Scary And Smart

By RICHARD CORLISS

The scariest part of a horror film often is waiting for it to start. You hear the premise (The Sixth Sense's "I see dead people") or see the trailer (a ghostly image on a TV screen for The Ring), and your palms sweat. Standing in line, you glance around to see if anyone else has that anguished look. By the time the film begins, you're a nervous wreck. What movie could match your nightmare of anticipation?

For two decades, horror movies have been R-rated snuff cartoons with severed limbs and buckets of blood. The Freddy and Jason films and the Chainsaw Massacres appeal to the connoisseurs of special-effects gore. Every item is laid out for you to see, like the carcasses in a butcher's window.

But there's another kind of horror, a subtler, more seductive and lingering kind. "Whether it's Polanski's Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby or Kubrick's The Shining," says former Fox studio boss Bill Mechanic, "some of the best horror movies had a certain elegance to them." These films tell you that what you don't know or notice can hurt you. They are to the gore fests as romantic dramas are to porn. They are about mood, atmosphere, the notion that death is everywhere and inevitable.

Gross-out horror movies are essentially facetious; the more artful films are dread serious. "For me," says M. Night Shyamalan, who revived the ghost-story trend with The Sixth Sense in 1999, "the challenge is taking a B-movie subject like ghosts or aliens or monsters in the woods and treating it with absolute respect and sincerity." And at their heart, they have an all-too-human sadness. "There may be a bit more acceptance of horror because of what's going on in the world today," says George Romero, director of the classic Night of the Living Dead. "When people feel threatened, they either go to pure entertainment or to something that might strike a chord with the fears they have in real life."

The trick of dread movies is to take ordinary events and invest them with the unbeatable combination of must-see and can't-bear-to-look. Go on, take a stroll in the woods (in Shyamalan's The Village) when you've been told that monsters lurk there. Or a dip in the ocean (in the low-budget thriller Open Water) when you're left stranded as shark bait. Try to wash out that feeling of dread by shampooing your hair (in the Japanese spookathon Ju-on: The Grudge). You begin to rub in the shampoo--and for a moment you feel a third hand, corpse cold, massaging your scalp.

Just now, grown-up horror is frightfully chic. The Village, which Shyamalan describes as "a Grimm fairy tale--Little Red Riding Hood, but an adult, dark version of it," creeps into theaters this week, followed by Open Water. Ju-on has opened in New York City and Los Angeles and spreads to a dozen cities next month. Soon we'll see an assault of Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror films. The Ring 2, a sequel to the 2002 Naomi Watts thriller that grossed $230 million worldwide, is being directed by Hideo Nakata, who helmed the original Japanese film version. A remake of Nakata's Dark Water, about a woman and her daughter drowning in sorrow and fear, will star Jennifer Connelly; Mechanic is the producer, and Walter Salles (Central Station) is the director. And Ju-on, Japan's top fright franchise (with four episodes) since The Ring, gets its Hollywood remake in October, with the original films' auteur, Takashi Shimizu, calling the shots and Sarah Michelle Gellar starring for producer Sam (Spider-Man) Raimi.

"Psychological or atmospheric horror is what's attracting audiences these days," says Roy Lee, the Korean American who sold The Ring and Ju-on to Hollywood. It attracts producers too, since atmospherics cost less than computer legerdemain. But you don't have to be Japanese to scare people smartly. You need only a potent idea and $200,000. That was the budget for Open Water, based on the true story of an American couple who were left behind on Australia's Great Barrier Reef by a scuba boat.

In the movie version, Daniel (Daniel Travis) and Susan (Blanchard Ryan) are on a Bahamas holiday when their dive boat leaves without them. A day and night in open water bring out all manner of monsters, not just sharks. And all manner of fears. As Susan says of the lurking creatures, "I don't know what's worse: seeing them or not seeing them." Just knowing the unknown may be near is dread enough.

"We absolutely did not set out to make a shark movie," says writer-director Chris Kentis, who shot the film with his wife, producer Laura Lau. "And we didn't set out to make a horror film." But it couldn't have been fun for the two leads. Travis and Ryan had to spend two days dangling in water surrounded by dozens of gray reef and bull sharks (and a few shark experts, who threw chunks of bloody tuna to the sharks to keep them nearby but not hungry). The mix of emotional intimacy and shark verite in this well-crafted indie effort makes for 80 minutes of aqua anguish.

"You have to credit M. Night Shyamalan for bringing horror back to the Hollywood mainstream," says Walter F. Parkes, the DreamWorks exec who produced the U.S. Ring movies and has optioned the Korean doomed-family epic The Tale of Two Sisters. "The Sixth Sense was beautifully shot, well written, with a mature approach to the genre." It also grossed $294 million at the North American box office. That number will scare up a lot of converts.

Shyamalan's latest exercise in mystery is set in a village as remote, quaint and full of foreboding as the Hobbits' Shire. The elders warn their young not to go into the woods, for there monsters dwell. For years a tense equilibrium has obtained; neither group invades the other's terrain. Suddenly there are raids and animal mutilations by the unseen creatures. Fear grips the village, but two of the young--Lucius (Joaquin Phoenix) and his blind, beloved Ivy (Bryce Dallas Howard)--are bold and pure enough to confront the demons.

After The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, Shyamalan is practically a scientist of horror. "All the decisions are made in honor of the God of Tension," he says. "Raising the tension over and over and over and never letting you up." That means direction and misdirection worthy of Hitchcock. "Where you would normally cut, I don't cut, so now you're not sure of the rhythm of the movie, which makes you feel uneasy. Or the camera is moving just six inches over the course of three minutes--you're not sure why because you're not aware, but you're feeling somehow more tense. You can see the outline of a path that you know you are supposed to walk because you've walked it so many times. But you're getting lost in the woods."

The film's payoff raises more questions than it answers, which may be Shyamalan's intent in this political parable of fear. When the kids are let in on the fairy tale's secret, they are told, "Do your very best not to scream." That's a rule viewers of The Village need not obey. --Reported by Desa Philadelphia and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Desa Philadelphia and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles