YOU CLOSE YOUR EYES AND HOPE THAT'S JUST YOUR IMAGINATION (PART I: NEIGHBORS)

June - July 2009

John Landis’s video for Thriller.

A door creaks open, a shadow appears on the wall, sounds are heard that one does not identify…you know all those horrifying techniques. But cinema has many ways to scare.

You close your eyes, but the terrifying idea remains. Fear is nothing but your imagination.

In Dominik Moll’s Lemming or Harry, in Picnic at Hanging Rock or in Room, you’ll find nothing but allusions, feelings, psychological studies and precise social portrays. But you’ll shiver when you’ll see revealed secret thoughts and desires, untold little crimes of everyday life and the results of common frustrations.

Meanwhile, Michael Haneke’s look at our society is a final conviction that values become illusory, that the world is made up of ordinary violence. Beware of your neighbors? No: see how YOU are the neighbor.

Then come the monsters, the serial killers, the madmen, the nightmares, the vampires, the beasts and the curses; write brilliant critical texts about the “genre” and its evolution, be informed, act as a connoisseur, know the auteurs—but admit it: watching these movies, something happens that is beyond knowledge and even beyond cinephile commitment. Something that has to see with what cinema is about: make believe. A delicious perverse feeling: I know it’s not true, but I truly shiver.

The feeling that an image will never escape your imagination, that a new, unexpected sensation in the reality of your life has been created. Because you discovered that the film, at a certain moment, was talking about you.

- Marie-Pierre Duhamel Muller