“The second thing we could note is that a quarter of them (20 movies previously listed) bear a reference either to ‘night’ or ‘the dark’ in their titles. The dark, it goes without saying, provides the basis for our most primordial fears….
All of which is very fine when you’re doing a deal in a well-lit executive boardroom or ironing the laundry in the living room on a sunny afternoon; but when the lights fail during a thunderstorm and we’re left to creep around from place to place, trying to remember where we left the goddamn candles, the situation changes…When the lights go out and we find ourselves stranded in a shoal of darkness, reality itself has an unpleasant way of fogging in….
Fear of the dark is the most childlike fear. Tales of terror are customarily told ‘around the campfire’ or at least after sundown, because what is laughable in the sunshine is often tougher to smile at by starlight. This is a fact every maker of horror films and writer of horror tales recognizes and uses-it is one of those unfailing pressure points where the grip of horror fiction is surest. This is particularly true of the film-makers, of course, and of all the tools that the filmmaker can bring to bear, it is perhaps this fear of the dark that seems the most natural, since movies must, by their very nature, be viewed in the dark.”
-Stephen King (on how important darkness is a tool best for creating suspension from reality) from his synopsis of horror entitled “Danse Macabre”
Now, consider how we have since lost this essential aspect of viewing movies. We now safely watch Netflix on tiny, mobile devices waiting for the bus or on the subway or in a Uber. We wait for something to come around on cable and watch it interrupted in a well-lit living room in the comfort zone of our own home.
Folks no longer walk into a huge, weirdly designed theater and sit down in front of a huge and imposing screen waiting for a film to come on after the lights have gone low and our senses have started to detach and disorient and our brains then become as impressionable as over-imaginative children.
We need to reclaim that.
