Scarier than ever Classic horror films speak to today's big questions
Now that a human embryo has been cloned, the time has come to go back to those old, old horror movies and see they weren't joking around.
Far from camp, films such as "Frankenstein" (1931) dealt with unsettling moral issues -- the eerie metaphysical questions that spring up every time science encroaches on God's territory, assuming powers once thought to be strictly divine.
After the announcement last month that Advanced Cell Technology of Worcester, Mass., had experimented with cloned human embryos, President Bush called the experiments illegal. News commentators asked, "What if they saved Hitler's brain?" -- or something like that. On Fox News, one anchorman raised the specter of cloning Osama bin Laden. Uh-oh, look out in 40 years.
The media presented a variety of objections to cloning, practical and moral.
Yet the real concern, the thing that gets under our skin, was left unspoken. After all, the worry is not what cloning might cause but what it might imply--about life and the universe. If a human life can be cloned in a laboratory, what does that say about our lives?
Filmmakers were thinking about precisely these things in the early '30s. Coming out of a social revolution in the first decades of the 20th century, artists were re-examining everything -- social behavior, moral practices, religious faith. Horror movies, which had always been reassuring -- showing innocence and beauty ultimately triumphing over monsters -- suddenly got truly eerie.
In "Dracula" (1931), Bela Lugosi, unlike the more sentimental fiends played in silent film by Lon Chaney, had no trouble dominating beauty and innocence. It was only a stake through the heart that he couldn't handle. But Dracula backed off when he saw a cross, implying there was some kind of order at the heart of things.
"Frankenstein" was more bleak. The monster comes into the world hideous. (You'd think, if you were going to bring a person to life, at least give him passable looks.) He is doomed to an unhappy, solitary existence and virtually predestined for annihilation.
What makes Boris Karloff's performance so touching is that the monster seems to have an inkling that he should be annihilated. In a wordless way, he seems to have an idea that he's without a soul.
There's a central existential question raised by "Frankenstein," and it's a big one. It's the same question hovering eerily in the air above the cloning debate. If scientists create life in a laboratory, is it fully and completely life? And who puts the life there? Do the scientists create life or just assemble the pieces?
In "Frankenstein," the monster either has a soul or he doesn't. If he does, when did he acquire one? Perhaps when the lightning struck. On the other hand, if he's soulless and yet sentient and has feelings, then we have truly entered a terrifying land: one in which scientists can whip up life in a laboratory but not life with any divine significance.
The implications of "Frankenstein" are even more unsettling. Once we accept that it's possible for the monster to be alive and yet soulless, we have to wonder: Maybe this is what life is. Maybe the notion that life has a spiritual component is just a lie we tell ourselves to keep from going insane -- a lie that the monster, by his very presence, threatens to expose. Is it any wonder, then, that the townspeople all come out @break to burn him alive?
It's the same fear that brings the townspeople into the streets that makes us recoil at cloning. If life is nothing but a mechanistic concoction, some kind of drum-machine dance number in the midst of a moral and spiritual void, well, that's not good news. And anything that makes that seem more possible is not welcome information.
Censors didn't welcome "Frankenstein" and tried to stop it in 1931, but they didn't yet have the power. They also tried to suppress "The Island of Lost Souls" (1932), a Charles Laughton picture that was even more metaphysically grim.
Based on the H.G. Wells story "The Island of Dr. Moreau," the picture starred Laughton as a demented scientist making evolutionary experiments on a remote island. He takes animals through painful graftings and treatments, turning them into quasi-human beings. There are whole packs of them. To keep them under control, he gives them a makeshift religion, consisting of laws instructing them to walk on two legs and never shed blood. On the island, Moreau is a god.
Only the creatures' misplaced faith in the importance of the law -- their belief not only in the doctor's power but his divine virtue -- prevents them from turning into savages. We know the truth, of course, that Moreau is a maniac and his laws are just guidelines, without moral value. But before we can feel smug about the creatures' plight, we recognize the question the movie is raising: How do we know we're not as bad off as they are?
Horror filmmakers of the early sound period understood the terrifying consequences and implications of scientific investigation. The world was moving rapidly. It still is. Imagine going back in time to 1901 and telling people about the terrible world event that would happen on live television in 100 years' time. Imagine the questions: What's a skyscraper? What's a jet plane? What's live television? Now imagine 100 years from now.
The horror films of seven decades ago recoiled at the thought that science might make life unbearable -- and, at the same time, rob people of the comforts of spiritual faith. A cruel combination. Seventy years later, that notion and those movies are still scary.
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