Your senses are much too blunt!

What is terror, exactly?  This is an important question considering horror cinema since it is that very quality that a given thriller reaches for to scare and captivate its audience.  But in recent years, filmmakers seem to have lost the essential understanding of what it is that creates terror in the human mind.  Instead of really thinking the problem through, modern screenwriters on a horror picture will simply go for plain gore, as excessively bloody as the special effects budget will allow, and utterly fail to show an iota of imagination to try to come up with an ever more shocking spectacle than the last dozen gorefests masquerading as "horror" movies.

Such filmmakers are very much like the character of Alfredo in Roger Corman's 1964 horror/philosophical masterpiece, The Masque Of The Red Death.  In a film that turned upon generating its horror through a rising degree of tension to create unease, one of its most brilliant scenes highlights this very quality as Prospero contemptuously dismisses Alfredo's sensibilities as far too blunt to appreciate what terror is prior to giving a true explanation and demonstration of the source of fear in the human mind.  As the scene unfolds, the crowd of sycophants who have gathered at Prospero's castle are bidden to silence as he soliloquizes, with only the sound of a clock ticking away in the background:

"Silence!  Listen.  Is it to awaken and hear the passing of time?  Or is it the failing beat of your own heart?  Or the footsteps of someone who, just a moment before, was in your room?  But let us not dwell on terror.  The knowledge of terror is vouchsafed only to the precious few."

At that very moment, the clock strikes the hour, causing one of the women in the castle to flinch with fear at the sudden shock, to the amusement of Prospero who had created that fear simply with the sound of his own voice, gradually ratcheting up the tension level during his exposition.   The moment is perfect, since Price here lulls the audience, as Prospero lulled his, into a stupefied fascination much like the cobra hypnotizing a bird before it strikes.  This is perfectly in keeping with the character who, as has been outlined in this blog's previous examination of this singular movie, is a brainwasher, using a number of psychological techniques to disrupt and then recondition the minds of his victims. The movie, likewise, takes the psychological approach to creating horror in the minds of the audience.  And when one of the very few moments of gore in the entire picture does occur when Prospero's wife Juliana is ravaged and killed by his hunting falcon, it achieves maximum impact upon the viewer after having been lulled into complacency, much like both Juliana and Francesca, by the intellectual manipulations of Prospero as they watched.  Which is why this movie remains the classic it is.

Sadly, such subtle manipulation of the audience is beyond today's gorefest schlockmeisters, who believe that horror equals lots of blood and screaming.  To any of those directors, Prospero would have the perfect put-down: "What do you know of terror?  Your senses are much too blunt!"