Memory text

One morning, I was probably about eleven years old, it just so happened that class was unexpectedly cancelled for some insignificant reason I don’t remember. Anyway, we only discovered that when we were already on the school grounds, so one of my classmates asked some of us boys round to his place to watch a horror film from his older brother’s VHS shelf. 

I remember having had mixed feelings at first because I knew that I wasn’t supposed to watch those kinds of movies. But then, I also found the idea alluring, especially since I was invited although I wasn’t always popular with this group of boys. 

Soon, I was intrigued by a story I was too young to fully understand. What did captivate me was certainly the atmosphere of mystery and secret behavior, the tension beneath the idyllic surface. Of course, the feeling that I was doing something forbidden and that there was still a slight chance of being found out might have added to it. 

I also learned – if only in hindsight – how well-presented suspense situations even work when you’re watching a dubbed VHS tape on a small tv screen surrounded by a bunch of noisy kids with sunlight pushing through the partially closed blinds. So although I wasn’t keen on those viewing conditions – even back then, my idea of collective film experience was connected to cinema – I was certainly hooked on suspense. 

Needless to say, what I saw in this movie shaped my expectations of what a horror film was and should be for many years. I specifically credit one spine-chilling revelation (which from today’s perspective wasn’t too convincing or even fresh) with starting my hunger for thriller narratives. Maybe that’s also why I still associate the word “horror” more with “thriller” than “gore”. 

Speaking of naïve assumptions: since the story alluded to biblical myths that were completely new to me, I accidentally took the antagonist’s name – which I hadn’t heard before – for a biblical reference as well. Isn’t it funny how as a child even random pop culture tropes can seemingly change the way you look at the world or feel like you’ve been let in on an exciting secret? 

When I was recently rewatching the film, I was surprised how precisely I memorized the architectural layout of a terrifying set piece which I had mixed up with a more famous scene from a later movie. I definitely didn’t remember what had happened in the scene and who got hurt, but the railing that was involved looked exactly like I remembered it. 

Come to think of it, it was also the first movie I saw that didn’t end happily. At least not for the designated protagonist. It did for another character who became the “hero” of the sequel which we started to watch afterwards. Unfortunately, after a few minutes into the first sequence, we heard someone approaching from the stairwell. Whether our host’s mom came back early from work or whether just we forgot about the time, I cannot tell. 

Yet, our host’s reaction made it immediately clear that we somehow shouldn’t have been in that place and that he certainly didn’t ask his parents about inviting us. So there was a payoff to that creeping fear of being found out. And like in a good screenplay, it came from a different direction than I expected. It wasn’t my mom that would be the problem. Well, not yet at least. 

As our friend restored the living-room to its former state, we attempted to escape over the balcony. Suddenly, I found myself climbing over a railing. Thankfully, the apartment was only on the raised ground floor so that even an extremely clumsy kid like me managed to jump off the ledge unharmed. Looking back now, I’m not even sure it would have been that much of a problem if our friend’s mom had seen us. 

Strangely, I remember her as a dark silhouette in a door frame. However, this was impossible to see from the balcony. In fact, I did not see her at all. Funnily enough, I remember that rather ridiculous escape like a tightly edited Hitchcock sequence (no Herrmann music, though). In my mind’s eye, I see a close up of the opening door revealing a shoe entering, cut to me looking back from the balcony and so on. 

But my story didn’t just end there. Although I was home right on time for lunch and I decided to keep the whole affair a secret, I almost instantly told my mom that I had just watched my first horror film at a friend’s place without any adults present. Despite not being able to conceal my excitement and pride – especially because I knew my brother envied me – I couldn’t shake the feeling of having done something awful. 

There were no consequences like revoked tv privilege or anything like that. But my mother who wouldn’t watch anything gory was not concerned about my well-being which was punishment enough, most likely for both of us. Part of that uncomfortable feeling only subsided when my dad asked some specific questions about some preposterous details of the plot and I realized that he had also seen the film in question. 

It dawned on me that talking about it in this matter-of-fact way was not only possible, it also freed the experience from its uncomfortable secrecy and forbidden aura. After all, looking at it from a distance, it was not some conspiratorial monstrosity but a not too realistic mainstream movie. On the one hand, this normalization was a relief, on the other hand, it disappointingly reduced an overwhelming emotional experience to something really mundane. 

But not completely. There was something more complex about it. Although I’ve never had nightmares because of horror scenes, there was one thing that kept haunting me every now and then: a rather graphic decapitation was seared into my memory. I certainly knew it was not real. There was not even blood which I don’t think I had noticed back then, to be fair. But it felt like I’d experienced it in slow-motion. 

As I’ve recently looked at that scene again, it turned out to be actually filmed in slow-motion. Overall, it’s drawn out so long that you could close your eyes and still see it once you’ve opened them again. Now, part of me never wanted to see something like this again, yet at the same time I was somehow drawn to that kind of thrill. It took me some time to discover that this tension between being attracted to and repulsed by the same thing is part of experiencing suspense. In German, there is even a word for it: “Angstlust” which combines the words “fear” or “anxiety” and “pleasure”.

Author’s reflection on the video

Initially, I was reluctant to watch the video that was made from my cluttered text I had later come to feel ambivalent about. What if someone had adapted it in a straightforward way? So that Alan O’Leary’s multi-layered approach has been a relief. As a fan of Italian cinema, I also love the Italian title and whispery voice-over narration which make me see the American film I was writing about in a whole new context. Besides compressing the main statement of the text into a more palatable form, O’Leary also put himself on the line by implicating his own family (history) in the video. The video seems to be as much about his own “relationship to cinema.” At the same time, the reliability of all the narrators and personal revelations remains ambiguous – the essayist refers to his own audiovisual presence as a “persona” and the scripted opening monologue spoken by his real-life partner challenges much of what that persona says later on. 

Choosing to work with a film called “Caché” seems only appropriate in that context. I was still surprised by it because I never think of Haneke as a director of horror films. But since Caché – unlike many of Haneke’s other works – is a film that I could not appreciate either, I was amused by the premise of “making a bad film” out of it in an act of “revenge.” Overall, O’Leary’s reluctance to engage with my text, the horror genre or his own childhood seems to be mirrored by everyone involved: his partner’s voice informs us that she was “annoyed” and “hardly listened,” whereas the children are reluctant to participate in any staged scenes. With its overall tone fluctuating between sincerity and irony, “Angstlust” may not be as emotionally accessible, but ironically, it affects me in a way I associate with certain Haneke films. What lingers on in my mind are the freeze-frames of a sweaty Daniel Auteuil in bed contemplating graphic violence, torn between “Angst” and “Lust,” leaving me with a more complicated feeling of unease than the slick occult thriller the text was based on could ever have elicited.

Biography

Oswald Iten is a Swiss film scholar and video essayist with a practical background in hand-drawn animation. Currently, he works at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences as teacher and a PhD researcher as part of Johannes Binotto’s project “Video Essay: Futures of Audiovisual Research and Teaching”. He is particularly interested in the relationship between sound and image, as well as colors and editing. He also works part-time in a cinema.