horror and what is concealed
As I've been writing plays the past few months, most of which incorporate horror elements if not outright horror itself, I find it very interesting to contemplate how the stage differs vastly from other art forms in terms of concealment and reveal, and how much that plays a role in making the horror work and be.. well. horrific...in the ways we want.
With writing, the writers conceals and reveals at will. As readers, we are wholly in the hands of how the author has us experience its worlds and characters. Depending on the POV of any given passage of writing, we know only what that POV tells us, notices, experiences, ect. Film is obviously different and a form where things are concealed and revealed by camera focus and camera work, which gives us our experience. I was thinking of this when watching OBSESSION recently in the theater..how well the lighting and shadow effects worked to conceal faces and rooms to excellent effect. Or how the P-O-V footage of BACKROOMS, which we saw the other night, worked to reveal its unending labyrinthian sets. The act of making visual art in general is very focused through the eye of the artist and what / how they choose to render a scene or experience.
Poets are perhaps similar to art in how we focus our (and the readers' attention). Poetry does not have much room for conceal and reveal--not like fiction or film--at least. It can talk over and around things, which I love to wield,, but there is still limited field and space. We've been taking in a lot of horror theater lately, including Goodman's astounding COVENANT and a smaller storefont company, Bump in the Night's HOOKMAN, which while very different in their concerns, both weilded horror adeptly to explore broader social issues.
I also find myself thinking about last fall's production of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, which really inspired me to start imagining the horror possibilities onstage. The trickery possible with lights and illusion and set design that are just as important as the words on the page. Also, how we experience it from the audience, when everything is visible in the field of the stage and how to move the attention and focus of the audience around, like an invisible lens. How that can be used to create terror and shock.
A few years back, we spent Halloween at a spooky soiree down at the Museum of Surgical Science. There were complimentary cocktails and gothic entertainments, one of which was a seance room based around the darker paintings of Francisco Goya. Within a couple minutes of joining the soiree, we are introduced to haunted objects around the room and spooky lore, but then while our attention is on those things, a figure in a plague mask rises from the center of the table and startles the hell out of everyone and forcing them to flee the room. IN Paranormal Activity, one particular scene wields diversion to conceal/ reveal something so well audiences apparently are left figuring out how they did it.
But this magic can also be harder to manage. They eye of the audience can wander, whether you want them to or not. You can't always focus attention so deliberately as with writing or a camera. While you want your audience to be looking one way, they may be fixated on another. Large spaces can be problematic, but so can small ones. How much you can conceal with lighting, sets, etc. Or how much you can't conceal everything. A perfect example was HOOKMAN, which was stages in a small black box space with a really close audience. The low light between scenes made figures visible, so when the hook man hid behind a car for a backseat scare, we saw him come out and hide, so we knew he'd be popping up in the scene. But that is not always a bad thing. There is a scene in the film OBSESSION, for example, where you know something is going to happen by the camera focus, but it still takes you by surprise and offers a jolt.
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