Beware of spoilers.
No one knows what to expect when Twin Peaks picks up next year after its last episode aired 25 years
ago. We know that many of the old-cast members will be returning, and some key
ones—such as Michael Ontkean, Michael Anderson, and Lara Flynn Boyle—won’t. We
can assume that the black coffee will flow, the red curtains will billow, and
the traffic lights will sway, because those are all key atmospheric components
in a fictional world richer in atmosphere than most others. A good deal of that
atmosphere derives from “a sort of evil out there… something very, very strange
in these old woods,” as Ontkean’s Sheriff Truman once told us (and obviously
won’t again).
David Lynch and Mark Frost poured so many generic flavors
into their world. Twin Peaks adopted
the format and melodrama of soap operas, the physical comedy and zany
misunderstandings of sitcoms, the investigative procedures of cop shows, and
even a bit of sci-fi conspiracy theories and abductions. The series’ horror
elements were not necessarily more abundant than those of the sitcom or cop
show genres, yet few would classify Twin
Peaks as a sitcom or cop show while many have put it in the horror bag. Horror
channel Chiller TV has run Twin Peaks
marathons, horror mag Fangoria has
featured the series on its cover under the heading “David Lynch’s Horror Show
Remembered,” bloggers have often debated its scariest scenes, Rolling Stone named it The Best Horror TV Show of All Time last year, and it spawned
David Lynch’s only feature film that fits comfortably on the horror shelf.
Perhaps Twin Peaks
has endured as a piece of horror because horror has a tendency to overwhelm.
Once elements of horror are introduced, other elements tend to get sucked into
its vacuum. This is not true of, say, comedy. It is not unusual for a drama,
western, sci-fi film, or horror film to have funny moments. Rosemary’s Baby, for example, has many,
yet it is not classified as comedy. Lynch’s Mulholland
Dr. is also very funny, and its humorous moments (Betty’s tour with Coco
through the courtyard, the hit man’s comedy of errors, the muddle-headed
director for whom Betty auditions, almost all of director Adam Kesher’s scenes)
are more plentiful than its scary scenes (the man behind Winkie’s, the
discovery of the corpse in the bungalow, and the appearance of the tiny old
people), yet it is much more remembered for being scary than funny. We expect
humor in entertainment. It always has a place. Horror does not. It belongs in
films and television shows explicitly pushed as horror.
Twin Peaks was
never pushed as horror. ABC never advertised it as horror. Frost never
described it that way. The only one of Lynch’s works the director has ever
described as horror is Lost Highway.
With all of its winking allusions, Twin
Peaks very rarely paid homage to fright films. The most explicit examples
of horror homage tangled around Leo Johnson and his shocking emergence from
catatonia. Shelly Johnson approaches the wheelchair in which Leo had been
confined for most of season two. She spins it around like Vera Miles
discovering mother in the fruit cellar in Psycho.
The chair is empty. Suddenly, she finds Leo standing, grinning, a party hat and
a cake-smeared face transforming him into John Wayne Gacy. She screams.
The horror homage spills into the next episode, as Uli Edel
directs the continuation of Leo’s awakening as pure slasher homage. The lights
go out. Leo grunts and throws Shelly around like a rag doll. She cowers in a
corner when she should be running or defending herself simply because this is
what women always do in poorly scripted slasher movies. Bobby Briggs runs to
her rescue but can’t figure out how to get through the door simply because this
is also the kind of inane thing that would happen in a slasher movie. Shelly
finally stabs Leo with a kitchen knife like the classic Final Girl she is. Leo
howls and runs into the night. In
mimicry of the cheap film stock used in z-grade slashers, the scene
even displays a much heavier grain than is usual for the normally pristine
Twin Peaks. Bobby underlines what we’ve just seen in the
following episode by referring to Johnson as “Leostein.”
Twin Peaks was
scarier when it wasn’t winking so hard at the audience, though its use of
horror could be just as explicit. Unquestionably the series’ most frightening
character, Killer BOB, is basically a horror chimera. He is a serial killer,
stalking through the real world, murdering Teresa Banks, Laura Palmer, and
Cousin Maddy. He is also a supernatural demon who needs to possess a living man
to do his horror business. He exists in dreams like Freddy Kruger. He claims
souls like the Devil. He casts a repellently seductive spell over his victims
like Dracula. He only appears in one third of the episodes, usually just for a
minute or two apiece, but BOB almost singlehandedly casts a cloud of horror
over the entire series.
Almost. Twin Peaks
also conjured horrific moments from Agent Cooper’s discovery of Windom’s
Earle’s murder victim who looks almost exactly like Coop (the corpse is played
by Kyle MacLachlan’s brother Craig), the grotesque discovery of another of
Earle’s victims inside a giant chess piece, and Earle’s shocking appearance
when hovering over Leo Johnson (who has been demoted from Frankenstein’s
Monster to Earle’s hunchback assistant by this penultimate episode) with his
face painted corpse white and his teeth blacked out. Director Tim Hunter said
this was an homage to non-horror director Ozu-Mizoguchi, but the effect is
still uncompromisingly scary.
Twin Peaks also
goes out on a note of pure horror as the surreal nightmares integral to the
series since Episode 2 manifest in the real world when Agent Cooper enters the
demonic limbo known as the Black Lodge to rescue his girlfriend Annie from
Earle. There he meets the white-eyed apparitions of dead characters, finally
confronts BOB in the flesh, and is ultimately hunted, captured, and possessed
by his own evil dopplegänger.
The chase between Cooper and his dopplegänger from red room to red room has often been compared to
a similar scene in horror maestro Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill! though I’ve yet to find any evidence that the
episode’s writer/director Lynch had ever even seen Bava’s film.
By the time the final episode of Twin Peaks reaches its denouement, all soap opera, situational
comedy, cop procedural, and science fiction has been purged from its system.
All that remains is the undiluted horror of the series’ purest hero awakening
from his terrifying experiences in the Black Lodge to gaze at his reflection in
a bathroom mirror and find the face of the series’ purest villain grinning back
at him. It is the stuff of nightmares… quite literally. I myself have had at
least one bad dream in which I look into a mirror and see BOB staring back at me.
When Lynch next continued the story, he did so with a
reasonable share of comedy and police procedures, a modicum of soap opera
drama, a total lack of science fiction, and a profusion of horror. Earlier
films such as Eraserhead and The Elephant Man had often been classified
as horror despite the former being more of an avant garde work and the latter
being a historical drama. Twin Peaks:
Fire Walk with Me was Lynch’s first and most complete work of horror, BOB
making his presence felt in the prequel/sequel more than he ever had in the
series. Even when actor Frank Silva is not on screen in his dirty denim jacket,
BOB is always lurking just outside the frame. He is there when Cooper finds the
words “Let’s Rock” scrawled in blood on the windshield of a junked car. He is
there when Agents Chet Desmond and Phillip Jeffries disappear. He is there
whenever Laura descends into self-destructive behavior. He is most certainly
there when her face turns grey, her teeth turn yellow, her lips turn black, and she hisses the
film’s title phrase at Harold Smith in one of the film’s scariest scenes. With
its greater emphasis on BOB, more explicit violence, and consistent scenes of
pure and completely effective horror, Fire
Walk with Me cemented Twin Peaks’
place in the genre for good. So, while I wouldn’t dare to speculate about what
will happen on Twin Peaks when it
returns next year, I can say with some confidence that you should prepare
yourself for nightmares.
