The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
227
Landis: Ray Harryhausen saying he never made a horror film is very much
like Boris Karloff and Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing and Vincent
Price—they always objected to that name: horror film. Because the truth is,
to horrify is pretty easy. [laughs]
If I want to make a horror film, if I show you a person who’s been shredded
up, it’s pretty easy to get a horrified response. It’s not hard to horrify. It’s
difficult to generate suspense, or terror, or suspension of disbelief. Karloff
especially used to hate the word “horror,” because that meant just gruesome.
There are many horrible things: starving children. It’s not difficult to make a
horrible horror film—it’s difficult to make an elegant, terrifying, suspenseful
picture that keeps you on the edge of your seat because of your concern for
the characters’ welfare, as well as the filmmaker’s ability to make you believe
something not real is real. A fantasy picture.
For me, probably the best fantasy film ever made is The Exorcist. Now
people say that’s a horror picture, because it’s so horrific. Well, in fact, I totally
do not believe in the devil—at all. I think that people are what’s scary. But
nonetheless, the devil is something I emotionally and intellectually reject as a
bad excuse people have for their own behavior. Having said that, the genius of
the The Exorcist is while you’re watching the movie, William Friedkin manages
to make you believe that this little girl is possessed by the devil! And it’s
really scary.
Now, for me, having been raised liberal Jewish, as soon as the movie
was over, we went out to eat, we had dinner and talked about it, I was very
excited, then we went home to bed. Didn’t scare me. But my Catholic friends
were tormented for months.
My mother, too. It messed with her pretty badly.
Landis: All those kids who were raised Catholic, all those altar boys and
stuff—it scared the shit out of them! [laughs] Because it touched something
in the brainwashing of their youth. However, my point is, that film genuinely
created suspension of disbelief. While you were watching that movie,
you had—yikes!
And in terms of creating fantasy worlds, it’s something many people
have done. Probably for me one of the most successful fantasy films is
also the most blatantly artificial, which is The Wizard of Oz. That movie