"Why Are You Torturing Me Like This?"

Rating: 10/10 (30 April 2013)

Let me start by telling that I'm not actually a fan of gory horror movies and that the movies that scare me the most are those in which the horror is not graphic but rather happening in your head. Like the most scary movies to me are "The Phantom of the Opera" (1925) and especially the scene when the phantom is described and one can see the horror on the face of the person who is describing him, or The Haunting where the horror is also only conveyed by the reactions of those exposed to it.
The other preliminary is that the first thing I learned about this movie is that it was banned in Germany for being too brutal and yet I watched it and am glad I did for I was pleasantly surprised - if one can talk of pleasant in the context of a horror movie. For what I found was a movie that takes its brutality and gore and the effect on its protagonists seriously.
For me the conflict became evident in Ash's exclamation: "Why are you torturing me like this?". First of all I took it as being directed against the demons who are of course threatening him, but then I discovered some other deeper meaning here. For he is the only one who actually knows the remedy against them, which is dismemberment, but he is also shown as being very reluctant to actually apply it. So what is tormenting Ash is also this knowledge and the effects it does or would have on his soul. Which according to Peter Brook also happens to be the central one in Hamlet. Hamlet is ordered to revenge his father's death, but at the same time the ghost also demands him not to taint his soul. In both cases the choices are horrible and both are quite classic.