Scream: Great Movie or Greatest Movie?

When Adolf Eichmann stood trial for crimes against humanity in Israel, someone suggested that the most fitting form of retribution would be to lock the former Nazi in a cell and slowly drain the room of oxygen. After getting wind of this idea, Alfred Hitchcock promptly directed the proposed execution's cinematic manifestation: Psycho.

Okay, so I can't exactly prove that correlation to be true, but there has never been a more eloquent maxim for how a horror movie should be fashioned (besides, to the masters the truth is only a hindrance), and Psycho is what auto-erotic asphyxiators watch as they choke themselves while masturbating. Unfortunately, as I was subjected to the trailer for Scary Movie 4 (how is there not a religion that worships Leslie Nielson by now?), I realized that in effectively defining the horror genre, Psycho might have also crippled it.

I attribute the genre's creation to Hitchcock (rather than his predecessors, like Fritz Lang and the stop-motion, creature-feature genius of Ray Harryhausen) simply because, for worse or for worse, one particular convention that Psycho established has most informed the current face of horror. When composer Bernard Herrmann offered Hitchcock a score by a miniature string orchestra rather than the jazz ensemble the director had requested, he unwittingly became one of the most subversively influential musicians of the 20th century. By practically inventing the jump scare (epitomized not by the infamous shower scene but rather the jolting overhead shot of Norman murdering the P.I.), Herrmann provided a flood of hack directors with the means to inflate their wallets as they deflated their films.

Because that's exactly what the jump scare does-it eliminates tension with extreme prejudice. As it evolved from a gimmick to a widely condoned narrative device of unprecedented laziness (a process that shifted into high gear with Wes Craven's Scream and the legions of teenage moviegoers/suckers it unearthed), the jump scare has come to represent the apotheosis of terror.

Gone is the pure dread of The Shining or the surreal suffocation of Onibaba-the stuff that doesn't take your breath away so much as it removes the air you breathe. Instead, national embarrassments like When a Stranger Calls and its ilk formally announce they're going to frighten you before sucker-punching you in the gut with the sharp crack of an impossibly loud violin. So much time is devoted to the former that narrative momentum becomes consumed with delivering the jostle­. The plot now serves the gimmick. A kitten rubbing against a window with the cacophonic force of an orchestra has the same physiological effect as a cannibalistic knife-wielding serial killer (who is inevitably the hero's other personality). You scream, you smile, and then you breathe-the scare is entirely confined to the moment of its conception. There is no cumulative effect, so The Hills Have Eyes is only as scary as it is long (very). This is not the stuff of which nightmares are made.

But if you're better off burning a pile of money as people call you an idiot for 90 minutes, why do we eat this shit up? Why was Saw II the most profitable film of last year, and why am I salivating at the very thought of next week's Silent Hill? The only feasible rationale that I can think of is that we're so desperate for solidarity that we delight in the palpable cohesion of strangers-we're not alone in the dark, but collectively swindled. It's the reason why The Crying Game was such a phenomenon in theaters but is only remembered today for eliciting the greatest gasp in cinematic history.

Or maybe great horror is just too uncomfortable. I know I'm alone here, but I believe that The Blair Witch Project is unquestionably the most haunting American horror film of the past decade. Its deceptive marketing aside, watching Blair Witch feels like being slowly drowned-pulled deeper and deeper until, by the film's supremely unsettling final image, you can't even see the surface. The dialogue's bizarre quasi-improvisation leads to a trio of characters who are believable in their obnoxiousness, and the shaky camera promotes immersion and rewards investigation. Even the film's admitted silliness is a testament to its success, as it isolates the viewer in spite of its inanity. The world around you is taken away, and the subsequent feeling of isolation left me unsettled and vulnerable. The Blair Witch isn't hiding in your closet, but the fractured feeling she imparts could make the dark a scary place for nights on end.

The recent wave of Asian horror has attempted to bridge the gap to some degree, but the spine-tingling tones and jaw-dropping gore of films like Suicide Club and A Tale of Two Sisters are lost amidst plots that pioneer new realms of absurdity. But at least they're trying. On these shores, the uber-convenient jump scare is becoming so lucrative a gimmick that it might soon be too appealing for other genres to ignore, as it's the perfect way to stretch a five-minute pitch into a ninety-minute vacuum. Maybe Brokeback Mountain would have made more money if Ennis had burst into Jack's tent rather than inside of it. Or maybe, as that film's success suggests, the movies are the safest venue for some to explore their fears, and they're not doing us any favors by letting us drop our guard. What Herrmann and Hitchcock did so effectively has been deflated by the lazy and the opportunistic. Now, when we need to be more intimate with our fears than ever before, our scary movies should screen in Eichmann's room.

David Ehrlich is a Columbia College junior majoring in film studies.