horrorfest evening seven: the Gewissengeist film

Allow me to call your attention to a favorite subgenre of the horror film by giving it a name: the Gewissengeist film. That's "conscience" and "ghost" strung together, and everything sounds more impressive in German.

This is how you make a Gewissengeist film (and I wish you would. The formula works very well indeed):

1. Take a handful of excellent character actors, British whenever possible.

2. Trap them in a confined place: a submarine, perhaps, or a bunker. Wartime is an opportune setting, with WWII crossing the finish line with a conspicuous first place lead over other wars, probably because Nazis are so easy to turn into evil ghosts and zombies whilst retaining that weird photogenicity. It need not, however, be wartime as long as...

3. ...there is some terrible threat of physical danger from without (ie: the enemy or a posse closing in) to offset the growing supernatural threat from within.

4. Wartime, however, also affords plenty of chances for good people to do bad things, which leads us to the instigating plot-point: some -- but generally not all -- of the characters have, usually prior to the action of the film, been involved in an atrocity or travesty of justice in which innocents were killed. The ensuing psychological tension combined with an eerie, furtive, supernatural presence propels the action into madness, chaos, and, for the lucky few, catharsis and new beginning.

5. The entity in question is real; it exists independently of the characters. In my favorite examples of the subgenre, it rarely takes direct action (as in Below). It lurks and hunkers, rather, like Banquo's ghost; it goads and directs, threatens or warns, messes with machinery and minds, but you never see it clearly and may never be certain in the end exactly what it is. In lazier hands, it becomes the usual macabre specialist in creative gore-dispersal which Hollywood assumes that we want.

6. Lastly, this supernatural force may or may not be directly connected with the crime committed. Sometimes it is, but more often the general premise seems to be that it's your bad conscience which lays you vulnerable to curses and other malevolence from beyond the grave.


Below (2002. dir: David Twohy) is the quintessence of Gewissengeist, and an overlooked stunner. The ensemble cast is splendid, and the tension builds relentlessly without sacrificing subtlety. It's got genuine scares, tense action sequences, a perfect story. The submarine lends itself beautifully to the claustrophobia necessary for the Gewissengeist film to work its dark magic. Bruce Greenwood is the captain who must pay for his crew's terrible mistake, Zach Galifianakis has a fine turn as a horror afficianado with theories about "the malediction", and Jason Flemyng may be the best actor around to fill those all-important but glamorless character-actor shoes.


The Bunker (2001. dir: Rob Green) is less successful but still fascinating. Nine Nazi soldiers are stuck in a bunker in the last days of the war, and the Yanks are encroaching. This particular bunker was built on grounds of ancient evil, and you know what that means: something's skulking in the tunnels. More crucially, seven of the nine share a terrible memory which preys on them to varying degrees. The best thing about it is the flashback to the atrocity. Done in heavy, saturated yellows and greens and in slightly slower motion, the sound-scheme is brilliant: all noises are muffled except gunshots, the heavy drone of insects, birdsong, and the terrible clicking of a camera shutter. Taken together, it's absolutely haunting. The race to the climax unfortunately opts for loudness and gore over substance, but it's still a pleasure to be trapped for an hour and a half with this solid group of actors. (Jason Flemyng again!)


Dead Birds (2004. dir: Alex Turner) is both unique and wildly unsettling. Set in Alabama during the Civil War, it begins with a brutal bank robbery and follows the ragtag group of miscreants to a cursed plantation house. Nobody is innocent in this one, and no one finds redemption. The cast is stellar (Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Isaiah Washington. Michael Shannon!) and the suspense'll keep you from sleeping soundly unless you wash your brain with a comedy before retiring.

POSTSCRIPT: As for Triangle, I'm going to amend my previous statement that it fits into Gewissengeist. Rather, I'm making up a new category for it: it's a Bardo film. It's all about conscience, to be sure, but no independent supernatural agent is necessarily involved, and really there's only one person whose guilt is being explored, so it's possible the whole thing is her mad, post-mortem rush through that liminal labyrinth of terrifying hallucinations and karmic feedback that the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the Bardo state.

Other examples of the genre, off the top of my head, might be Siesta, Jacob's Ladder, and even, arguably, Inception.