Have I scene this before? (sorry, had to).

This week I watched the sci-fi horror thriller the 4^th Kind.  The movie presents itself like this newer genre of horror movie that mixes “real” recordings with scenes acted out by actors.  I found the plot of the film to be similar to that of newer exorcism movies like the Last Exorcism and the Devil Inside and even akin to the Paranormal Activity series and the Blair Witch Project.  The main character of the movie Abbey Taylor, who actually is in the real recordings throughout the movie, is a psychiatrist in Nome, Alaska (A.K.A generic small town where mysterious things happen like in the Last Exorcism).  Her husband dies mysteriously before the movie and she is left with her two young children.  As she struggles with his death, she works with other patients who begin having the similar problem of waking in the middle of the night (specifically at the creepy time of 3:33 – similar to the first Paranormal Activity) and feeling fear and anxiety.  She asks one patient to meet her again as soon as possible so she can perform hypnosis (exorcism) on him to see if they can get to the root of the problem.  He starts to explain what happens to him at night, and then he recounts what he said, and finally starts to envision something terrible and reacts violently (what happens in any exorcism in the movies).  It is clear that he is unstable, but she allows him to return home.  Taylor receives a phone call early in the morning and is summoned to her client’s house.  The cops are waiting because her client is holding up his family by gunpoint.  After she fails to calm him down, he kills his wife and children and ends this murderous rampage by committing suicide.

            She performs the same exorcism on another client… whoops, I mean hypnosis (Freudian slip?).  He reacts violently as well, offering us some disgusting throat gurgling noises and vomits on top of that.  In light of the shooting, Taylor makes sure that he and his wife are prepared for anything.  Like any typical horror movie, we have a break in the action.  We are returned to the recording Taylor made a couple of days before.  It surprises us with screams and deep, mysterious, and evil sounding voices that we did not hear before.  Instead of the voices coming from a demon, we learn that the language is ancient Sumerian, the language of the first human race (or not so human as the movie would like us to believe).  Taylor is then called down to the home of her most recent client to find him in a state of panic at home.  As she attempts another hypnosis to calm him down, his body floats into the air and contorts into inhuman shapes.  He then produces the same evil voice that we had heard before.

            The final twist of the movie comes when Taylor is under house arrest for her association with these brutal occurrences.  The cop stationed in front of her house wakes up around 3:33 (coincidence?) to see a bright light above Taylor’s house.  He steps outside his vehicle and see what appears to be a UFO fly above her house.  When all of the cops arrive we learn that Taylor’s daughter has disappeared, presumably taken by the aliens in their UFO.   Everyone, of course, thinks that she is insane and they take her son away from her.  In a last ditch attempt to find her daughter, she has her friend psychiatrist preform hypnosis on her.  She has the worst reaction in the film and tries to communicate with the aliens to find her daughter.  (I will attach the scene for your viewing pleasure.  I say pleasure because I found it hysterical, but some of you may find it terrifying.)  In the end, no one really believes Taylor and the movie leaves us with little hope, another original moment of horror films.

            I realize that this is a particularly long account of what happened in the movie, but I wanted to emphasize one of the major points in Freeland’s Realist Horror.  Freeland stresses that our attraction to horror flicks does not stem from the classical approach of an interesting plot and curiosity with an unbelievable monster, but rather, “realist horror showcases spectacle, downplays plot, and plays upon serious confusions between representations of fiction and reality” (269).  By describing the plot of this movie, I was attempting to show how unoriginal the plot line is.  It follows the general form of most of the exorcism movies and more recently the Paranormal Activity films.  Generally I find those movies absolutely terrifying, so terrifying that I lie awake in bed for a couple nights trying really hard not to think about demons or exorcisms.  I do not find them frightening because the movies drive my curiosity, but rather, like Freeland says, because of spectacle.  That being said, I did not find this movie to be scary in the least.   Instead I found myself laughing at the “scary” scenes and the movie in general.  What I think this movie fails to do is create “serious confusions between representations of fiction and reality.”  The one scene that seriously attempted to do so was the murder-suicide at the beginning of the movie.  In fact, this was probably the most frightening moment of the film.  Other than that one moment, the movie never really crossed fiction and reality boundaries for me.  What I cannot tell you, on the other hand, is why I find exorcism and paranormal movies more frightening than this rendition of an alien-abduction movie.