The only thing missing was a dead phone line. Otherwise Gothika, the new Halle Berry film, was horror-by-numbers, and although it made for an unsettling drive home just now I doubt that it will leave any long term damage, like say the more inventive, The Exorcist and The Shining, which just by mention has me looking over my shoulder.
It relied almost exclusively on formulaic technique: darkness and lightning; a soundtrack of amplified sound effects and stabbing strings; and a script that actually included the line, "But that's impossible. She died four years ago..." Watching Gothika was like being on one of those fairground ghost trains, with horrors leaping at the sides of the carriage, crawling slowly along the dark track and towards the man in the black cloak and Scream mask that fondles your hair. Like the fairground attraction that unfolds from a truck, Gothika had a sort of short-lived shock value to it and a shoddy construction that adds a second layer of fear.
Its construction is what is always most frightening about horror films, and that is how we, the audience, is cast. Our participation in Gothika was so apparent to deserve billing beside co-stars Penelope Cruz and Robert Downy, Jr. Because when the camera was stalking the heroine around the women’s prison, in her car, through her house, it was clear that we were not, like Berry, the victim, we were the perpetrator; we were not to sympathise, we were to kill. And it is always that perverse pursuit of the female body in horror films, so explicit in Gothika, that scares me.
But that is not to say that it is a bad film. The plot might make no sense, the script may be preposterous (“I’m not deluded, Pete – I'm possessed!”), and it won’t leave you pensive or a changed person, but like the ghost train Gothika is involving, scary and absorbing for precisely its running time. It is a by-the-numbers horror film. And a very good one, at that. But there is no accounting for taste.
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