For my money, the best single reveal in horror history is the moment when one poor guy gets his first look at Leatherface, the killer at the center of Tobe Hooper's masterful Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That reveal can take a movie that seems to be in another genre into the realm of horror, or it can take an already scary movie to another level. So much of horror is about the reveal, the moment when the characters realize they've stumbled into a very, very bad situation. There's not a better single shot to explain what the horror movie is. There is a great, big beam of light, and in the center of it, pure black malevolence. It's not what we might be accustomed to in the modern era (when we can film in very low-light situations fairly easily), since this vampire story seems to be set in broad daylight, but the most famous sequence - the creature ascending the stairs to assault a young woman in her bed - is all about the interplay of light and dark. Notice how Murnau balances light and darkness throughout. This vampire, though he's made up to be a horrifying ghoul, connects to the monstrous side of our own sensuality, the part of us that feels as if it could do anything when out of control with longing. Murnau's Nosferatu, a film that's basically a bald-faced ripoff of Dracula. And if we're beginning there, then there are few better places to dig in than German Expressionism, a movement that arose in post-World War I Berlin that depicted complex emotions through the use of heavily visual language and symbols. Any discussion of how horror movies work must begin in one place - the battle between light and darkness.
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