A gentle horror movie?
A horror film circa 1983 devoid of cascading blood and oozing guts? Whose main themes are the simple parables of childhood and not slavering shamblers from beyond the stars or demented psychos with terminal Oedipal complexes? No, no, quite impossible.
But Ray Bradbury is a gentle man. His celebrations are joyous and full of life. Death to him is a kindly old abstract, a half-real shadow which lurks always in the background, too polite to shove its way in where it's not wanted. For Bradbury, waves and flowers and the grand expanse of the Universe as witnessed through a good telescope are hard-edged and real. Death remains a fuzzy, inexplicable presence, round and soft instead of exploding with sharp, pointy things. Bradbury's death is grandfather, not grave-robber.
This is not to say Bradbury can't generate a good scare when he wants to. Smooth, practiced wordsmith that he is, he's quite capable of fashioning chains on the busy forge of his typewriter with which to drag us down to the dark places as well as haul us up to pastel heights.
What is missing is the lascivious love of the mechanisms of terror which filmgoers have become accustomed to seeing on screen these past 20 years. There's no lingering adulation of the sordid step-by-step dismemberment of our secure vision of a safe world in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Instead, all is implied, hinted at, and the cutting edges of modern screen terror are kept locked safely away in their cabinets. There are chills in Something Wicked, but no screams.
Cinematic horror today is based on an explicitness made possible by the astonishing advances which have taken place in the filmic magic shop, the realm of the special effects personnel. Bradbury wants to give us the thoughts of fear, while these new masters want to show us what they can do. They want to give us reality, and they have, often ad nauseum. Many of them are young, and their outbursts of technical skill sometimes remind one of youngsters engaged tn their first explorations of sex, where everything is new, everything is unique, and there are no such words as "Too Much."
Ray Bradbury was raised on the innuendo of terror, when butcher knives were shown being removed from their holders instead of being put to use. Back then, audiences — as well as readers — knew what such instruments were going to slice and dice, and it wasn't the Christmas turkey. No, it was some other unfortunate turkey, usually female, always too stupid to stay out of dark houses or to turn around an instant in advance of disaster. As filmgoers saw more and more films and became more and more attuned to the language of cinema, their perceptions and knowledge of the horror genre advanced, until it was no longer necessary or even desired to explore the movement of knife to victim. Old stories demanded fresh treatments, and the advances made in special effects enabled producers to provide them, by showing the weapon finally penetrating heretofore Hays Office-forbidden flesh.
But clinical horror wears out faster than psychological, and the audience quickly found itself trooping into the theater to admire technical virtuosity instead of acting and writing, with the result that today's audience for horror films is suffering from biological overkill. Most films are the weaker for it.
In most instances, Something Wicked suggests instead of showing, as did the horror films of yore, but somewhere between conception and execution, someone involved with the production decided to hedge the bets. In Hollywood, this practice is also known as "covering your ass, " which sounds much better than saying you don't know what the hell you're doing. On a film costing $20 million plus, not even the cat who haunts the soundstages dares to admit to not knowing precisely what she's doing at all times.
[…]
