As we gear up for another spring full of rampaging monsters and psychopathic serial killers, Desson Thompson in the Washington Post wonders if something elemental to the whole concept of the horror movie isn't missing: the victim.
After the usual handwringing over the 'torture porn' generation, the artist formerly known as Howe goes on to make some pretty compelling points: the horror films of today — even the stylized, artsy ones influenced by or coming from the J-horror movement — tend to focus entirely on the means by which the victims are dispatched: intricate traps, complex schemes, gruesome tortures, gigantic monsters. Very little attention, on the other hand, is given to providing the audience with an identification figure: while in previous horror films we were at least able to identify with the person going through such terrifying treatment (as in Rosemary's Baby) or with the person doing the terrorizing (as in Psycho), the modern-day horror film has lost its focus, one way or another, on humanity and gives us precious little to care about beyond the novelty of learning how the next victim will snuff it. "When we think of the horror classics", says Thomson, "we don't recall the gruesome acts so much as the people who weathered them. Think of Rosemary Woodhouse, the determined mother in Rosemary's Baby, who faces the prospect her baby has been fathered by the Devil. Remember Regan MacNeil, the sweet pre-teen of The Exorcist, whose satanic transformation forces heroics from two soft-spoken priests. Even Jack Torrance, the demented murderer at the heart of The Shining, affects us because he's a husband and father gone horribly awry, not some abstract ax wielder."
Providing a much-needed antidote for this alienating inhumanity in the horror genre, he claims, are a new wave of Spanish horror directors, presaged by Guillermo del Toro in the disturbing Pan's Labyrinth and followed up by two of his proteges, director Juan Antonio Bayona and screenwriter Sergio G. Sanchez, whose dark, moody The Orphanage is enjoying limited release in the U.S. They both cite the Spanish cultural heritage of the Day of the Dead (which is "not something that you look upon as horrifying or sad or terrible but as a way to conciliate with death; you bring death home instead of trying not to think about it", according to Sanchez) and the country's all-too-recent emergence from the shadows of fascism as reasons why this brand of non-gory, emotionally powerful, human-centered horror is hitting home with their audiences.
Whether or not The Orphanage will trigger a string of "S-horror" hits in the U.S., they're doing quite well at home; the movie was last year's highest-grossing film in Spain, outstripping even the blockbuster foreign imports like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.