Today, American audiences will get their first taste of Rubber , a French horror comedy about a tire that kills people with its psychic powers. (It won’t hit theaters until April, but you can catch it on most video-on-demand services starting today.)
French film theorists Jean Epstein and Louis Delluc wrote of the power that cinema has to take an object in front of the lens and give it an inner life, or photogénie , which can transform even the most mundane object into a character. Filmmakers have employed this power to various ends since, persuading protagonists and patrons to weep for volleyballs , fall in love with sex dolls , and worship giant black obelisks .
But above all, filmmakers have chosen to send us screaming towards the exits, because these non-carbon-based, non-life forms are out to kill us.
Why do our whatsits keep rising against us?
1. They’re possessed by evil spirits or aliens.
According to the movies, aliens and evil spirits often choose to hide in ourmost harmless household products. Stephen King, in particular, wrote a number of stories-turned-films about bewitched appliances, including the possessed Plymouth in
Christine
, the alien-infiltrated 18-wheelers
and vending machines
in
Maximum Overdrive
, and the haunted laundry machine in what would become
The Mangler
(and its two sequels).
In films about hostile doodads, the “possessed by demons/aliens” explanation often produces the most laughable results, in part because it feels so lazy. You don’t need to give a homicidal demon a motive, because killing’s just what they do.
On his album
Werewolves and Lollipops
, comedian Patton Oswalt
wonders at
the depth of laziness that gave rise to one such film in particular, as he introduces us to
Death Bed: The Bed That Eats
. (Oswalt’s pitch for an evil-furniture film?
Rape Stove: The Stove That Rapes People
.):
2. They’re out for revenge.
In
Poltergeist
, when familiar items (including a clown doll, a tree and a television) attack their suburban owners, it’s in part because they’re
—
you guessed it
—
possessed by evil spirits. But more directly, it’s because those spirits are out for revenge: That plot of land used to be their resting place.
Vengeful possessions predate the movie camera. The Japanese, for example, have long believed in
Tsukumogami
, objects that, having celebrated their 100
th
birthday, become self-aware and may take revenge on careless owners. According to Wikipedia, these items include
Morinji-no-okama
(tea kettles),
Bakezori
(straw sandals), and
Ittan-momen
(rolls of cotton). (
Ittan-momen
are said to “fly through the air at night and attack humans, often by wrapping around their faces to smother them.”)
Perhaps the screen’s most straightforward story of non-carbon-based revenge comes from
The
Twilight Zone
. In the episode “A Thing About Machines,” a technologically inept man afflicts his appliances with one too many grievances, and they decide they’ve had enough:
3. They’re manifesting our deepest Freudian fears.
Even the lightest objects can carry a lot of symbolic weight. The Surrealists, who were fascinated by Freudian dream analysis, loved to employ inanimate objects in their films
—
particularly when those
uncanny
objects could symbolize ideas that provoke a confused combination of attraction and repulsion. For example, in the 1943 surrealist short ”
Meshes ofthe Afternoon
,”
a woman has a series of disturbing encounters with a threatening knife, which keeps transforming into a key, which keeps vaguely transforming into the man she sleeps with. Perhaps the most well-known example of this trope comes from
Requiem for a Dream.
When Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb
battles her refrigerator
, the hallucination plays out both Sara’s desire for food and her fear of fat.
In David Lynch’s
Eraserhead
, when a chicken dinner begins to
writhe and ooze
between its thighs, it embodies Henry Spencer’s paired lust for flesh and fear of abortion:
4. They’ve got no reason at all.
Sometimes a murderous cigar is just a murderous cigar. While the red balloon in the classic 1956 short ”
The Red Balloon
” follows a boy around because it has become his loyal friend, Billy’s balloon in “Billy’s Balloon,” the 1998 Don Hertzfeldt animated short, turns on its unsuspecting owner for no reason at all. It’s just a cruel world.
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