MASTERCLASS:Who, what, where, when, why? Writer and director Gerard Stembridge, whose new suspense thriller 'Alarm' opens in cinemas next week, attempts a scholarly dissection of the genre
WHO? Women alone, couples under stress, anyone with a suitable physical impairment
If thrillers reflect anything of real life, then the babysitter must surely be the world's most vulnerable profession. Girls of 16 to 18 years of age alone at night, apart from a sleeping baby upstairs, usually in a house almost entirely made of glass without curtains, drapes or blinds, are just waiting to be slaughtered! By virtue of their professional commitment to protecting the tiny tot in their care, they cannot leave the house and so are easy prey to threats from without; nasty voices on the telephone, shadowy figures at the French doors; or from within, right behind them.
Thrillers just love a woman alone and in trouble. Hitchcock put his women under a variety of threats, from Freud ( Marnie) another woman ( Rebecca),a man's mother (Psycho), even from birds (The Birds). Couples going through a rough patch, suffer appalling consequences in thrillers. In Straw Dogs, Dustin Hoffman and Susan George find that minor domestic tension inevitably ends with a double-barrelled assault on their home, by the sadistically violent half of a village, while the lesson from The Shining for all couples is, don't holiday with your partner in large empty hotels for any longer than a weekend. For Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don't Look Now, was it not enough for them to have to cope with the death of their child, without having to deal with an evil dwarf in a red cape spoiling their trip to Venice?
Muscular stars should never be vulnerable, but a significant physical impairment helps. Having his leg encased in plaster for the entire film certainly added to our fears for the safety of the otherwise heroic and self-sufficient James Stewart in Rear Window. Hitchcock achieved a moment of perfect dual vulnerability when he put his favourite blonde, Grace Kelly, in danger in the apartment across the courtyard, while the watching Stewart can do nothing to save her because of his inability to walk, let alone fight. Another excellent example of a two-for-one victim is Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. Being both blind and a young woman, how could she not be under daily threat?
In the case of Alarm, the seed of a notion which much later became, as Woody Allen once put it, an idea, then a concept, then an outline, was first sown when I was the victim of a burglary. But when it came to transmogrifying this personal experience into a film project, it just didn't feel quite right to make an overweight middle-aged male writer the terrified victim of malevolent forces beyond his control, even if the reality was that, when it happened, I was as timorous as a one-legged virgin babysitter.
WHAT? Rural life, urban life, suburbia, the unknown, totalitarianism
What in thrillers is the source of terror? Where to start? Take rural life: show, in high angle wide shot, a car driving through a lonely, barren landscape and there is a fair chance that within the hour the occupants of that car will be chopped into little pieces. See a house standing alone against a backdrop of fields and mountains in a grey sky, and you know that anyone living there, or merely visiting, is asking for trouble of a gruesome kind. Walk into a quaint village pub and the faces that turn to you all have brutal slaying with a farm implement etched into every long silent stare. But before scurrying to the protection of the big city, consider the dangers lurking in urban apartment life where, because no one even knows their neighbours, it is impossible to guard against the probability that they are cross-dressing serial killers, stalkers with darkroom facilities, or a coven of witches with their greedy eyes on your unborn child.
So what life choice is safe? Ah, of course, the picket fences and lawns of the suburban dream provide a glorious haven surely? Certainly, they seem so in the summer sunshine, but thankfully the film industry has made us aware that come nightfall, particularly in late October/early November, those tree-lined avenues will be chock-a-block with crazies in costumes wielding unusual and vicious weapons.
But at least, if the danger is a certain size and shape, one knows what to look for. Let's face it, anyone who cannot spot Freddy Krueger a mile off, must be as blind as Audrey Hepburn.
With the classic suburban maniac, the victim has a sporting chance, as long as she doesn't strip down to her bra and panties and venture out into a wood on a misty night, for no logical reason. Much more frightening, surely, is the unknown. That which is beyond our understanding. That which we cannot name. That which is behind the mirror, outside the tent, up in the attic, or slithering around in the plumbing. It is in the whistle of the wind, the creak of a floorboard, or as suspense writer Mary Higgins Clark wittily pointed out, the terror of a toilet flushing when you think you are alone in the house.
The unknown, of course, can also take socio-political rather than supernatural form. The paranoid thriller loves to place the victim in the firing line of an evil faceless State. In these films, fear truly is everywhere, and every character, no matter how minor, who gets a smiling close-up, or cutaway reaction shot, is likely to be an agent of evil willing to do anything to destroy our hero. A great box-office advantage of these thrillers, is that they allow Alpha males to be vulnerable without being reduced to big girls' blouses. Even Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise can be forgiven for running scared when whole governments turn nasty.
WHERE? Location, location location
For many years, films tended towards the obvious; castles so forbidding that even horses rose whinnying on their hind legs as the drawbridge went up and any simple maiden who stepped across that moat was clearly simple in more than one way. Then filmmakers discovered the power of the seemingly innocent workaday location. Roman Polanski was first to corner the market in the particular psychological terror of apartments. Across three films, Frantic, Rosemary's Baby,and The Tenant, he seemed to be on a single-minded mission to destroy the high-rise property market of major cities.
Meanwhile The Stepford Wivessold the line that an expensive suburban idyll was likely to be far more dangerous than Count Dracula's cellar. Hitchcock, of course, had his cake and ate it by giving us, in one location, a creepy old house on a hill attached to a modern motel with shower facilities.
One day, back around 2000, travelling through middle Ireland, I noticed at the end of a rather pretty village a particularly ugly brand-new enclave of houses. It was probably the extent of the contrast between the lovely old village and the bland horror of the development that drew my attention that day. As the boom boomed, no pretty village was safe from the developers' improvements. When criticised about the inappropriateness of so many of these creations, our former taoiseach would hit back with: "Isn't it better that our young people can now buy houses in Monaghan or Meath instead of Massachusetts or Manchester." (I have to admit I'm dressing up the quote a little, the alliteration is mine, but you get the gist.) This, apparently, was our choice: Live in ugly, inappropriate building projects and spend hours commuting every day, or emigrate.
Having digressed for a needless and malicious attack on our former taoiseach let me return to the subject of thriller locations. I became obsessed and could not pass these places without comment, even occasionally going in to have a look around. The similarity of atmosphere in all of them was both fascinating and chilling. During the day they were almost entirely deserted and certainly entirely childless. If one was to go to any of the "units", as property developers like to call them, and press one's nose to the glass, one would see all the hallmarks of a comfortable existence - 40-inch TVs, top of the range music equipment, expensive three-piece suites, artwork, Shaker kitchens, worktop islands (not all in one room obviously). But there were never any actual people enjoying their own amenities. "Lakeside View", "Meadow Valley", "Eden Woods" became to me the scariest places in Ireland. I had found my terrifying location.
WHEN? Present, past, future?
The suspense thriller has almost always preferred the present. Perhaps this comes from a belief that the world as we know it now, really is the most frightening it has ever been, and who would argue? Okay, the generation that lived through the second World War have a case. So is the strangeness and dislocation of the past more creepy? Or is the immediacy of fear that is right outside your door now, more effective? Personally speaking, I can be equally terrified by past or present, but future settings tend to be too cold and intellectual to have much impact at the gut level. 2001: A Space Odyssey or 1984 or Brave New World may be "terrifying" visions of the future, but none of them make the heart pound.
I thought I had written Alarm as an contemporary suspense thriller until the end of the boom turned it, in a matter of months, into a period piece. So, if you are already nostalgic for soaring house prices, and gazumping, as well as enjoying tension and fear, this is the film for you.
WHY?
Now I know why "why?" is always last in this list.Because it is the hardest to answer. Luckily, however, filmmakers are not required to understand why people like to be made feel tense, scared, edgy, creeped out. That is for minds more complex than ours. Filmmakers just have to know how to take meretricious advantage of it. I can, however, tell you why I thought we should make a paranoid suspense thriller set in Ireland now. Because, it seems to me, Ireland in the 21st century is as scary as anywhere else in the world. Are we not entitled to our very own paranoia?
Alarm opens in cinemas nationwide next week