‘The Batman’ — Horror’s Heavy Influence On Matt Reeves’ Dark Epic
In Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the crushing atmosphere of Gotham City threatens to sink our protagonists before they’ve had a chance of salvaging what they can. Though influenced by the paranoid milieu of the 1970s and classic noir cinema, impressions of something more sinister run across the film that an “elevated” superhero veneer can’t contain. Speaking to Elvis Mitchell about Batman’s roots, Reeves touches on Neal Adams’ gothic interpretation of the character. Reeve’s adopted his vision to give the film a horror touch legitimated by the comics themselves. Then, the works of Frank Miller are used to reflect a deeply broken city whose depravity several characters indulge in solitude.
Committed to being a hyper-stylized whodunnit, with a plot driven by a serial killer who channels political rage into all of his crimes, the film leans heavily towards the giallo corner of horror cinema. But in centering the uncomfortable headspace of its two leads, it also harnesses the power of a slasher.
Despite a hopeful resolve, The Batman is largely constructed to be a solipsistic nightmare. The boundary separating “hero” and “villain” is tenuous at first. Visual and aural textures of a downward mental spiral bind us equally to both Batman (Robert Pattinson) and the Riddler (Paul Dano). Regardless of whose perspective the picture favors, cinematographer Greig Fraser keeps the viewer on edge by suffocating his frame with vignettes in the daytime and a shallow depth of field at night.
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Michael Giacchino’s minor scale leitmotif of “Ave Maria” for Riddler is particularly haunting, leaving traces of the character on and off-screen. For Batman, the music is ferocious. Pattinson’s take on the character is angular and wretched, resembling Max Schreck’s timelessly creepy Count Orlok in certain scenes. The composer threads prickly atonal sounds into his score, reminiscent of tracks like Krysztof Penderecki’s “Polymorphia” and George Crumb’s “Night of the Electric Insects.” It’s fitting for a spiritually battered Bruce Wayne, entrenched in his second year as the vigilante.
As much as it seems to excite filmmakers to paint the world of DC’s favorite mentally ill loner with the harshness of Taxi Driver, parallels between The Batman and seedier cinema from the Bronze Age of exploitation filmmaking briefly touch hands. During the “fear is a tool” monologue, Bruce walks hyper-vigilantly among a crowd of Gothamites celebrating Halloween. The neon images spraying over the public via giant screens, along with a grimy exterior, make central Gotham look like a zombified 42nd Street. It’s evocative of how filmmakers like Frank Hennenlotter capture the otherworldliness of traversing through nightlife on the Deuce.
But the film this newer iteration has the most in common with is William Lustig’s Maniac. A film where Joe Spinell plays Frank Zito, a man who murders and scalps sex workers, seems antithetical to the merchandising juggernaut. However, the way both Frank Zito and Bruce Wayne seem overcome with shame while ritualistically revisiting their own exploits is at least pathologically in tune. Both characters are vessels for resentment, anger, and inescapable loneliness. We watch them feed their respective compulsions. As their audience, we are implicated in these extremities.
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The pressure of voyeurism in the slasher has been the subject of conversations about the subgenre for decades. For a significant chunk of its runtime, The Batman forces its audience to assume the role of an aggressor. Whether disposing of victims, or leaving them beaten within an inch of their lives, the violence is quite brutal. The film’s opening kill sets the stage for Reeves’ psycho theater.
As Riddler stakes out the home of Gotham’s current mayor, the frame is tight and labored breathing seeps in beneath the soundtrack. Zeroing in on a tender image of a family getting ready to trick-or-treat, the mayor plays dead for his son before bidding he and his wife farewell. Riddler then appears behind him and beats him mercilessly with a carpeting tool. Wrapping a cadaver’s face with duct tape and removing his thumb is horrifying. But there’s also the bleak realization that prior to noticing his father was dead, the mayor’s son likely found the body and naively poked it around in the hopes he would get up again.
Spectatorship of traumatic events is crucial to the Riddler’s character. His deranged videos grab the attention of thousands, and his energized base of minions is alarming despite the paltry 500 follower count. The ghoulish way Gotham City’s news stations report on these killings is another factor in propagating terror. More than we’ve seen in other live action Batman films, Reeves forces his audience to live with these killings. He plants a fear that no one in Gotham is safe at any moment.
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Riddler, whose warped moral trajectory seems patterned after Batman, might as well have Michael Myers’ dramatic flare. One scene involving his kidnapping of Gotham’s district attorney is even constructed down to its pacing like Annie’s death in the original Halloween. Again, the focus on perspective is key. What slashers accomplish by giving us first-person accounts of brutality is giving the spectator a sense of carrying out primal urges. For the Riddler, corrupting a public is the entire goal.
Concerning proto-slashers, David Fincher’s Zodiac gets all the glory for inspiring Dano’s character. Though it’s the 1971 exploitation flick The Zodiac Killer that deserves a spotlight; not only because the latter film was actually made prior to the slasher boom, but for its weirdly sympathetic bent towards the eponymous killer. Far from a prestigious and meticulously researched epic, the film sees a Satan-worshiping, animal loving Zodiac come to terms with his own alienation. For a film allegedly made to “catch” the killer (then still at large), he is shown dragging several institutions of quiet and decent American life down with him. Perhaps, he’s exposing their frailty in his own way.
Reaching forward a decade to The Batman’s Maniac analog in NYC, if a “rata alada” can be a penguin and a falcon, why not a duck? Watching Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper, one would be compelled to draw comparisons between the Riddler and the Donald Duck , who both get a kick out of taunting the police with their cryptic ramblings.
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Joking aside, once the Riddler is confined to Gotham’s famous house of freaks the question of Batman’s role in Gotham City remains open-ended. Mainly, because his existence as a vigilante makes him volatile. Slasher films take liberties with their portrayals of mental illness and needless to say, their track record borders on abysmal (if entertaining). We shouldn’t hinge positive representation on pulpy media, though it can be valuable in how it chooses to examine the inner workings of its characters. Batman is one of the foremost examples of this. The character has continued to thrive because artists take the plunge into stories that delve into his vulnerabilities. And Reeves’ film contains a revelation in the second act that purposefully doesn’t result in a neat payoff.
If Pattinson’s Batman looks distinctly perturbed, it’s because he suffers from an unspecified affliction passed down from his mother. Wedged between multiple twists and turns, this reveal is quite jarring. But it does refuse to cede conversations about the character to an overly simplistic good/bad binary. What cements The Batman, at least partially, as a solid work of horror is the abject reality of life in Gotham: random and powerful enough to bring its own elites down to their knees. This is a quality of the Batman mythology that the film renders strikingly well. Yet, horror can be about relentless dread as well as overcoming fear. This progression not only merges the newest film to the genre, but vital to the most enduring iterations of the Dark Knight.
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