There was a new concept of Art-Dread versus Art-Horror introduced in the reading Horror and Art Dread. I am trying to dissect these three films to uncover the art dread within them.
In The Thing, it opens with the helicopter chasing the sled dog trying to kill him and I was mad that they were trying to shoot the dog. It turns out the dog was the host for a monster. The dread came into play because they knew the threat was real but they couldn’t explain it and didn’t know what it was. They found the space ship and frozen alien and when the doctor did the autopsy, he discovered the organs were human revealing that the alien “thing” could take human form. The dread continued because they realized it was a high probability that it had infected others but they didn’t know who it was or even if it was them. In the end, they were willing to die to be sure they killed the monster so it wouldn’t be a threat to others.
In Let Me In, initially it seems like Art-Horror based on previous readings because the girl in vampire form is both frightening in her actions and repulsive to look at. But the more I think about it, who in the film was frightened by the girl? At the moments of the attacks, I’m sure the victims were frightened but nobody really knew there were killings taking place so they weren’t afraid of a monster on the loose. I actually felt sympathy for the girl because she seemed to have genuine connections with the man and the young boy. You could also see how much the man cared for her since he would kill and bring her blood to keep her alive and allowed her to feed on him before he died. You can see a similar commitment from the young boy when he is leaving on the train rescuing her in the trunk.
The Ring definitely fits the Art-Dread category. From the time the victims watch the video and immediately afterwards receive a phone call, the dread sets in. They don’t know what the evil is but they know it is coming after them. After the first girl dies, her aunt figures out that her friends that went to the cabin with her, all died at the exact same time. She goes to the cabin and finds the video and watches it herself. As soon as she receives the phone call, she realizes that she fell into the same trap as them. A lot of the scenes in this film were cold, dark and gloomy making it have that dreadful feeling as well. Rachel, the aunt, wasn’t going to sit around waiting to die. She started analyzing the video frame by frame and was able to identify a location from one of the pictures. She kept researching until she followed it back to the child Samara. The more she uncovered, the more we realized it wasn’t psychological but supernatural. When they uncovered her remains in the well under the cabin, they thought the curse had ended. But nope, she comes out of the tv and kills Noah. We realize at the end that the only way to survive is to watch it and make a copy to pass along to another potential victim.