Family vacation, we three kids splayed across the Oldsmobile Delta 88’s back bench seat, was prime time for torture. My sister and I had a mechanism sure to rankle even the coolest character — or anyone with an ear. Step 1: Take a popular song of the day, say, Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Step 2: One person sings on key. Step 3: The second person sings just flat or just sharp, but definitely out of tune (bonus points for clapping on the upbeat).
The result: horrible.
What’s so horrible about singing off-key or spoiling a steady beat? I’ll sum it up as dissonance: a lack of harmony or agreement, consistency or congruency in the presentation; a resulting clash — almost eerie in its incongruence.
What makes an artistic work — from films to novels and short stories — horrible, eerie or spooky might have as much to do with dissonance — disharmony in tune, time, tempo or even theme — as it does with plot. Here’s an experiment: Take your favorite horror film and mess with the dissonance. Turn the sound off, and then play your favorite scene accompanied by a laugh track or in slow motion. Still so scary?
In working to understand how horror works on our senses through dissonance and other devices, we stand to understand ourselves, our faith and God more fully. So, bring on the scary.
As a kid, I had plenty of reasons to find William Friedkin’s Catholic-themed 1973 film “The Exorcist” — arguably the most influential American horror film — very frightening. We 80s-era kids knew that demonic possession was not something to take lightly. We were told in school and at church to look out for co-opted Catholic symbols, like the upside-down cross, and were taught that popular games like the Ouija board, which is featured in the film, were instruments of the devil and his attendant demons. Then there were the film’s elements of gore and body horror to really make us scream.
Now, as a writer — and therefore de-constructor of all things story — I wonder how much of the hair-raising wasn’t plot but dissonance created by a savvy director and cinematographer. Take my favorite part from early in the film. Search YouTube for “Walk home with Tubular Bells,” and you’ll discover a serene and nearly dialogue-free scene that lasts only a minute. The mother/actress character Chris MacNeil (portrayed by Ellen Burstyn) walks home through the streets of Georgetown from her film set. It is the evening of Halloween, but it’s still daylight and warm; she carries her gloves in her hand. She has an easy, long stride as she passes nuns in their habits, children in un-scary costumes — quite innocent.
Throughout the scene, music plays from “Tubular Bells,” the debut studio album by Mike Oldfield, released the same year as the film. Though played in a minor key, the instrumental electronic rock music is fairly light in tone. The tune is repetitive, almost elementary, and is played at a quick tempo. A bass line comes in, but the music itself doesn’t lend the scene its foreboding air. It’s the dissonance in tempo and time caused by MacNeil’s legato stride in heels, the gently falling leaves, and the nun’s skirts and veils billowing in the breeze that clash with the music’s clipped pace. The disharmony builds to an arresting climax, when MacNeil sees for the first time Fr. Damien Karras (played by Jason Miller), the priest who will go to war with a demon for her daughter’s soul.
It’s the subtleties of dissonance, not story, that raise the scene to a new level of spooky. It’s dissonance that heighten the viewer’s senses, making us look a little closer, listen a little harder, and think a little deeper about the nature of good versus evil.
The film’s eponym, William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, “The Exorcist,” begins with a dissonance created by tempo — not of music, but of syntax. From the very first page: “Chris MacNeil was propped in bed, going over her lines for the next day’s filming; Regan, her daughter, was sleeping down the hall; and asleep downstairs in a room off the pantry were the middle-aged housekeepers, Willie and Karl.” Note the long sentence that sets the quiet, domestic scene.
What if using the Catholic imagination to examine disharmony and darkness in story shines new light on what it means to seek harmony and love in our lives?
Then there’s an interruption: “At approximately 12:25 a.m., Chris looked up from her script with a frown of puzzlement. She heard rapping sounds. They were odd. Muffled. Profound. Rhythmically clustered.” Note the short sentences that quicken the tempo, followed by a change in tone — from sleepy and homey to the strange and supernatural: “Alien code tapped out by a dead man.” At the end of this novel’s first chapter, “What looked like morning was the beginning of endless nights.” And so the terror, deepened by dissonance, grows, as we inhabit a story that examines human nature as it confronts supernatural evil.
More than compatible with the Catholic imagination, horror stories might be essential to the Catholic imagination. In working to understand how horror works on our senses through dissonance and other devices, we stand to understand ourselves, our faith and God more fully. So, bring on the scary.
One more example: this time a story from that most famous of Catholic storytellers, the Southern Gothic master, Flannery O’Connor. If “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is O’Connor’s best-known work, it is in my opinion also her most frightening — less grotesque (as in her story “Revelation”) and more plain horrifying. O’Connor was a master of dissonance, not only of tempo and tone but of character and theme as well. In the last couple pages of this story, both veer directly at horror, leaving readers questioning our own actions and our very souls.
The story’s plot is the stuff of (darkly humorous) nightmares for its speedy devolving into death. And (for the rare reader who hasn’t come across this story) here are spoilers: Having escaped prison, a murderer, who calls himself “The Misfit,” and his gang come upon a family on vacation, take them into the woods and kill them. Despite protestation and prayer from the story’s archly hypocritical (classist, racist) grandmother protagonist, only the family cat survives.
If we can imagine embodied dissonance, we can envision The Misfit character, a murderer who compares himself to the crucified Jesus. “Jesus thrown everything off balance,” The Misfit says. “It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime.” The idea of the world being off-balance, a kind of living-and-breathing dissonance, is explored further.
What if understanding what makes us shiver and quake — and why — helps us come closer to God and to each other?
The Misfit tells the grandmother that he calls himself the name because the punishments he’s endured don’t fit the crimes he’s committed. This idea of societal imbalance informs The Misfit’s unhinged criminal rationale: He finds no joy but in enacting evil. “No pleasure but meanness,” he says, and we readers leave the story wondering if The Misfit was the only monster in the story. We imagine ourselves in the place of the grandmother and consider how our actions toward others create dissonance, imbalance or worse in our world and how we might work to right ourselves in God’s image.
Here in the U.S., we’re closing in on our spookiest holiday, one with deep and fascinating Catholic roots, Halloween. I’m left thinking of my natural response to a good jump scare — a laugh, an embrace, a release. Likewise, what if using the Catholic imagination to examine disharmony and darkness in story shines new light on what it means to seek harmony and love in our lives? Rather than turning away from what scares us, what if understanding what makes us shiver and quake — and why — helps us come closer to God and to each other?