There's Something About Scary

By RICHARD CORLISS

Comedians are the schoolyard bullies of this summer's box office. Mike Myers, Adam Sandler, the South Park gang and those cutup cowboys Will Smith and Kevin Kline have upended propriety and frolicked like unruly kids until the collective funny bone is virtually numb. After this week's senior-prom sex farce American Pie, even connoisseurs of adolescent comedy may whisper a desperate prayer: "From Austins and Adams and Wild Wild Westies, and teens that go hump in the night, Good Lord deliver us."

This prayer is now answered. Summer films are ready to creep over to the dark side, where anxiety about what's behind the door or outside the camp tent can drive people nuts. This isn't last summer's type of teen-scream movie. The new films, a dozen due for release this year, are essays in mature terror, for and about grownups, with big or serious stars and a few A-list directors. For the moment, slasher films are deader than a naked cheerleader. Horror is going both artsy, in the Method madness of The Blair Witch Project, and adult, in the domestic suspense of Stir of Echoes. Renouncing sicko-kid melodramas for a mix of ghost stories and satanic parables, Hollywood is pursuing subtler demons, deeper themes: matters of life and death, life after death and life just before death.

Bruce Willis stars in The Sixth Sense as a psychologist caring for a boy plagued by ghosts. Winona Ryder confronts the face of evil in Lost Souls. In End of Days, Arnold Schwarzenegger must stop Satan (Gabriel Byrne) from taking a human bride. Johnny Depp stars in three upscale creepies: as a space traveler in The Astronaut's Wife, as a bookseller searching for an accursed text in Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate and as Ichabod Crane in Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. Late this month Samuel L. Jackson will chase, or run like hell from, a pack of very smart sharks in Deep Blue Sea.

Some of the projects (The House on Haunted Hill, with Oscar-winner Geoffrey Rush, and Jan de Bont's The Haunting) are remakes. Others recall The Exorcist, Jaws, Rosemary's Baby. But that conservatism simply underlines the urge of top filmmakers to rediscover an honorable American tradition: the tale of psychological terror. Invented by Poe, mastered by Melville, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft--and branded forever on film by Hitchcock--the horror genre is too important to be left to the kids. It speaks to every doubt and guilt we silently carry; it lends a seductive form to fear and leaves us with a dread not easily shaken off.

"The old New Breed of horror films was postmodern and self-mocking," says David Koepp, director and screenwriter of the ghostly Stir of Echoes. "The new New Breed movies aim a bit higher in the hierarchy of horror." Koepp's film, to open in September, stars Kevin Bacon as a blue-collar guy haunted by intimations of a distressed, deceased soul somewhere in his house. Says Koepp: "I tried creating a sense of total reality, because the movies that always scared the hell out of me were set in real, almost mundane domestic situations." In these restless residences and bucolic settings, fear can emerge like a stench from the cellar, a howling in the dark woods.

Every teen slasher film imitates Psycho. The new New Wave is inspired by quieter Hitchcock films--Rear Window, Vertigo--that slowly reveal their themes of obsession and possession. Renny Harlin, who directed Die Hard 2, applied Hitchcock's lessons to Deep Blue Sea: "I wanted to keep building the tension, with no release, tightening the noose all the time."

You can tighten the noose yet not show the jugular explode. In The Astronaut's Wife and Lost Souls, "you won't see people cut up in 16 pieces," says Robert Shaye, CEO of New Line Cinema, the films' distributor. "Any violence is effective but discreet." That's because we fear the imminent unknown. "The monster is always scarier when he's in the closet," notes Rand Ravich, writer-director of Astronaut. "There's nothing as scary as hearing a knock on the other side of the door."

Next week the ghostman will knock twice. Opening the same day as Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick's hemlock cocktail of passion and fear, are two films that set the parameters of new horror. One, Steve Miner's Lake Placid, a killer-crocodile epic that co-star Oliver Platt has called a "Jaws with neurotics," was written by TV superscribe David E. Kelley. Amid the churning bass violins, the plodding plot development and a nice scare when the beast gobbles a cow are dialogue riffs that suggest Kelley was trying for an Ally McBite. "I know that under the circumstances, eating me might seem viable," says Platt, a croc-loving professor, as he stares into the eyes of the 30-ft. reptile. "But it would cheapen you."

In its cold, mechanical heart, Lake Placid is a cheapie. The Blair Witch Project, which earned raves at Sundance, is stingy only in its budget--a ridiculously low $30,000. The picture purports to be an assembly of footage found a year after three young filmmakers vanished in the Maryland woods while shooting a documentary about a local witch legend. Apparently the director and her two-man crew lost their way, believed the Blair Witch was after them, then spiraled into rage and madness. And it's all on film.

We know one sophisticated filmgoer who, until the closing credits, figured the whole sordid deal was real and got so frazzed she begged for an escort home. Not many will see Blair Witch in that state of Edenic ignorance; word is out that the film is one serious fake--it's just a story, folks. The picture operates under two rigorous rules: it will show only what the team could plausibly have filmed, and it will not reveal any sources of outside terror--no monsters or maniacs. Directors Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick gave the actors the merest outline of the scenes to be played. No wonder the film dwells on the edge of seemingly genuine hysteria.

There's another filmgoer (this one) who found the rules so confining, the characters so strident, the climax so muddled, that Blair Witch was only a fascinating failure--a campfire tale turned into a ranting, John Cassavetes-style improv movie. No one can deny the ambition and intensity of this horror mockumentary. For those who fall under its spell and feel deep shivers scampering down their backs, this is spinal tap.

"I loved Blair Witch," says Joel Silver, producer of The Matrix and The House on Haunted Hill. "It was scary, man. The genius thing about it is what makes our business so great: a spectacular, pure idea will touch people. It's not about being bigger and scarier. It's about being fresher, newer--uniquer, if that's even a word."

Movies will try to be uniquer by scaring you without cheapening you. If upscale horror clicks as art and commerce, only those big bully comedians will be terrified. Grateful viewers will have the last ghoulish laugh.

--Reported by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York and Jeffrey Ressner/ Los Angeles