I mean, I've always loved horror movies. Even since I was a little kid — and consequently way too young for most of them — I just ate them up. Couldn't get enough.
By the time I was 10 or 11, I was a pretty savvy horror-film viewer. I knew all the tropes and conventions of the all different subgenres — the spooky castles and fog of the old Universal films, the first-person killer POV of the slasher movies, the brooding shadows and ominous sound design of the haunted house films. I wasn't even a teenager, but I already felt like I'd seen it all.
And then came Adrian Lyne's 1990 masterpiece "Jacob's Ladder."
I've already talked about the arthouse and transgressive qualities of Clive Barker's "Hellraiser." Lyne's film works in similar ways, but it's much more artful in its approach and WAY scarier because it depicted a world that seemed at least a little bit relatable to my own. Barker's vision was so far out there I just could never really wrap my brain around it.
There were images in this film that were unlike anything I'd ever seen in a movie before, and the crazy see-sawing linear structure was discomfiting in a way that, as a kid, I just had no context to grapple with. The movie got under my skin in ways that I didn't understand. It really felt like a trip down the rabbit hole into someone else's madness, with all the pain and desperation and hopelessness that such a journey would entail.
It would be hard, probably, to watch this movie now and really get a sense of how profoundly influential it was on the genre at the time. So much of the imagery has been cribbed and repackaged over and over and over again in the two decades since, so what seemed truly disturbing and completely original at the time now sort of feels like your average, second-rate Nine Inch Nails music video. But some of my favorite moments from this film aren't the batshit ones, but rather the small little touches. The scene where Tim Robbins gets lost in the subway is one of the quietest moments in the film, but it's utterly terrifying in that it successfully captures the slow degradation of reality and perception that characterizes the most vivid nightmares. And the close-up shot of Robbins lying, eyes wide, in the ice-filled bathtub is heartbreaking in its sense of absolute futility. That's the moment where you realize this guy's not getting out of this thing with his body and soul intact.
It's pretty dated now and, like most Hollywood films, it felt obliged to deliver a nice, gift-wrapped little coda that suddenly "explains" everything to us in the most patronizing way possible (studio interference, I'm sure). It's a true flaw of the film and one I, to this day, have a hard time getting past. But, such flaws aside, this was the first "horror" movie I saw that really opened up my mind to the psychological and spiritual possibilities of the genre. It was an absolute mind-fuck of the highest order.
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