I had the joy of watching Signs again today. The M. Night Shymalan film is one of a handful of his films that were incredible works of story and cinematography in the vein of Hitchcock. Yet for all of the wonder of what he can do his work is often met with shrugs or outright laughter. This is not entirely his fault. See, I watched the film with my class today and when the creature (mostly hidden for the first 50 minutes of the film) is revealed, they laughed. They saw the creature and it was not at all what they expected. It clearly wasn’t frightening enough and, as a result, when a character jumped back and screamed, that reaction didn’t match their own level of fright and surprise. The result was their laughter.
I immediately wondered why this reaction happened. I think I have it sorted out. The students had expectations of a creature that was truly menacing and terrifying. They expected something that would force them into a fear state–likely accompanied by a jump scare and other standard fear images (blood, weapons, mutilated bodies, etc.). None of these things accompanied the Bigfoot-esque image of an alien walking across screen, and as a result they had no proper frame of reference to analyze this scene as frightening. This is an inherent property of P-zeds.
I think we have become numb to new input that is expected to conjure existing feelings. I think I’d say more but we are out of time.