It cannot drive into a cemetery, for instance, because it cannot tread into sacred ground. In this case, the black car is an avatar of pure evil. This highly-entertaining Jaws-knock-off involves a prowling, hunting black sedan that terrorizes the highways and back-roads of a sleepy southwestern town, Saint Ynez…at least until an heroic sheriff, played by James Brolin, tangles with it. At one point, the truck pulls up so close to the camera lens that the vehicle squeezes out all other images, a sign of its dominance on and off the road. The truck is a terrifying sight throughout the film, and Spielberg accents its monstrous, out-sized appearance with his visual compositions. When the truck plummets down the mountain, its death rattle sounds suspiciously like the cry of an angry dinosaur, not a lifeless vehicle. For example, the vehicle attempts to nudge David’s Valiant onto railroad tracks as a locomotive crosses at full speed and even pursues David’s out-matched Valiant up a treacherous mountainside. The truck is driven by a mysterious and mostly unseen cowboy figure, but the truck itself seems to be a malevolent entity. The film depicts the pulse-pounding tale of a wimpy salesman, David Mann (Dennis Weaver) who meets up with a relentless, rusty truck on a desert highway.
Originally a TV-movie, Steven Spielberg’s Duel was released theatrically in the United States in 1983. Perhaps these evil film vehicles thus represent our fear that the objects of our material desire actually have a mind of their own. You may notice that all of these vehicles appeared on our screens during the 1970s and 1980s, an era defined by affluence and conspicuous consumption. In other cases, our tools - perhaps sensing some inadequacies in the driver’s seat– have switched to a more powerful owner: the Devil himself.īelow are my choices for the five most diabolical vehicles in the horror cinema, listed in chronological order. In some cases vehicles - having acquired sentience - simply know better than we do, and they ruthlessly assert their control. When broaching horror movies about evil vehicles, the big question is: how could our beloved machines turn on us, their owners and creators? They have become, in fact, a physical manifestation of man’s Id or dark side, and vehicles for the furtherance of Evil to boot. In horror movies, cars and trucks have become even more than that. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote that the modern automobile has become “the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell of urban and suburban man.”
0 kommentar(er)
