there’s a noise in my head! what horror!

On the same note, I have to say something about the newest riff on the “media causes mass insanity” plot coming to a theatre near you. I’m talking about the indie horror flick called “The Signal“, and it is excellent.

Critics have had mixed feelings about its plot structure, which is admittedly idiosyncratic. The movie was written/shot in three parts, and each part was the brainchild of one of the three directors. The first part, “Crazy in Love”, shows the entire population of the city of Terminus turning into homicidal maniacs after being exposed to a strange swirling transmission over television, phones, etc. The plot centers around the lovers Ben and Maia, who are coming to grips with having to confess their affair to Maia’s husband, Lewis. The second part, “The Jealousy Monster”, is about Lewis’s mad search for Maia, which takes a wrong turn when he crashes a happy couple’s New Years party. Appropriately enough, the story ends with Ben’s search for Maia in the third part, “Escape from Terminus”.

Maia’s husband Lewis is one of the first to be afflicted by the transmission, and he is both the story’s main antagonist, and an amazing villain at that. Throughout the movie, you get a genuine sense that you really do understand why Lewis is doing what he is doing — his motives aren’t mysterious, they’re both intelligible and completely understandable — but never for a moment do you actually sympathize with him, because he is a complete monster. This kind of villain is a refreshing and intelligent antidote to the ethical-gray-area style of realism that was so important to people in the 1990s, and which brought us the army after army of anti-heroes and sympathetic villains.

I want to focus on the scenes that feature Lewis, because he’s a vital figure in the story. I will argue that critics have failed to appreciate the centrality of his role, and this has led them to think that the story suffers from a lapse in continuity. Worse, in some cases this confusion is exacerbated by a failure to “get” some basic elements in the craft behind making a horror story.

The second segment is the strongest and most original part of the movie, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that it understates the screen time of its main protagonists, Ben and Maia. Rather, Lewis takes the center-stage, terrorizing the houseguests with his paranoid dementia for a solid half-hour.

Now, this was also the part of the story that confused some people. On first blush, I think that some were unable to absorb what was going on in part because the segment worked so well at disturbing the viewer, by way of bouncing back and forth between black comedy and just plain horror. Some saw this oscillation of mood as being thematic babel, but actually, the back-and-forth between comedy and horror is a common device used by horror writers. Danse Macabre 101 tells you that, if you don’t give an audience the chance to laugh, and to feel relief in between horrific moments, you will exhaust their spirit. The success of both the original and the remake of Dawn of the Dead are examples of the “recharge the audience’s batteries” technique put successfully into action.

All this is just to say that people shouldn’t confuse a storytelling strategy that has to do with evoking a mood for awkwardness of plotting and confusion of themes. I suspect that people will make this mistake more often when dealing with horror films than, say, suspense thrillers, exactly because they confuse the target of their feelings; i.e., by directing their feeling of disgust on the quality of craft in a movie with its effectiveness at evoking disgust. That’s what horror movies are meant to do (though when it comes to good horror films, that’s not all that they do). But of course, the distinction between “my disgust created by the picture” and “my disgust for the picture” only holds up for horror fans. If a person is not a horror fan, then all horror movies will be bad movies to them. But this only tells a wary reader that they aren’t equipped with the standards that are needed to make sense of the craft behind a horror film.

The other thing, which I briefly alluded to before, is that the second segment derails from the first and third segments and focuses only on Lewis’s dementia. This could be misinterpreted as a lapse in continuity, unless you accept that Lewis is possibly one of the most central characters of the film. In a sense, he is more important thematically than either Ben or Maia. This is consistent with the fact that Lewis plays a central role in all three parts. To some extent, the entire film can be read as a character study of him.

With most critics (Marlow Stern, linked above, is no exception) you don’t even get the sense that they have any interest in exploring the craft behind the themes and moods used in films, even at a superficial level. For this kind of critic, there are just adjectives, boo-words like “awkward” and “overboard”, which vaguely point in the direction of something like an interesting thought, but which never cash out into even perfunctory reasons.

(Maybe I shouldn’t take these things seriously, except that the same critical laziness is pandemic in philosophy, too. I am frustrated to say that the outer fringes of philosophical life over the past decade (i.e., the lives lived by the majority of career philosophers) must be understood as The Great Idle, reflected in the prominence of puzzle-solvers, question-makers, intuition-followers, and sycophants. The sharpening of good judgment and the development of intellectual virtue takes a backseat to the studied analysis of what Sidgwick had for breakfast.)

Anyway, I came away from the film very impressed. I get the sense that the Zeitgeist is moving in the direction of trying to provide an antidote to the critique of middle-class postmodern culture posed in Don Delillo’s satire “White Noise”. Far from being derivative, the recent cluster of films can be read like an ongoing conversation about alienation in contemporary middle class (sub)urban life. “The Signal” does not exhaust the possibilities here, and I think the material can be fruitfully drawn in more directions.

But, to end on a “boo” that would be familiar to Stern: at least “The Signal” does a fair bit more than flops like Stephen King’s “Cell”.