Blogical Conclusion

SCARES AND SCORES

APR 5, 2009 – FEW GENRES IN FILM ARE AS INBRED AS HORROR, which is why even the most original of screenplays can reduce you to a geneticist clucking in disapproval while wading through a first-cousin gene pool. Other genres, too, have their ineluctable templates, their clutches of conventions to be adhered to – but the marriage of these closely related clichés can still result in able-bodied offspring. Despite the best efforts of, say, the romantic comedy to plant devastatingly insurmountable obstacles along the path of true love, it is a certainty that, by the final reel, boy and girl will wind up in each other’s arms – and yet, the really good representatives of the genre bestow on this inevitability a twitchy element of chance, either by means of mammoth narrative embellishments (like time travel) or simply through miniature recalibrations of dialogue and staging and performances.

Horror filmmakers, however, do not have these recourses. (When was the last time you walked away from a scary movie awestruck by the actors or by the precisely sculpted words that fell from their lips?) Possibly owing to the borderline disreputability of the genre, filmmakers almost always take the lazy way out, striving just enough to goose us with a procession of “boo” moments and, subsequently, granting us the mandatory intervals of respite, so we can laugh sheepishly at our susceptibility. With most horror films, there isn’t even a discernable effort to twist the original DNA into new shapes – unless you consider The Shining, but then again, that was by Kubrick, and his genetic material was certainly not of this earth – and we end up with overfamiliar scenarios inherited, over and over, from the same set of sturdy ancestors.

The haunted house (from, say, The Amityville Horror), the undead seeking retribution from the otherworld (Madhumati), the prescience of key events (The Eyes of Laura Mars or Nooravadhu Naal), the father-caretaker wielding a lethal weapon (The Shining) – all these scenarios are faithfully reproduced in Vikram K Kumar’s Yaavarum Nalam. (The key word in this context is “reproduced” – for horror films are inherently incestuous, and even if you strove to conquer virgin territory, the odds are high that an earlier filmmaker has already hacked his way through at least a few thickets of that terrain.) As with Michael Haneke’s insidiously creepy Caché, a family becomes privy to a series of electronic dispatches – disguised as a television mega-serial – that gradually reveal themselves as an eerie echo of the happenings within the household.

And as subsequent episodes turn viciously sinister, it’s left to the paranoid protagonist to uncover the mysteries behind these parallel occurrences, and eventually save his joint family from mass extinction. This barebones synopsis of Yaavarum Nalam, quite frankly, is infinitely more terrifying than the film that unfolds, which accords its audience a surprising amount of respect. It’s not entirely above reaching for the easy, sound-effects-assisted scare – the one that made me leap out of my seat had to do with, of all things, milk-white contact lenses – but the director isn’t so much after racking up the body count in devilishly clever ways as teasing us with questions whose answers are, at all times, right in front of our half-squinted eyes. Despite the presence of numerous creatures from the afterlife, Yaavarum Nalam isn’t your typically derivative horror film – there’s evidence of a reasonably respectable pedigree.

THE NEWS OF THE DEMISE OF Maurice Jarre brought to my mind, expectedly, snatches of his music for David Lean’s elephantine epics, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, but also, unexpectedly, a quote from Sunset Boulevard, where the once-famous actress declaims, with rightful vanity, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” The moviemaking climate, today, is defined less by temperamental typhoons of monumental risk-taking – films that sound so crazy, only a madman would consider the attempt – than by pleasant-smelling breezes that bear tidings of cozy familiarity. Cobble together a couple of low-key instrumental passages, or assemble a tracklist of singles from upcoming bands (or the Rolling Stones, if you’re Scorsese and you have on your head the unblanching studio executive’s hand) – and there’s the soundtrack for your intimate domestic drama or indie-stoner comedy or what-have-you.

But even the big pictures, these days, rarely resonate with a score that sears itself onto your consciousness along with the scenes, to the extent that it’s impossible to ascertain if the music set the tone for the movie, or if the movie dictated the nuances of the music. (The English Patient, borne aloft Gabriel Yared’s soaring compositions, is among the exceptions. It’s also, coincidentally, a desert epic with a star-crossed wartime romance, or loosely, Lawrence of Arabia meets Doctor Zhivago.) And that was certainly the case with Lawrence of Arabia (Peter O’Toole snuffs out a matchstick; cut to sunrise in the desert, the strings in the background all in disarray, as if mangled by the rising heat, and then, miraculously uniting for long, luscious lines that rise and fall as if shaped by very winds that shaped those dunes) and Doctor Zhivago (with the filigreed ice-crystal textures of Lara’s Theme). Try remembering either film without the score and you’ll see why Jarre now resides in the pantheon of the immortals.

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