasion is cruelly brilliant. But more than highly stylized art house torture porn it is certainly not. Why? Because the whole tone of the film is ruined by obnoxiously clever editing. For example, in one of the final scenes, Naomi Watts manages to snatch a shotgun off the coffee table and gun down one of her assailants in an attempt to rescue her husband from being murdered. As soon as the viewer feels a sense of relief, the film is rewound to the point just before Watts can get her hands on the shotgun and the torturers see her trying to grab the gun, take it away from her and kill her husband anyway. This kind of cleverness gives the film a tone of glibness. It's one thing as a filmmaker to tell a story of the unspeakable horrors of which people are capable, but when the character's lives are played with through the editing and formal aspects of the work in the way that they are in Funny Games, when no ethical weight is given to their lives or deaths, one questions whether the critique that Haneke is claiming to enact about our compulsion as Americans, as viewers, to watch violence is a really misplaced critique. One asks oneself, who lacks compassion, me as the viewer, me as the American, or him as the filmmaker for whom death is an exercise jokey post-modernism? Also, in light of recent events, one questions whether the types of horrors depicted in Funny Games are not actually more indigenous to the film's native Austria.
Seeing Funny Games kick started my recent obsession with horror movies, sort of an independent study in what constitutes an effective horror movie, what is horror and how is it made? The Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters (2003 directed by Kim Ji-woon) has done much to answer these questions. The movie succeeds in being actually suspenseful/scary and stylized without being glib ala the aformentioned movie. A Tale of Two Sisters centers around a family–two sisters, a father, and a stepmother. The story itself is not so remarkable, it's pretty much a classic gothic horror story of domestic tensions pushed to murderous limits. There's little character development and hardly any dialogue (most of the lines are delivered in screams). Everything you come to know about the family and all the thrills and chills are derived from the deployment of pieces of the story through editing. A Tale of Two Sisters is so masterfully edited and structured that it doesn't need to show you that much explicit imagery. It haunts you as much with what it shows you as what it doesn't. In one scene, a girl is visited in the middle of the night by a ghost shrouded in black which keeps coming closer and closer, but every time it moves closer, the camera cuts so that you see a series of closeups of slightly parting black fabric. The effect is chilling. More importantly, this film derives its depth through the psyhcological traumas that it enacts formally rather than through the cheap didactic tactics of a film like Funny Games. To me, there's is something irreducible, unspeakable, unknowable about horror which is captured in A Tale of Two Sisters. Somehow there's much less horror in the much more grim exercise of watching some vaguely unlikeable yuppies, American or Austrian, being tortured to death.
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