August 1, 2004

The Village: Exploring Fear

By Rose Pacatte, FSP

M. Knight Shyamalan has done it again. He has created another horror film with The Village. To be sure, there are differences between this film and Signs (2002) or the ground-breaking thriller Sixth Sense, the eerie Unbreakable (2000) and the Jungian Wide Awake (1998; a little movie that people who treasure family films - in the best sense of the word - will love). All of these films have a spiritual dimension, that is, an acknowledgement of other possible worlds and dimensions to human life and existence that give rise to tensions and contrasts. What binds all of these films together most of all, however, is that they are predicated on chaos over which one person or more have no control. This is what makes horror movies work. They scare.

I once heard Wes Craven speak about the horror genre and he said that the reason people go to horror films is because they are already scared. They go so they can gain a kind of symbolic control over the loss and chaos of their lives and experience catharsis, or as the dictionary says, “a purgation of emotions.” Horror films in general have a beginning, middle and an end and thus offer specific and vicarious closure. Viewers will have to decide ultimately if The Village offers cinematic closure or lets the audience create its own sense of psychological finality to the story or better yet, the story’s theme.

The Village is about a group of white people, mostly families, who are presumably well off enough to live isolated, within an enclosure; there are only hints of any work being done to support the group. The village people seem to be living around the year 1900 and they are surrounded by Covington Forest which turns out to be in Pennsylvania . They have probably been there for the length of a generation, about twenty years. They seem peaceful, at least the leaders are; everyone else is pretty much terrified by "those of whom we never speak" who dwell in the forest. These creatures are attracted by red berries, so the people dig them up whenever they see them. Some villagers have seen the creatures; they certainly hear them. The creatures wear red capes, and have claws and horns, and skeletal faces. As the film opens we see skinned dogs left about the village. One of the elders, Alice (Sigourney Weaver), explains the phenomenon as the result of coyote attacks.

A young girl gets all sweet on the quiet, brooding young man Lucius (played by Signs actor Joaquin Phoenix), but he turns her down. School goes on as normal, taught by Edward Walker (John Hurt) who seems to be the community’s leader. His oldest daughter gets married and Lucius and Ivy, Edward’s blind daughter, acknowledge their love for one another.

At night, Lucius helps keep guard over the village that is surrounded and seemingly protected by a ring of fire. Another skinned dog appears; someone sees one of the red-caped creatures.

At a meeting of elders one day, Lucius asks their permission to go out to the towns to get medicine for Noah (Adrien Brody), the good-natured "village idiot" who is not as handicapped as he seems. Lucius believes the creatures will sense his good heart and let him pass unharmed. The elders refuse him permission.

When Lucius and Ivy's love is made known to the community, Noah stabs Lucius and leaves him for dead.

Ivy seems to have preternatural vision, and the courage of a "man." She asks permission of her father to go to the towns to get medicine for her beloved Lucius. Edward makes a list of the needed medicines and lets her go, accompanied by two young men, dressed in the yellow capes that are supposed to signal the creatures that those who wear them do so in peace. Before she leaves, Edward “shows” her a secret and tells her not to scream. The elders are furious with Edward because they had made a covenant among themselves never to go out to the towns again.

During Ivy’s Blair Witch-style odyssey through a forest to the towns we start to understand what's going on. It's as if the ending of the film has just happened, but there's still more scary stuff to come. The second and third acts of the film seem inverted.

The Village is a psychological horror film about fear - real fear and manufactured fear; fear of the chaos of living because of the bad things that can and do happen to good people; it is about the kind of fear used to manipulate and keep people under control so they will be safe (supposedly); and maybe its about the false security created by an addiction to fear.

When I reflected on the film I asked myself who has the right to keep people from living freely, under the guise of keeping them safe, by creating a situation of perpetual terror from threat of attack? Do you terrorize your own children so that they will not stray into the forest and see what's beyond the narrow horizon you have built for them? The village elders thought they could do this. And from their very human and humane community came forth reasons for faith, hope and charity – but envy, jealousy and murderous deeds exist there just the same.

The fear in this film could be seen through the lenses of family, town and city, faith community, the media, and nations because it is about how people use fear, as a defense and as a weapon, and how sometimes one turns into the other. Fear is a universal emotion affecting every human reality. How we deal with fear and its causes is where awareness, conscience, freedom and responsibility come into play. What we do with fear is a very moral dilemma.

I thought early on that the film was going to be about supernatural and natural evil vs. supernatural and natural good, like The Sixth Sense. Instead it was about the extremes to which good people will go when they cannot handle the chaos, loss, grief, abuse, and sins that life hands to them. In the case of The Village, the people could not name the darkness, so they created more darkness to deal with it. As a social experiment it seems doomed to fail. But does it?

Some things in the film are never explained, like why Ivy sees people in "colors" and what Lucius’ color really is; no one ever questions the decisions of the village elders and how they know what the creatures will respond to and what antagonizes them, though we do find out how the village came to be. The Noah character deserves much more consideration than what I have offered here, but I didn't want to give away the whole storyline. Why there are only white people in the village raises deep social questions. Shyamalan once again uses color and the alien theme (the “other”) to create chaos and fear. To his credit, Shyamalan has finally chosen a female protagonist. All his other films focus on the male hero or the male as the central character, even though here Ivy’s father still pulls all the strings.

The Village is a movie with ideas, but without a very satisfying ending, or better yet, the formulaic expected ending. Does the horror continue? We are not to know. Was this intentional on Shyamalan’s part or the result of script problems? Whatever the answer, the film worked for me. I went to see this with my sister and I have bruises on my arm where she kept grabbing onto me at the scary scenes. We talked about the nature and reality of fear all the way home.