By Keri O’Shea
Since the widespread colourisation of film replaced black and white as the go-to format for popular cinema, horror movies have frequently led the charge when it comes to the most creative use of colour palletes, special FX and lighting. It’s something of a myth, a myth which persists, that horror always takes place in the shadows; sure, we’ve always had great examples of less-as-more giving us good films, but many of the most memorable horrors have been choc-full of different gaudy hues – elaborate make-up rendered in unnatural detail, hosts of garish grotesques and lashings of Kensington gore. Just consider Roger Corman’s Masque of the Red Death – the whole spectrum comes into play, with fantastic effects.
However, as fascinating as the rise and rise of technicolour terrors is (and this may well be a subject for another time), I’d like to set the clock to 1980 – the beginning of the decade where I grew up, and the period of time when so many of my favourite lurid horrors took on a look all of their own. We can start with one of the most game-changing visual experiences to ever grace our screens, and to my mind, the film which set the bar for a new, popular pallete. I’m talking of course about Dario Argento’s Inferno. Although other films of this year made some good use of the new colour scheme, such as The Boogeyman with its brightly-coloured lighting in key scenes, to me it is Inferno which takes the prize for utterly drenching its characters in certain bright colours – blue and pink, primarily. These colours began to take on a fun, recognisable significance of their own, with others adding to the popular range before long; Inferno, with its beautiful cinematography and a director who had steadily built a reputation for his formidable use of aesthetics, was the start of the new wave.
Argento was, by the time 1980 came around, no stranger to the importance of colour, and his stand-out work, Suspiria (1977) looks almost painterly: key scenes are flooded with washes of coloured light, and the end result is a pretty overwhelming sensory experience. However, in terms of style, Suspiria was all about the primary colours – red, in particular, being used to imbue the interiors of the dance academy and keying in to all the associated properties of alarm, danger, even blood. Suspiria is a horror film of the 1970s, and it looks in every way the part. Argento carried on with the stylistic choice to flood his horror with colour in Inferno, but here he changes the colours he uses, heralding something new in the process.
Moving away from the use of primary colours (with the exception of the rather royal blue lighting used), the new colours-for-strangeness were modern and different to what had come before, perhaps also reflecting the fashions of the day: bright colours were widespread and trendy at this time, after all. Developing technologies also allowed more scope for adding neon-coloured SFX to films in post-production, too, further widening the array of possibilities – but a select set of horror films and directors really turned this potential to particular effects – using these modern, bright, unnatural hues to tie in with their fantastical plots, even becoming part and parcel of the strange goings-on.
In Re Animator (1985), Stuart Gordon’s madcap, grisly spin on the HP Lovecraft short story Herbert West: Re-animator, we see West (genre film god Jeffrey Combs) working on a serum which will reanimate (natch) dead flesh – with grotesque, but hilarious consequences. West’s ‘re-agent’ – capable of overthrowing the natural order by conquering death – is emblematic of bad science, and all of the fears and anxieties people have about science refracted into one blackly comedic substance. It is as such an unnatural, luminous green. Luminous green as code for ‘sinister substance’ has endured, too: as recently as 2007, more than twenty years after the re-agent, the zombie movie with a twist Wasting Away colourised its own sinister substance the same bright colour – the only colour, as most of the scenes are entirely black and white.
‘Bad science’ on screen, as seen throughout the rest of the horror decade, has seen some other notable uses of madcap colour – and one of my absolute favourites is also a horror-comedy spin on Lovecraft, from the same director as Re Animator, no less. This time, though, the film is From Beyond, and Gordon represents the nefarious experiments of Dr. Edward Pretorius, and his inter-dimensional gateway machine the Resonator, with a palate of shockingly bright pinks and blues. The colours operate as a rather eye-catching portent of doom: right before bad things are due to happen, you get your senses hit with waves of vivid, incongruous colour.
(The apex of madcap horror-science though, for me, probably occurs right at the turn of the decade with Frank Henenlotter’s touching tale of boy meets girl, boy accidentally dismembers girl with lawnmower, boy reconstructs girl with an assortment of hooker body parts after blowing a whole host of them up with explosive crack. Yep, Frankenhooker (1990) comes across as a glorious hurrah for a decade of demented experiments: the reanimation scene here, which is an update of a horror staple seen in numerous Frankenstein movies, uses an eye-popping range of colours, neatly combining our luminous pinks, greens and blues into one scene.)
Going back to the 80s, though, we can see these pinks, greens and blues being put to other uses, exploring different aspects of cinematic strangeness. Richard Wenks’ oh-so 80s Vamp (1986) has another way of hurling modern society into disarray – this time, through the exploration of the supernatural, where ultra-old meets very-new. Our protagonists are your standard Frat boys out on a pledge (and for some this might be horror enough) but when they find themselves in the After Dark Club on the look-out for a stripper, it turns out that the staff there are none other than bloodsucking vampires, with their star girl, Katrina (Grace Jones) the head of the group. Her bizarre key scene – pure 80s, partly erotic and partly unsettling – defines the look of this film perfectly, placing an ancient being smack-bang up to date in terms of the aesthetics put in place, and her transformation scenes are bathed in the same colours too, conflating her performance with her predatory nature. Jones looks striking enough under her own steam, and so here she looks pretty remarkable.
Whilst you could look for, and find, a bit of social critique in Vamp if you saw fit (certainly the self-assurance of some self-satisfied frat kids takes a hell of a knock), there’s definitely more to be had in a film of the following year – one which is equally viewed through an array of vivid shades. Jim Muro’s Street Trash (1987) looks at the effects of a noxious substance which finds its way into the human food chain – well, into low-grade alcohol actually, where it has a horrific effect on a group of people who already have it bad enough, being down-and-outs on the streets of New York. A new drink – Viper – hits the shelves, and it has a horrible, albeit incredibly lurid, effect on the people who drink it. Right there, on the streets of one of the world’s most iconic cities, these people literally dissolve into a dew – or else, a torrent of blues, greens and pinks, an absolute explosion of the spectrum and a grisly death…
As a cartoonish horror movie, Street Trash isn’t exactly meant to be a political statement, but along the way you can’t help but see it as a spit in the face of the American Dream, particularly in its incredibly mercenary 80s phase. (The same could be said of C.H.U.D. made a few years before, which, although rather less garish, also spins its narrative around the plight of the urban homeless, here extending the demonisation of the homeless all the way to their literal transformation into monsters.)
The last film I’d like to talk about here is another Henenlotter; this is a director who liked to push the envelope, and found a host of ways to do this on screen; in this movie, psychoactives and addiction are given the Henenlotter treatment, all via a little parasitic critter known as an Aylmer (something which prompts the Aylmer’s unwitting host, Brian, to exclaim “Elmer? You fucking called it Elmer?”) An absurd and fantastic genre film, Brain Damage (1988) is many things – monster movie, trip movie, camp gore fest and body horror. As Brian is parasitised by the crafty (and tuneful) Aylmer, which has escaped from a nearby household after years of being kept weak by a lacklustre diet, he finds that he’s getting a hefty dose of a powerful psychoactive, which makes him see and experience the world in psychedelic glory (even a car-lot can become a carnival on this stuff). Only thing is, the creature wants a bellyful of human brains in exchange, and when Brian refuses to help him get them, he withholds his narcotic ‘juice’ – sending poor Brian into hideous withdrawals. The whole escapade is trippy throughout, looking incomparably 80s, and using our pet palate to variously represent Brian’s trips, and his eventual comeuppance. It’s still an oddly eerie film to this day, both because and despite the fact that it is so firmly of its time.
And all of these films are of their time, aren’t they? Oh, of course lurid lighting and colour never went away (*cough* Gasper Noe *cough*) but skip forward to the current day, and the norm is something far, far more washed out; think of the new wave of French horrors and you think of their drained, blue-filtered aesthetic; think of the ongoing onslaught of ‘found footage’ horror and you’re lucky to get much in the way of polished cinematography at all, let alone a color palate to play with. That said, this isn’t true of the glut of faux grindhouse films we’ve seen of late; in emulating films which came before, movies like Hobo with a Shotgun picked up on a lot of the same colour usage and styles, making for fun play with a distinctive palate whilst showing that there’s a taste for this stuff out there still. The film itself ain’t perfect, but it was so good to see that look again. I suppose, for me, nostalgia makes all of this feel like home – and as much as I love modern horror, I do love the fact that these bold, eye-catching shades are finding their way to screens again. We don’t always want realism, after all – sometimes, we want a bit of sorcery, a bit of nature gone awry or a healthy dose of science-paranoia. It’s part and parcel of the magic of horror…