Scream and Halloween reveal horror’s biggest sin: curiosity

Curiosity claimed the life of the cat. The horror film naif was also destroyed by curiosity. Cats have nine lives, though, and naifs don’t. Advantage: Cats.

In 1996’s Scream, horror scholar Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy) lays out the rules for making it through a horror movie alive: Don’t have sex, don’t toke up or get blotto, and if you leave the room, nEver, ever tell your friends that you’ll be back. These are the genre’s cardinal sins in the book of Meeks. But there’s a sin more common than the rest that characters frequently commit in horror films: Curiosity. When something goes “bump” in the night, saying “I’ll be right back” doesn’t doom you; your nosiness does. Don’t look in the basement. Don’t go to the creepy old house on the hill at midnight. Don’t hang out in cemeteries. Don’t read the ancient tome bound in human skin and written in blood. We should all listen to Edgar Wright rather than Randy Meeks. Just don’t.

Curiosity isn’t a new sin in horror. It’s an original sin that dates back to the experiments of Henry Frankenstein and Jack Griffin, carried through the 1950s, 60s, and 70s in films like A Thing from Another World Fly Black SundayAnd Onibaba Texas Chainsaw MassacreAnd The Wicker Man. Then along came Tony Randell’s Hellbound: Hellraiser IIThe most detailed and thorough explanation, in excruciating detail, of curiosity’s role in horror cinema (and literature in general) is found in 1988.

“And you wanted to know,” says Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins), a smirk at her lips sharp enough to puncture the spirit, as she betrays her lover, Dr. Phillip Channard (Kenneth Cranham) to a fate worse than death; she’s left him to the tender mercies of Leviathan, the god of Hell in Barker’s gothic horror series, drained of fluids, mutilated, and remade into a Cenobite — demons for whom pain and pleasure are one and the same. “Now you know. “And I desired. EverythingNow everyone is happy.” Now everybody’s happy.”

Channard would have to disagree, screaming and gurgling in pain, but that is what he paid for his curiosity. He has been driven to his death by an obsession with Hell and the Lament Configuration, an ornate puzzle box apparently made with pure temptation. Used correctly, the Configuration calls forth the movies’ most famous Cenobites: Pinhead (Doug Bradley), Chatterer (Nicholas Vince), Butterball (Simon Bamford), and Barbie Wilde’s “Female Cenobite,” as if being a woman is distinguishing enough. All Channard wanted was to “know.” About Hell, about Leviathan, and about the Cenobites themselves. Knowing isn’t a sin in the real world. In the world of horror, it’s a party foul punishable by execution. Channard isn’t the only person in the Hellraiser movies to find out the consequences of mucking about with the Configuration, but he’s the first to have it driven home clearly, and with wicked glee, that ThisThis is the price one pays for spying.

Before horror movies, there was. Hellbound: Hellraiser IIHorror cinema is available afterward Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Cotton’s deliciously heartless monologue makes it impossible to watch horror movies without singling out the characters who look where they shouldn’t and inflict misery on themselves, their friends, their families, and any helpless schmuck who winds up in the way. “Investigate the mystery sound” is one of the genre’s staple tropes, right alongside “let’s split up and look around,” two fatal mistakes routinely made in spite of obvious lurking danger. They are just gimmicks. They’re also necessary for moving horror plots forward. John Ford once said, “If characters make smart and thoughtful decisions instead of making bad choices,” that’d be the end. It is We Not requiredTo make their curiosity pique about horror, they must be played by characters.

Image by New World Pictures

Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods provides one of contemporary horror’s best examples of this dynamic in action, a meta analysis of not only Why?The movies are filled with characters who do dumb things, and how crucial it is for them to do so. Here, a shadowy organization, known quite creatively as The Organization, employs engineers Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) and Hadley (Bradley Whitford) to conduct an operation-cum-primeval sacrificial ritual, with a group of college kids serving as their victims; each represents a horror movie character archetype, a’la the whore, the athlete, the scholar, the fool, and the virgin, and each has to die to appease old gods roiling under the Earth’s surface. The literal end of this world is if we fail to fulfill these requirements.

Once curiosity wins out, it is time for the ritual to begin in earnest. Clearly, these objects are evil in their rustic getaway cabin’s old cellar, the gang pokes and prods these various curios, until Dana (Kristen Connolly) reads aloud from a diary, summoning a zombie redneck torture family who stalks and murders them. That’s just the first floor of The Cabin in the Woods’ curiosity; eventually the two remaining characters, Dana and Marty (Fran Kranz), descend into a subterranean lair where The Organization is running the show, and discover the awful truth about the zombies, the gods, and the ritual. This knowledge is used to decide that everyone should be killed, and they do so by pissing the gods. It continues as such.

Horror films often combine knowledge with curiosity. Many 2010s-era horror films make a connection between curiosity and curiosity’s rewards; characters seek the truth and regret finding it. Jennifer Kent’s Babadook uses a classic horror setup, the haunted book, which invites the title’s tophat and trenchcoat bedecked spook into the home of a single mother (Essie Davis) and her son (Noah Wiseman). They are tortured by the fiend, most notably her for not reading his tale. Ari Aster’s Midsommar calls on the folk horror tradition for a grueling tale of madness in daylight, where cultural anthropology students travel to Hälsingland to study an enigmatic Swedish commune and become the centerpieces of a 90-year sacrificial ritual.

Most overtly of all, David Gordon Green’s 2018 sequel to John Carpenter’s HalloweenSimply put, Halloween, kicks off with true crime podcasters goading Michael Myers, a man not at all known for being talkative, into saying something — Anything, anything, as long as it’s Something. Myers eventually stalks and kills them. His own doctor Ranbir Sartain, Haluk Bilginer, attempts to do the same. Myers exchanges his head for wine grapes. The nature of the kills isn’t critical, though Halloween being a slasher, we’re there for the kills at least in part. However, the reason these kills occur is not insignificant. It isCritical. If the podcasters hadn’t bothered Myers, they would have lived. If Sartain’s mad desire to study Myers “in the wild” hadn’t overtaken him, then everyone else who dies in the film would have lived, too. While Myers may be the killer, his curiosity is a sign that other people are holding the knives.

Conflict is necessary for movies. Action is the key to conflict. The engine of storytelling is maintained when characters take responsibility and act. Horror movies aren’t unique, in other words, but the mechanism fueling them remains chief in the genre. Without curiosity, a swath of horror movies — Halloween Babadook Midsommar The Cabin in the Woods Contact Us Sea Fever The Wailing Jane Doe’s Autopsy Creep V/H/S/2 Spring Sinister — simply don’t happen, and that’s only a present day sample. Curiosity is horror as much as the slashers and monsters that comprise the genre’s most iconic villain are horror. Forget the cat; if you aren’t careful, it’ll kill you, too.