Halloween with Peggy Ahwesh
The Scary Movie (1993)
Halloween with Peggy Ahwesh
By Alice Gribbin
On Peggy Ahwesh’s The Scary Movie (1993).
The Scary Movie streams exclusively on Metrograph At Home as part of EAI’s Experiments in Terror. The Exterminating Angel opens at 7 Ludlow on October 27 as part of Haunted House.
Peggy Ahwesh
Staring hard at their own upheld palm is one of the more uncanny things infants do. Mid-play, mid-bath, mid-meal, a baby will come upon her hand as another of the world’s objects to be scrutinized, only this one is attached to her. An adult behaving the same way we’d say was in an altered state, tripping. What could be more familiar than one’s own hand? Lacking this familiarity, babies easily perceive what the rest of us rarely can—that a hand seems to have a life of its own. Those appendages, such trouble for figurative artists, act on our behalf all waking hours without our consciously directing them: turning pages or scrolling, gripping a cup, gesturing while we talk.
The Scary Movie (1993) by American experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh begins and ends with a harp being played, or rather, a harp’s strings being stroked. The first harpist is a girl no older than ten, done up in a bowler hat and black cape, fake eyebrows and mustache, leather gloves and plastic claws. The second player is a stiff rubber hand, moved along the strings by someone off-camera, whose own hand we’re shown.
Shot in silent black-and-white, from Ahwesh’s early, low-fi period, the film actually opens with a woman’s campy scream. Its soundtrack is a collage of B-movie stock sounds—creaking doors, howls, yelling voices, instrumental crescendos—that rarely correspond too closely with what’s on screen. Connections can sometimes be made. Foreboding chords play over the first, brief clip, the camera panning across a long sheet of pen-drawn musical notes held up by a child’s hands; the next track, fake gunfire, accompanies a girl’s feet in high-heeled sandals stomping repeatedly on the same sheet of paper. Conversely, the film’s most “violent” episode plays to the zany music of classic cartoons. We might wonder whether the relation of image and audio is part of a game the actors are playing—inventing action that seems to match, or totally mismatch, the soundtrack. Because there is no plot to this eight-minute film, only very short scenes.
We’re watching what feels like a homemade Halloween sleepover movie, the product of two girls who’ve been given, instead of a newer camcorder, an old Super 8 to play with. Perhaps a third friend is behind the camera. Along with their costumes, the girls’ spooky props include forceps-like kitchen tongs, a stethoscope, knives made from aluminum foil. A series of “scary” scenarios constitute their movie: a stabbing, a maniacal doctor’s examination of a lifeless body, a dismembered hand come to life, scenes of creepy stroking and witchy hypnosis and more stabbing. Both actresses play a blended character, identified in the handwritten closing credits as “doctor/killer” and “patient/hand lover.” The erratic camerawork, repetitive shots, handmade title cards, and bad synching of the soundtrack all add to the film’s intentionally amateur feel. Yet the lighting, so excessively dramatic, is quite masterful, lending the short an expressionism evocative of early horror cinema.
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
There is an echo, perhaps, of Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), which features its own anonymous disembodied hand. (Buñuel’s Viridiana, released a year earlier, is referenced in Ahwesh’s 1997 short The Vision Machine.) Unlike Ahwesh’s masculine prosthetic, Buñuel’s ambiguously gendered hand is menacing and weirdly ethereal. Even for those acquainted with his oeuvre, the hand’s appearance in The Exterminating Angel is surprising, the only overtly surreal element in a film whose premise is otherwise absurd, or supernaturally inflected. Delirious, ill, her face shining with sweat, the unfortunate party-guest Leonora watches in fear as a human hand slips from a closet and slides across the darkened room before attacking her at the neck. When she goes to stab the hand with a dagger, the room is at once lit, Leonora surrounded by the other guests, the strangling hand vanished. It seems to have been a figment of her disturbed mind. The hand plays a role both psychological and metadramatic, returning the audience’s attention to the artifice of what they’re watching. The same effect follows from the filmmaker’s heavy use of repetition—of images and deeds and dialogue, even entire repeated scenes.
As a study of archetypes, The Scary Movie has an aptly generic title. How many horror films has the average prepubescent girl seen? These girls know the genre well enough to act out its tropes, but their knowledge runs up against the hard fact that they are children: to them, tropes are for misunderstanding, riffing on, and undermining. So the evil doctor, with waggling eyebrows, is flamboyantly evil; the murderer’s tinfoil knives scrunch up pathetically when thrust upon his victim’s chest; the animated hand is treated by the child it’s supposed to be petting like itself a small pet. In the final shot before credits, the hand wobbles upright in the air, unthreatening as a rubber chicken. An object of terror has been domesticated, made ridiculous.
Much could be said about the film’s exploration of gender and performativity, spectatorship and transgression. Ultimately, The Scary Movie is too experimental to be pedagogic or socially instructive. It is the work of an artist who trusts her instincts as much as—possibly more than—her intellect. Given its home-movie aesthetic, the degree of formal cohesion is impressive. As in The Exterminating Angel, re-shot scenes play back-to-back. Gestures and images are mirrored throughout. The interplay of sound and action, often surprising, never feels arbitrary.
Ahwesh knows that children can be very literal, and one of The Scary Movie’s pleasures is its childish self-awareness. Proper movies, unlike any old bit of video recording, have credits at the end; accordingly, the final credit sequence here takes up a quarter of the runtime—first, a handwritten cast list held up by one of the actresses; next, a handwritten sign with a self-referential joke: “And that’s the sound of one hand clapping”; at the very end, Ahwesh’s own closing credits. The stock scream that played over the title opener finds its visual counterpart in a post-credit shot of the girls, now out of costume, pretend-screaming in front of a blank wall.
The scream of a young girl being chased in a game, delirious with excitement, can easily be mistaken for a scream of terror. In the last scene of The Scary Movie, the two actresses dance together in the living room, sunlight pouring in through the windows behind them. Emphasizing their frenetic energy and uninhibitedness, the clip has been slightly sped up. The overlaid music is less horror film, more Looney Tunes. It’s a fitting coda, both out-take and summary of all that has come before.
Alice Gribbin is a poet and essayist. She writes about the arts at her Substack, Notes of an Aesthete.
The Scary Movie (1993)
