#i want to be eebil

[sylvieusedhyperbeam]

re: Jacob’s Ladder remake 2017 part II

Okee dokee, given my previous reaction, I guess I generally owe a modicum of a decent explanation. Or hell maybe I’m running on three hours of sleep in the past couple of days and feel like rambling about whatever the fuck because I’m at that weird point where I’m tired, some would say bone tired, some would say dandelion-cottonfluff-headed tired, but I could very well keep going if I wanted and I want to and yet I don’t.

…Yeah, it’s gonna be that kinda thing.

I’m’a try to stay on course though because you know, criticism finds further credibility in coherence or some shit.  I don’t know, I didn’t make the rules.  Whoever did is dumb.  You’re dumb.

Also possible spoilers for Jacob’s Ladder if you somehow haven’t seen it in the twenty-five fucking years it’s been out or whatever, psh

It should be known, first and foremost, that my view is indeed biased and entirely shaded by my love for the original work.  Jacob’s Ladder, directed by Adrian Lyne in 1990, was a masterfully done psychological horror revolving around a soldier’s return from Vietnam, and the demons that haunted him.  He’s plagued by what can only be described as surreal hallucinations that run a gamut from literal demons to dreamlike shifts in reality that gradually grow into hellish nightmares.  It gets even stranger when he finds out that the members of his old platoon seem to be suffering from the same delusions.  The plot only unwinds from twist to twist, all the while retaining that feverish nightmare-dream reality that literally leaves you guessing what the actual fuck is gonna happen next.  In the fabric of the reality Jacob and his comrades are perceiving, there’s literally no telling.

I… know I warned for spoilers, but I kind of refuse to spoil the ending and what really lied beneath the fabric of it all.  It’s my personal opinion that it’s something you have to watch and experience to fully appreciate.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t talk about what I appreciated about this movie, what I loved about this movie.  

For one thing, the fact that it nailed horror down perfectly, from note to note, from start to finish.  

Yeeeeah I’m a bit cynical to be repeatedly quoted to saying this, but I’ll continue to say it: Hollywood doesn’t understand horror.  They don’t.  Writing in vapid jumpscares and oh no generic characters like Whatsherface and Static MaleProtag are dying while frantically hoping to shock people doesn’t make for a good horror story.  Excessive gore and violence doesn’t make for a good horror story.  Some potential commentary or musing on the bestial, vindictive urges in us, maybe, but horror?  Nah, or at least, not horror that can be expected to resonate beyond a flicker of disgust and maybe morbid intrigue.

Jacob’s Ladder nails down horror because it’s horror in raw context.

Horror is, essentially, the extension of the less palatable aspect of the human psyche. You see it in old school horror that essentially nailed its audiences to their seats: common human fears like the fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of people, fear of the bestial desires are translated into metaphors such as monsters, zombie hordes, werewolves, creatures that personify those fears, that draw out these fears and magnify them. When horror is written, a nightmare is written.  Horror stories take place in terrible worlds where fears, doubts and anxieties are given form and substance.  Horror is written by knowledgeable mapping of the fears you wish to translate into breathing forms, and healthy allowance of the human imagination.  Horror is when what you don’t know will not only hurt you, but kill you.  

It’s not Suchandsuch walks down a dark hallway and all of a sudden PIANOSLAM JUMPSCARE BOO FUCK YOU.  It’s startling, but startling and scary aren’t the same thing.  Someone who jumps out at you from behind a door can startle you, that doesn’t make them scary or the experience of walking out of a room scary.

It’s not glorified gore – when you’re making gore look cool because wow that franchise sure is 3edgy5me (Saw, Texas Chainsaw remakes? I’m looking straight at you) then yeah, it kind of loses its point in a horror movie.

And while the nature of a nightmare can be chaotic, for the most part it entails even abrupt shifts as elements that are some essential part of the nightmare itself.

Jacob’s Ladder nails horror because it literally is a nightmare from start to finish, with human emotions serving as its engine to boot.  We’re in the nightmare with Jacob because the tonal shifts throughout the movie are all nightmares we ourselves have had.  It deals with raw human elements of denial, longing, hurt, and painful confusion over something as human as saying goodbye. It magnifies things that a lot of us have felt at some point or another, it clouds them, because when we’ve felt or suffered the things that Jacob has?  Chances were we ourselves didn’t understand what we were feeling or what was happening.  

This is what makes horror so much of a passion for me.  It doesn’t have to be all DUNDUNDUN chase music and dark hallways or glorified guts spattered on a bathroom mirror.  Horror can stem from aspects of the world and aspects of ourselves that we don’t understand being cloaked in ugly metaphor.  Horror can be human perspective as it struggles against a cold and unfeeling reality far larger than humans can understand (which was what a shit ton of Lovecraft’s work centered around – the persistent theme that under the simple veneer of human perception, there is an ugly, unyielding reality so vastly beyond our understanding, we’d go mad just by glimpsing it).  Horror, at its core, is driven by an engine that is sheer humanity.

Hollywood has lost sight of that because HAHA JUMPSCARES LOOK A JUMPSCARE LOOK THAT GUY GOT CHAINSAWED IN HALF OH LOOK THERE’S CREEPY PIANO MUSIC LOOK ANOTHER JUMPSCARE HOLY SHIT AND SOMETHING THAT YELLED BOO AT YOU LOOK IT’S GOOD VS. EVIL LOOK THAT EVIL THING IS A JUMPSCARE

HOOOOWARRRGHHHAHAHAHA               !!!!!  THAT’S SCARY RIGHT

No, Hollywood. No, it’s not.  It wasn’t when you rewrote The Haunting from a murky psychological horror into a vapid GUD VS. EEBIL pile of childish horseshit, it wasn’t when you killed The Thing via CGI graphics, it wasn’t when you threw the blurry line between fiction and reality set up by The Blair Witch Project completely out the window for that godawful shitter, Book of Shadows.

And while I did find the recent sequel to BWP respectable enough an installment (a hell of a lot more than Book of Shadows could EVER be), this is just… me warily glaring down this remake of Jacob’s Ladder from my corner.  Jacob’s Ladder, I’ll admit, was a movie I connected strongly with for some of the nightmarish shifts in Jacob’s reality as well as the music. I loved everything about it, no fucks given about what other people thought of it.  

This is me sincerely doubting that Hollywood even understands what made Jacob’s Ladder unique as a horror movie.  This is me sincerely believing that Hollywood is going to see Jacob’s Ladder for the demons, and not the human forces that were driving those demons.  This is me cynically calling that this remake is going to be riddled in jumpscares, alongside protagonists we don’t care about because they’re otherwise bland, empty-headed trollies hot to trot to cart us around from one jumpscare to another.  This is me many times bitten, many times pissed off about it.  Because the destruction of things you love is in itself horror, but it shouldn’t be the only kind of horror that Hollywood actually IS getting right.

Do not remake a work unless you understand it, kids.

Do not remake a work unless you understand it.

DO NOT REMAKE A WORK UNLESS YOU UNDERSTAND IT.

This has been a psa thank you tip your servers I’ll be here until two in the morning probably

#rants #oh look a rant and it isn't political #ominous britney spears #thoughts #blogging i guess