Horror as therapy: this is a remarkably consistent, usually implicit theme in horror cinema. One might say it's simply the nature of a strong narrative to have characters transform through their experiences; and when that narrative concerns horror, unsurprisingly the transformation is due to experience of horror. That is to some extent true. But one wouldn't refer to just any transformation as therapy. There's something peculiar about horror that is therapeautic. Horror is facing not just a fear, but an unpleasant truth about ourselves and suffering for it; it's simultaneously an indulgence and a punishment. In Robin Wood's account of Hitchcock, he suggests this therapy is for the protagonist first and for the audience identifying with the protagonist second. For both it is a nightmare come to life that must be encountered and understood if it is to be transformative.
There are many instances. Take a recent film like Vacancy (2007). A feuding couple, haunted by the accidental death of their son, are put through such a horrific ordeal that the guilt poisoning their relationship is entirely remedied. A similar dynamic is present in the classic Straw Dogs (1971), in which an easily-cowed intellectual kills a group of yokels who raped his emasculating wife and, as a consequence, is happier than he's ever been in his life. His marriage is ruined, clearly; but he's transcended his wife. He has become a strong male, capable of violence, through the ordeal: this is a good thing in Peckinpah's universe. Romero often uses the therapy structure as well. In Monkey Shines (1988), for instance, an alpha male is placed at the mercy of a female monkey; he only triumphs because he has learned, through his ordeal, to view a woman as an equal. In all films the horrific situations fix the protagonists of some imbalance, some psychological or social fault. This taps into the same well as a host of familiar platitudes: "Everything happens for a reason," "What doesn't kill us makes us stronger," etc.. However, the therapy dynamic occurs on a subtler, less triumphant level as well. As Carol Clover argued, the Final Girl tradition in slasher films is really about fixing an excessively independent girl through horror. Her friends have already gone too far and perish; she alone has the option to turn back and be a Good Girl.
With that prologue in mind, let's dive into The Hole, directed by old master Joe Dante and written by the author of the aforementioned Vacancy, Mark L. Smith. A magic realist story, the film concerns a teen boy (Chris Massoglia) and his younger brother (Nathan Gamble) finding a bottomless pit--cleverly concealed with a trapdoor beneath a throw rug--in the basement of their new home. With nothing else to do in the small town, the brothers and their sexy*, teen neighbour begin probing the hole for answers, but find themselves the probed instead as the hole gazes into their deepest fears and confronts them with what it finds.
Each of the youths gets a fear to confront. The young boy must face clowns, the older boy his father, and the girl a tragedy from her past. They of course don't realize what the hole is doing until the contrived moment in the narrative where realization must dawn. Prior to that, it all seems to be random creepiness. Upon discovering the hole's sinister effects, they research the hole by consulting Creepy Carl (Bruce Dern), the previous tenant of the house and a character we've seen a hundred times before: the antisocial kook who provides a piece of key information. They implausibly get all the right information at just the right time in every instance and set about facing their fears one-by-one.
If the above plot description doesn't make it clear, the film's narrative is riddled with cliches. How the characters come to the conclusion the the hole makes them face their fears, how they realize simultaneously that one of the hole's manifestations is from the girl's past, and the relationship between the mom and her teen son is all the lazy and contrived sort of plotting and drama-building we've seen in countless other films. One might say the film is aimed at a younger audience, and indeed it is; but twelve-year-olds, already pretty media savvy, do not need such a primitive, dumbed-down structure. The film plays like an episode of Eerie, Indiana--Joe Dante's contribution to the world of television--extended by an unnatural forty-five minutes.
Not only the narrative is diluted. The film has a pretty heavy-handed moral I found displeasingly trite: All you have to do is face your fears, understand them, and they will have no power over you. To be fair to Dante and Smith, their definition of 'fears' is broad enough. The two teenagers seem to feel more guilt than fear. The boy feels guilt for the abuse he and his brother have suffered at the hands of his father; the girl for the event in her past. Although in what sense guilt and fear are related emotions is, of course, not explained, it's fairly obvious that these emotions feed one another in various ways.
The moral itself is arguably not that problematic. Psychoanalysis is all about understanding and facing our repressed fears, guilt, and desires. The way the film presents the moral is what's disappointing. First of all, understanding and facing fears is not a quick, simple process. One can't merely destroy a clown doll to overcome one's fear of clowns or throw a belt buckle at an abusive father to overcome the fear, guilt, and shame he's instilled in one's psyche. This is a ridiculous and cavalier treatment of the psychology of children. Compare to a film like Curse of the Cat People (1944), where the child's creative impulses and fantasy life are repressed until they bubble up in the form of an imaginary friend: her father's deceased first wife, the individualistic Irena of Cat People (1942). Curse of the Cat People takes child psychology seriously. The Hole does not.
Second, the hole itself is clearly some sort of mirror to the subconscious. The signifiers are all present: it's in the basement, bottomless, dark, refuses to be covered up once opened, and produces what the children don't want to face. Creepy Carl refers to the hole gazing into its victims and that's what it does: it looks into the mind and manifests what's negative, makes the children face it. This is a really clever device and mirrors what horror films generally do. As I claim above, horror films, like the hole, make us face our repressed anxieties and desires; we leave with them either freshly repressed or destroyed. (Increasingly, however, we leave the theater or turn off the DVD with the monster triumphant. Arguably this is better. But that's a discussion for another day.) In a sense, the hole is offering the the children the same therapy horror films offer us. We know the hole will never kill the children, so like a horror film, it's a non-threatening way of facing those repressed fears.
But this is the problem: repressed fears are never straight-forward. If the hole is mirroring the subconscious, one would expect it to be considerably more inventive. The subconscious is beyond logic, realism, order, language; a realm of nightmares, to push the spatial metaphor. The bottomless black pit that is the hole suggests Dante and Smith are aware of this--of course they are! Yet, all the hole manages is the most superficial horror: clowns, abusive dads, and a traumatic experience. As Bruce Kawin writes, "One goes to a horror film in order to have a nightmare...whose undercurrent of anxiety both presents and masks the desire to fulfill and be punished for certain conventionally unacceptable impulses."* Similarly, when Robin Wood writes of Hitchcock's therapeutic films (Rear Window, Marnie, Psycho), he notes the film follows indulgence in some deviance before the therapy. A fear of clowns is most likely a subconscious mechanism for evading a more pressing and disturbing repression, a fear of a part of oneself and the consequences of indulging it; that would have been much more fascinating to explore in a horror film. Instead, we get a creepy clown doll anyone would be frightened of. And a fear of an abusive father is hardly a deep-rooted, subconscious fear; it's a pretty reasonable thing to fear, in fact.
The basic idea of having children developing by facing their fears was done much more interestingly and with a more imaginative touch of surrealism in an episode of the '80s television series The Real Ghostbusters, entitled "The Boogieman Cometh." When a film compares unfavourably to episodes of syndicated television cartoons, even very good ones, there's a problem. Considering Smith could have had the hole do just about anything, it's so unfortunate it was limited by his imagination to the most banal ideas. We have no symbolism, no psychological depth, none of the rich imagery the history of horror films have yielded.
I brought up the therapeutic structure found in horror films at the beginning of this review because The Hole employs it quite explicitly. The hole only loses its power when the fears it presents are faced. Creepy Carl, who padlocks the hole and leaves the house is merely repressing his fears, not overcoming them. When the hole is re-opened, he pays for his repression. Undergoing horror therapy is the only solution. The problem with this film is that the fears are so shallow and their solutions so immediate and brute that if it's therapeutic for the characters, the audience does not share that therapy at all. And since we can't share the therapy, the climactic confrontations with the hole really lost my involvement. Not because I was thinking of therapy, Bruce Kawin, and Robin Wood while watching, but because it was all very unimaginative.Even Joe Dante's visuals, one of the pleasures of the film, could have used more imagination. He gets what milage he can out of the Screenwriting 101 screenplay, treating us to some fun expressionism where he's able. (In one of the film's many sight gags, there's even a reference to the German expressionist classic, Orlac's Hande.) The climactic decent into the hole yields some pretty impressive visual ideas in a Dali-esque deterioration of childhood memory. Also particularly enjoyable is the stop-motion animation of the various creatures from the hole. Before one thinks this is a remake of The Gate (1987), the creatures from the hole are mostly human. Yet they move like puppets. There's something alarmingly uncanny in that, not unlike the unsettling denizens of a Svankmajer film.
My concerns suggest the film is lacking in ambition, a little too complacent and lazy. But that needn't stop a film from being fun, right? Indeed, The Hole is still an enjoyable experience. From my own memories of watching Eerie, Indiana as a child, I suspect children of twelve and under will find it very enjoyable. The relationship between the brothers is playful, the girl next door charming in a Lolita sort of way, and their investigation into the nature of the hole had the natural pull that any investigation into a mystery will have. Moments of seriousness, such as the obligatory Chat with Mom scene in which she asks her teenage son to help her make things work, are thankfully few and far between, so we can continue to watch Joe Dante play with toys. Why else does one watch a Joe Dante film if not to see him playing with toys? Still, this is a far cry from the brilliance of The 'burbs (1989) and Matinee (1993).
*1 - If you feel guilty for finding the young lady in The Hole sexy, I'm pleased to inform you that Haley Bennett was in her twenties when the film was made.
*2 - from Kawin's classic essay, "The Mummy's Pool."
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