Transcription
[Music] Horror stories have existed for centuries. Gothic novels lead to silent horror films, lead to mid-century psychological horror movies, '80s slashers, and eventually to children's horror book series and modern horror movies. These stories see an array of horrifying creatures. When writing or directing a horror project, it makes sense to start with a terrifying villain, right?
Strangely, there's a genre of horror film and literature that focuses on creatures and objects that aren't very scary on their own. Currently, a lot of our horror stories focus on the corruption of innocent figures. Children are innately innocent beings, lending to their fear factor when they're transformed into one of the most recognizable forms of horror iconography. "Come and play with us, daddy." Children's music has changed, too, with nursery rhymes gaining a horror association with "tiptoe by the window" and the music box melodies being distorted by movies like Insidious and The Conjuring.
Clowns are friendly and childlike figures known for their ability to bring joy and laughter until they're twisted into horror figures in books like The Circus of Dr. Lao and movies like It and Killer Clowns from Space. Even the most innocent figures of the bunch, dolls. "Look who's come to your house to stay. A pal you can play with all day long." With their purpose being of children's toys and their appearances intentionally designed to be as cute as possible, they are morphed into horror creatures in Annabelle, Chucky, and books like R.L. Stine's Night of the Living Dummy.
Why are we often more scared by innocent creatures turned evil than outright sinister horror creatures? I'm going to attempt to answer this by using an example of one of the most innocent and friendly creatures I can think of, rabbits. Just by looking at them, it's clear that they're pretty unthreatening. They're small and fluffy, and their status as a prey animal solidifies the decision not to fear them. But they're inextricably linked to fear and violence through their presentation in the media.
Let's take the first example that probably comes to mind when I say the word rabbit. "I'm late. I'm late for a very important date." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 children's book written by Lewis Carroll that follows the titular Alice's journey down a rabbit hole and into the fantasy world of Wonderland where she meets an array of whimsical characters, drinks random potions, and defeats a tyrannical queen who chops people's heads off. It's a heavy kids book, but it was popular enough to define a generation, then continue to impact generations to come as each saw their film adaptation of the novel. And one of the central characters is the White Rabbit.
Culturally, rabbits have been known to symbolize innocence and rebirth. This mostly tracks with his identity in Alice in Wonderland. He represents curiosity, and his anxious nature tracks with the anxious, flighty personalities of rabbits in the real world. Jump forward about a hundred years, and you get probably the most violent depiction of rabbits. 1978's Watership Down is a terrifying children's movie, and that's a loose classification, about a rabbit facing oppression and violence from both predators and the authoritarian leader, General Wound. There's a literal rabbit slaughter in this movie, and that's probably the nail in the coffin for people's association with rabbits to violence. When you think about it, the people who made some of the movies that will be mentioned later were young children when this movie came out. And that traumatizing image can change the perception of rabbits forever. Richard Kelly, the director of Donnie Darko, even said that when designing the character of Frank, he wanted him to be disturbing and animalistic, and that the 1972 Watership Down novel was the inspiration for the character. The direction and lighting of Frank's scenes, the score that accompanies him, and his costume design all contribute to a very eerie feeling surrounding the character. From a narrative perspective, he symbolizes mortality and Donnie's struggle with identity and decision-making. Towards the end, Frank is unmasked and revealed to be a regular human, contributing to this notion that a regular innocent creature is enclosed in this violent and disturbing symbolic shell. "Why you wear that stupid bunny suit? Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?"
A similar relationship is explored in the 1950 film Harvey, where Jimmy Stewart is acquainted with an imaginary rabbit that represents duality and an escape from reality. This notion even appears in music. Jefferson Airplane's song "White Rabbit" tells the Alice in Wonderland story, a children's tale, through a very eerie song with a soft-spoken voice and a haunting melody. Again, a seemingly innocent story is obscured by reframing its contents to be creepy.
Often times, this symbolism introduces other plots to explain the violent nature. In 1972's Night of the Lepus, the appearance and aggression of rabbits is directly linked to their forced experimentation by humans. They transform from cute, fluffy pets into horror creatures that inflict violence and destruction. This story aims to explore the relationship between humans and animals that we only view as beings that exist for our need to further human scientific understanding.
A similar story is explored in Jordan Peele's Us. In the opening scene, the first thing we see are rabbits trapped in cages. This scene is creepy for a number of reasons. The music, the lack of specificity in the location, and the confinement lead us to assume the worst fate for these rabbits. The initial assumption likely being that they're about to be violently experimented on. Turns out their fate is even worse. They're about to be eaten. This cements them as part of the cycle of violence, survival, and death, predator and prey. Their status as a symbol of innocence and the fact that the Tethered are eating them also serves as a reflection of the violent nature of the Tethered, their eventual connection to the people above, and the "us versus them" message of the movie. "We're human, too. You know, exactly like you." The rabbits are innocent to the people above, but mere sustenance, a means for survival to the people below, mirroring the way the Tethered and the people above view each other. Their cages are also in classrooms, possibly hinting towards the use of rabbits in experimentation for educational understanding. Suffice it to say, the inclusion of rabbits in Us is not a coincidence. Nothing in a Jordan Peele movie is.
But he stated that in order to make a good horror movie, you have to start with something that scares you. "Really tried to make something that incorporates what I love about those and sort of steps into its own new subgenre." For Us, he cited his own fear of coming face to face with an evil doppelganger of himself. And clearly, this was a popular enough fear to make the movie a commercial success, earning $70 million in the United States on its opening weekend.
But why rabbits? Well, looking at the other interviews that Peele did for this movie, it becomes abundantly clear that he has a fear for rabbits. In an interview with Time, he said, "Rabbits, they're supposed to be cute. On paper, they're adorable and lovable, but have you ever gotten close to a rabbit? You can tell in their eyes they have a brain of a sociopath. If you put a rabbit brain in a human body, you have Michael Myers. They have no empathy. They're an animal of duality. They're adorable, but they terrify me at the same time. And they've got those scissor-like ears that creep me out." So, it's clear that his existing fear for the creatures led to their inclusion in his horror movie. Even his comment about their scissor-like ears and the symbol of scissors in the movie as the chosen weapon of the Tethered and the tool to make the Hands Across America paper cutouts fits with the message of the film.
In another interview, he shared the first horror movie that he remembered watching as a kid. "So, so scary, so inappropriate for how old I was, and yet I was able to watch it and understand it. And by the end, I felt less scared than I did before watching it. So, that's how I knew the power of horror." It makes complete sense that the first horror movie he watched revolved around a fly's DNA being mixed with a human to create this disgusting creature. It's the same story that's been molded with rabbits in the media. A creature with a previously innocent reputation is distorted in a horror movie and impacts its reputation to the viewer.
From animated kids movies to adult horror movies, we see this mixing of rabbits with horror. In Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace is trying to cure the rabbit population problem and accidentally creates a giant human-rabbit hybrid that terrifies the town's people. The film is light-hearted, but the stop-motion animation and this unnatural hybrid can be scary to child audiences. David Lynch's surrealist sitcom Rabbits is a more outwardly disturbing take on the unnatural human-rabbit hybrid. The anthropomorphic family of rabbits is living in an eerie sitcom reality, giving the viewer a sense of unease. "It's a simple, easy, effortless technique that allows any human being to dive within and transcend and experience this ocean of pure consciousness."
If rabbits don't exhibit horror behaviors, they just have a hint of creepiness. One of the main characters in The Secret History who meets a violent end is named Bunny. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is a children's book about a stuffed rabbit. But Edward is consistently abandoned and experiences poverty and neglect in his journey. If rabbits do exhibit horror behaviors, they're often not some metaphorical reasoning in the background; they're the point of focus. The Bunnicula book series follows the family dog Harold, theorizing that the new pet rabbit is a vampire. These fears are eventually healed, but the cover of all the books features a scary-looking rabbit with furrowed brows and bright red eyes. Horror movies like Bunny Man and Sexy Beast also directly center around rabbits being an apt focus for horror. And that's not even mentioning the video games.
[Music] Bonnie from the Five Nights at Freddy's series is an animatronic robot haunted by the spirit of a murdered child. Robbie the Rabbit from Silent Hill 3 is a rabbit mascot for the Lakeside Amusement Park. Following the themes of the game, his innocent appearance contrasts the dark setting, and he appears as a symbol for fear and unsolved childhood trauma. Even in more indie games like the Rusty Lake franchise, we see characters like Mr. Rabbit, a mysterious anthropomorphic rabbit figure, murder the player Dale's family at his 9th birthday party. It's not even. This act symbolizes the death of innocence, which goes back to the original characterization of rabbits.
So, why is this? Why are there so many examples of rabbits as symbols of fear and violence? Well, if we go back through history, we can find a number of possible explanations. Looking back at medieval art, there's a strangely large array of works that feature rabbits as violent creatures. These drawings are drolleries, small artworks in the margins of manuscripts that often feature funny scenes and a mixture of animals. In these drolleries, the enjoyment of them comes from the distortion of reality, a reimagination of the world from a different point of view. So the humor in these likely comes from the universally considered innocent creatures performing violent acts.
Rabbits may have also gained a negative reputation because of their link to disease. Tularemia was a disease first discovered in 1911. In 1919, bacteriologist Edward Francis linked the disease to wild rabbits, earning it the name "rabbit fever." This disease led to a fear surrounding wild rabbits as disease carriers. This negative attitude surrounding rabbits existed years earlier in 1887 when rabbits brought to mainland Australia in 1859 began reproducing at an alarming rate, and 25,000 were offered for any method for the effectual extermination of rabbits. They were viewed as a nuisance.
Rabbits took on other interesting symbolic meanings in different cultures as well. African folklore features a character named Br'er Rabbit, a small but clever trickster. In tarot, though the meaning can be changed by the position of the cards, the rabbit tarot usually symbolizes transformation, fertility, and intuition.
Another reason rabbits might have developed this reputation as horror creatures is because of their association to witches. "What's cooking?" Witches, like rabbits, are often depicted living in the forest, being one with nature. Both are associated with superstition, fertility, and cunning. Historically, witches don't have the best reputation. And if black cats, which were associated with witches, ended up with their sullied reputation, it makes sense why this connection might lead people to view rabbits in a different light as well. As Christianity began to take over Western Europe, rabbits that were originally associated with the goddess Eostre due to their supposed ability to procreate alone were guarded with suspicion because of their association to witches. Stories spread about men following rabbits that were really witches, and their reputation took a major hit. This is solidified in pop culture today by rabbits being familiars to witches, seen in 2015's The Witch, where the rabbit is an eerie, unexplained creature hinted to be related to the witch and the strange occurrences of the town.
Another reason for the supernatural association to rabbits can be found in magic shows. Illusionists like Harry Houdini, illusionists, magic tricks, something that a person does for money, would pull rabbits out of hats in the 19th century. Realistically, this was likely due to the availability of rabbits, them being small creatures that were easy to work with, and the magic appearance of a cute creature being popular with children. "Pull out a rabbit, but that's a rabbit out of a handkerchief. It's out of a silk. It's not a real top hat. It's also not a real rabbit."
And the last weird association I can think of is the Easter Bunny. "That's not the Easter Bunny."
[Music] Probably the most light-hearted character of the bunch. He's fluffy. He hides eggs for children to have fun finding, and he gets you a break from school. But even this figure holds a strange juxtaposition with his cheery and light commercialized identity and the true purpose of Easter as a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in Christianity. Just like Jordan Peele saying there's a weirdness behind their cute eyes. And just like a real human character existing behind Frank's mask, one of the most highly recognizable holiday figures is just the shell of a rabbit concealing the true internal purposes of this religious holiday.
In terms of their representation in horror, it relates to the creation of new fears. Because when you base a horror creature off of a normal innocent creature, it allows the viewer to be scared by that during their everyday life. I've never run into a ghost or a zombie, so I'm able to dissociate those creatures from my own life. But Psycho made an entire generation scared of showers, and Scream made people jump in fear every time their landline rang. There's a sort of uncanny valley when innocent creatures are amalgamated into evil things. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody stated that "the rabbit's cute and gentle air of innocence becomes an easy mask for macabre design while also suggesting powers of easy and plentiful reproduction that happens largely out of view and suddenly results in a vast unexpected new population. The ordinary into the uncanny valley and the apparently harmless into deceptive sources of evil."
All in all, the transformation of rabbits speaks to the possibility of horror. You wouldn't think that an innocent creature could become a somewhat irrational fear, but their history explains how their current perception was slowly being built throughout the centuries. Rabbits are anxious animals, and their consistent preference to flight in fight or flight situations lends them to be easily used in movies that center around grim subject matter. It poses the question of what innocuous creature will be transformed into a horror icon next. We'll just have to wait and see.
"When people believe something can be real, it will scare them more. I was 10 years old. It was Scream. And I reme I still remember the VHS, the VHS. I was afraid of the tape. I was afraid that the tape would do something to me. As children, we fear these things and we let our fears out. We tell people because we're unsophisticated. And as we get older, we still have the fears. We just sublimate them. I mean, David Lynch, he's not a horror director, but he still made some of the scariest stuff out there. And he's someone that makes his his own sound. The animals are a reflection of what that that person's inner psyche is doing, what's happening with them, what position they're in. Cuz the the he's in headlights and Get Out, the rabbits and about there being underworld and then being duplicated and then the horses they how they're being used in the Hollywood context. When when he told me of his dream of how this movie should be and the the mix of fantasy and horror and surrealism that he wanted to imbue in the film, I was just really taken with the man as a sort of dark artist."
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