Dance Evokes Discomfort in Horror
The blisters after Wednesday night technique class were always the worst. The point shoes would still have to go on the next day, and so, something had to be done about the padded sacks of serum sitting bouncy on the tops of my toes.
Nail scissors made it easy to pop them and trim away abraded skin. Salt followed by hot air from a hair dryer always worked for sucking moisture from the wet, red flesh. It hurt for a moment, but by the next day, it was like the blister never happened. The pain was always worth it.
Dance is an inherently creepy thing because the strenuousness of the pursuit is universally understood. Everyone knows what’s happening inside a pointe shoe can’t be as pretty as it looks on the outside. It’s a given that a dedicated dancer has to be a little crazy, right?
As a lifelong dancer myself, I know more than anything else, dance pays you back in pain. Blisters, broken toes, tense muscles, body dysmorphia, and that’s just if you’re lucky. All of this makes it a perfect vehicle for adding physicality to a central theme or externalizing a character’s psychology in horror.
Here are four movies that master the art of using dance to add to discomfort.
CLIMAX BY GASPAR NOE
Climax follows the story of a dance troupe that descends into madness when the sangria at a post-rehearsal party is spiked with LSD. Selva, the company’s leader, acts as our focal point as she moves throughout an old school building where the dancers are camped out to finish a piece.
From the beginning, the film explores gender dynamics and how gender impacts attitudes toward sex. We learn one of the dancers, Lou, has become pregnant and is considering abortion. Her experience is juxtaposed against Emmanuelle, a former dancer who has moved into an administrative role for the company after the birth of her son Tito, who is present for the rehearsal. Lou discusses the ethics of abortion with Selva, while we cut to conversations between male dancers, which contain little more than vulgar opinions on who in the troupe they’d sleep with and what they’d do to the women, despite their protests.
For the men, sex is a crude joke. For the women, sex entails fluid choices that can change the trajectory of their careers, especially so in dance. This is reinforced in the gender-contrastive choreography. The male members of the company pop, lock, break, and mannequin with aggressive energy. The choreography for the women is fluid and seductive, a soft and emotive contrast to the jutting movement of their counterparts. The only one who transcends this binary is a gender-fluid character, who blends the two with whacking choreography during their featured solos.
SUSPIRIA BY LUCA GUADAGNINO
I prefer Guadagnino’s Suspiria over Argento’s because of how dance is used throughout the film. However, the plot at the center of each is the same – an American dancer travels to Germany to join a prestigious dance company that is unknowingly overseen by a coven of witches.
Guadagnino’s Susie Bannion finds the coven in a time of power struggle. Madame Blanc, the company’s creative director, and Mother Markos, an ages old witch who has long ruled the coven, are both vying for a position of power. This dynamic is reinforced through movement as Susie begins to push out her fellow dancer, Sara, from a lead role.
What Susie doesn’t know is that her body is a conduit for spells woven into Madame Blanc’s choreography and her performances have the ability to decimate her classmates. Ultimately, the company is practicing for a performance ritual that will allow Mother Markos to inhabit Susie’s body. The choreography mirrors this – sharp, breathy, and transcendent with positions of prayer and gestures of worship. Sometimes blunt like knives traditionally used in ritual. Geometric formations are set in the routines to mirror the power-structure at play within the coven.
The pursuit of dance puts the body at risk, but Guadagnino’s Suspiria takes this to an entirely different level. The same can’t be said for Argento’s original. While visually stunning with its iconic down-the-rabbit-hole set, the original Suspiria merely uses dance as a backdrop for its larger narrative. Movement is not a weapon as it is in the remake. Argento opts for straight-razors and barbed wire instead.
MIDSOMMAR BY ARI ASTER
Dani and Christian are coming apart at the seams, but a tragedy keeps them together long enough for a once-in-lifetime trip to Sweden. However, the truth of their relationship cannot be ignored in the pastoral knoll of Halsingland. Dance is a small part of Midsommar, but it comes at a crucial moment, representing Dani’s choice to relinquish herself fully to the Hargas.
Slowly, through a circuitous sequence that takes place at the base of the Harga’s Maypole, Dani earns the title of May Queen. This scene is one in which she is fully cleaved from Christian, left to fend for herself, and the result is bonds formed through the madness of dance. At one point, it seems as though Dani even gains the ability to speak Swedish while dancing; however, we can’t be sure. One of the women says to her, “We don’t need words to talk, it’s dancing.”
And in a way, this summarizes so much of Dani’s psychology. She has just lost her sister and her parents, and she is slowly losing Christian. In this scene, she begins to realize, the connection she craves is universal, that she is not wrong for craving it, as Christian has made her feel, and that the women dancing around her can provide this connection to her. Dance is a mania, a ritual – one that is universally understood. The primal need for family and community is just the same. Language or cultural traditions, especially those as gruesome as the Hargas, do not diminish this.
BLACK SWAN BY DAREN ARONOFSKY
At its heart, Black Swan is a story about obsession, just like Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In Swan Lake, Odette is turned into a swan by the evil magician Rothbart, and the curse can only be broken with true love. Odette falls in love with a prince, who might break her curse, but Rothbart transforms his daughter Odile into Odette to trick the prince. With her true love stolen, Odette kills herself.
This same story plays out in the film with Nina Sayers, a soloist with the New York City Ballet, as the white swan. Nina pushes herself past the brink of sanity to prove she is capable of playing both Odette and Odile, a new twist added to the production by Thomas Leroy, the company’s director. Nina finds her own antagonistic swan in the form of Lily, a new dancer fresh from San Francisco, who threatens both her role and the affection of Thomas, albeit unwanted, that Nina tolerates to maintain her place within the company. Ultimately, Nina’s obsession transforms her into the black swan, stamping out all traces of her once innocent, perfectionist self.
The iconic choreography of Swan Lake pairs perfectly with Nina’s story. It’s desperate, dizzying, and disorienting, just like the protagonist’s descent into madness. It’s also important to note how difficult the choreography is. Swan Lake is a money-making fan favorite, thus requiring it to be performed often to an incredibly high standard. The context of this ballet illuminates just how much pressure is sitting on Nina’s frail shoulders.
But despite all the blisters and the blood, each time a dancer steps on the stage, it’s a chance to be reborn – just as Mother Markos seeks, the perfect parallel for conflicted mothers like Lou and Emmanuelle. Each performance is an opportunity to give birth to yourself. And maybe the pursuit of such a thing makes the dancer crazy, but I can tell you insanity feels worth it in the moments where exhaustion sends you to the floor, and like Nina Sayers, you whisper to yourself.
“It was perfect.”
