chiller blog

Posted Dec 15, 08 11:26 AM

Dark Science

For the re-imagining of The Day the Earth Stood Still – starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, and Kathy Bates (opening in first place this past weekend) -- writer-director Scott Derrickson once received advice from Robert Wise, the filmmaker behind the 1951 original. “He told me that if I was interested in genre films, then, I should make my first film a horror film, because a horror film will really show what you can do as a director,” Derrickson said.

That was three horror films ago.

Schooled in curiosity. Thoughtfully reflective. Sporting the kind of hip frames that usually prompts one to ask where he bought them. Derrickson since turned in the franchise’s strongest sequel in Hellraiser: Inferno, then debuted theatrically with Urban Legends: Final Cut. But it was The Exorcism of Emily Rose that turned heads – and not necessarily 360-degrees. Here was a remarkably polished horror thriller that was – surprisingly -- even more absorbing in it’s protracted courtroom argument as theology and science take turns explaining away each other.

So as an accomplished filmmaker who’s, as of late, leaned horror toward science, would his 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still pull science back toward horror?

Not quite. Derrickson tells Chiller that the film is “much more thriller than sci-fi horror”. But the remake -- eschewing dark, washed-out hues and frigid foreboding – heralds the respectful question: how “much” is “much more”?

… You know, it certainly looks like sci-fi horror. And infinitely less placidly-wrapped than the Robert Wise version.

Oh, those genres. There they go, bumping up into one another and spilling over the edges. Sci-fi’s mortar is factual possibility -- a parable-laiden mirror to human nature. Horror, on the other bloody hand, encircles that possibility with paranoia and distrust. The former concerns itself with ideological survival; the latter: gut-check, in-the-moment survival. One wants an answer; the other, an exit.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was a studio gamble for it’s day, playing off Cold War fears by employing a Christ story subtext in legitimizing an entire B-genre. Other “A” sci-fi titles followed, with a decreasing trust in the unknown and an increasing palate for – well – blowing *#&@ up: War of the Worlds, Forbidden Planet, When Worlds Collide. With the sudden, omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation, science transformed from a peace-inciting talisman to the vessel through which our worst fears went presto. Labs, test tubes, and toxic waste became easy criminal catalysts for shock. Them! led the way with nuclear-grown killer ants, followed by genetically-mutated spiders, birds gone afoul, African bees, lawnmower-sized crabs, not to mention Janet Leigh and all those enormous bunnies. At least even the layman can see from what cloth Jaws was cut, or what film cycles sparked the galactic virus of The Andromeda Strain.

In turn, within a generation, horror has notably lowered the temperature of it’s sister genre. Tones – and then overtones – have moved consistently into sleeker and bleaker shadow. (E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the innocent-sweet exceptions, but even the genteel Contact still dimmed it’s cool-colored palate.) The result is a hybrid feel that permeates the dark, physical look of sci-fi, from Independence Day to Alex Proyas’s brilliant sci-fi noir of Dark City to The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The seed grew from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Not only did Kubrick’s opus become sci-fi cinema’s Citizen Kane, it provided the visual benchmark for and signaled the cut-off line to a new generation. It’s future-dreamt technology demanded make-it-plausible research. Gone were the days when audiences accepted paper plate saucers, and numbly heard mumbo-jumbo scripts that couldn’t pass a basic physics course. Sci-fi got specific. Sci-fi horror had to be built to last. And they both started to resemble one another.

Certainly, compared to the style of the prior decade’s films, movies of the 1970s could be more closely identified with an increasingly harsh, often nasty edge of physical reality, but what was the sci-fi horror prototype? Not the fuzzy-flat Embryo (1976), in which Rock Hudson grows a full-grown Barbara Carrera in mere weeks in a basement lab. Nor the standardly photographed Demon Seed (1977), in which fear of technology out of control finds a computer imprisoning and impregnating Julie Christie. I say it was Ridley Scott’s definitive monster-in-the-house masterwork, Alien.

Two years removed from collaborating on Star Wars, Roger Christian and Les Dilley’s future-grounded art direction (with set decoration by Ian Whittaker) established the Nostromo as the very blueprint for genre visuals. Likewise to Derek Vanlint’s cinematography. Close your eyes and remember his lighting: fog-textured blase brightness. Thick mechanical silhouettes dripping water. Darkness punctuated by intermittent, often chaotic light sources. Composer Jerry Goldsmith (my favorite, did I mention?) even went so far as to employ instruments from the 16th century on back to Biblical times – and then utilize the music-makers in orthodox ways. The result: a score brimming with sounds evoking the unexplained, and sounds whose origin – even to a trained ear – remain unexplained.

Alien’s template continues to echo through both genres. Science has become increasingly antiseptic and shop-talked. Instead of abstract gobbly-gook, genuine research conveys (do you recall Ed Harris breathing water in The Abyss?) And horror doesn’t shy away from sweaty editing and corn starch-glistening prosthetics. John Carpenter’s often-rattling redo of The Thing – owed greatly to Rick Baker’s startling, gross-out make-up effects and Vangelis’ isolationistic soundtrack – was a galaxy removed from the Howard Hawks original. That was an era whose science rode the fear of flying saucers… not necessarily the fear of what rode in them.

And that era, touché, was 1951.