Little Horrors

SPOILERS BELOW…

BUÑOL, VALENCIA, SPAIN: La Tomatina festival. Residents and visitors have been hurling tomatoes at each other annually since 1945. Why? Nobody really knows, yet a popular theory suggests that townspeople rioted and attacked city councilmen with the little red vegetables (or are they a fruit?), and this act of red defiance has been honoured ever since. In 2015, it is estimated that almost 145,000 kilograms of tomatoes were thrown. That’s a lot of red.

Red — shocking, garish, over-saturated red, so saturating that it is intensely uncomfortable — is splattered across the frames of Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 We Need to Talk About Kevin. A motif hinting at the film’s horrifying, bloody climax. A motif established in the opening’s chaotic tomato fight. Tomato-soaked bodies fill the first frames, writhing about in the orgy of red like blood cells flowing down a vein. Perhaps it is this imagery coupled with the film’s subject matter, and the many films that have preceded it that the tomatoes appear not as innocent red vegetables, but as blood. It is an orgy of blood. A satanic orgy that precedes the birth of Eva and Franklin’s devil-spawn Kevin.

Though it is film that aims to ground itself in reality, one cannot help but be reminded of the many supernatural horror films that have come before — horror films centred around a single child, or even a whole brood of them. It is yet another instalment in an area of the genre that critic Mark Kermode describes as “paedophobic horror”. The list of films that fall into this sub-genre are almost countless. We have young Danny Torrance and his supernatural psychic abilities of Kubrick’s masterpiece The Shining (“REDRUM REDRUM REDRUM”), Carol Anne of Poltergeist (“They’re here”) offering the family’s bridge to a supernatural world of ghosts, and the evil adopted ‘child’ Esther of Orphan (“I’ll kill mummy if you tell”). But take here for instance an early example: the 1960 Village of the Damned, based on John Wyndham’s 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The super-intelligent alien-bred children of this sci-fi/horror classic look more like part of the Nazi Youth than aliens from a distant planet. The blonde wigs that the children wear had a built-in dome to give the impression they had a larger-than-normal cranium size making them appear strange and uncanny. This is just the beginning of what makes them so unsettling. These children are far from innocent and it is terrifying for people to see childlike innocence perverted. Children aren’t fully formed physically or emotionally, so there’s something inherently “other” about them. There’s a feeling that they could turn on you at any moment.

“I think the demon’s target is not the possessed; it is us … the observers … every person in this house. And I think the point is to make us despair, to reject our own humanity, Damien, to see ourselves as ultimately bestial; as ultimately vile and putrescent; ugly; unworthy.”

This quote is taken from William Peter Blattey’s novel, The Exorcist, perhaps best known as being the source material for William Friedkin’s 1973 film. It is a film that is still considered to this day as being one of the scariest films ever, and in turn, one of the best horror films ever made. The film features a whole cast of characters. We have Linda Blair’s young Regan, possessed by a demonic entity, Max Von Sydow’s Father Merrin, doing battle with this old foe, and his understudy Father Karras played by Jason Miller. But it is Ellen Burstyn’s Chris MacNeil, actress and mother of possessed Regan who leads this film. We see the possession of a helpless child through the eyes of a mother. The film adopts a distinguishing feature of the sub-genre — a narrative voice outside of the child’s experience. Therefore, it is the mother’s experience, rather than the child’s experience that is more important to understanding the director’s intention.

The cultural impact of The Exorcist was monumental upon its release, and before its release it was widely speculated upon and anxiously anticipated by critics and audiences alike. However, no one could have anticipated the reaction it received. It broke opening day records and became a cinematic and sociological phenomenon. Queues stretched down the hot Los Angeles streets, and those willing to wait hours would have seen pale-faced viewers stumbling out of the theatre, telling stories of people screaming in their seats, to stories of people vomiting and feinting. Cinema ushers even kept smelling salts to hand in order to resuscitate those who passed out in the screening, before escorting them out.

But what is it about this masterpiece of horror cinema that made it so scary to its contemporary viewers, and even to this day? It is perhaps the juxtaposition of religion and sin that the film explores. In fact, the film’s publicity quoted the Pope emphasising the importance of demonology to the Roman Catholic faith. The child has always been a symbol of innocence and an object of compassion, ideas deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. Therefore, images such as those of a possessed child — one that appears to literally ooze demonic evil — masturbating with a crucifix are designed to go against this tradition in order to repulse and shock viewers. Consequently, The Exorcist is subverting this religious symbol in order to create horror and depict the horror that not only exists within the supernatural, but also within one of the standing pillars of society — religion. In a similar way to another famous novel and film that uses children as a motif, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, William Peter Blattey and William Friedkin adopt this motif to some extent as an easy option in order to make a point not about children but rather about the general malaise of mankind itself. When the mechanics of civilisation are stripped away, the demonic child evokes the corruption of all that is traditionally pure and worthy in humanity. Beneath the surface there lies a heart of darkness.

Though it can be said to have been hoping to capitalise upon the success of The Exorcist, The Omen is perhaps the most obvious cinematic depiction of a demonic child. Damien is the son of Satan himself — the Antichrist. And it is another film seen through the eyes of a parent, Gregory Peck’s Robert Thorn. Damien is quiet, yet the camera wishes to present him as calculated, similarly to the alien-spawn of Village of the Damned. In fact, it is this mysterious intelligence that makes Damien so uncannily creepy. One of the reasons why Damien and the children of other horror films are so creepy is because they appear ‘blank’ on the surface, yet also appear to harbour a darkness within. Ignoring this darkness for a moment, children are immediately creepy and uncanny due to an adult’s inability to understand these innocent, unimpressionable and unimpressioned objects. It is a world that Robert Thorn cannot ever gain access to, and thus the horror comes from this central fear of intelligence. How can a child appear so sweet and innocent yet seem to be at blame for the death of the people around him?

It is said that many of these paedophobic films manifested due to a phobia of the younger more-rebellious, more-affluent, more-intelligent generation in the 1960s and 70s. This is why The Exorcist and The Omen, and similar films, were such a phenomenon in the 70s. Compare the idea of Sinclair Roger’s 1976 book They Don’t Speak Our Language designed to help parents understand the ‘language’ their children spoke in, to the tongues that the demonically possessed speak in, or even the language of A Clockwork Orange, which still to this day baffles many who attempt to read it. Also, around this time — 1968 to be exact — came Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, one of the most famous depictions of this phobia. Though delving into the supernatural world of a demonic cult, this film’s central theme is arguably post-natal depression, and the fear and paranoia that is coupled with this. Through Polanski’s masterful direction and attentive focus on the viewpoint and perception of Mia Farrow’s struggling mother, viewers begin to doubt the reality of the satanic neighbours in the same way that Rosemary begins to doubt her own sanity. A more recent film, The Ones Below, heavily influenced by Rosemary’s Baby, further explores this idea of post-natal paranoia and perceived madness, as well as the idea that our neighbour’s cannot always be trusted and perhaps have sinister intentions regarding our children.

So, this leads us back to We Need to Talk About Kevin, and the perceptive gaze of the mother, Eva, that Lynne Ramsay’s camera represents. The film opens with an intentionally disorientating image, and continues this theme throughout, running its timeline through a series of non-linear scenes and situations, cut apart by strong and intense images — almost unbearable in their power — oozing with dark symbolism. Therefore, the film is not so much tied to Eva’s literal life journey from before she gave birth up to the event that changed her life and its fallout, but rather it attempts to trace a more subjective journey of Eva’s mind and the emotions. It is because of this, that Eva’s experiences and perceptions are so important to understanding what the film is trying to say about a mother’s experiences and perceptions. Take for example the Halloween scene. Eva drives down the dark road, her car being constantly approached by children and teenagers in scary costumes. This is perhaps Ramsay’s most obvious indicator of Eva’s tortured mind. It not only represents her state of mind — a mind haunted by metaphorical monsters and ghouls — but also the idea of children that Eva has constructed due to her experiences: that they too often grow up to become the real-life monsters that they so innocently dress up as in the name of fun.

Furthermore, it seems that the only two people involved with this film that can see Kevin for what he really is (an evil little shit) are Eva and the camera, and thus the audience. Even Eva’s husband Franklin, the father of Kevin, can’t see that something isn’t right with Kevin, and thus doubts Eva’s state of mind, leading to difficulty in their marriage. Like The Omen that asks: “How could you kill a child?”, We Need to Talk About Kevin asks: “How could you hate a child?” Because that is all Eva comes to know — a hatred for her own child — something that seems almost inexcusable for a mother. We, as the audience, see Kevin’s dark and cruel side, yet one begins to question whether the images that Eva presents us with should really be only taken on face value. Is she simply an unreliable narrator? A woman who looks out of place amongst other future mums, and thus perhaps a woman who never truly wanted this child.

Through Ramsay’s symbolic narrative of a mother’s mental state, we are able to see her fears. And once again, it boils down to a central fear of intelligence that most, if not all, paedophobic horror films wish to explore. Eva is scared that behind Kevin’s seemingly innocent young face is a calculated child that knows what he’s doing and may be smarter than her. Though she opens her film with an interesting metaphor of tomatoes and sex, a dreamlike scene that evokes the sexually charged dream sequence of Rosemary’s Baby, Lynne Ramsay aims to distance her horror film from the supernatural that pervades The Exorcist and Village of the Damned, perhaps in order to show us the real horror that can exist in people, and therefore at the heart of society and humanity. Like the demon Pazuzu of The Exorcist, Ramsay’s target is her observers. Perhaps she wishes to represent the real post-natal fears and paranoia in dramatic, cinematic fashion. Or perhaps she just wishes to deter all women away from bearing a child in her own sick, twisted way.