Noiseless Chatter Archive

It’s easy to review horror without giving any indication that you were or are under its spell. You can talk about the inventiveness of the central concept, the performances, the casting. You can talk about the dialogue. You can talk about how predictable or unpredictable it was. But talk about horror — actually talk, with actual people — and it becomes much more difficult. With very few exceptions, your friends won’t want to hear or talk about the gears in the machine. They’ll want to hear and talk about the film’s effect . “It wasn’t scary,” and “It scared the hell out of me,” are two of the things you’ll hear most frequently. That’s not necessarily because your friends don’t have the vocabulary to assess the film on deeper levels; it’s because how much it spooked you is the common language of horror, just as how much something made you laugh is the common language of comedy and how much something made you cry is the common language of drama. Horror, though, is a...

I’ve often wondered why science and religion have such a difficult time coexisting. I’m not an especially spiritual person, but even when I was a practicing Christian, I didn’t see why the theory of evolution — as just one example — would be seen as such a threat. Does the existence of a set of rules that govern our universe eliminate the possibility of a God? Why should it? Or, rather, should it have to? Can’t God have created and applied the rules of evolution? I’m not saying He did, or that we need a God to explain anything at all, but having a creator and having demonstrable rules never seemed to me to be mutually exclusive. I don’t know if John Carpenter agrees with me, but Prince of Darkness certainly does. It’s a spiritual horror film that is also, to exactly the same degree, a scientific horror film. It examines one serious central threat not through two separate lenses, but through two overlapping ones. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Carpenter’s ...