El Orfanato... y por qué Películas Espantan

It isn't very often that a film experience is enhanced by a vocal and expressive cinema audience. I've only been privy to about three instances of that happening. The first two were due to the communal sense of fandom and wonder that came with seeing Harry Potter and The Simpsons on the big screen amongst others who felt the same way as I. The third was last night's cozy nine o clock gathering in Nova Cinema on Lygon st, where a few dozen Melbournians, myself included, came to see Juan Antonio Bayona's El Orfanato (The Orphanage).

I have yet to hear so many screams in a theatre in my life. And each, I would say without fail, was closely followed by a very genuine and warm laugh of delight. It was the sound of a people desensitized by shock value and real societal terror discovering with joy that they could still be scared by a movie. It was a beautiful, wonderful sound.

The Orphanage is not a terrifying film, not in the way that films have terrified audiences in the past (mostly in the sixties and seventies). It is, however, profoundly creepy, and this thick, pervasive foundation of creepiness, which takes on a cinematic delight all its own, strips away the audiences' defenses so that when it punches us (which it wisely seldom does) , we are knocked to the floor. But, as I say, we are happy to be there. That's what we paid for.

Perhaps the physical presence of other filmgoers, the dark cinema and the atmosphere of engrossment thereby produced made the movie seem better than it was. But I say no film can be better than one which flowers in the environment just described, which is exactly what The Orphanage does. It is a film with such a wicked understanding of how horror works. It takes both its protagonist and its audience on a steady and solid regression back to our days as children, when horror was not an abstract filmic concept, but a living breathing thing in our hearts that flared up at midnight when we heard a noise we couldn't account for. There is a scene in it toward the end when our heroine unearths a descending staircase into pitch darkness. This reveal provoked laughter from the people around me that was not at all inappropriate. It was the unnerved, self conscious laughter of people who can't believe they've been manipulated back to this horrible place that they thought they outgrew when high school started.

It was laughter, because we are more or less adults who are in on the illusion. As adults, it's the only reaction to give: "Ahahaha they totally did it. They totally did it right. That's scary." It's our helplessly intellectual nature shielding us from the reason we're laughing: we're scared. Really, truly. Our terrified inner child is standing right there with the heroine, staring down those steps to nowhere, coming to shaking grips with the realization that there could be anything down there in that darkness, anything, anything at all.