The Nightmare of Drugs: From Slasher Tropes to Haunting Horrors
We all know the slasher tropes. The killer chases a gang of teens, with cliched character archetypes making their appearance: the jock, the cheerleader, the nerd. A couple will run off to have sex, a few of them might indulge in under-age drinking or drugs, and they are punished - brutally.
Everyone knows these things. The 'final girl' (another well established trope in loads of slashers) is the one that is pure, virginal and who 'just says no'.
Senator Palpatine says, Just Say No
So, if you do drugs in a slasher movie, you die. Simple premise. Slashers do sometimes boil down these complex ideas into really blunt points and that is what makes them effective. Halloween came out right around when the term 'stranger danger' started being thrown around. These early slasher films - the ones that people still know and love today - had their finger on the pulse when it came to heavy handed social observation.
So, then drugs are the enemy. Gaspar Noe's fantastic 2018 film Climax seems to have that opinion, even if the director says the movie is not meant to show us that. In the movie, a troupe of French dancers are rehearsing for a big show. We get a few little interviews with the dancers: introducing themselves, telling us about why they dance, why they're here. A few of them mention drugs in an offhand way ("I tried a line of coke once", giggles one of the dancers, bashfully). They have a party to celebrate the completion of the dance and one of the women, who used to dance with the group before she had her child, has made a big bowl of sangria. Yum!
Yummy Sangria! (Climax, 2018)
From here on out, we are treated to a slow descent into hell. The sangria was laced with LSD. No-one knows who did it. Perhaps the tee-total Omar? They kick him out into the snow. Everyone starts to lose their shit. As an audience, it is kind of slow at first, but it is obvious that people are changing slightly. The shots are bathed in red, painting long shadows across the dance floor. The choreography is amazing but by the end the characters are twisting themselves into freakish shapes, all bones and limbs jutting. One girl is pushed to madness after she is kicked repeatedly in the stomach while pregnant. A brother assaults his sister, in a disgustingly long sequence. Little Tito, the child of the ex-dancer starts to hallucinate too, and electrifies himself on a breaker box. After his death, his mother commits suicide. All of this is conveyed to us through these epically long, spinning but steady shots. And it is chilling. As it happens, Omar, who they kicked out quite early, has frozen to death in the cold. The whole package is a fever dream nightmare. Through Climax, I get the sense that horror in this form has held onto that nightmare view of drugs. They are not necessarily evil, but to partake in drugs is to open yourself up to death, evil and general hauntings of that variety.
My Sleep Paralysis Demon (
Shrooms
, 2007)
A passing mention here for the genuinely awful film Shrooms. It tries its hardest, bless it. A group of American college students go to Ireland for a wild camping trip. One of them knows all about some secret kind of super mega trippy mushroom that you can only get in Ireland, in this specific forest. They all take magic shrooms together and it appears that it gives our protagonist visions of the future and opens her up to paranormal influence. She starts seeing creatures from ghost stories. They get killed one by one. Standard.
While it plays as cheap and charmless, there is something to get from this. Our plot twist ending sees the protagonist realising that she killed her friends, on some crazy mushroom trip. She doesn't leave this behind though. After she remembers her killings, she is saved by GARDA helicopters and gets her hands on some scissors to kill her saviours with. She will go on to kill again.
O.K. So, take a breather. What have we learned? Take drugs and bad things will happen. Even after the fact, you're not out of the woods.
Continuing after the influence is our next target. What does it mean when in Shrooms our protagonist goes on to kill again? The character who did drug the sangria in Climax happily doses themselves with LSD again in the final shot of the film.
Fatherhood can be rough I guess (
The Shining,
1980
)
Enter, Jack Torrance.
The Shining is an absolute classic. Stanley Kubrick's masterwork of horror might just be one of the most influential horror films of all time. Jack Torrance falls into madness one step at a time, and we get to watch every agonising second. But Jack has a vice.
Wendy lets slip a little glimpse into the problems that happened before we caught up with the family to the doctor when she is getting Danny checked out.
"He dislocated his shoulder [...] My husband had been drinking, and he came home about three hours late, so he wasn't exactly in the greatest mood that night. And well Danny had scattered some of his school papers all over the room ... and my husband grabbed his arm, you know and pulled him away from them. [...] on this particular occasion my husband just used too much strength and he injured Danny's arm"
Yikes. She says that this caused Jack to give up drinking, and he's been clean for a few months. But the fear that we see Danny harbour towards his father doesn't go away. Whenever the pair are alone there is the lingering feeling of cold, cruel hate.
As Jack begins to fall to the sinister energies of the Overlook Hotel, we get to see a glimpse at the man behind the mask. He says he would sell his soul for a drink and whether the busy bar with a friendly barman ready to pour him a whiskey is a creation born of his own withdrawal from drink or a vivid trick pulled on Jack by the Overlook Hotel itself, he finds himself where he can truly let loose. That is, sitting at a bar, rambling incoherently and never paying for the shots he knocks back.
Jack's abuse is something he never blames on the alcohol. Instead he mentions all the harm that being on the wagon is doing to him, having to put up with his wife and child sober is a chore that he can only handle with a bit of liquid assistance.
The ghost in room 237 is described beautifully by Ashley Christine in an interview for Fangoria:
"At first, she's a beautiful naked woman whom Jack embraces joyfully; then suddenly mid-kiss, she turns into a horrifying, rotting hag, putrid and laughing. Emotionally it is similar to how alcohol first appears to the alcoholic: a lovely and beautiful panacea that can fix all ills, then, somewhere along the line it shifts into a hideous poison that destroys your mind and body."
So, Jack is haunted by addiction. His family are too. Their forced confinement means that Jack's pent up aggression has to be taken out on someone, and we all know how that ended. Axe through door, here's Johnny, etc. His drinking problem becomes murderous rage.
Addiction to drugs in horror is villainised through Jack in The Shining, but more contemporary horror shines a light on the humanity of drugs and addiction.
Luke gets it ROUGH (
The Haunting Of Hill House,
2018)
The Haunting Of Hill House is one of the most thoughtful horror things I've ever seen. The only other thing I can compare it to is Midnight Mass, also by Mike Flanagan, but the acting is heart-breaking, the drama and family tension is nuanced and understandable and the spooks are frequent!
Luke Crain is one of the siblings who was tormented by the evil spirits inside Hill House. He was only a child when it happened, and Flanagan kind of jumps around in time to give you a little insight into every single sibling and what their deal is. It's clear to see Luke gets the worst of it. Seeing Luke fall into heroine addiction is upsetting; his siblings who mean the world to him, his protection against the dark, leave him after he robs and cheats them and runs away from rehab that they have paid for. When he isn't 'getting well', though, he sees creepy bowler hat men that stalk him and threaten to consume him.
Floating Spookem' (
The Haunting Of Hill House
, 2018)
Pretty heavy stuff. Even worse, the only person who never gave up on him is his twin sister and he pressures her to buy him heroine on the way to rehab for one last hit before he gives up for good. He's said this before, but only his twin is faced with the dilemma: to enable him or to argue?
He shoots up next to her in the car, mere months after she lost her husband and she sees the ghost from her childhood so that he can escape his. Addiction haunts those around it as much as it haunts those inside it. The only person who can understand Luke, Paige, is another addict in rehab with him, and the chemistry between them is crazy. But when Paige runs away from rehab Luke runs right after her, continuing to steal from his brother but this time to get his friend safe and clean.
When Luke gets to the haunted house he is shown visions of Paige trying to come on to him, trying to drag him back into his addiction and forcing him to shoot up rat poison. What terrifies him most is that this recovery won't stick, that he will relapse and that he won't be in control when he does.
Poor Luke. I feel for the guy. When all of his siblings start to mistrust him and push him away, it's cruel and only lowers him deeper into his substance abuse. But by the end, he is two years clean, and his siblings celebrate with him. By overcoming the ghosts, misdiagnosed by his brother as mental illness, Luke finds the strength to overcome his addiction.
Addiction, supernatural horrors and mental illness are all tied up together.
To finish, then, let's look at the Evil Dead remake from 2013.
Nothing is as scary as the original tree scene ... (
Evil Dead
, 2013)
Even movies that aren't world-shaking have a place at the table. They are much more common, for one. And they probably have more of an impact on our societal views than we might like to admit. So, the remake of the fantastic Evil Dead spews onto screens with an interesting narrative framing device. This time, the group go to a cabin in the woods to be with their friend Mia while she goes clean, coming off of a cocktail of drugs. They are expecting resistance.
We get a few reveals that we can link back to Luke Crain: Mia was abused (trauma in childhood), Mia has tried to recover from her addiction multiple times, Mia's family are fed up. And again, Mia is the one most affected by the haunting of the Deadites. She can smell them, sense them and hear them before anyone else. Her pain, and her mental instability, make her vulnerable.
To shoot forward to the end, Mia is the only survivor. She fights against a writhing naked creature that looks like a bony and gaunt version of herself. Struggling desperately, Mia eventually manages to slay it, chain sawing it's head in two in a gleefully bloody scene. And it shrinks away, leaving Mia reborn. She had to lose her arm, her friends and a lot of blood along the way, but she escapes. The house where she was abused burns down into ash.
There is so much more that we could say. Horror has changed a lot, and while Stephen King himself admits that The Shining was about his own alcohol abuse it can be hard to get any concrete thesis statement out of these movies. But stories are important. They inform and explain.
Drugs have become a symbol of something else. They used to put you in danger, but now they are revealed as something darker. Drugs are attracted to pain, as a coping mechanism to deal with bigger issues. They drown out people's morals and make them hurt the ones around them. But there is a way out.
Getting well, getting clean, is possible.
And hey, in Cabin in The Woods cannabis helps you resist being a sacrifice to the devil for an evil international super government. So there's that.
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