The Last House on the Left

Because I go to so many movies at the same theaters, and because I prefer to get to them with plenty of time to spare, I inevitably wind up sitting through many of the same pre-movie advertisements over and over.

At the Entertainment Cinemas in Leominster, they rotate the slides from EOnline that feature "Do you know?" factoids about Hollywood stars.

Why yes, I do happen to know that Colin Farrel was once a line dancer in Ireland.

This afternoon as I was waiting for Last House on the Left in a nearly empty auditorium, I saw the now-familiar one quoting Reese Witherspoon, along the lines of: "Whenever something is frightening to me, I always think I should go ahead and do it."

"O.K., Reese," I said. "I'll take that to heart."

I wasn't really in the mood for a horror movie this afternoon. It was such a nice day. It seemed like a shame to spend the last few daylight hours cooped inside for two hours of tension and screaming. But the mission goes on. I didn't want to fall behind schedule in my movie-watching.

I've gone on record as saying that the American horror genre is dead. As I watched the factoids scroll, I meditated on why this was so, in a deep way. I think it is mainly because the movies that are supposedly in the horror genre no longer have any capacity to generate actual horror.

Sure, they can shock, frighten, and disgust us. But do they really cause the emotion of horror? To me, horror is something behind extreme fright. It is an existential condition in which one senses that the rules of goodness, truth, and even reality as one knows them have been violated, and that they might not ever be regained in the sense that one has known them.

True horror in a movie takes you to a place where you feel very, very far from home, where you glimpse a moral universe beyond your previous ability to process it. Done right, it allows you to see the arbitrariness or fragility of the normal world as you have previously perceived it. It is, as least fleetingly, very uncomfortable. If it isn't, it is not true horror.

And that's exactly what I don't think American horror movies do anymore. They don't take us to places beyond the rules of normality as we have known them, and force us to glimpse our little toy world from the outside as we gasp for oxygen to be let back inside the capsule. Instead they take us to well-worn and ironically "comfortable" places of fright and shock---what one might call "the titillation of fear." Horror has been reduced to the adrenal rush of a thrill ride.

Why they do that, well that's another story.

Anyway, given that, I indeed had a few hopes for today's matinee. Wes Craven produced, but did not direct, this remake of his earliest film, from 1972. It's an interesting project, and one that says a lot about the evolution of American cinema.

If you know the original, you know that it is an underground classic that is one of the most shockingly violent American movies ever made. It is not easy to watch, even if you've seen other horror movies.

Simply put, there is no way that the original could be remade today without many modifications. It simply could not be shown in theaters. Because of this, one can argue that this project differs from the recent remakes of Friday the 13th and My Bloody Valentine, in that whereas the remakes of the latter two movies seemed completely gratuitous, a form of box-office plundering, the remake of Craven's movie actually has a rationale: namely to provide a version that is viewable by today's audiences.

That means nothing to horror afficionados who liked the original, of course. This movie isn't for them. For example, don't make mistake of bringing up the 2006 remake of Craven's The Hills Have Eyes to Thor unless you're willing to discuss how it compares to the original.

In the case of The Last House on the Left, the story is nearly the same, although with some changes that make it more up-to-date. For example, in 1972 it was believable for the villains to pose as traveling salesmen in order to gain entrance to the house, but this is unfeasible in 2009. A different premise for their stay overnight in the secluded homestead was necessary, and even then they were believably exiled to a guest cottage.

Some of the changes serve to improve the narrative as a whole. You can see that Craven has learned how to tell a more fine-grained narrative in the last 37 years.

It's still a morality tale about two teenage girls who get into trouble when they go off to buy marijuana from a stranger, but there is some added depth to the characters that substitutes for much of the unceasing violence.

Among other things, we get a little bit of back story about both the good guys and the bad guys that is used to heighten the tension, and to draw out the introduction. The bad guy's teenage son gets a character upgrade and plays a more nuanced role this time around, making him a full-blooded character.

The villains are actually played as more restrained, less prone to Manson Family-style psychotic violence until specifically provoked. Contrary to what you'd think, this actually heightens the tension, but we almost see the rational humanity coming through at times.

The violence is compacted down into a few discrete but extremely graphic episodes. The rape scene is one that will indeed be horrifying to any woman in the audience, and was superbly acted by Sara Paxton. In fact, the acting was extremely good all around.

In narrative terms, one of the things I enjoyed while watching this movie was the quiet set up when the Collingwood family arrives at their house by the lake. As we follow the family around the grounds, we get introduced to the elements of the household, including the boathouse.

In a good horror movie, what is happening here is a "setting the stage" for action that will later on, in completely different (and more dire) circumstances. I always have fun, in situations like this, making mental notes while guessing what various locations will be used for, when they reappear. Sometimes I'm disappointed by the lack of "set up, pay off," but not in this case. The stage was set right.

After the movie was over, I indeed felt as if I had experienced enough horror to call this a horror movie. It was a light dose, however, like a quick puff on a reefer cigarette, just enough to get buzzed.