The use of a Style

Did I say predictable? It Lives Again is a horror film, and to my mind one of its strongest virtues is the way it utilizes the conventions and traditions of that genre. The film opens with a warning of some terror about to be unleashed — nothing is seen, but much is suggested. The warning is met with open disbelief, which is only dispelled in the face of undeniable physical proof. But first, before outright confrontation, we get physical attacks in which we only glimpse the terror — the film is well under way before we ever really see it.

There is a climactic confrontation in which good destroys evil. The central characters are in some way changed by the whole experierence, almost as if the threat, the terror, is some inner fear or crisis (riven physical form. There is perhaps a sufficient moral dilemma introduced as to make the final victory a qualified one. And, as the film is ending, there is the suggestion that maybe it could all happen again ............

That's a rough outline of the structure of It Lives Again, fundamentally the same as that for, say Jaws and The Omen. Which you could maybe say is a rip-off by Larry Cohen and Co. But we're dealing here with a form almost as old as movies themselves, a narrative structure made famous by James (Frankenstein) Whale Tod (Freaks) Browning in the 1930's and Val Lewton in the 1940's.

Val Lewton described this basic formula to the Los Angeles Times: "Our formula is simple. A love story, three scenes of suggested horror and one of actual violence. Fadeout. It's all over in less than 70 minutes." The calm, everyday sequences were to alternate suspense sequences of ascending terror, resulting in a climax which would bring the two moods of the story together.

"We tossed away the horror formula right from the beginning. No grisly stuff for us. No masklike faces hardly human, with gnashing teeth and hair standing on end. No creaking physical manifestations. No horror piled on horror. You can't keep up horror that's long sustained. It becomes something to laugh at. But take a sweet love story, or a story of sexual antagonisms, about people like the rest of us, not freaks, and cut in your horror here and there by suggestion, and you've got something. Anyhow, we think you have. That's the way we try to do it." (Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror — Joel E. Siegel)

(Incidentally, the Wellington Film Society is showing a couple of Lewton's best films this year, I walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim, which alone makes it worth becoming a member.)

This approach to film-making should not be denigrated merely because it is 'formula', and designed merely to provide maximum audience entertainment. For all its simplicity, it takes a great deal of skill to use the form successfully, and even artistry to be able to totally involve the viewer in a flight of fantasy, and genuinely affect his / her emotions, which is what the form demands. The Swarm fits the genre (as far as, I've been able to describe it) and it must surely be one of the most dismal failures (even on the molt undemanding level) in screen history.

But It Lives Again succeeds. Firstly, it really scares. Well, it disturbed me, and I'm pretty hardened to screen horror. Secondly, it uses its time-honoured form efficiently and at times rather elegantly. The audience is kept involved all the way along the line — we sense the inevitability of the plot, but we are teasingly kept in suspense. Efficient. And elegant? I think Cohen's handling of the moral quandaries in the film deserves the word. Throughout the film there is a tension between the various attitudes to the mutant children: between the danger they are to society, and the maxim of sanctity of life; are the children really abnormal? and what is normal anyway; between love for the children and the break-up of the marriage they came from. These conflicts and others which arrive are handled, with a real artistry.