Transcript + vocabulary list + exercise:
[00:00:00.000] - Oliver (Host)
Welcome back to another episode of English and Beyond. My name is Oliver. I'm the host. With last week's episode, you might really have noticed that some of the vocabulary that was used was very high level.
[00:00:11.510] - Oliver (Host)
So I hope that you had a look at the transcript if you had any difficulties understanding any of the vocabulary.
[00:00:17.820] - Oliver (Host)
This week, as ever, the transcript is available at www.morethanalanguage.com.
[00:00:24.680] - Oliver (Host)
So come on the website, check it out.
[00:00:27.760] - Oliver (Host)
I also have to apologise in advance for a bit of a nightmare with some of the recording that we encountered this week. So there may be parts of the dialogue when you notice that something is a bit off.
[00:00:39.620] - Oliver (Host)
I apologise, and next week it will be back to normal.
[00:00:43.870] - Oliver (Host)
César's cousin recently came to stay with us. I have a lot of time for this woman. That quite modern English idiom, "to have a lot of time for someone or something", means "to like them, to be interested in them". When my partner and I first moved back to London together, she was already living here with her long-term boyfriend. I loved going for lunches, dinners, coffees with them. She's a fascinating person, a very interesting person, and it was always a pleasure.
[00:01:15.370] - Oliver (Host)
However, time moves on quickly, no?
[00:01:18.600] - Oliver (Host)
She and her boyfriend decided to have a baby, and almost immediately after this baby was born, they left London to move back to Spain to raise their child. So, as I said, she came to stay and she brought her now five-year-old son. You might be wondering what connection could there possibly be between this five-year-old and horror films, the topic for today's episode. No, it's not that this boy is some sort of ghastly horror film infant, creepily jumping out of the shadows and lacking any reflection in the mirror like a vampire. And no, I didn't find a Satanic birthmark of 666 on the crown of his head or anything like that. Instead, the horror of this boy was very conventional and ordinary: anything his exasperated, frustrated mother said, he did the absolute opposite. But this is actually a very typical human reaction, and one not limited to little kids. When we're told we can't have something, we want it. And this is the link for me to today's topic. I vividly remember being quite little and walking into the living room, attracted by the tense music and shrieking coming from the television. My mum and my sister were curled up together on the sofa, transfixed by the TV, gripped by what they were watching.
[00:02:52.790] - Oliver (Host)
Immediately, my mother hurried me quickly out of the room. She shooed me out of the living room. They were watching the '90s horror film classic Scream, and my mum didn't want me to watch. Now, whether this was because she thought it was too mature for me or because she didn't want to have to deal with my constant questions, I don't know. But it certainly sparked my curiosity, and being told not to watch this film hugely increased my interest in Scream and films like it.
[00:03:24.310] - Oliver (Host)
Later on, when I was about 12 or 13, I invited a friend over to stay the night. We hung out, we played some PlayStation, we cooked up some popcorn in one of those microwaveable bags, and we sat down to watch a film. I chose the film, taking it from my family's collection.
[00:03:44.930] - Oliver (Host)
I knew better now than to ask my mum's permission. It's like they say, in some cases, it's better to ask forgiveness than permission. The film I chose was The Exorcist. I loved it.
[00:03:59.550] - Oliver (Host)
My friend, to say the least, did not.
[00:04:03.020] - Oliver (Host)
He allegedly went off to the kitchen in search of some more food. Although it took me a while to realise, his trip to the kitchen had lasted an extremely long time. Eventually, I went to look for him and found he hadn't gone to the kitchen at all. Instead, he was hiding in my bedroom, totally traumatised. He had been so scared of the film that he had essentially run away. The next time my mother ran into his mother at the playground, she got a real earful. That means she was told off by his mother, she was strongly criticised by her. She was told that she had been neglectful for allowing us to watch this film. Her son hadn't been able to sleep in his own room for weeks, convinced that he would become possessed by some evil spirit if he were to do so. For my part, I was totally fine. In fact, at the age of 12, or whatever I was, I was probably most bothered by the fact that I wasn't able to finish the film after finding him so upset. However, these two experiences together meant that my love affair with horror films had begun.
[00:05:16.930] - Oliver (Host)
The first interesting thing about horror films is that I find it really surprising that this genre of film exists at all.
[00:05:25.430] - Oliver (Host)
I can't think of any other film genre where people enjoy tormenting themselves in this way. It's obviously not a nice feeling, as such, to be scared, but people love to subject themselves to it anyway. Watching horror films provokes the usual fear response: the hairs on your arms, standing on end, sweat, your pulse racing, etc. So why do we put ourselves through that for entertainment? I guess it's probably because it allows us to confront our fears in a safe way. We may be terrified of the spiders or psycho killers or demonic dolls on screen, but once we've turned it off, they disappear. They're no longer a threat.
[00:06:10.170] - Oliver (Host)
A second interesting fact for me: horror films are a great example of something called "habituation", the process of becoming accustomed to something, becoming used to something, resulting in a decreased response, or even the disappearance of the response altogether. That means, the more we do something, the smaller the effect it has on us. In the context of horror films, when I first started watching them, I was shaken to my core. I was terrified by the first few ones that I watched. However, over time, their scares become samey, unoriginal. I didn't feel anywhere near as engaged.
[00:06:53.650] - Oliver (Host)
We experience this all the time as humans. It's obviously something that children don't understand very well. Often, my students at school would wish that it were Christmas every day or that they were always on their summer holidays. The reality, of course, is that this would not be a pleasant experience if it were true. They would get bored, and the value of those pleasant experiences would be lost.
[00:07:18.510] - Oliver (Host)
This brings me to the third idea that I have about horror films: maybe the reality is that it's not so much that I have become accustomed to horror films; maybe the reality is that it's the horror film genre itself that is the problem, rather than me. Being a horror film fan is a little like being in a long-term relationship with an unreliable partner. Horror films have kept me hanging on so many times. So many times I felt let down. So many times I've been disappointed. There's a great variety within the genre, but the quality of the average horror film feels lower than other genres, and that's coming from a self-declared fan. Specifically, often the final act, the third part of the film, suffers in comparison to the rest.
[00:08:11.230] - Oliver (Host)
Films can be really scary while the monster or the villain is simply hinted at. But once they're fully revealed and battled at the end of the film, they just seem to lose that actual horror that they once held.
[00:08:25.760] - Oliver (Host)
César, César, I've dragged you along to many horror film outings in the cinema, and you've fallen asleep during many home viewings of the genre. So in the great tradition of the killer's infamous question in the first Scream: what's your favourite scary movie?
[00:08:48.930] - César (Guest)
Well, I have to say that one of the horror films that actually traumatised me was one that I went to watch when I was 12 or 11.
[00:09:00.120] - César (Guest)
It was my cousin's birthday, and she was like 15, 16, and I was invited. I don't know why. She and her friends went to the cinema. They brought me along with them, but she wasn't really paying attention to me. She was like, "Sit there." So I was on my own on that row. They were behind me or something or in front of me. And we went to watch The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis.
[00:09:28.350] - Oliver (Host)
Oh, yeah. Great film.
[00:09:29.750] - César (Guest)
Great film, but it was really, really scary. Like, I had nightmares for weeks. I couldn't be on my own. I couldn't be in the dark for many weeks. So I think it's one of my favourite horror films, but the one that really triggered something in me. I mean, I've always been scared when I was little, especially I was scared of darkness and spirits and something from other worlds. Then you introduced me to Scream actually, I hadn't seen Scream before I met you. I really like that saga. Can you say saga?
[00:10:06.290] - César (Guest)
Like a series of films?
[00:10:07.930] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah, a saga. I mean, you had seen Scary Movie, hadn't you, though?
[00:10:11.980] - César (Guest)
Yes.
[00:10:12.830] - Oliver (Host)
We can talk about that in a minute. But you were talking about The Sixth Sense, and I think The Sixth Sense is a great film. Obviously, I think it's the director's best film. Yeah.
[00:10:22.000] - César (Guest)
Huge plot twist by the end of it.
[00:10:25.100] - Oliver (Host)
Incredibly famous plot twist. And...but I think the thing that it does so well is that it actually, unlike what I was saying in my little spiel, it actually maintains that sense of dread the whole way through, which is interesting because I suppose - I don't want to reveal the twist because there may be some people that especially from the non-English-speaking world who haven't seen it - but the ghosts are so scary the way they're presented the whole way through the film, and then the end of the film, even though lots of the stuff around the ghosts has been resolved, it's still scary because it's scary in a different way. I think that that's quite a good job of dealing with that difficulty that I mentioned in my spiel, where you have a killer, and then once the killer has been revealed or you have a threat like a ghost or something like that in another film, and once that's been battled, it becomes so much less scary. We went to see Longlegs, a new horror film.
[00:11:24.500] - César (Guest)
Who's the actor? Nicolas Cage.
[00:11:27.660] - Oliver (Host)
Nicolas Cage. The first time you see Nicolas Cage on screen, you don't see his full face or you see it for a split second, and it's genuinely creepy.
[00:11:36.950] - César (Guest)
Very scary.
[00:11:37.780] - Oliver (Host)
But by the end of that film, and I can only assume it was deliberate, elements of it just become quite comic. That is something that I think happens a lot in horror films.
[00:11:48.200] - César (Guest)
Do you think it's deliberate? Do you think they want to add this campness to it, this comical touch in films like Scream or this one we've seen?
[00:12:00.080] - Oliver (Host)
Maybe we can talk about Scream and Scary Movie now already, because one of the funny things about Scary Movie is that it parodies Scream, but Scream is itself already a parody of other slasher pics.
[00:12:13.950] - César (Guest)
It's very meta.
[00:12:14.770] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. A slasher is-
[00:12:17.180] - César (Guest)
Killing someone with a knife.
[00:12:18.580] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. Well, not necessarily with a knife, but you call a slasher pick, a slasher film, one where it's almost like indiscriminate violence. So there is a killer going through just slashing certain victims to death.
[00:12:31.980] - César (Guest)
Very bloody, wild, savage.
[00:12:33.850] - Oliver (Host)
The killing is almost the point. So a lot of the time you'll have people whose character consists of two lines of dialogue, and then they really only exist on screen to be cut into pieces. That's a slasher pic. And Scream is actually, I think, a very intelligent version of those. But it is in itself laughing at that kind of genre, which makes Scary Movie's parody of it...arguably less valuable because it's making fun of something that's already making fun of other things. It's like Scary Movie doesn't really get that. But the other impact, I think, of Scary Movie is that it's now almost impossible if you've seen Scary Movie to watch Scream without just finding it quite funny, even funnier. And I think actually Scream's original working title was Scary Movie, so I think that tells you everything that you need to know about Scary Movie, and arguably, it's kind of lack of a reason for existing. But I think Scary Movie is a fun film,
[00:13:33.370] - Oliver (Host)
Actually, about the Sixth Sense - you went to go and see it in the cinema. There's a big difference watching a horror film in the cinema.
[00:13:42.100] - César (Guest)
Absolutely.
[00:13:43.040] - Oliver (Host)
I went to see The Grudge. I don't know if you know that film.
[00:13:45.560] - César (Guest)
With that little girl that comes out from the television.
[00:13:50.210] - Oliver (Host)
That's The Ring.
[00:13:51.390] - César (Guest)
Okay.
[00:13:52.640] - Oliver (Host)
I actually had the Japanese films on DVD as well, but I can't remember if it was The Grudge or The Ring. But we went to go and see the American remake with my school when we were on a school trip in America. We were there for some big, kind of athletics competition that we had been invited to. We encountered another group of school kids in the cinema, and we were kind of teasing each other. It wasn't aggressive, anyway, from either side. But I remember that some of us, during one of the big jump moments, one of those moments where you get really scared, we crawled underneath the seats. And you can tell with horror film, the music is building, and it's a big moment - we grabbed their legs underneath the seats!
[00:14:33.090] - César (Guest)
I would have hated that.
[00:14:35.440] - Oliver (Host)
Me too. But actually, I suppose it's...if you're going to the film to be scared and someone does that to you -
[00:14:42.860] - César (Guest)
It's like an immersive experience.
[00:14:45.530] - Oliver (Host)
Exactly. It's like those 4D rides at Disney. It's more than money can buy. So I wonder if they remember that, that group of school kids, but yeah.
[00:14:56.450] - César (Guest)
I was actually thinking about immersing yourself in films. I think the reason you like horror films that much is because you really get into them. Like, when we watch a film, I'm quite relaxed.
[00:15:13.120] - Oliver (Host)
So relaxed that you almost always fall asleep.
[00:15:15.620] - César (Guest)
Yeah, I fall asleep like 50% of the time, especially if we watch a film from home in the evening. Last night is a good example of it.
[00:15:26.180] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. Because we had watched this film for almost 2 hours and you got annoyed with me because I kept waking you up at the end. But you had managed to get through 1 hour, 50 minutes, and then chose the last 5, 10 minutes to fall asleep.
[00:15:41.350] - César (Guest)
I promise I really made an effort last night to keep myself awake. Like, I even went to brush my teeth in the middle of the film to keep myself awake, but it didn't work. Anyway, I was saying that I think you really like horror films because you really immerse yourself in them. You're always very empathic with the main character. You're always shouting at them, saying, "What are you doing? Grab the gun!" I'm quite relaxed. I'm just, like, watching as if the story has nothing to do with me. It's not connected with me while you are more involved in it and more engaged.
[00:16:29.340] - Oliver (Host)
I think, it sounds stupid to say that "you like films". I mean, that's like saying you like books.
[00:16:34.700] - César (Guest)
Well, some people don't like films. I know many people in Spain who don't go to the cinema, ever.
[00:16:41.380] - Oliver (Host)
Sure. But I think it's such a broad thing to say that you like or don't like. I think that it is true that I watch films in a more active way than you because I can't stand it when you're listening to a script and it just sounds so unnatural. You know that I hate it when there's lots of really poor quality exposition.
[00:17:04.230] - César (Guest)
Yeah, like they over explain the plot, the story.
[00:17:10.200] - Oliver (Host)
Well, yeah. Or you'll have a pair of siblings that obviously see each other every day. At the beginning of the film, they're like, "Do you remember when Mum died 10 years ago and we've been going to the cemetery every week since then, and yet we've never seen any other flowers left on the grave next door" or something like that? It's just, it's such an unnatural conversation to have, and I can't stand that. I'm a much more active film watcher than I am a book reader. I've read books where other people will criticise so many plot holes and stuff like that, and I will think, "Oh, that's true." If someone points it out, but I don't notice in the same way I notice for films.
[00:17:49.000] - César (Guest)
Actually, going back to horror films, specifically, I feel they do that very explicitly. For example, if there is something about spirits, they start with this title at the beginning, "20 Years earlier", and they explain to you what happened 20 years earlier in that house. No?
[00:18:11.520] - Oliver (Host)
I think it depends on the film. Sometimes that can be done well, sometimes it's done really badly, right? As I said, I think that even though I do love horror films, I think there is a lot of bad quality filmmaking in the horror genre.
[00:18:26.540] - César (Guest)
Do you think that streaming platforms like Netflix, HBO, Disney+, and the amount of new productions, new films they produce every year make that the quality of these productions is getting worse and worse?
[00:18:46.490] - Oliver (Host)
Not really. I think, I imagine that the reason there are so many bad horror films is because I think they're relatively low budget. That is, they're made for not very much money. I think that that means that there are many, many horror films that Netflix and other streaming companies can buy that have existed for a long time, and they're very, very cheap purchases for Netflix, so they just throw them on the system. I think that probably is more to do with it. But as I said, I think, generally speaking, horror films are quite cheap to make.
[00:19:23.390] - César (Guest)
Another thing I've noticed talking to people our age as well is that some people like me who used to love going to the cinema to watch horror films when we were teenagers, because I think most horror films are made for the teenage public. In the same way I used to go to the amusement park or theme park to ride a roller coaster, for example, now with both horrible films, horror films and roller coasters, now I'm much more scared of them, and I don't enjoy them as much as I used to. I guess when you mature, when you grow old, you actually don't want or don't need to feel that thrill anymore. No, you don't want to be scared for the sake of it. I don't know.
[00:20:21.180] - Oliver (Host)
That speaks to what I was talking about before, doesn't it? That it's a weird thing that horror exists, that we put ourselves through that as a genre. But I think, personally, I've gone full circle on this, that when I was a teenager, I used to love watching horror films, loved watching slasher films, and really didn't care about the violence on screen at all. Completely washed over me, kind of ignored it, didn't-, it just didn't bother me watching someone be hacked to pieces. And then, it's not like I've actually witnessed these things in real life, but when I got a bit older, I find it much harder to watch things on the news or something where I can imagine terrible things happening to people in my life. So if I watch something on the news, for example, where there's a little girl that gets in some way harmed, then I instantly think about my nieces, and it fills me with horror in a way that I don't think it did when I was a teenager. And correspondingly, I have found it harder to watch horror films in general. I was never one of those people that looks away when I was younger, but now I find myself more likely to look away or to grimace or something like that.
[00:21:32.440] - Oliver (Host)
(Grimace is to pull an expression of disgust.) I now enjoy horror films again because I think that during that period, I lost interest in them. I enjoy them a lot more, but it is, it's true that I still have that, kind of, aversion, this dislike of watching gore, lots of blood and guts and things like that. I don't like watching people getting beaten up or hurt. Although, interestingly, I find it really hard to watch boxing. I don't know if you've ever watched boxing, but I find it really hard to watch because it is just so violent.
[00:22:13.590] - César (Guest)
It's very real.
[00:22:14.400] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. Whereas when I was younger, I loved watching things that were violent.
[00:22:21.210] - César (Guest)
I guess it's normal when you are a teenager, when you are younger, you just want to feel a thrill and you probably can't relate as much than when you are older.
[00:22:33.240] - Oliver (Host)
I have another question for you, a final question, in fact. Is there a particular sub-genre of horror film that scares you more than others?
[00:22:41.720] - César (Guest)
Yeah. All things related with spirits and phantoms and these things. They really scare me.
[00:22:50.500] - Oliver (Host)
Do you believe in them in real life?
[00:22:52.180] - César (Guest)
I don't really, but I find them really scary. I remember when I was little, I remember dreaming about the people coming at me and saying things to me and these kinds of things.
[00:23:07.870] - Oliver (Host)
I don't think I find that scary because I fundamentally don't believe in it. But I think I find most scary the films where people believe that there are ghosts, but then it turns out that they're just insane. Because I think I find that idea of going insane and there being ambiguity over whether you are insane or whether there is something out there trying to get you. And I think that that is quite an engaging psychological trick for me.
[00:23:38.020] - César (Guest)
Yeah, I'm thinking of Smile, a horror film we recently watched.
[00:23:43.190] - Oliver (Host)
Exactly. And I think Smile is actually one of the better ones of the last few years. Yeah. Okay. Do you have anything else to add?
[00:23:53.060] - César (Guest)
Well, actually, I wanted to ask you something else, because thinking of horror films, I feel that there is now a shift where people don't watch as many horror films as they used to, but they consume much more true crime documentaries. And that, for me, is actually quite dark because you're actually engaging with a real story.
[00:24:22.780] - Oliver (Host)
You're taking entertainment from someone else's horrible misfortune.
[00:24:26.390] - César (Guest)
Yeah. It's very interesting that some people really enjoy watching or reading true crime.
[00:24:33.280] - Oliver (Host)
I think it's the same principle, though. My mum loves watching true crime documentaries about middle-aged women that have been brutally murdered, like middle-aged women living alone in their houses and are horribly murdered. I think does this no worry you because you are a middle-aged woman living alone in a house.
[00:24:53.180] - César (Guest)
Well, I've read actually that people who like true crime, they watch it because they feel safer If they're watching these documentaries, they feel like they have more control and they can actually know or detect what might happen to them. They've got the knowledge.
[00:25:16.100] - Oliver (Host)
Yeah. Well, I mean, after reading about the BTK killer, which stands for Bind, Torture, Kill, I did spend a lot of time looking in wardrobes and places like that because he used to hide out in their houses until they went to sleep, I think, and then would creep out. But luckily, where we live now, there are extremely few places where someone can hide, so it's a very efficient check. It only takes me about 30 seconds.
[00:25:43.040] - César (Guest)
They can't hide below, below our bed.
[00:25:46.500] - Oliver (Host)
No, because -
[00:25:47.240] - César (Guest)
There's no space.
[00:25:47.600] - Oliver (Host)
Exactly. It's so full. It would be obvious that they had to unstack all the boxes.
[00:25:52.880] - César (Guest)
They'd be like, I can't be bothered. Too much work.
[00:25:56.240] - Oliver (Host)
"Someone else can kill them." Okay, well, on that positive note, thank you very much for listening, listener. Please write in with your own scary movies or any other observations on the genre. Are you a big fan of horror? Have you gone through different stages like me where you have thought it was great and then you've lost interest? Let me know by writing to me at oliver@morethanalanguage.com. Until next time!
[00:26:23.290] - César (Guest)
Thank you.
[00:26:24.400] - Oliver (Host)
I should say, in the great tradition of Scream, "I'll be right back."
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