Halloween Week: Pitch Black (2000)

1 year ago

Halloween Week: Pitch Black (2000)

YOU’RE NOT AFRAID OF THE DARK, ARE YOU?

by Sarah Malone

If you saw the theatrical trailer for Pitch Black, you may remember the shot the editors chose to end with: a man (English antiquities dealer Paris P. Ogilvie) kneeling, spitting a final swig from his flask across his lighter flame to illuminate the creatures that have just skewered and will soon devour him. But for a moment they pull back, rustling, eyeless, their bony head protuberances making uneasy antler-knocks. Having evolved for total darkness, the creatures are actually hurt by light.

Lucky flaw! There are some flagrant departures from known science in Pitch Black, and a lot of coincidences (of all the times for a ship to crash on a planet, right before an eclipse that lets cave-dwelling carnivores roam unimpeded; of all the passengers to be on board, a convict whose eyes have been surgically altered so he can see in the dark?)

But despite that, the movie seems to me to rely on constraints of physics and stamina (even if conveniently tweaked) in a way fundamentally different than Alien (maybe Pitch Black’s most direct inspiration); and I think that difference is central to what the difference in what the films’ makers are up to. In neither are the creatures solely meant to shock, though Alien still does, thirty years on. Pitch Black treads more expected ground; we would have been surprised if a remote planet’s caves hadn’t harbored something nasty. Pitch Black generates anxiety by fulfilling rather than shattering our expectations.

Early on when writing a new cosmos, you get to decide: how alien is it going to be? Will the world your characters land on—or what arrives on our world—defy the audience’s and the characters’ knowledge, upend their sense of the order of things, and (er…) get under their skin, as in Alien or John Carpenter’s The Thing? Or will you stick close enough to the known world to let the characters figure things out, but deprive them of their usual means of coping, the insulation of technology and the strength in numbers of civilization, forcing them to confront what we, and they, can already guess is out there, and inside?

“We are all on hajj now,” says the Muslim holy man in Pitch Black. “To get to know your Lord, better, yes. But to know yourself as well.”

Pitch Black is the only sci fi/horror movie I know of to echo with “Allahu Akbar,” and though perhaps meant by the filmmakers to seem exotic in Anglo ears (and I admit: the call fits well with the planet’s heat-haze) it’s one of a number of gestures that both lay out the movie’s ideas and deftly sketch out the galactic geography of this near future. By not explaining, the movie makes its few external details—New Mecca, the Sol-Track shipping lanes—into established context. The characters take them for granted, and so do we.

The movie has the sense of a castaway tale from the age of seafaring colonial empires, transposed to space. “This is an emergency dispatch from merchant vessel Hunter-Gratzner,” says Owens, the first officer, sending out a distress call after the rather haggard ship in the opening credits gets peppered by the tail of a rogue comet. “En route to the Tangea system with forty commercial passengers on board.”

His distress call, of course, is hopeless, and so begins our literal and figurative descent, from worrying about whether we’re in the shipping lanes to whether we can survive a crash landing to where will we find water to how can we find a way off this rock to dear God please let us not be devoured.

The creatures are only the most imminent threat (Notably, the movie isn’t named for them a la Alien or Predator or earthbound movies in which zombies, vampires, werewolves, dragons, radioactive dinosaurs, aliens, mutants, insects, birds or viruses are out to get us.) The creatures only turn up the pressure on the characters to a boiling point. For much of the movie, the logic resembles that of disaster movies such as Deep Impact: there’s little you can do; so what are you going to do? Carolyn Fry, the ship’s docking pilot, and the surviving passengers (who only gradually learn that she had been ready to jettison them if it would have made a safe descent more likely) have the planet’s heat and thin air to adjust to. They have to watch out for Riddick, a murderous convict who was being transported on the ship; and Johns, his guard, seems increasingly suspect. Then, burying the dead from the crash, they discover the underground dwellers—but only after coming across a kind of alien bone yard, the bleached skeletons of enormous sauropod-like creatures.

“What could have killed so many great things?” the holy man translates from one of his ill-fated companions. (You know, given a party of castaways, that some won’t make it).

Pitch Black keeps piling on such moments, gorgeously shot, often bleach processed, hints of mysterious threats in addition to the ones it’s already made clear, while the search for water leads the castaways to a desiccated encampment left behind by a vanished team of geologists.

“They didn’t leave,” Riddick says—only voicing what, as Fry says, they’re all thinking: the underground creatures got all of them.

The characters seem familiar enough with this script to know the rules to stay alive (though some of them just can’t help themselves). And they know that the chances of all of them making it alive through the eclipse is very slim. The dread of the inevitable is made visible in the gorgeous shots of the eclipse beginning through the heat haze.

“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” Riddick says as the last of the planet’s three suns slips behind the giant neighboring planet. By then, two-thirds of the way through the movie, we’ve still only had a few quick interactions with the underground creatures; despite its title, the movie has been mostly in brilliant heat. Pitch Black is interested not only in the fear of what might be unseen in the darkness around us but in the dreadof what might happen when darkness falls. The movie infects the light with fear.

Part of the fun of this genre is the varying distance between the characters’ knowledge and ours (we, of course, having been informed by trailers, reviews, and main titles). We want exactly what the characters (except Riddick) don’t want: more eyeless underground hammerhead razor-toothed spindly-armed bat-like cannibalistic flying creatures, please!

They’re all the creepier for their ‘evil’ being purely in our sense of them. They’re only animals, out for a meal (the sound design, full of crunching bones and smacking teeth, wonderfully underscores their animal nature). Their intelligence is at best reflexive—flee light, follow motion. They have no tribal loyalty; they pursue one another as ferociously as they pursue the castaways. Less baroque than the Alien aliens, they also don’t achieve the same stomach-turning pitch of horror. Which isn’t to say they aren’t terrifying, with their bony, almost human hands, and prehistoric, disproportionate batteries of teeth. They’re scariest as a prospect viewed in dread: a bewildering tangle of teeth and horns; but a single, impossible-to-kill movie adversary is a somehow more existentially unnerving than too many adversaries to be able to kill them all; and being munched from the outside doesn’t match the horror, even now, of something hatching inside you and eating its way out, of become not only prey but host.

Pitch Black is up to something different. It’s more interested in personality and personal history. Unlike its sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick, it has only passing interest in politics (that will happen with low odds of surviving until sun-up). And though it was marketed as Riddick’s movie, I think it’s every bit as much the story of Fry’s redemption (IMDB’s comments on the script history—which are spoilerly—would seem to confirm this). Yes, the camera indulges in gratuitous T & A, and there are a lot of shots of Fry open-mouthed and out of breath, slightly dazed, if you’re looking them; but her character traits are nuanced enough that it’s difficult to sustain judgment for or against her. She’s too self-interested to be the castaways’ emotional core, not competent enough to be their voice of reason, and not interested, for most of the movie, in being their leader; but it’s her decisions that determine where they go and most of what they do, and her moderation in responding to more heated opinions gives her a real, grown-up presence that the other characters either never achieve or lose as the pressure mounts (also: the movie passes the Bechdel test, and by my reading of these criteria Fry passes the test). She has the most screen time, and she’s the first to enunciate the movie’s central concern.

“I’m not going to die for them,” she yells as the Hunter-Gratzner hurtles into the atmosphere.

Maybe her redemption is not so much that she decides differently about “survival instinct,” as Riddick puts it, versus the duties of a ship’s captain. Maybe it’s that she changes her mind about what you get to decide in a movie like Pitch Black, when the night is coming and the dark will fly with teeth and claws.

Sarah Malone’s writing most recently appeared in Staccato Fiction and The Awl.