At the start of our spectrum then, we find the sort of horror film that uses almost nothing that is visually obvious. Drawing heavily on the viewer’s nerves and on their more subtle perceptions to create atmosphere and suspense, these films work from the straightforward formula that less is more; the less the film actually allows the audience to see of what is happening, the more they will worry about what might be happening. In short, the film is creating dread. In order to assess the effectiveness of this, let’s look at it in real terms for a moment.
You hear a noise in your house at night. At what point are you most afraid? The point at which you are creeping downstairs with a hefty picture frame in your hand, edging open the living room door as the first act of Scream plays across your mind’s eye (in startling detail considering that you haven’t seen it for ten years)? Or the point at which you discover that it’s just the neighbour’s cat? Dread – that growing sense of impending doom – is hugely important to horror and the longer it can be made to last, the better. Horror directors don’t have the liberty to actually break into your house and stage something awful in your living room. What they do have though is the ability to make you do the walking down the stairs part for a good two hours.
Rosemary’s Baby is one of the best examples of this first ‘minimal-visuals’ stage of the spectrum, Polanski’s near-perfect classic takes a sunny, innocent-looking beginning and gradually weaves through it a slightly uncomfortable sense of doubt that is finally developed into a confirmed nightmare. The viewer never gets to see the titular newborn – but Rosemary’s own horrified expression as she looks into the crib makes us pretty grateful that we were spared the trouble.
The Ring – both the original Japanese version and the later American one– is another fine example of the power of purely suggested threat. Although the apparently death-inducing video is highly unpleasant, none of its images are anything other than just profoundly weird. What is awful, however, is that the characters themselves have essentially died of fear. And the fact that for several days after watching it we couldn’t hear a phone ring without needing to be within handy distance of a defibrillator.
The Blair Witch Project draws viewers helplessly in to the students’ own desperate need to work out something – anything – about what is happening to them. The Woman in Black relies almost exclusively on the traditional scaring devices of sound and disappearing entities, and fear in The Orphanage essentially revolves around an empty sack of flour. Examples from the ‘home-invasion’ subgenre, such as The Strangers and You’re Next often depend entirely upon the questions ‘who are they?’ and – more importantly – ‘where are they?’ remaining unanswered until as late as possible. In both The Sixth Sense and The Others, the importance of what we don’t see is utilized to the extent to that we actually get a whole new film on the second watching. In all of these cases, the horror lies almost totally in what might be about to happen; human beings just do not like not knowing what’s going on.