Losing a Visual Language in Horror, Sci-Fi

The surreal "garden club" scene in The Manchurian Candidate is a masterpiece of b&w imagery. Photo courtesty of the IMDb.

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Born in the early 60s, I was the last generation of Americans who grew up watching television in black and white. In fact, my parents didn’t spring for a color television until 1980, and by then I was in college, watching a second-hand b&w portable. As an adult, I actually didn’t get a color television until 1984.

As I recall, the switchover from b&w to color on television--and later on the big screen--was pretty rapid during the 60s. At the beginning of the decade, nearly all TV was b&w; by 1970, all was color. But TV producers still had to plan their production designs around the millions of b&w televisions that were still being watched out there in TV-World. Such as the original Star Trek series, which most people--including me--viewed in first run in black and white.

Star Trek:TOS is a great example of a television series that worked much better in black and white than it does in color. For those who scoff at the cheap costumes and special effects of the iconic series, know this: it’s an entirely different experience watching it in b&w, as I did in prime time in the late 60s, and then later in syndicated reruns in the 70s and early 80s.

B&w, when done right, can hide a plethora of budgetary sins, and the cheesy costumes and dime-store ship models of TOS actually looked REAL in b&w, without the distractions of color. (Well, except for the episode with the Gorn. Nothing could make the Gorn look non-cheesy. However, it did look less cheesy in b&w.)

You could say similar things about other iconic sci-fi shows of the era, such as Lost in Space and Space: 1999. Completely different shows in b&w.

Some celebrated, old b&w works look fine in color, such as Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. But other famous b&w works would be completely ruined by color

I can’t imagine, for instance, the 1962 John Frankenheimer masterpiece, The Manchurian Candidate, with all of its surreal, disturbing imagery, in anything but b&w. The b&w cinematography by Lionel Linton, is so tactile and present, it almost looks edible. The creamy whites remind me of a particular type of Lindt white chocolate bon-bon that I love to munch on sometimes, and the velvety darks remind me of a particularly rich type of chocolate frosting. Frankly, I'm getting hungry just thinking about The Manchurian Candidate right now.

Another b&w Frankenheimer film, the speculative drama Seconds (1966) with Rock Hudson, has b&w cinematography provided by the great James Wong Howe, and the camerawork is even more affecting and surreal than that of Manchurian. (I love both films to death btw.) When Frankenheimer switched over to color, something got lost, and I don't find his later films at all as interesting as I find his b&w stuff.

The Twilight Zone Style

The original Twilight Zone series is another onscreen work that wouldn’t have been the same in color. A lot of the TZ camera style is similar to the surreal look and feel of the early Frankenheimer films that I mentioned. Take Nick of Time (1960), one of my all-time favorite episodes.

This episode features William Shatner as a newlywed husband driving across the country with his new bride, played by Patricia Breslin. They stop in a small town in Ohio to get their car fixed and eat lunch at a small diner called the Busy Bee Cafe. While at lunch, Shatner’s character becomes obsessed with a fortune-telling napkin holder, which spits out a card with an enigmatic "fortune" on it in exchange for a penny. The statements on the cards are of the Magic 8-Ball variety--vague "answers" to a "yes" or "no" question that can be interpreted in several different ways. When some of the cards seem to predict specific situations encountered by the newlyweds, Shatner becomes more and more attached to the napkin holder. Eventually, however, the wife convinces him to leave the napkin holder behind; after they leave, a desperate-looking couple walk in and head for their former booth, and start frantically asking the same napkin holder a barrage of questions. The implication is that the napkin holder has enslaved other people besides Shatner and his wife—how many others, we are not told.

How the Busy Bee Cafe looks is an essential part of the creepiness of this epsiode. It is supposed to be the picture of small-town, Middle-American “normalcy”, but it all looks a bit off-kilter. There’s a strange lattice-design room divider that casts creepy shadows on the walls; ditto the Venetian blinds in the front window, and the Busy Bee gold window-lettering that shadows the wall in reverse. There’s a pay phone on the wall almost directly above another table—who would use it if that table was occupied?--and an ominious-looking schoolhouse clock. Strange. And what of Gil, the affable counterman? Surely he knows there is something “different” about the table with that particular napkin holder, yet he seems oblivious. Does he keep his mouth shout because the napkin holder is a money-maker? We'll never know.

I can’t imagine Nick of Time in color, period. There’s no way that color could reproduce those weird lattice shadows in quite that way, or make us feel so completely the surreal atmosphere of the Busy Bee Cafe in the midst of all the cheerful, small-town “normalcy.”

It would be nice to think that b&w film-making of this quality could make a comeback, but that's obviously not going to happen. Aside from the occasional oddity, like The Artist (2011), b&w is dead. Younger people (and by "younger people," I mean anyone under 50) won’t even watch it, even in a famous film like Hitchcock’s Psycho. (Another b&w film it’s impossible to envision in color.)

Yet, b&w seems especially suited to a certain type of film or show that deals with the otherworldly, the creepy, the surreal, the out-of-ordinary. The shadows look shadowier, the odd camera angles look odder, the blood looks bloodier (which is, usually, Hershey's chocolate syrup.) Not every--or even most--of the horror and sci-fi films being produced today would look better in b&w, but many of them would, especially the low-budget ones that are essentially good, but which look cheap because of sets, costumes, and bad CGI.

The loss of the b&w style of film-making has deprived horror, sci-fi, and thriller genres of an important filmic language option, I'm sad to say. Of course, we do still have the old classics, but it would be nice if b&w were an option for newer work as well. Take, for example, Jordan Peele's upcoming reboot of TZ. I suppose it's wildly unrealistic to expect that he would revive that arresting, Frankenheimer-style of b&w cinematography for the new series. But I really think a new b&w TZ would be an unexpected hit, if done correctly.