30 in 30: A MONTH OF HORROR. GERALD’S GAME

DAY 18

GERALD’S GAME (2017)

Being trapped is pretty scary, but is it horrific? Let’s find out.

Have any of you seen 127 HOURS? Well, GERALD’S GAME is like the horror version of that movie. Here we’ve talked about ‘concept’ and how it plays an essential role within the horror genre. This is because our beloved genre lives and thrives in the ‘unknown’, but the industry pushes it into formulas, which kills a lot of the horror. If you know what to expect, then you’re not going to be emotionally moved.

Philosopher Nick Land has an interesting take on this:

“(…) Horror is indistinguishable from a singular task: to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown.”

A good concept breathes fresh air into the movie, and to the industry at large.

GERALD’s GAME is a story about a couple who are trying to rekindle their flame. To make this happen, they take a trip to a cabin somewhere in the woods. Once in the cabin, Gerald wants to spice up their sex-life by putting her wife, Jessie, on cuffs. Jessie reluctantly agrees but eventually decides against it, frustrating Gerald so much he gets a heart attack and dies… While Jessie is still tied to the bed.

Great elevator pitch. I’m already hooked. But we were talking about the unknown here, and none of it is actually “unknown”. As I stated at the beginning, this is just another take on the idea of being trapped, which I feel belongs more in the thriller camp than in horror.

So, where is the horror of GERALD’S GAME coming from? It comes from The Moonlight Man.

While Jessie is cuffed to the bed, she sees her husband and another version of herself talking in the room. They are parts of her imagination manifesting themselves visually, but we (and Jessie) know they aren’t real. But another figure haunts Jessie’s nights and sights. A tall, pale man with a box full of jewellery and red, bright eyes, comes to her each night. He stands silently in a corner…. staring.

For most of the film, we don’t know the nature of The Moonlight Man, and he is terrifying. To me, horror lives in abstraction, it is untouched by objectivity and hidden in a veil of darkness, which gives the abstraction endless possibilities.

That’s why great horror stories never show the whole monster. H.P. Lovecraft was great at this; he never showed the whole of the beast. We were witnesses to an eye, an arm, part of its skin, but we where also told that the abomination was so big and strange that we couldn’t even comprehend it. It’s like H.P. Lovecraft was writing about horror itself.

At the end of GERALD’S GAME, we discover that The Moonlight Man was real, a crazy man who robbed graves and raped corpses. But this realization takes away the real horror out of the now real man. It works in this film because, in the end, this is a story about empowering Jessie against those who tormented her in life. It’s a humanistic story, which is really hard to find in horror.

But don’t worry, we are leaving humanistic behind.

Tomorrow: The Texas ChainSaw Massacre (1974)

Yesterday: APOSTLE (2017)