(Originally published at MadLord Innovations)
Last night I went to see the new movie “The Orphanage” (El Orfanato) by director Juan Antonio Bayona. Before the film came out I had read a number of very good reviews and after watching the trailer I was pretty pumped up to see this new Spanish language movie. I believe Roger Ebert hit the nail on the head in his review of “The Orphanage” when he said, “here is an excellent example of why it is more frightening to await something than to experience it.” There is no question that “The Orphanage” had a very creepy atmosphere to it but personally, after watching the film I couldn’t bring myself to describe it as what I think of as scary. “The Orphanage” is a film that masters suspense rather than disgusting the audience with gore and causing constant jumps of startled fright. Sure there is a little blood and sure you do jump once or twice but these rare moments in the movie only seem to occur to keep us the audience believing in the greater ghost story that is going on. The real success I believe was, like Ebert pointed out, all the waiting, knowing that something is going to happen, almost has to happen, and yet not being in any way sure when that is going to be. “The Orphanage” isn’t a horror movie and one who is looking for that genre might not be as impressed with the way that the film plays with suspense, which may be in some ways linked to fear but is not fear itself. When I see a good horror movie that really scares me I often find myself not wanting to be home alone or to have to get out of bed at night to use the bathroom. I didn’t feel that way after watching “The Orphanage” even though, while I was in the theatre, I was on the edge of my seat almost the whole time. The movie has a great grasp of timing and knowing how to drag something as simple as a walk down the hall into an arduous and potentially perilous trek. Add to the timing the minimal dialog and the wonderful sound editing and one really can’t help but feel that there is apt to be a fright around every corner that the characters walk. But there isn’t. More often the scare doesn’t come where you expect it, and in many ways that makes the whole thing more suspenseful. The effect of suspense is produced with utter genius in “The Orphanage” and to anybody who is into movies that do such I’d say this film is a must see.
Over the years I have become more and more a fan of suspense and horror movies and now regularly look forward to watching such films. On one hand there is nothing quite as good as a gory vampire or zombie movie while on the other hand sometimes I just need that riveting suspense that can build in a movie like “The Shining” or “The Orphanage.” Before I became really interested in movies that give me a scare or a thrill I was into books that could do it. When I was young I read a whole bunch of books by an author named John Bellairs and they really had the power to freak me out. Now these books were marketed for what I’d call an adolescent audience and so I am not sure that they would creep me out in the same when any more, but I remember that when I was ten or twelve and reading them I was thinking, “man this is some pretty scary stuff.” As I got older, and had exhausted Bellairs’ collection, I moved on to Stephen King. I remember being in eighth grade and reading a Stephen King short story titled “The Boogeyman” from his collection of short stories Night Shift and not being able to fall asleep if the closet door was open even a crack for something like a month. A few years later King really freaked me out again with his short story “Lunch at the Gotham Cafe” in the collection Everything’s Eventual. I am more than willing to admit that some stories and movies really do get to me and scare me and get my brain imagining something horrible waiting for me down the hall at night when I have to use the facilities. The thing that interests me is how I keep going back. I still think that “The Exorcist” has to be one of the creepiest movies ever and yet every year around Halloween I can not wait until some channel shows it on TV. Why?
My personal opinion is that there are a lot of people who enjoy the thrill of being scared or the unnerving of long contemplated suspense as long as it is brought to them in a safe way. Probably nobody would be all that thrilled to be chased by a real Michael Myers, because honestly a knife wielding psycho in real life is a very potential danger. A fictional monster on a movie screen or in a book however still possess the power to scare us a bit but when we leave the theatre or put the book down we can always just sigh and say, “hey it was only fiction.” There is a difference too in the way we deal with suspended disbelief in horror and suspense movies. We all know that zombies don’t exist and so the fiction is almost more present in the existence of the monster in and of itself. But a good suspense movie doesn’t necessarily need to deal with things that we all agree to be made up. While movies like “The Shining” or “The Orphanage” may make the viewer at first think that there is something supernatural involved, something to do with ghosts or hauntings, further consideration on the part of the viewer may reveal that the suspense might partially have been created solely from a specific characters vantage point and as such may be a work of only imagination. In many ways I think that movie or novel that plays with suspense more than downright horror has the ability to touch closer at home with us all because in everyday life we are probably more likely to experience real feelings of suspense as opposed to horror. Think about it, we constantly face that suspense of waiting. Waiting to hear back about a job, waiting to meet somebody we haven’t seen for a long time, waiting for our next flight to take off; waiting, waiting, waiting. And it is while we are waiting, and letting our minds wander, that we feel the suspense of a situation. So perhaps even more than liking the safe thrill in a horror or suspense is relating to a reality we do deal with, in that real life can be quite suspenseful if we find ourselves waiting and thinking too much.
Kudos to the writers and directors who know how to stimulate our feelings of suspense because those who are good at it really know how to make us sit on the seat edges, our hearts pounding in our chests, hands clenching the arm rest, with the all around feeling that the slightest noise will cause us to snap and let out a yelp. And guess what, if the artist has done it right, that little noise will be all that it takes.
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