Energetic but easily freudened

Rating: Null/10 (27 April 2013)

As a lifelong and avid watcher of horror, I've come to know what generally works for me.
One thing that puts me off is horror that spend more time tinkering with the wrap than the actual thing inside; a smart script, attempts at drama, good acting, polished visuals in a general sense, it is neither here nor there if a film has these for me however professional-looking the end result, and the same is true for nonhorror. That is all superficial attention to appearance.
What I do care about, by contrast, is ecstatic energy in the gears of narrative, raw edges; Texas Chainsaw, Suspiria, Halloween, Alien, The Funhouse, Evil Dead are all prime examples in horror. Drag Me to Hell more recently. They can be stylized or meticulously designed but that's not the point. The point for me is this visual energy that exhilarates, usually starts slow and builds to ritual dance.
My other parameter is that, generally speaking, horror is a matter mental urges, the story of ghosts is how we try to explain and reason with what just rose in the mind. So is this inner life of images clean apart from outside reality? Do we have for instance a portal to the horror dimension as normally in Stephen King? Or is it inextricable from mundane life, the same fabric? Do the images create the life? On this end we have all the ambitious stuff, from Videodrome to Inland Empire.
So what Del Toro puts on the table is just not for me. He is polished, professional, but the finished thing is usually meek and ever so reasonable, there is no letting go of mind. And the other-world of urges is always apart from life. So I have no use for his Devil's Backbone or Labyrinth. And whether because he attracts similar-minded talent or he has sway as a movie man, his produced films feel to me as tepid as his own—The Orphanage above all, well-made in a general sense but where's the passion?
This is well-made and at least the premise is effective, missing children are mysteriously rediscovered years later in a log cabin in the woods, having regressed in an animal state.
But again the main story, swathes of backstory about a mental asylum in the 1800's and psychological nuance are contrived, too much is cleanly explicable. We have some polished visuals, especially near the end. But the implications, the what-it-all-means, is sophomoric at best—as with Insidious last year and Del Toro's own stuff, the psychological world is its own fantastical realm, taken at face value. The aural effect may appeal to the teenage audience but it's a reduction from my view, or to quote from Joyce: "when they were jung, and easily freudened".
It may be the tipping point in this type of film was Poltergeist, where ever so dull Spielberg used all sorts of sfx gizmos to clarify Hooper's metaphysical force in the walls of the film.
Still, deep down there is some marvellous energy here, some startling occasions. For a while, this is as creepy as some of the Japanese stuff, where the point is a negative void. And then we have the swelling of jump scares, the forward motion—it is a dynamic effect. But all the other stuff works against this burying itself deep, we see and reason too much so the thing is made whole outside of us. Was a talent stifled here? We'll see in the future.