Hello, and welcome back to Horror 101, where we like turn an academic eye on the vast, bitchin' and often unintentionally hilarious world of horror movie conventions.

Thus far we've been discussing the plucky fellows who survive horror films. It think it is time we started to delve a little deeper in the pantheon of characters. After the Hero and Love Interest, and the Villain of course, probably the most important individual to a horror film's story is:

The Guy Who Knows Things

The Guy/Girl Who Knows Things serves an import and thankless task in horror films: exposition. Everyone hates exposition and it is very hard to write (which pretty much guarantees that it’ll suck in most horror movies), and unfortunately, because they are always dealing with an unknown factor – legends, mutant animals, made up monsters - horror movies usually involve a lot of exposition.

Some movies, like Tremors (1990), determine that you don’t need to know anything about their made up monsters to enjoy the film, but generally the movie just won’t make sense if we don’t have some exposition. Would Nightmare on Elm St. (1984) have worked without the Freddy legend? Someone has got to tell the backstory. Someone has got to inform us that the lake monster is blind or that the crazed hunchback is afraid of the color pink. Thank God we’ve got the GWKT!

The GWKT is an interesting sort of character, as there is no specific personality type. Sometimes the GWKT is also another character within the horror movie spectrum, like a Partner. Even the Hero can be a GWKT, though this usually isn’t the case (it’s always a nice mini-crisis when the GWKT can die, leaving our Hero without an easy source of info). If a surviving Hero appears in a sequel, he/she usually becomes a GWKT (like Reggie Bannister in the Phantasm series). Who better to tell our new characters about the monster?

There are four basic categories of GWKT: the Expert, the Know It All, the Prophetic Local, and the Folk Teller.

The Expert
The Expert is a professional, either in reality or purely in practice. The two varieties of Experts are the Scientist and the Fanatic.

The Scientist gets paid to know all the shit he/she knows. Think government agent sent to investigate the meteorite crash or the chick that studies ants at UCLA and is called in when giant ants attack Los Angeles. The Scientist usually works for a museum or something else boring and stuffy. That way they’ll be dramatically unprepared for the adventure the movie sends them on. A lot of the time this character is a really hot chick who will be partnered with our small town sheriff or park ranger Hero. Sometimes the Scientist is even the person who created the monster, such as Kevin McCarthy in Piranha (1978). Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws (1975) is my favorite Scientist. Gotta love the Hooper.

The Fanatic doesn’t get paid. They’ve learned all this stuff out of personal interest or obsession. Sometimes they’ll come off like a Scientist, but I can’t bring myself to consider crypto-zoology a genuine field. This is the sort of person who shows up in a movie about the Yeti. The Fanatic is often independently wealthy, which allows them to use all their free time learning about Yetis.

Sometimes we get both a Scientist and a Fanatic in one movie, like Bridget Fonda and Oliver Platte in Lake Placid (1999). The Expert doesn’t even need to be a real character. Sometimes they are only in one scene, like Tony Todd in Final Destination (2000) or Dick Miller in The Howling (1981).

The Know It All
The Know It All can often know just as much as an Expert. The difference is they didn’t come by their knowledge as part of a life pursuit. It’s a complete coincidence that they know all this crap. And Experts usually get called in action. The Know It All just happened to be there. KIAs are a signature fixture in Eclectic Groups (next installment of Horror 101). The two varieties of Know It Alls are the Random Know It All and the Inexplicable Know It All.

The Random Know It All usually found a book or, in a current annoying trend, was watching the Discovery Channel recently. When we meet an Expert we already know they know this crap. That’s their whole character. With the RKIA it often comes as a total fucking surprise, and for some reason the RKIA always seems to have come by their random information either very, very recently or an unrealistically long time ago. So when the giant Komodo dragon bites one of our college kids, our GWKT will either say:

“Wait! Last week I was watching the Discovery Channel and there was a special about Komodo dragons on! Their saliva is poisonous!”

Or:

“Wait! When I was a little kid I took a vacation to Komodo Island with my family! My uncle was bitten by a Komodo dragon! Their saliva is poisonous!"

So forth.

A great recent example of a RKIA was in the Roger Corman web series Splatter (2009), where a dumb-blond groupie randomly translates some important African writing, then says: "I dated this really hot hip hop artist and he toured Kenya, and I have an ear for native tongues."

Sometimes we do get “set-up” for the RKIA.  In a moment of lame foreshadowing, we’ll first see them watching TV or reading a book about the kind of animal that will end up terrorizing the town. Of course, as preposterous as the RKIA can be, they’ve got nothing on the Inexplicable Know It All.

The IKIA didn’t learn. They just know. We don’t even get the bogus Discovery Channel thing. This is a character that inhabits only the most poorly written movies. In the real world people can know things. I mean, I know shit about Komodo dragons. I don’t know why. I’m just a nerd. But movies can’t work quite like real life. For whatever reason there needs to be a qualifier.* The previously moronic sex-addicted sidekick to our football captain Hero shouldn’t randomly know how long it takes army ants to devour a human corpse. And if he does, he’d better have been watching the Discovery Channel last night. A good example is Anthony Heald in Deep Rising (1998), as the cruise ship owner who inexplicably has extensive knowledge of deep sea life.

The Prophetic Local
Being a stranger in a strange land is always a little scary. You don’t know anyone and you don’t know where anything is, so, in the days before cell phones, if something went wrong, you wouldn’t know what to do. It only makes sense that most horror movies are fish-out-of-water tales about tourists, college kids on a weekend camping trip, or an unfortunate roadtripper with a flat tire. Who do they turn to for directions? That’s where Prophetic Locals come in. They are cautionary GWKT.  They give our Hero a warning, a warning about something only a local would know. These are the people that the Hero wishes he’d listened to later.

There are three kinds of Prophetic Locals: the Concerned Samaritan, the Ominous Townie and the Crazy Guy. All very different, they agree on one thing: You kids shouldn’t go to the ______ (insert location our kids go to and die).

The Concerned Samaritan is usually a shop/gas station owner or hitchhiker friendly driver. Our stupid twenty-somethings will either stop for gas and directions or are thumbing it along the road when they all encounter each other. The Concerned Samaritan is always upset to hear where the kids are going. “Camp Crystal Lake? You don’t wanna go there.” That kind of thing. They’ll then inform our Hero that wherever they’re going is haunted or was the site of a grizzly mass-murder (and the killer was never apprehended). Our group of idiots will shrug off the warning and continue on their way. Pretty much any movie like Friday the 13th has this character.

The Ominous Townie is very similar to the Concerned Samaritan. The difference is that he doesn’t like to be completely open. He has secrets. He seems nervous talking with our kids. Usually there will be several of these characters hanging out together in the mechanic’s garage or bar. That way when our kids ask about the abandoned house on the hill, they can all look back and forth uneasily before one of them answers. They’ll try to get our kids to steer clear of their destination without out actually showing all their cards, but still leaving a few hints in the process, “You might want to carry something pink if you’re going up there.” Things would go a whole lot better if they were simply more forthcoming: “On, no, don’t go to the abandon house on the hill. There’s a crazy inbred hunchback who lives up there who is afraid of the color pink. He’s constantly killing the travelers we fail to properly warn about him.” My favorite Ominous Townies are the Slaughtered Lamb patrons in American Werewolf in London (1981): “Stay on the road.” “Beware the moors.”

The Crazy Guy is always fun. Usually a hobo or town drunk, he knows just as much as the Samaritans and the Townies, but is so completely nuts that no one has any reason to heed his warnings - especially since unlike the CS and the OT, our Hero never asks the Crazy Guy anything. The Crazy Guy jumps out in front of cars, or stumbles up to our kids while they’re pumping gas, then proceeds to ramble nonsensically about how they’re all going to die. One of our stupid kids will be made nervous by the encounter and usually later on asks the group something like: “Do you think that could be true? That there’s a crazy inbred hunchback living up there?” “Oh, that guy was just crazy.” Then they all die. Friday the 13th Part III (1982) has an excellent Crazy Guy, who carries around an eyeball for added craziness.

The Folk Teller
The Folk Teller deals with local mythology, either true or made up for the movie. In their mind it isn’t special knowledge, which is what separates them from a Fanatic. Folk Tellers often don’t even think what they’re saying is true. They might think they’re simply telling a spooky story to little kids or drunken friends. Of course, the Folk Teller is actually giving us, the audience, the villain’s backstory and sometimes letting the Hero know how to kill it, or in the case of Candyman (1992), how to summon it. Folk Tellers often inhabit movies with another GWTK. That way we can get the spooky local legend backstory and then later on when they’re all trapped somewhere, the other GWKT can reveal that he’s known the real story all along. I’ve already referenced the Friday the 13th series twice here, might as well do it again: Part II (1981) begins with a classic Folk Teller convention, the campfire ghost story, in which the FT recaps both Jason’s origin and the events of the first movie.

 

  *  Often to a stupid degree, such as in Salem’s Lot (1979) where nearing the climax our Hero says, “I called my friend in San Francisco. He’s turned on to the occult…” And this is how we learn that the Hero needs to stake the head vampire during the day in his coffin. This is probably going too far with the knowledge qualifying. Even a lousy screenwriting teacher will tell you, “Show. Don’t tell.” Since we don’t see this phone conversation it seems pointless to even bother with the qualifier. The “occult” angle is clearly meant to indicate that our Hero was talking with a Fanatic, but any 7 year-old could have told him to stake the vamp in his coffin. This is making the Hero a little too stupid, especially since there’s another character, a 13-year-old, who figures out to try and do the same thing by himself. Usually you don't want your Hero to be dumber that a junior high kid.


Past classes of HORROR 101:
The Solo Hero
The Couple
The Stragglers