Oxford local Ben Hervey could only be described as unassuming jack-of-all film trades. A critic, screenwriter, and lecturer who has made an early mark as the author of a British Film Institute book on the 1968 classic horror film, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Hervey completed his doctorate on turn-of-the-century Victorian horror literature here at Oxford, but attributes his passion for the creepy-crawlies to a fascination with horror starting at a young age. ‘I’ve always been a horror enthusiast, although I was forbidden from watching them as a child. For Night of the Living Dead, my parents were out, and I was aware that they would come back at any moment. I had sat right next to the TV with my finger on the stop button, inches away from the screen.’
At age seven or eight, he saw Don’t Look Now, which remains his favorite horror film. However, as I can attest from the terrifying character of Ursula in The Little Mermaid, fright can also come with a PG rating. Hervey agrees. ‘I was very traumatized by films that weren’t specifically horror. Jack the Giant Killer was a crude children’s fantasy film that was intensely disturbing to me.’
So, magic beans aside, now that he’s viewed a few more movies away from the watchful eye of Mum and Dad, what exactly defines a good horror flick? You mean it’s not all about gobs of gore and copious carnage? ‘For me, the most compelling horror is that which undermines our sense of reality to some extent. One thing that the best horror films have in common with some Victorian literature is finding ways to impart the feeling that the physical world around is almost a charade or mirage, and that there’s a larger, eerier and more threatening reality behind it.’ For those like me, blubbering wimps who would rather undergo a root canal than watch a Saw film, there may lie a less threatening comparison in Hitchcock. ‘There’s not a very big sense of mystery in Hitchcock, except maybe in The Birds,’ Hervey explains. ‘There’s something very profound and pregnant about the way the birds are just sitting there afterwards and you’re just much more aware of how volatile the world is.”‘
However, this mysterious aspect of horror films remains an anomaly in today’s exceedingly violent, and often senseless, films. ‘The tendency of horror now – and Night of the Living Dead is an important step towards this – is a more materialist form about violence and the destruction of the human body. Often the best horror films show virtually nothing, are very inexplicit, but have created a sense of mystery.’ He cited the recently released House of the Devil, set in 1980 at the height of American panic about Satanism. Hervey also downplays shock value, which can make audiences immune and indifferent. Instead, he favours a more excruciating approach: ‘Just to mercilessly let stuff simmer, without any kind of shock or violence interrupting that, can be the most effective.’
His book on Night of the Living Dead is well-regarded, but Hervey feels guilty about contributing to the critic culture that has tethered the often unappreciated Romero to the undead. ‘I believe that he doesn’t want to read my book, because he refuses to look back on that stage.’ Yet that isn’t to take away from the importance of the film: ‘I think it’s fair to say that horror movies up until Night of the Living Dead were about horror and evil and dark forces, but they were ultimately about the abilities of people to overcome them. It was the first horror film in which everyone dies, and that was absolutely shocking. I’ve spoken to people who saw it when it was first shown and there were people just left sitting in their seats, because they didn’t have enough of a sense of the film having rightly ended.’
Surprisingly enough for a critic, Hervey dismisses the notion that all horror films can be examined from a critical angle. ‘It’s sort of become a cliché that horror films were meant to represent a society’s anxieties and I think these days, it’s very easy for filmmakers to borrow a little bit of extra credibility by making some superficial gesture towards that,’ Hervey clarifies. ‘For example, the Hostel films have these nods towards being some sort of commentary on Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo Bay. But I can’t help thinking that filmmakers like Eli Roth are just attempting to ride the coattails of people like Romero with obvious nudges to suggest that they’re doing something ideologically interesting, when in many ways Hostel is just a retread of civilized Americans going abroad and meeting rural menace genre that’s been around for decades.’
Aside from more cinematic dismemberment, is there anything for horror audiences on the horizon? Hervey thinks that horror’s influence is creating an exciting fusion with the mainstream. ‘Maybe the positive things that have been happening in horror have been somewhat outside. What can be done by sort of contaminating mainstream cinema with horror elements, I think that’s where the fun is. In the meantime, I think horror is waiting for another defining film to come along.”
