Since I just finished watching 'Home', this is probably the time to talk about nightmare fuel, which The X-Files contains rather a lot of.
As I mentioned in my review of 'Home', I watched that episode during the day. That doesn't stop images of it from burrowing their way into my head when I'm awake, though. It's hard to get that out of my head!
But even not taking into account the gruesomeness of 'Home' or even any of the other most gruesome episodes, there's more to nightmare fuel than just blood and violence.
'Squeeze' and 'Tooms', for example, are not particularly gory, but may actually be far scarier than 'Home'. I don't know why I reacted so strongly to 'Home' but not to those. I guess because those were more psychological thrillers than pure slasher stories. 'Home' had elements of both - I'm already fairly constantly worried that I've left my doors unlocked, and an episode like 'Home' certainly did nothing to help me get past that worry, with its frequent focus on the fact that no one in the town of Home ever locked their doors, because for the most part, they felt they didn't have to.
So in watching the two Tooms episodes, there's a definite fear of someone invading my space, but so far anyway, the worry they create has been very superficial and has yet to enter my subconscious. (Watch, it'll come up tonight after I write this. Because my brain hates me.)
Oddly, I never even considered 'War of the Coprophages' very nightmare inducing - I already have occasional nightmares about bugs and infestations, so I guess there wasn't much this episode could show me that wasn't already somewhere in my head. Plus, it was so over the top it was hard to take the cockroaches very seriously. A lot of times when there are creatures involved, it's the made up ones that are harder for me to deal with. Like the Flukeman in 'The Host' or the insects in 'F. Emasculata'. Those, and their effects, respectively, were far more horrifying than a bunch of cockroaches.
'Ice' was similarly disturbing to me, with its brain affecting worm, but I think the winner in the creature department is the glow-in-the-dark bugs from 'Darkness Falls'. Not only were they creepy in themselves, but the way they trapped and killed their victims was more than a little terrifying. I'm pretty sure we decided to watch a palate cleansing episode after that one, and fortunately, my Apple TV somehow advanced the selection past 'Tooms' and we watched 'Born Again' next, which wasn't particularly good, but also wasn't particularly scary. I think if we'd watched in the correct order, we would have had to stay up to watch 'Born Again' anyway.
And I know I've talked a bit about paranoia before, and how some of the episodes, like 'Blood' and 'Wetwired' and 'Ascension' and 'One Breath' are incredible because they really put you in the frame of mind of the characters, and you're not sure what's coming around the corner, or who you can even trust. In some ways, those are far scarier than the bloodiest, most gruesome episode could possibly be.
It's not just the idea that other people can be manipulated into believing you're their enemy, but what if you're the one being manipulated? In other words, what if The Matrix is real? What if our entire lives are simulations and we're just bodies in pods somewhere?
I think that's far more worrying than the idea that there's someone who can contort his body to the point of being able to enter a house through the air conditioning system or mail slot. (Of course, he's just a computer simulation, too, so maybe accepting The Matrix would be kind of a relief.)
There's a lot of horror in this show, and when it's well done, it works to build the tension. When it doesn't work ('Space', '2Shy', for example) it's a mix of camp and unintended horror. A bad monster can be far more unnerving than a well-done one.
Given how infamous 'Home' was, I'm hoping it's the worst offender, at least for a while. I think sensibilities probably changed a bit as the show progressed, which might open it up to more nightmare fuel.
Not that that would stop me from watching it.
Physical horror really doesn't bother me. It's too amateurish to me, although the Rock DJ music video traumatized me as a young child.
ReplyDeletePsychological horror is what really gets me. Have you ever seen the Teen Titans episode "Haunted"? Robin is tormented by a hallucination of his dead nemesis, Slade. He even ends up getting physically beaten up in the hallucinated fights, and the Titans are so worried about him they lock him to his bed. And then the hallucination of Slade comes and beats him up more, and he is completely unable to defend himself. Slade says, "I am the thing that keeps you up at night. The evil that haunts every dark corner of your mind." And Robin eventually realizes that this means he can only see Slade in the dark. So he turns the lights on and Slade disappears.
This had me terrified to go to bed without a light on in the hall or the bathroom for years.
But I don't like when someone is clearly trying to scare me, like the ending of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and when Steven Moffat pulls his all out to give us the creeps with gas-mask-faced children that say "Are you my mummy?" I resist manipulation strongly.