Earned Endings and Weak Plots

Dracula, Nosferatu, Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, Bride of Frankenstein, and The Haunting, while considered by some to be significant horror films, are horrifying to me as an English student. Since writing stories in elementary school and now as a future Language Arts teacher, I can attest that I am more horrified by the lack of Aristotelian plotline. Remember in grade school being given that plotline to help plan the story?

From my viewing of each of these films, I have yet to see a traditional Aristotelian plot. From a future teacher's perspective, the plots of these films thus far has been a nightmare! The Introduction of the movie seems to go on forever or give a lot of irrelevant information and the rest of the movie is rising action. The climax comes near the end of the movie with little or no falling action or resolution.

Now, I understand that a lot of the suspense and fright of these movies comes from not knowing exactly how the stories wind up. A feeling of unknowing is distressing for many because they will wonder for some time after the movie is over "Was she crazy or was she really possessed? Was the house really haunted or were all the people insane? Who is the monster in the movie?" and so on. This is a good scare tactic, one that many of these movies use to up the suspense factor of a movie.

However, we have studied both of the most popular horror movie plot types: Complex Discovery Plots and Overreacher Plots. The Complex Discovery Plot has four parts -

1) Onset - where we see evidence of the monster, or the actual monster,

2) Discovery - where someone discovers that some "thing" is causing the problems,

3) Confirmation - the discoverer has to prove to everyone else that the monster exists, and

4) Confrontation - where the people confront the monster and a scuffle takes place, ultimately leading to one side winning.

The Overreacher Plot also has four parts -

1) Preparation - where we see the scientist setting up and learn of the experiment,

2) Experiment - we see the experiment actually happening

3) Experiment Goes Bad - obviously, something goes wrong with the experiment and a monster is created

4) Confrontation - the created monster is confronted, often by the scientist who made him.

Neither of these two popular horror plot types includes much of a resolution. This is fine, this is not my argument. My argument is that thus far, these movies have lacked a suspenseful, "horrifying," scary rising action. Then the climax is like "BAM!" from out of nowhere and then the movie is over. This is not how it should be; these are not good plotlines. So many of these movies could be so much better, so much scarier, if the rising action were focused on more instead of introducing the characters with random details and stories about the pasts of the characters.

In "I Walked With a Zombie," there were three scenes that I can remember that would qualify as appropriate rising action conflicts (the scene of the two women in the tower, the woman and man at the cafe with the singer, and the voodoo ritual scene). These scenes piqued our interest in the story and might have even caused a feeling of horror. Unfortunately, these scenes were weakly connected with scenes that quickly allowed our feelings of horror to disintegrate.

In my opinion, the worst film so far has been "Bride of Frankenstein." This could be due to the fact that I have read the novel and did not see "Frankenstein" before watching "Bride." Whatever the reason, the climatic ending of the monster killing everyone when his bride did not love him was completely "un-earned." In other words, the rising action did not quite fit the climax and ending. I felt cheated, because I sat and watched the whole movie and saw how Frankenstein was more just lonely and was getting to be more civilized and refined. To me, that was the major conflict, not the creation of a bride. (Though a bride could have been the answer to the conflict, except the creator was not trying to solve that problem.) Then when the bride was alive, I more just felt sorry for Frankenstein's monster that he was so hopeful that he wouldn't be alone anymore and his supposed bride was disgusted by him.

After watching The Haunting today, I have hope for the next movies that we watch. While The Haunting was also long on telling and introductions and backgrounds, it was better than the films from last week. I definitely felt some "art-horror" while watching this movie. I am more frightened by suspense and sudden-ness, but this movie had plenty of that in addition to inducing some fear of the unknown and The Fantastic. I am hoping that in the films to come I will be able to feel horrified by the events, instead of cringing at the weak plotlines.