What Is Horror?
A Serbian Film vs Happiness  

2,741 words

What is a horror movie? One which horrifies the viewer, presumably, but the genre is a fluid one. A quick scroll through YouTube brings up a host of aficionado sites which obviously fit the bill, and should you wish to peruse 10 Disturbing Italian Cannibal Horror Movies That Can Terrify You For Weeks, then be my guest. But while romantic comedies, westerns, war movies and gangster flicks are relatively easy to categorize, what makes a horror film can depend very much on who is watching it.

Those of my generation, now in our 60s, often reference Hitchcock’s The Birds as the first horror film they remember seeing, and it certainly was terrifying to the young viewer, but today’s kids are doubtless somewhat more inured to what is and isn’t frightening. Boundaries have been progressively pushed ever further outwards, and Sam Raimi et al’s 1981 movie The Evil Dead, as controversial as it was when it came out, looks like a cartoon now. A modern movie deemed controversial would doubtless offend for ideological reasons rather than its gore or kill count, and you don’t even need make movies to horrify a modern audience. Today’s liberals would be just as terrified at the very existence of the website you are reading as the audiences who blenched at 1973’s The Exorcist or 1999’s The Blair Witch Project.

The first horror flick I recall seeing post-Hitchcock was Polanski’s Repulsion, and this is the psychological side of horror. It is a reasonable central division in the genre, between the viscerally disgusting – what some call “body horror” – and movies which are frightening due to their depiction of troubled and troubling psychological states. Monster movies of one variety or another could count as a third genre, but even those tend to double as body horror. Alien fiends, vampires and zombies rarely show up in movies as incidental characters, and are generally set on human dismemberment of some kind.

I recently saw two movies for the first time, 2010’s A Serbian Film, and 1998’s Happiness. Both films are horrific, but achieve their effects in wholly different ways. I wouldn’t watch either again, but not for reasons of artistic weakness or because they were boring. Both films are gripping and well directed and acted, but while A Serbian Film is appalling both visually and for its warped subject matter, Happiness could be described as a black comedy, were it not so thoroughly disturbing.

A Serbian Film is set in that country’s pornographic industry, and follows a retired male porn star, Milos, who is offered a role in what the director believes will be the ultimate dirty movie. The movie opens uncomfortably for the viewer, with the young son of Milos and his wife watching his father in action in one of his past skin-flicks. Although the pair justify his father’s old line of work to the boy, and Milos has resolved to stay out of the porn game, the couple have financial troubles, and Milos agrees to meet with the director to discuss his somewhat unconventional approach to pornography.

“Pornography”, at its ancient Greek root, comes from pornos, or “lewdness”, and graphein, meaning “to write”. It is thus the writing down or notation of lewd acts. Pornography was certainly not unknown to the ancients, and the Japanese in particular seem to have been enthusiastic fans of the artistic genre. With the advent of photography and moving pictures, porn received an accelerant, and it is well documented that the late 20th century saw the emergence of the “snuff” movie, in which actresses were actually killed onscreen during filmed sex acts. I have never seen one of these movies and, even if I had, I wouldn’t admit to it. As far as I am aware, watching such a film still makes the viewer an accessory to murder after the fact. Snuff movies, it transpires, are entry-level for Milos’ director as the actor signs a contract and arrives for the first day of filming at, ominously, an abandoned orphanage. Milos is already disturbed by what he is asked to do and watch, and calls his brother, a policeman, asking him to do a background check on the director. After the call, the camera pans back from the brother to show him involved in a sex act while watching a home movie of Milos and family enjoying dinner at home. This is already a very sick film, and it is just getting warmed up.

Milos’ discomfort at on-set proceedings is already disturbing him, but presumably a veteran of hardcore pornography has a stronger stomach than his colleagues in the acting fraternity. After the second day of filming, however, in which he is forced to brutally assault a woman while a little girl from the orphanage looks on, he resolves to quit the picture. The director attempts to persuade Milos to stay, however, by showing him a video which he calls – and which I won’t expand on – “newborn porn”. A Serbian Film probably set records for walkouts, and I would imagine this scene produced the first wave of refuseniks.

At this point, the viewer (if still viewing) asks himself why anyone would make such a thing. Director Srdjan Spasojevic claimed it was a middle finger to the politically correct films then coming out of Serbia, but could he not just have made a politically incorrect one, a movie with a black villain, say, or in which a man interrupts a woman while she is talking? The film uses the tried-and-tested plot device of the vulnerability and innocence of children, but the extremes to which this is exploited here make the viewer question whether the producers and director were not exorcising – or exercising – their own vile ghosts. To be utterly disgusted by A Serbian Film does not make you a prude but rather should be a basic prerequisite for a normal human being. If anyone actually enjoyed this film, I wouldn’t even want to be in the same town as them, forget the same room. It becomes an endurance test, and I am certainly not recommending it in the way I might other films. Go there if you want to. In many ways, I wish I hadn’t. The recent buzz–concept of “something you can’t unsee” holds sway here.

To list the atrocities which double and redouble in intensity during the remainder of the movie feels a little bit like the film reviewer’s version of clickbait, and it isn’t even accurate to call it an orgy of violence. An actual orgy would seem as anodyne as a suburban dinner party by comparison. Milos is injected with bull Viagra and let loose on various women, losing himself in the woods but compelled to return to the sets of the film when his flashbacks compel him to see if he has indeed performed the acts he believes and fears he has. Anyone who has seen, for example, Cannibal Holocaust, The Human Centipede, or the unspeakable Martyrs – which was even, inexplicably, remade – knows where films can go if their directors’ twisted visions are played out, but A Serbian Film justifies, at least, its reputation as one of the most disturbing films of all time. Usually, with harrowing movies, I advise to “approach with caution.” Not this one, which I advise you not to approach at all. I wish I hadn’t.

I can’t say the same about Happiness, which is a good film although it horrified me in a way very different from A Serbian Film. Happiness is, at least at surface level, a far more sedate affair, although in comparison with A Serbian Film, Rob Zombie movies are sedate affairs. There is no blood (except in the savage dreams of one of the male characters), and although there is a murder, it is reported rather than shown.

Resolutely middle-class, it follows the lives of three American sisters, and the various characters who enter and leave their lives. It stars, among others (it is an ensemble piece), Ben Gazzara and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who must be the sweatiest and most unappealing male actor in Hollywood history. Hoffman’s character’s pastime is to go through the phone directory searching for lone women to call and sexually harass. He tells his psychiatrist about his warped fantasies of sexual domination of vulnerable women, and the doctor appears to be making notes when he is actually writing a grocery list. The doctor – apparently in a perfect marriage with one of the central sisters – is also the one with the murderous dreams, added to which he is a pedophile, masturbating in his car to a magazine featuring teenage boys while children play outside oblivious. The men in the film are moral monsters who display an outward veneer of respectability. The women are either victims or locked into their own meaningless worlds. It is a bleak film, most of which looks like a bland suburban soap opera. When the psychiatrist’s son tells his father that a young male school chum is home alone for the weekend, the doctor says he is going out for a while, asking only to confirm the little boy’s address. It is expert film-making to produce a frightening scene with no obvious fear factor.

We see Joy, a natural victim superbly played by Jane Adams, at the beginning of the film on a first date with Andy, a fat workmate she is not attracted to. It is the first excruciatingly awkward scene in a movie stuffed with them. She rebuffs him, but accepts a rather tasteful gift. He watches her pleasure in receiving the object and snatches it back, saying it is for the woman who will love him one day. When he kills himself later in the film, Joy’s workmates spend five minutes debating who Andy was. No one can remember. He was just another lonely, blank cipher in a movie full of them.

Later, Hoffman calls Joy and goes through his dirty phone call routine, making her feel even more worthless than she already did. He also calls Helen, another sister and a noted author torturing herself because she wrote about her own rape even though it never happened. Hoffman sticks another postcard to his bedroom wall using his semen as glue. The film is punctuated with these small outrages, which compound to produce an existential horror rather than the visceral terror of A Serbian Film. No one in the movie can be described as happy, making the title nastily ironic.

But the worst of the many sub-plots is the pederastic obsessions of Bill, who drugs the food of his son’s little school chum and is horrified when he doesn’t like ice-cream. Bill gets the cruelest lines in a film composed almost entirely of verbal cruelty. It’s a different type of horror, and although described by IMDb as “comedy/drama”, I must have missed the gags.

Happiness isn’t a movie you would have found in the horror section of an old video store but I can only call it as I see it, and I found it depressingly horrible. It is relentlessly bleak and wretched, offering no hope for the human condition, although I would have no hesitation in recommending it. Just don’t watch it on a date if you want to see the person ever again.

So, horror is what horrifies us, and we have begged the question. While A Serbian Film is unrelentingly vile, Happiness does not ease up in showing you what lives of bleak, nasty desperation look like. Either way, we are left lying with Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – another masterpiece of horror – lying dying on the floor of his mud hut and whispering; “The horror. The horror”.