TAMPA – It’s easy to forget, down here where the change of seasons barely registers, that for most of the time humans have walked the Earth, to be cold was to die. And darkness was coldness. Every year, as the nights grow longer and the plants get browner and a chill starts to sharpen the air, our ancestors’ thoughts turned grim. But as lives got safer and we developed fear-as-entertainment, we learned to deploy that darkness to frighten and thereby to thrill.
And yet if you’ve ever been on a Florida beach on an August afternoon, you know that light and heat can be shockingly scary too. Even dangerous.
And because Tampa Theatre’s Big Picture series curators like being contrary, they’ve decided to lead into spooky season this year with a sampler of frightening films that all operate in the sunlight, though each in different ways:
- Aug. 6: This month opens with the new classic “Midsommar,” a discombobulating, trancelike nightmare that’s still the most straightforward horror film in the series. It’s a useful introduction to the vibe all these movies have in common: something about horrible things being completely visible makes them feel both more realistic and more surreal.
- Aug. 13: Next is “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” a groundbreaking and frequently imitated creature-feature that trades one kind of darkness for another. No matter how oppressive the heat and prickly the light is on land, go a few feet underwater and everything is dark and cold forever. The underwater scenes were filmed in Wakulla Springs, just south of Tallahassee, so this is practically a home movie.
- Aug. 20: Then we take a slight left turn to “No Country for Old Men,” not a typical thriller but a scintillating exploration of a much more recognizable kind of monster. Every shot is desiccated and sunbleached, with cinematography that’s lizardlike in its economy of motion. All you have to do is watch what happens.
- Aug. 27: And finally we wrap with “The Vanishing,” aka “Spoorloos,” a Dutch psychological stomach-churner about a woman who disappears at a rest stop during a sunny French vacation. It’s got the frank and wide-eyed perspective of security camera footage or a celebrity magazine profile, and Stanley Kubrick thought it was the scariest movie he’d ever seen.
Big Picture tickets cost $7 for Tampa Theatre members and $10 for others. Buy them at the Franklin Street Box Office and at www.tampatheatre.org
