Fighting Invisible Monsters or The Scariness of That Which You Cannot Describe


I had a surprisingly hard time with this one. While it is easy to identify “dark matter” moments whenever happen upon them (hell since reading Sofer’s article, I feel I see them everywhere), it was hard for me to sit and think of one, especially one that related to Emily’s specific prompt. However, after following Emily’s lead a bit and narrowing my brainstorm to horror movies that I have seen, one particular example springs to mind. David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows is a horror movie that essentially cashes in on the inherent spookiness of dark matter. The premise is at once straightforward and confusing: “something” (a monster, a ghost, a curse? Who knows? Mitchell’s film provides no explanation) is killing teenagers in a small, American town. The curse is passed from one teen to another through sex. To avoid getting killed, a character must have sex with another character to pass the killing curse/ghost/being on to another person.
            In the movie, only the person being hunted can see what is hunting them (“it” takes the form of various people: men, women, children- some of them looking like people the victim knows, or something looking like victims of sexual assault, which is a whole other thing I’d need a separate post to dig into) but to everyone else they remain invisible. That means that this villain at once fits and breaks Sofer’s thesis that “invisible phenomena are the dark matter of theater.” The scary thing in It Follows it at once seen and unseen and it is a surprisingly effective tool. In one memorable shot, the victim, Jay, sits in her high school class. A window looking out over the grounds of the school frames her. There are students milling around but one figure stands out. An old man dressed in white clothes that no one else seems to see walks slowly and deliberately in what is an unmistakable straight line towards Jay as she sit, unaware in her classroom. At this point in the movie we know no one but Jay can see this “thing” but she has not noticed it yet. As I watched, my anxiety kept building and I wanted to scream for her to look up (classic horror movie reaction).
            The beginning of the movie is full of these moments and I remember sitting in the theatre thinking, “wow, this might actually be a great horror movie.” However, at the end of the movie the “dark matter” quality of the villain made things a little tricky to resolve. I don’t want to spoil anything but I’ll just say the ending is pretty unsatisfying (and not in the good way, at least in my opinion). After all, it’s hard to wrap up loose ends when the main focus of your film is indefinable.  
            Perhaps that is why Sofer is so explicit that “dark matter” is a theatrical convention. Movies make it too easy to make something dark matter and regular (?) matter all at once. As I mentioned above, the “it “ in It Follows is both seen and unseen and that convention serves up some seriously tense moments at times. I wonder if they would have been as successfully scary had the “it” remained completely invisible to us (the audience). It’s easy to imagine a few chilling scenes of Jay’s reactions to seeing something we cannot, but could you make an entire movie like that? I don’t know…
            As far as politics and morality go, It Follows seems to have a subtext that is pretty on the nose. These sexually active teens are passing a “curse” on to their sexual partners. If they knowingly pass it on, they are safe but they are condemning their partner to death. Sounds sort of like an STI metaphor to me…
            Of course there is also the side that if they chose not to pass it on, they will die. So ultimately it seems sex is bad. Or is it? A review of It Follows in The Atlantic points out that, “Sex means death, but it also can mean life.” (Actually the whole review is worth a read as writer Lenika Cruz analyzes what makes this movie scary and seems to be talking a lot about dark matter while doing so- though she doesn’t name it!) I’m not sure how I feel about it, whether I “dig” it or not. I think it’s an interesting twist on the traditional horror movie sex trope, but I’m also unclear as to what it’s saying. And those sexual-assault-victim-forms “it” takes? I’ll need to think on that for a minute…


Comments

  1. Mike D.March 2, 2018 at 10:14 AM

    I totally thought of this movie as well when writing my post. I think it's natural to make the leap to horror movies when talking about Dark Matter because the idea of "that which is unseen" is so much a part of the horror movie DNA. The other one that came to mind for me was the first half of THE SHINING. We never really see a ghost until midway through the movie. Up until then it's just this family in a hotel and the father is slowly be affected by...something. Nothing is seen, yet a presence is all around, pushing in on the family and drawing them in. You could even argue that the Danny's imaginary friend, "Tony", is Dark Matter, because he is never actually seen, he just speaks through Danny. My pushback on using Dark Matter in reference to horror movies, is that I can't actually think of one where the "evil" remains truly Dark Matter. (I also don't know why I continually capitalize Dark Matter, but that's for another day.) Anyway, you almost always see the alien, ghost, devil, madman, shark, thing, zombie...etc. Even in your example, IT FOLLOWS, there is almost the constant shift to the "infected" person's POV, and the sight of random strangers, usually old people if I remember right, following the protagonist is really creepy. But it plays on the idea that at least one person (plus the audience) can SEE what is following. Maybe we need a new term: Gray Matter--that which is mostly unseen except by the audience for purposes of scaring the crap out of us. I may have lost the thread of this comment...

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